Part 8 (2/2)
It is not easy to see why religion should be a.s.sociated with gloom and disheartening ugliness. The long-drawn music of an Old Testament psalm is not without a certain doleful impressiveness, but the human soul needs occasional stimulus, even on Sundays, of something less lugubrious. Certain congregations hate hymns: they consider them carnal and uninspired. As for organ-music in a church, that would be _praising G.o.d by machinery_, a preposterous and intolerable approximation to Popery. Not long ago, a poor crofter in a Hebridean towns.h.i.+p, came to his minister, requesting that good man's offices for the christening of a child. The crofter in question was the possessor of an asthmatic old concertina, and the clergyman, before the rite of admission to the visible church could be performed, insisted on the annihilation of the unG.o.dly instrument of music. The minister, in person, visited the croft, and disabled the concertina with a hammer. The child was then christened, and the clerical zany strode off victorious, feeling he had done a good day's work for Heaven. ”Who ever heard of the Apostle Paul playing on an organ?” was the question once propounded by Dr. Begg. The argument was a splendid _reductio ad absurdum_, and resembles the old reason for the reluctance of the peasantry to eat potatoes, because no mention was made of them in Holy Writ. But songs and music are filtering into the glens, in an official way, by the agency of the Scotch Education Department. Musical drill is a feature of the school-room, and it is a joy to think that such is the case. Some of the old folk, however, look on astounded and shocked; they shake their heads, and would, if they could, abolish such frivolity. ”Why all this singing and tramping?” said a Skyeman to me once. ”What good will all the songs of the world do to a man when he comes to his death-bed? I would rather, this very moment, sit down in a public-house, and drink till I was intoxicated, than screech and howl these worldly airs.” Life was not so absurd in the days of the Catholic ascendency. But human nature is slowly a.s.serting itself, and the days of the glum tyrannical zealot are a.s.suredly numbered.
ETHICAL TEACHING IN SCHOOLS.
In some districts of the North, the inspectors have considerable trouble with certain teachers of the devout type who, from conscientious scruples, refuse to read to the children anything in the nature of a fairy tale. While examining a cla.s.s in a remote Sutherland school, an inspector requested the schoolmaster to narrate to the children, in Gaelic, the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and get them thereafter to put it into English. But the teacher most emphatically refused: ”No, no, I cannot do that: it is all a lie; wolves do not speak; _no animal speaks_.” The inspector, to refute him, unwisely alluded to the Scripture account of Balaam's a.s.s in the twenty-second chapter of Numbers; whereupon, the dominie nearly swooned at the impiety of comparing that inspired animal with a secular beast like Grimm's wolf.
For some time after, the inspector was bombarded with anonymous letters, accusing him of habitually _sitting in the scorner's chair_. He was terrified lest some Member of Parliament, eager for a grievance, should be got to move the adjournment of the House of Commons, with the righteous object of directing the attention of Government to Little Red Riding Hood and the naughty inspector of schools.[17]
The question of religious teaching in schools is capable of an easy solution, and we in the south have come pretty near solving it. The best solution is to have no dogma at all in the school-room. The Catechism and Prayer-book are excellent in their way, but the school is no place for them. We have a very complete and extensive organisation of churches in the land, and an army of officials ordained to teach doctrines and tenets: let them take up the inculcation of creeds and rites, but don't let us perplex the school children with catechisms and metaphysical definitions. It is easy to make a distinction between morality and doctrine--a distinction which is alike clear and reasonable. Morality is an earthly and secular affair, and has to do with matters of elementary honesty such as every responsible citizen of a free country ought to practice. Religion is a higher affair, dealing with our relations.h.i.+p to the unseen: it is outside the province of the teacher, and should not be thrust into the school programme along with history and geography and grammar. Morality is of this world: religion of the next. Let everything be kept in its proper place. As to that division of duty which deals with right conduct, there is no controversy whatever. _Thou shalt not steal_; _thou shalt not bear false witness_--these, and the like elementary rules of conduct, are universally admitted to be right, for they are the groundwork of society. Take these away, and the world lapses into chaos. The following virtues are capable of being taught in schools:--(1) a strict adherence to the truth; (2) the application of the golden rule; (3) cheerful obedience at the call of duty; (4) reverence and respect for everything n.o.ble and great in the history of the world. These can all be taught, and are actually taught, by every conscientious teacher in the country. They const.i.tute not the whole of duty, indeed, but the most difficult part of it--certainly all that need come into the realm of pedagogy.
[17] How differently the items in the Sacred Canon are regarded in scholastic circles in the South! A Glasgow teacher, discussing the Origin of Evil with a Government official, expressed great resentment at the loss of paradise through Adam's sin, and added: ”It comes specially hard on me, seeing that I don't care a _docken_ for apples.”
THE MODERATES.
_Ami lecteur_, have you ever heard of the _Moderates_? If, by chance, you have dipped into the interminable controversies that gyrated round the Disruption year, it is probable you may have heard more than enough of them. One gets the impression that they were an unimpa.s.sioned, easy-going, anti-brimstone, but highly estimable body of men. They were blamed for preaching morality and not the penetrating mysteries of the faith. In ”The Holy Fair,” Burns gives us an inimitable picture of the moral philosopher in the pulpit:--
”But hark! the tent has changed its voice, There's peace an' rest nae langer, For a' the real judges rise-- They canna sit for anger.
