Part 6 (1/2)

[Footnote 17: ”All fair things be thine”]

Once a week during the session a party of six or eight students came to tea at Spence Street, until the whole of his two classes had been gone over After tea in the otherwise seldo-room of the house, some of the party accompanied the professor to the study

Here he would show them his more treasured volumes, such as his first edition of Butler, which he would tell theh once a year Others, who preferred a less unclouded atmosphere, withdreith his brother into his sanctu-roo--some of Sankey's, which were then in everybody's mouth, soht suggest references to his student days in Berlin or to later experiences in the Fatherland, and solish hymn-writers At last came family worshi+p, always impressive as conducted by hiatherings It was a very si; but the hoifts, very different in kind as these were, of hinant presence, o off well, and the students went aith a deepened veneration for their professor now that they had seen hi his first two years in Edinburgh he was busily engaged in writing lectures and in adapting his existing stock to the requirements of the new curriculum Of these lectures, and of others which he wrote in later years, it must be said that, while all of them were the fruit of conscientious and strenuous toil, they were of unequal merit, or at least of unequal effectiveness Soetic courses, were brilliant and stireat personality to deal with, such as Origen, Grotius, or Pascal, or, in a quite different way, Voltaire, he rose to the full height of his powers His criticisms of Hume, of Strauss, and of Renan, were also in their oay y seeid view of Inspiration, which did not allow him to lay sufficient stress on the different types of doctrine corresponding to the different individualities of the writers And when, after the death of Principal Harper, he took over the entire departy, his lectures on this, the ”Queen of sciences,”

while full of learning and soave one on the whole a sense of incomentariness This impression was deepened by the oral exa every week on his lectures

For these exa up soreferences which he deemed necessary to make them complete

His aim in theress, but to communicate information of a supplementary and miscellaneous character which he had been unable to work into his lectures And so he would bring down to the class a tattered Father or two, and would regale itsGreek quotations and with a old to him but were hid treasure to them His examination of individual students was lenient in the extreme It used to be said of him that if he asked a question to which the correct ansas Yes, while the answer he got was No, he would exert his ingenuity to show that in a certain subtle and hitherto unsuspected sense the real ansas_ No, and that Mr

So-and-so deserved credit for having discovered this, and for having boldly dared to _say_ No at the risk of being misunderstood This, of course, is caricature; but it nevertheless sufficiently indicates his general attitude to his students

It was the same with the written as with the oral exae proportion of the papers sent in Once it was represented to him that this method of valuation prevented his exa any influence on the adjudication of a prize that was given every year to the student who had the highest aggregate of marks in all the classes He admitted the justice of this contention, and proe When he announced the results of his next exaood as his word; but the change consisted in this: that whereas formerly two-thirds of the class had received full marks, noo-thirds of the class received ninety per cent!

And yet the popular idea of his inability to distinguish between a good student and a bad one was quite wrong He was not so simple as he seemed All who have sat in his classroom remember times when a sudden keen look fro atteave rise to the uncomfortable suspicion that, as it was put, ”he could see s with his eyes shut than most men could see with theirs wide open” The fact is, that all his leniency with his students, and all his apparent ascription to therasp, had their roots not in credulity but in charity--the charity which ”believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things” His very defects came from an excess of charity, and one loved him all the better because of theot far ot fro

It is not so much his lectures as his influence that they look back to and that they feel is affecting theh from Berwick, it was only to a limited extent that he allowed himself to take part in public work outside that which cay There were, however, two public questions which interested him deeply, and the solution of which he did what he could by speech and influence to further One of these was the question of Te the first twenty years of hisposition on this question, although personally he had always been one of the most abste any pledge or enrolling hiiven up the use of alcohol He had done so largely as an experithened with those in his own congregation and beyond it whom he wished to reclaim from intemperance

When he became a professor he was invited to succeed Dr Lindsay as President of the Students' Total Abstinence Society, and, as no absolute pledge was exacted froreed to do so From this time his influence was more and more definitely enlisted on behalf of Total Abstinence, and in 1874 he took a further step In trying to save from intemperance a friend in Beras not a ed him to join the Good Templars, at that time the only available society of total abstainers in the town In order to strengthen his friend's hands, he agreed to join along with hiarded its original purpose, and Dr Cairns re the rest of his life

