Rab and His Friends and Other Papers

I was saying how much my father enjoyed women's company. He liked to look on them, and watch them, listening 21 to their keen, unconnected, and unreasoning, but not unreasonable talk. Men's argument, or rather arguing, and above all debating, he disliked. He had no turn for it. He was not combative, much less contentious. He was, however, warlike. Anything that he could destroy, any falsehood or injustice, he made for, not to discuss, but to expose and kill. He could not fence with his mind much less with his tongue, and had no love for the exploits of a nimble dialectic. He had no readiness either in thought or word for this; his way was slowly to think out a subject, to get it well "bottomed," as Locke would say; he was not careful as to recording the steps he took in their order, but the spirit of his mind was logical, as must be that of all minds who seek and find truth, for logic is nothing else than the arithmetic of thought; having therefore thought it out, he proceeded to put it into formal expression. This he did so as never again to undo it. His mind seemed to want the wheels by which this is done, vestigia nulla retrorsum, and having stereotyped it, he was never weary of it; it never lost its life and freshness to him, and he delivered it as emphatically thirty years after it had been cast, as the first hour of its existence.

I have said he was no swordsman, but he was a heavy shot; he fired off his ball, compact, weighty, the maximum of substance in the minimum of bulk; he put in double charge, pointed the muzzle, and fired, with what force and sharpness we all remember. If it hit, good; if not, all he could do was to load again, with the same ball, and in the same direction. You must come to him to be shot, at least you must stand still, for he had a want of mobility of mind in great questions. He could not stalk about the field like a sharp-shooter; his was a great sixty-eight pounder, and it was not much of a swivel. Thus it was that he rather dropped into the minds of others his authoritative assertions, and left them to breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick snell remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning – flashing, smiting and gone. In Church Courts this was very marked. On small ordinary matters, a word from him would settle a long discussion. He would, after lively, easy talk with his next neighbour, set him up to make a speech, which was conclusive. But on great questions he must move forward his great gun with much solemnity and effort, partly from his desire to say as much of the truth at once as he could, partly from the natural concentration and rapidity of his mind in action, as distinguished from his slowness when incubating, or in the process of thought, – and partly from a sort of self-consciousness – I might almost call it a compound of pride and nervous diffidence – which seldom left him. He desired to say it so that it might never need to be said again or otherwise by himself, or any one else.

This strong personality, along with a prevailing love to be alone, and dwell with thoughts rather than with thinkers, pervaded his entire character. His religion was deeply personal, 22 not only as affecting himself, but as due to a personal God, and presented through the sacrifice and intercession of the God-man; and it was perhaps owing to his "conversation" being so habitually in heaven – his social and affectionate desires filling themselves continually from "all the fulness of God," through living faith and love – that he the less felt the need of giving and receiving human affection. I never knew any man who lived more truly under the power, and sometimes under the shadow of the world to come. This world had to him little reality except as leading to the next; little interest, except as the time of probation and sentence. A child brought to him to be baptized was in his mind, and in his words, "a young immortal to be educated for eternity;" a birth was the beginning of what was never to end; sin – his own and that of the race – was to him, as it must be to all men who can think, the great mystery, as it is the main curse of time. The idea of it – of its exceeding sinfulness – haunted and oppressed him. He used to say of John Foster, that this deep and intense, but sometimes narrow and grim thinker, had, in his study of the disease of the race, been, as it were, fascinated by its awful spell, so as almost to forget the remedy. This was not the case with himself. As you know, no man held more firmly to the objective reality of his religion – that it was founded upon fact. It was not the polestar he lost sight of, or the compass he mistrusted; it was the sea-worthiness of the vessel. His constitutional deficiency of hope, his sensibility to sin, made him not unfrequently stand in doubt of himself, of his sincerity and safety before God, and sometimes made existence – the being obliged to continue to be – a doubtful privilege.

When oppressed with this feeling, – "the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief world into the unchangeable and endless next, – I have heard him, with deep feeling, repeat Andrew Marvel's strong lines: —

"But at my back I always hearTime's winged chariots hurrying near;And yonder all before me lieDeserts of vast eternity."