Smith opens out his cauld harangues On practice and on morals, An' aff the G.o.dly pour in thrangs To gie the jars an' barrels A lift that day.
”What signifies his barren s.h.i.+ne Of moral powers an' reason?
His English style and gesture fine Are a' clean out o' season.
Like Socrates or Antonine, Or some auld pagan heathen, The moral man he does define, But ne'er a word o' faith in That's richt that day.”
I confess to a certain liking for Smith. He knew what was good for the Holy w.i.l.l.i.e.s and the other ”chosen samples” and ”swatches o' grace” in his auditory. Like a sensible man, and like the Apostle James, he laid more stress on ”practice and on morals” than on lip-wors.h.i.+p and faith.
”Faith without works is dead” is a dictum that needs to be incessantly emphasised, and nowhere more than in certain ultra-orthodox localities of Scotland at the present day.
The Established Church is, with few exceptions, a negligible denomination in the Hebrides. For some reason it is regarded as the modern representative of the Moderate or Broad type of Calvinistic Christianity, and, as such, an abomination to the zealots. To show what a poor hold the Establishment has in Lewis, it is enough to remark that there are in that island only 183 Auld Kirk communicants out of a population of 32,947. Figures almost equally striking could be given for the Presbyteries of Uist, Skye, and Glenelg. The chief occupation of some parish ministers in insular Scotland must be that of killing time.
I once met one of these reverend gentlemen in one of the hotels in Stornoway. He seemed to take a pleasure in running contrary to all the darling prejudices of the islanders. Dancing he approved of; he did not believe in prefacing his prayer or homily with a sanctimonious whine; and he actually was willing to admit that a few Catholics might get to heaven. An equally glaring fault--in the eyes of bigotry, I mean--was that he _dropped into poetry_ at stated times, and sent his Gaelic verses to one of the Highland newspapers. The Parish Church buildings, in many localities of the West Highlands, are in a woeful state of disrepair. They have a prevailing odour of must and damp; the seats are hard deal, unkind to the human anatomy; doors and windows rattle and shake during the service; creeping things move along the walls; sometimes the floors are nothing but the uneven and unconcealed Scottish earth. In such churches, there is some credit in being devout.
A SAVOURY BOOK.
An outstanding member of the clan Macdonald, for some time minister at Applecross, deserves a cordial vote of thanks for a savoury book he has written on the social and religious condition of the Highlands. He is not a bit scared by the Darwinian theory of evolution. ”We have a good deal in common,” he says, ”with the brute creation, and have no cause to feel ourselves degraded on that account. The lower animals, not excluding the much-despised monkey, are specimens of divine workmans.h.i.+p which _reflect the highest honour on the skill and power of the Maker_.”
Could any admission be more handsome or candid than that?
I have learned a great deal from Mr. Macdonald's cheery and broad-minded volume. He is strong in history, and has had, it would seem, access to information that is closed to the general eye. There is a glorious simplicity in his views on Caledonian ethnology. A roguish prince, Gathelus, son of the king of Greece, migrated to Egypt, and married Scota, daughter of that Pharaoh who persecuted the Israelites. The various plagues ”that o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung,” terrified Gathelus, and he flitted in hot haste to Spain, and called his followers Scots, to please his wife. Later in life, he sent his son Hiber to Ireland, where the lad settled, and named the island after his n.o.ble self, Hibernia. Scots continued to pour into Ireland, _via_ the Bay of Biscay, and finally, under Simon Brek, subdued the entire extent of the Green Island. In 360 A.D., they came over to Argylls.h.i.+re, and aided the indigenous Picts (who were also Celts) against the legions of Rome. This is so compact and clear an account, that I wish it were true. The way in which sacred and profane history are blended strikes me as singularly able.
Mr. Macdonald has an intimate knowledge of Celtic superst.i.tions, and always castigates the right thing. Certain diseases of the brain were, till quite recently, believed to be curable if the afflicted man could procure a suicide's skull and take a drink out of it. Mr. Macdonald rightly dwells upon the absurdity of such a specific, but confesses that one might as well try to ”bale out the Atlantic” as eradicate the foolish pagan notions that still linger in the glens.
Ministers have a great deal of captious criticism to stand, if we may judge by Mr. Macdonald's anecdotes. They are blamed for terminating their discourses _with a silver tail_ (_i.e._, intimating a special collection). The sermon itself is not immune from cruel jests, as the following report of a paris.h.i.+oner's criticism will show: ”A minister is like a joiner. The joiner takes a piece of wood and shapes it roughly with the axe. Then he applies his rough plane, and smooths it down a bit. After that, he takes his fine plane; and, lastly, he rubs it with sandpaper, and finishes it with polish till he makes it appear like gla.s.s. And so with the minister: he works his sermon, from sheet to sheet, with pen and ink, till he makes it at last so smooth _that a flea could not stand on it_.”[18]
[18] Ministers, being public men, are, of course, as Mr.
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