heaven. Fanaticism is of no country; it is an overgrowth of the human mind, but it may sometimes spring from the same root as the noblest and truest aspirations of human nature.

If Mr. Buckle had been so minded, he might with equal truth have limited his researches to the three kingdoms united under the British sceptre and have proved that they are the most benighted portion of Europe, for in no part of Europe does the theological' theory prevail with more entire sway. In Ireland, Mr. Buckle would find the Church of Rome wholly unrestrained by the action of the civil power, and enjoying a degree of authority over the mass of the people, which has never been surpassed in any country or in any age; in Scotland he has sufficiently denounced the extremes of Calvinism and Presbyterian Church government; and even in England, if he will candidly pursue his inquiries into the prevailing theological opinions of what are called the Evangelical sects and a large portion of the middle classes, we are afraid that he will find at least as much narrowness and intolerance as in any part of the world. But while, in common with Mr. Buckle, we deplore the extent to which these extravagant opinions exist amongst ourselves, we draw from the fact a totally opposite conclusion. We infer from it, not that men of strong religious sentiments are necessarily the most benighted of mankind, but that intolerance itself is but the excess of the earnestness and deep conviction which produce energetic characters, and that faith, even though it be tinged with superstition, is a far surer foundation of national greatness and of personal virtue, than the destructive agency of scepticism or the vacant creed which denies the Providential attributes of God.

But Mr. Buckle asserts that whatever may have been the fanaticism of other countries and other Churches, Scotland stands on a bad pre-eminence, comparable only to the intense

See, for example, Sydney Smith's inimitable article on Methodism in this Journal for 1808, and in his collected works. Some of the instances quoted by Mr. Buckle show a ludicrous ignorance of the subject he is dealing with. Thus he finds in Abernethy's Physick for the Soul,' the words' Hell hath enlarged itself,' which he expands into the following sentence: Ample, however, as the arrangements 'were (for future punishment), they were insufficient; and hell, not 'being big enough to contain the countless victims incessantly poured into it, had, in these latter days, been enlarged. There was now 'sufficient room.' Mr. Buckle is evidently not at all aware that the Scotch divine was merely quoting from an older author, the Prophet Isaiah, chap. v. ver. 14. Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and ' opened her mouth without measure.' Irrefragable evidence!

bigotry of Spain, by reason of the political power the clergy acquired and the social influence they have retained. The following passage expresses with fairness and moderation his view of the chief cause of this domination:

'For a hundred and twenty years after the establishment of Protestantism, the rulers of Scotland either neglected the Church or persecuted it, thereby driving the clergy into the arms of the people, from whom alone they could obtain sympathy and support. Hence an alliance between the two parties, more intimate than would otherwise have been possible; and hence, too, the rise of that democratic spirit which was the necessary consequence of such an union, and which the clergy encouraged, because they were opposed and thwarted by the upper classes. So far, the result was extremely beneficial, as it produced a love of independence and a hatred of tyranny, which, twice during the seventeenth century, saved the country from the yoke of a cruel despotism. But these very circumstances, which guarded the people against political despotism, exposed them all the more to ecclesiastical despotism. For, having no one to trust except their preachers, they trusted them entirely, and upon all subjects. The clergy gradually became supreme, not only in spiritual matters, but also in temporal ones. Late in the sixteenth century, they had been glad to take refuge among the people; before the middle of the seventeenth century, they ruled the people. How shamefully they abused their power, and how, by encouraging the worst kind of superstition, they prolonged the reign of ignorance, and stopped the march of society, will be related in the course of this chapter; but, in fairness to them, we ought to acknowledge, that the religious servitude into which the Scotch fell during the seventeenth century, was, on the whole, a willing one, and that, mischievous as it was, it had at least a noble origin, inasmuch as the influence of the Protestant clergy is mainly to be ascribed to the fearlessness with which they came forward as leaders of the people, at a period when that post was full of danger, and when the upper classes were ready to unite with the crown in destroying the last vestiges of national liberty.' (Pp. 330, 331.)

It is a remarkable circumstance that in this passage and throughout this Essay, Mr. Buckle appears never to have taken the trouble to inform himself or to explain to his readers, what the constitution of the Church of Scotland really is: had he done so, he would have perceived that the use of the words clergy,' 'priest-ridden,' 'ecclesiastical despotism,' and the like, are inapplicable to the subject. The essential condition of the Church of Scotland is, in the words of one of its latest historians, that from the very first it laid aside the notion of

'Cunningham's Church History of Scotland,' vol. i. p. 481., an excellent and liberal book, which Mr. Buckle might have consulted with advantage. We hope to give a more extended notice of it in our next number.

priestly exclusiveness. The laity were largely admitted into all its courts, just because it did not recognise the distinction between the laity and the clergy. It never knew a sacerdotal caste. Every man in the nation professing the Reformed faith, who held a high office or an influential position, was invited to attend the General Assembly. In the first General Assembly there were but forty-one members, of whom only six were ministers. The General Assembly was from the first a representative body, and a much more thorough representation of the people at large than the Scottish Parliament. The same condition pervaded all the Church Courts, down to the Kirk Session; and whatever their spirit may have been, it was and is undoubtedly not the spirit of the clergy alone, but the genuine spirit and will of the nation.

Mr. Buckle has correctly described the spirit of the Church of Scotland as democratic, and he acknowledges the services it has rendered in the worst of times to civil liberty. But he entirely fails to perceive that the true cause of the want of enlightenment and tolerance which he deplores in the Scotch clergy is their dependence on the least enlightened and tolerant portion of the people.