His living so much on books, and his strong personal attachment to men, as distinct from his adhesion to their principles and views, made him, as it were, live and commune with the dead – made him intimate, not merely with their thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but with themselves – Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melanchthon, George Herbert, Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume, 23 Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander, etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest of men, – with all these he had personal relations as men, he cordialized with them. He had thought much more about them – would have had more to say to them had they met, than about or to any but a very few living men. 24

He delighted to possess books which any of them might have held in their hands, on which they had written their names. He had a number of these, some very curious; among others, that wild soldier, man of fashion and wit among the reformers, Ulric von Hutten's autograph on Erasmus' beautiful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe's (spelt How) on the first edition of Milton's Speech on Unlicensed Printing. 25

He began collecting books when he was twelve, and he was collecting up to his last hours. He cared least for merely fine books, though he enjoyed, no one more so, fine type, good binding, and all the niceties of the book-fancier. What he liked were such books as were directly useful in his work, and such as he liked to live in the midst of; such, also, as illustrated any great philosophical, historical, or ecclesiastical epoch. His collection of Greek Testaments was, considering his means, of great extent and value, and he had a quite singular series of books, pamphlets, and documents, referring not merely to his own body – the Secession, with all its subdivisions and reunions – but to Nonconformity and Dissent everywhere, and, indeed, to human liberty, civil and religious, in every form, – for this, after the great truths, duties, and expectations of his faith, was the one master passion of his life – liberty in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688 – the right and power of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and to appoint their own magistrates, of whom the sovereign is the chief.

His conviction of the sole right of God to be Lord of the conscience, and his sense of his own absolute religious independence of every one but his Maker, were the two elements in building up his beliefs on all church matters; they were twin beliefs. Hence the simplicity and thoroughness of his principles. Sitting in the centre, he commanded the circumference. But I am straying out of my parish into yours. I only add to what you have said, that the longer he lived, the more did he insist upon it being not less true and not less important, that the Church must not intermeddle with the State, than that the State must not intermeddle with the Church. He used to say, "Go down into the world, with all its complications and confusions, with this double-edged weapon, and you can cut all the composite knots of Church and State." The element of God and of eternity predominates in the religious more than in the civil affairs of men, and thus far transcends them; but the principle of mutual independence is equally applicable to each. All that statesmen, as such, have to do with religion, is to be themselves under its power; all that Christians, as such, have to do with the State, is to be good citizens.

The fourth epoch of his personal life I would date from his second marriage. As I said before, no man was ever happier in his wives. They had much alike in nature, – only one could see the Divine wisdom of his first wife being his first, and his second his second; each did best in her own place and time. His marriage with Miss Crum was a source of great happiness and good not only to himself, but to us his first children. She had been intimately known to us for many years, and was endeared to us long before we saw her, by her having been, as a child and girl, a great favourite of our own mother. The families of my grandfather Nimmo, and of the Crums, Ewings, and Maclaes, were very intimate, I have heard my father tell, that being out at Thornliebank with my mother, he asked her to take a walk with him to the Rouken, a romantic waterfall and glen up the burn. My mother thought they might take "Miss Margaret" with them, and so save appearances, and with Miss Crum, then a child of ten, holding my father's hand, away the three went!

So you may see that no one could be nearer to being our mother; and she was curiously ingenious, and completely successful in gaining our affection and regard. I have, as a boy, a peculiarly pleasant remembrance of her, having been at Thornliebank when about fourteen, and getting that impression of her gentle, kind, wise, calm, and happy nature – her entire loveableness – which it was our privilege to see ministering so much to my father's comfort. That fortnight in 1824 or 1825 is still to me like the memory of some happy dream; the old library, the big chair in which I huddled myself up for hours with the New Arabian Nights, and all the old-fashioned and unforgotten books I found there, the ample old garden, the wonders of machinery and skill going on in "the works," the large water-wheel going its stately rounds in the midst of its own darkness, the petrifactions I excavated in the bed of the burn, ammonites, etc., and brought home to my museum (!); the hospitable lady of the house, my hereditary friend, dignified, anxious and kind; and above all, her only daughter who made me a sort of pet, and was always contriving some unexpected pleasure, – all this feels to me even now like something out of a book.

My father's union with Miss Crum was not only one of the best blessings of his life, – it made him more of a blessing to others, than it is likely he would otherwise have been. By her cheerful, gracious ways, her love for society as distinguished from company, her gift of making every one happy and at ease when with her, and her tender compassion for all suffering, she in a measure won my father from himself and his books, to his own great good, and to the delight and benefit of us all. It was like sunshine and a glad sound in the house. She succeeded in what is called "drawing out" the inveterate solitary. Moreover, she encouraged and enabled him to give up a moiety of his ministerial labours, and thus to devote himself to the great work of his later years, the preparing for and giving to the press the results of his life's study of God's Word. We owe entirely to her that immense armamentarium libertatis, the third edition of his treatise on Civil Obedience.