While there were sos about the Order that did not appeal to hirades of membershi+p and of office, with their s as non-essentials, and was in hearty syh he was often urged to do so, he never would accept office nor advance beyond the initiatory stage of membershi+p represented by the sih, he looked about for a Lodge to connect himself with, and ultimately chose one of the smallest and most obscure in the city The members consisted chiefly ofcould not be fixed earlier than 9 ps as often as he could, and only lamented that he could not attend ht of others to come to a different conclusion fro his total abstinence on the ground of Christian expediency and not on that of absolute Divine law, his view of it as a Christian duty grew clearer every year And he carried his principles out rigidly wherever he went He perplexed German waiters by his elaborate explanations as to why he drank no beer; and once, as he cauine vision of the time when the vineyards on its banks would only be used for the production of raisins At the saious, social, and political aspects, was always beco keener He was frequently to be found on Temperance platfor of Temperance sermons Some of his speeches and sermons on the question have been reprinted and widely read, and one New Year's tract which he wrote has had a circulation of one hundred and eighty thousand

The other question in which he took a special interest was that of Disestablishment To those who adopted the ”short and easyfor the Disestablish that it was all due to jealousy and spite on the part of its promoters, his adhesion to that movement presented a serious difficulty For no one could accuse him of jealousy or spite Hence it was a favourite expedient to represent hi men--as one whose simplicity had been iainst his better judgment to do work in which he had no heart This theory is not only entirely groundless, but entirely unnecessary; because the action which he took on this question can readily be explained by a reference to convictions he had held all his life, and to circumstances which seemed to him to call for their assertion

He had been a Voluntary ever since he had begun to think on such questions His father, in the days of his boyhood, had subscribed, along with a neighbour, for the _Voluntary Church Magazine_, and the subject had often been discussed in the cottage at Dunglass It will be re his first session at the University he was an eager disputant with his classmates on the Voluntary side, and that towards the close of his course, after a nostic Society, he secured a victory for the policy of severing the connection between Church and State These views he had never abandoned, and in a lecture on Disestablishh in 1872 he re-stated the, as the United Presbyterian Synod had done in adopting the ”Articles of Agreeht to frame its policy on Christian lines, he denied that it was its duty or within its competence to establish and endow the Church

This is, to quote his oords, ”an overstraining of its province,--a forgetfulness that its great work is civil and not spiritual,--and an encroachment without necessity or call, and indeed, as I believe, in the face of direct Divine arrangements, on the work of the Christian Church”

These, then, being his viehat led hi part in a Disestablishs especially One of these was the activity at that time of a Broad Church party within the Established Church He maintained that this was no ht as a citizen to deal with it In a national institution vieere held and taught of which he could not approve, and which he considered compromised him as a member of the nation He felt he round of his action was the conviction, which recent events had very thened, that the continued existence of an Established Church was the great obstacle to Presbyterian Union in Scotland It is true that there was nothing in the nature of things to prevent the Free and United Presbyterian Churches coether in presence of an Established Church As a matter of fact, they have done so since Dr Cairns's death, though not without secessions, collective and individual But experience had shown that it was the existence of an Established Church, towards which the Anti-Union party had turned longing eyes, which was the deterotiations Besides, Dr Cairns looked forward to a wider Union than one merely between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches, and he was convinced that only on the basis of Disestablishument that, if the Church of Scotland were to be disestablished, its ht this about that they would decline to unite with theht safely be left to the healing power of time The petulant threat of some, that in the event of Disestablishment they would abandon Presbyterianism, he absolutely declined to notice

The Disestablishun before Dr Cairns left Berwick, and he supported it with voice and pen till the close of his life He did so, it need not be said, without bitterness, endeavouring to make it clear that his quarrel ith the adjective and not with the substantive--with the ”Established” and not with the ”Church,” and under the strong conviction that he was engaged ”in a great Christian enterprise”

CHAPTER X

THE PRINcipaL

During 1877 and 1878 the United Presbyterian Church was ard to its relation to the ”Subordinate Standards,” ie to the Wester and Shorter Catechisms_ These formed the official creed of the Church, and assent to them was exacted froe of opinion, perhaps not sothe doctrines set forth in these docu the perspective in which they were to be viewed, had beentimes It was felt that standards of belief drawn up in view of the needs, reflecting the thought, and couched in the language of the seventeenth century, were not an adequate expression of the faith of the Church in the nineteenth century The points with regard to which this difficulty was ion of the ”Doctrines of Grace”--the Divine Decrees, the Freedom of the Huly, a reater liberty was set on foot

There were many, of course, in the Church who had no sympathy with this anised and led, nised and trusted leaders of the Church were of opinion that the matter must be sympathetically dealt with, and, on the motion of Principal Harper, the Synod of 1877 appointed a Co up a report This Committee, of which Dr Cairns was one of the conveners, soon found that, if relief were to be granted, they had only two alternatives before them They must deal either with the Creed or with the tered that an entirely new and much shorter Creed should be drawn up