Had Mr. Buckle possessed any real knowledge of Scotland, or had he been able to discover in books the true key to her history, he would have perceived that it is not the people who are overridden by the clergy, but the clergy who are overridden by the people. Everything has been done to lower the minister to the rank of the servant of his congregation. The divine commission of the priesthood is fiercely denied; the right of temporal patronage vehemently disputed; the admission of ministers by the call of the Presbyteries rigidly maintained; the control of lay members of the Church is exercised even over the doctrine preached from the pulpit.* This one fact explains the whole maze of events in which Mr. Buckle has lost his way. The revolutions and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries threw the Reformed ministers of the Church of Scotland on the body of the people. The Church became, what it still is, essentially the Church of the people, and at the same time the principal seat and instrument of popular power.

* The Presbyteries exercised an equal control over the ministers and the people. Thus, when a committee of the Presbytery of Strathbogie visited the parish of Rhynie, they interrogated the elders as to the efficiency of the minister, who all in one voice deponed that concerning his literature he was very weak, and gave them 'little or no comfort in his ministry.'

It was the most formidable engine of resistance to the prerogatives of the Crown and the dominion of the great owners of the soil, but it has exercised in its own sphere an authority not less absolute and arbitrary.

The immediate subjects of this democratic authority were the clergy themselves: far from being its masters, they have too often been its slaves. The Reformation, which gave so great an impulse to learning in England and in Germany, lowered the standard of scholarship in Scotland. The parochial schools flourished within certain limits, the high schools and the universities held a humbler position than they ought to have done; though, by the way, Mr. Buckle is again wrong in stating that the Scotch Universities are under the control of the clergy it is notorious that they have, till lately, been mainly governed by municipal authorities, neither academical nor clerical. Everything conspired to place the ministers at the mercy of the prejudices, and even of the vices, of their flocks; being compelled to descend to this level, the Church gradually counted in its ministry fewer members of the most highly educated classes of society; it has made up in violence what it lacked in wisdom; it has alienated to a considerable degree the higher classes from its communion; whilst the extreme democracy of the Church chose to throw off even the slight restraint of the law, and seek in a vast schism to exercise a still more paramount authority. If Mr. Buckle is anxious to extend his gloomy catalogue of the misdeeds of ignorant fanaticism, he will find an abundant harvest in those popular sects which have, both in Scotland and in England, been most eager to throw off clerical authority. He will find the Free Kirk of Scotland incomparably more imbued with the doctrines he abhors than the Established Church. He may hear in an English Methodist Meeting, or a Baptist Tabernacle, the superstitions which he conceives to be most adverse to the progress of the human mind. And we hope he will forgive us for asserting our conviction that the safest barrier against the excess of popular fanaticism and intolerance, which we dread and deplore as much

*Even the intensely doctrinal tone of Scotch preaching, and the tendency to Antinomianism which pervades it, are attributable to this cause. It is extremely rare to meet with a Scotch minister who dares to pronounce from the pulpit a searching denunciation of those grosser violations of moral laws to which both sexes are in many parts of Scotland unhappily too prone. The theology of Scotland has so moulded itself to the popular mind, that the habits and prejudices of the people have sensibly affected the importance attached to the truths and the laws of Christianity itself.

as Mr. Buckle, is an enlightened clergy, independent by position, tolerant by reason, and attached to the service of a Church which is not governed by the prejudices of the lower orders.

Mr. Buckle speaks with extreme contempt of the state of literature in Scotland in the seventeenth century, and calls Burnet the only Scotch writer of eminence from the Restoration down to the Union. We should have thought that the eloquence and wisdom of Archbishop Leighton might have exempted him from this [sweeping act of oblivion. But Mr. Buckle also forgets that the Aberdeen Doctors' of the seventeenth century, as they were called, Bishop Patrick Forbes, Dr. John Forbes, Dr. William Leslie, who defended the moderate Episcopacy of Scotland against the Covenanters, formed as learned and accomplished a society as Scotland has ever known. They were crushed by a visitation of the Presbyterian Assembly of 1640. The Assembly's errand,' says Gordon of Rothinsay, was thoroughly done; these eminent divines of Aberdeen either dead, deposed, or banished; in whom 'fell more learning than was left in all Scotland beside at that 'time.' At this very time when learning was most depressed by revolutionary violence in Scotland, there was hardly a University in Protestant Europe which did not boast of its Scotch Professors; and Scotland was as well known abroad by the men of letters she sent forth, as by the soldiers of fortune who fought the battles of Gustavus.

Mr. Buckle does not appear to be aware (or at least he never adverts to the fact) that for upwards of a century two great parties have existed in the Church of Scotland-the Moderate party, and the Popular party-names which already indicate their respective positions. The Moderate party, which sought to maintain the authority of the higher Church Courts, has been constantly on the side of liberal opinions and toleration. In the last century it reckoned Principal Robertson as its acknowledged head; it counted men like Thomas Reid, John Home, Drs. Beattie, Blair, and George Campbell, the antagonist of David Hume, among its members. These divines defended patronage because it tended to raise the character of the clergy by making them less dependent on the opinions and the passions of the

An excellent account of the Moderate party will be found in the interesting book, entitled 'My own Life and Times,' by the late Dr. Somerville, minister of Jedburgh, recently published in Edinburgh. So little is the General Assembly a conclave of fanatical priests, that in the last century Sir Gilbert Elliot, Henry Dundas, and Sir Henry Jardine took a prominent part in its debates.

VOL. CXIV. NO. CCXXXI.

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