One other source of great happiness to my father by this marriage was the intercourse he had with the family at Thornliebank, deepened and endeared as this was by her unexpected and irreparable loss. But on this I must not enlarge, nor on that death itself, the last thing in the world he ever feared – leaving him once more, after a brief happiness, and when he had still more reason to hope that he would have "grown old with her, leaning on her faithful bosom." The urn was again empty – and the only word was vale! he was once more viduus, bereft.

"God gives us love; something to loveHe lends us; but, v/hen love is grownTo ripeness, that on which it throveFalls off, and love is left alone.This is the curse of time." —

But still

"'Tis better to have loved and lost,Than never to have loved at all."

It was no easy matter to get him from home and away from his books. But once off, he always enjoyed himself, – especially in his visits to Thornliebank, Busby, Crofthead, Biggar, and Melrose. He was very fond of preaching on these occasions, and his services were always peculiarly impressive. He spoke more slowly and with less vehemence than in his own pulpit, and, as I often told him, with all the more effect. When driving about Biggar, or in the neighbourhood of Langrig, he was full of the past, showing how keenly, with all his outward reserve, he had observed and felt. He had a quite peculiar interest in his three flocks, keeping his eye on all their members, through long years of absence.

His love for his people and for his "body" was a special love; and his knowledge of the Secession, through all its many divisions and unions, – his knowledge, not only of its public history, with its immense controversial and occasional literature, but of the lives and peculiarities of its ministers, – was of the most minute and curious kind. He loved all mankind, and especially such as were of "the household of faith," and he longed for the time when, as there was one Shepherd, there would be but one sheepfold; but he gloried in being not only a Seceder, but a Burgher; and he often said, that take them all in all, he knew no body of professing Christians in any country or in any time, worthier of all honour than that which was founded by the Four Brethren, not only as Godfearing, God-serving men, but as members of civil society; men who on every occasion were found on the side of liberty and order, truth and justice. He used to say he believed there was hardly a Tory in the Synod, and that no one but He whose service is perfect freedom, knew the public good done, and the public evil averted, by the lives and the principles, and when need was, by the votes of such men, all of whom were in the working-classes, or in the lower ha'f of the middle. The great Whig leaders knew this, and could always depend on the Seceders.

There is no worthy portrait of my father in his prime. I believe no man was ever more victimized in the way of being asked to "sit: " indeed, it was probably from so many of them being of this kind that the opportunity of securing a really good one was lost. The best – the one portrait of his habitual expression – is Mr. Harvey's, done for Mr. Crum of Busby: it was taken when he was failing, but it is an excellent likeness as well as a noble picture; such a picture as one would buy without knowing anything of the subject. So true it is, that imaginative painters, men gifted and accustomed to render their own ideal conceptions in form and colour, grasp and impress on their canvas the features of real men more to the quick, more faithfully as to the central qualities of the man, than professed portrait painters.

Steell's bust is beautiful, but it is wanting in expression. Slater's, though rude, is better. Angus Fletcher's has much of his air, but is too much like a Grecian god. There is a miniature by Mrs. Robertson of London, belonging to my sister, Mrs. Young, which I always liked, though more like a gay, brilliant French Abbé, than the Seceder minister of Rose Street, as he then was. It gives, however, more of his exquisite brightness and spirit, the dancing light in his dark eyes, and his smile, when pleased and desiring to please, than any other. I have a drawing by Mr. Harvey, done from my father for his picture of the Minister's Visit, which I value very much, as giving the force and depth, the momentum, so to speak, of his serious look. He is sitting in a cottar's house, reading the Bible to an old bed-ridden woman, the farm servants gathered round to get his word.

Mungo Burton painted a good portrait which my brother William has; from his being drawn in a black neckcloth, and standing, he looks as he sometimes did, more like a member of Parliament than a clergyman. The print from this is good and very scarce. Of Photographs, I like D. O. Hill's best, in which he is represented as shaking hands with the (invisible) Free Church – it is full of his earnest, cordial power; that by Tunny, from which the beautiful engraving by Lumb Stocks in this Memoir was taken, is very like what he was about a year and a half before his death. All the other portraits, as far as I can remember, are worthless and worse, missing entirely the true expression. He was very difficult to take, partly because he was so full of what may be called spiritual beauty, evanescent, ever changing, and requiring the highest kind of genius to fix it; and partly from his own fault, for he thought it was necessary to be lively, or rather to try to be so to his volunteering artist, and the consequence was, his giving them, as his habitual expression, one which was rare, and in this particular case more made than born.

The time when I would have liked his look to have been perpetuated, was that of all others the least likely, or indeed possible; – it was, when after administering the Sacrament to his people, and having solemnized every one, and been himself profoundly moved by that Divine, everlasting memorial, he left the elders' seat and returned to the pulpit, and after giving out the psalm, sat down wearied and satisfied, filled with devout gratitude to his Master – his face pale, and his dark eyes looking out upon us all, his whole countenance radiant and subdued. Any likeness of him in this state, more like that of the protomartyr, when his face was as that of an angel, than anything I ever beheld, would have made one feel what it is so impossible otherwise to convey, – the mingled sweetness, dignity, and beauty of his face. When it was winter, and the church darkening, and the lights at the pulpit were lighted so as to fall upon his face and throw the rest of the vast assemblage into deeper shadow, the effect of his countenance was something never to forget.

He was more a man of power than of genius in the ordinary sense. His imagination was not a primary power; it was not originative, though in a quite uncommon degree receptive, having the capacity of realizing the imaginations of others, and through them bodying forth the unseen. When exalted and urged by the understanding, and heated by the affections, it burst out with great force, but always as servant, not master. But if he had no one faculty that might be, to use the loose words of common speech, original, he was so as a whole, – such a man as stood alone. No one ever mistook his look, or would, had they been blind, have mistaken his voice or words, or those of any one else, or any one else's for his.

His mental characteristics, if I may venture on such ground, were clearness and vigour, intensity, fervour, 26 concentration, penetration, and perseverance, – more of depth than width. 27 The moral conditions under which he lived were the love, the pursuit, and the practice of truth in everything; strength and depth, rather than external warmth of affection; fidelity to principles and to friends. He used often to speak of the moral obligation laid upon every man to think truly, as well as to speak and act truly, and said that much intellectual demoralization and ruin resulted from neglecting this. He was absolutely tolerant of all difference of opinion, so that it was sincere; and this was all the more remarkable from his being the opposite of an indifferentist, being very strong in his own convictions, holding them keenly, even passionately, while, from the structure of his mind, he was somehow deficient in comprehending, much less of sympathizing with the opinions of men who greatly differed from him. This made his homage to entire freedom of thought all the more genuine and rare. In the region of theological thought he was scientific, systematic, and authoritative, rather than philosophical and speculative. He held so strongly that the Christian religion was mainly a religion of facts, that he perhaps allowed too little to its also being a philosophy that was ready to meet, out of its own essence and its ever unfolding powers, any new form of unbelief, disbelief, or misbelief, and must front itself to them as they moved up.

"One instance of his imperfect discernment of associations of thought that were not of a purely logical character was afforded, we used to think, by the decided and almost contemptuous manner in which he always rejected the theory of what is called the double interpretation of prophecy. This, of course, is not the place to discuss whether he was absolutely right or wrong in his opinion. The subject, however, is one of somewhat curious interest, and it has also a strictly literary as well as a theological aspect, and what we have to say about it shall relate exclusively to the former. When Dr. Brown then said, as he was accustomed in his strong way to do, that 'if prophecy was capable of two senses, it was impossible it could have any sense at all,' it is plain, we think, that he forgot the specific character of prophetic literature, viz., its being in the highest degree poetic. Now everyone knows that poetry of a very elevated cast almost invariably possesses great breadth, variety, we may say multiplicity of meaning. Its very excellence consists in its being capable of two, three, or many meanings and applications. Take, for example, these familiar lines in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream:' —

"Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,Could ever hear by tale or history,The course of true love never did run smooth:But either it was different in blood,Or else misgraffed in respect of years,Or else it stood upon the choice of friends;Or if there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied night,That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth.And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'The jaws of darkness do devour it up;So quick bright things come to confusion."

We remember once quoting these lines to a lady, and being rather taken aback by her remark, 'They are very beautiful, but I don't think they are true.' We really had forgot for the moment the straightforward, matter-of-fact sense of which they are capable, and were not adverting to the possibility of their being understood to mean that – nothing but love-crosses are going, and that no tolerable amount of comfort or happinesses to be found in the life matrimonial, or in any of the approaches towards it. Every intelligent student of Shakespere, however, will at once feel that the poet's mind speedily passes away from the idea with which he starts, and becomes merged in a far wider theme, viz., in the disenchantment to which all lofty imaginations are liable, the disappointment, to which all extravagant earthly hopes and wishes are doomed. This, in fact, is distinctly expressed in the last line, and in this sense alone can the words be regarded as at all touching or impressive. Sudden expansions and transitions of thought, then, are nothing more than what is common to all poetry; and when we find the Hebrew bards, in their prophetic songs, mingling in the closest conjunction the anticipations of the glories of Solomon's reign, or the happy prospects of a return from Babylon, with the higher glory and happiness of Messiah's advent, such transitions of thought are in perfect accordance with the ordinary laws of poetry, and ought not to perplex even the most unimaginative student of the Bible.