Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740–1800

By John R. McIntosh

Works on Scottish church history have sometimes been described as parochial, partisan, outdated or unscholarly. John McIntosh remedies this. He diverts attention from the Moderate Party in the eighteenth century, with its focus on the small group of Edinburgh literati, to the unexpectedly broad-based Popular Party, which opposed patronage in the Church of Scotland and included all shades of theological and political opinion.

As well as delineating the evolving theological re-alignment which led eventually to the nineteenth-century evangelical revivals and contributed much to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, John McIntosh sees the emergence of an intellectually confident grouping of ministers – orthodox Evangelicals but ‘Enlightened’ thinkers – as the most significant feature of the eighteenth-century Church. He also considers the responses of the Church of Scotland to the Scottish Enlightenment, to the American and French Revolutions and their associated ideas, and to the social implications of the Industrial Revolution.

The Church of Scotland in this period touched the lives of city lawyers, urban merchants, lowland farmers and highland crofters alike. This book is therefore recommended reading for social and political historians as well as students of church history and theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Donald
• Release date: Mar 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781788854405

Book preview

Introduction

The eighteenth-century Church of Scotland has received little attention from historians, and there has never been a comprehensive analysis of its nature and theology. It has therefore been necessary to study it through the usually unsatisfactory general surveys of ecclesiastical history, or through nineteenth-century biographies of some of its leaders. As has been asserted in this connection, however, ‘the large literature on Scottish ecclesiastical history is often parochial, partisan, outdated, or unscholarly, if not all four’.¹ In particular, the Popular party in the eighteenth-century Church has been substantially neglected.

This state of neglect can be ascribed to two main factors. In the nineteenth century much, if not almost all, historical writing on Scottish ecclesiastical history was produced in the aftermath of the Disruption of the Church in 1843, or was heavily influenced by subsequent ecclesiastical or theological wrangling later in the century. Secondly, most twentieth-century interest has centred around the relationship between the Popular party’s opponents, the Moderates, and the Scottish Enlightenment.

The twentieth-century historiography of the Scottish Church, in fact, shares the same type of defects which characterised it in the nineteenth century. Although there was no reawakening of interest in eighteenth-century Scottish ecclesiastical history until the 1960s and ’70s, the flurry of activity since then has not been the result of direct interest in the Church as a whole, far less of interest in the Popular party, and there has in fact been a move away from traditional ecclesiastical history. Some of the works which discuss the subject, indeed, are the result of interests which are not necessarily ecclesiastical in a fundamental sense at all. This is the case, for example, with those works which have their origins in the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. Also, in the twentieth century the influence of the social sciences has brought new approaches in old fields, but it has not directed any more attention to the Church in its own right; the result has perhaps been even less. Certainly attention has not been paid to the thought of the opponents of the Moderates, the Popular party which arguably contained the majority of the Church’s ministers. This explains the present study’s extended attempt to come to terms with the theology of the Popular party, since theology is a major part of the ideology of any ecclesiastical grouping. It is important to appreciate, furthermore, the importance of an examination of the Popular party even for the secular historians of the period.

After an initial chapter which briefly describes the history and ecclesiastical life of eighteenth-century Scotland, the present study is based on a survey of the extant theological, political, social, and cultural writings of the ministers and laymen who were identified with the so-called Popular party in the Church of Scotland from 1740 to 1800, and of their activity at the General Assembly. Particular attention is paid to their theological writings, since they are a prerequisite for understanding the nature of the party. Areas covered include the doctrinal premises, the nature of sin and salvation, and the practical implications of the theology. The picture which emerges is one of considerable theological complexity, which calls into question the assumption of doctrinal unity within the party that has enabled previous writers to propagate a picture of the opponents of Moderatism which is in many ways little more than a caricature.

Popular thought on secular issues is analysed with respect to the areas of the nature of society, government, poverty and wealth, and culture. The interplay of liberal and conservative political impetuses is examined, and the theological bases of the party’s secular thought elicited. This provides an explanation of such factors as why the Church was divided over the American War of Independence and Roman Catholic emancipation, but united over the French Revolution and radicalism in general.

The patronage dispute is analysed and an interpretation is offered, based on both the published works of the party and proceedings at the General Assembly, which argues that the fundamental religious or spiritual motivation of Popular opposition to the patronage system has not been appreciated, and that therefore the evolution of the Popular response to patronage as revealed at the General Assembly has been misconstrued. Far from the key issue in the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century being the dispute between the Popular and Moderate parties over patronage, of much greater importance was the evolving theological alignment.

The way forward for the study of the Scottish Church in the period, therefore, involves a supplementing of the history of ideas, and a moving away from preoccupations both with the debates and actions of the General Assembly, and with the significance of a small group of possibly unrepresentative Moderate literati. The need is for a re-examination of the evidence for hitherto-accepted assumptions, and for a wider-ranging investigation of the available sources than has yet been attempted. This is what the present study tries to achieve.

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¹.R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985), p. 351.

CHAPTER ONE

Church and Society, 1740–1800

In the years between 1740 and 1800 Scotland was a society in transition. Living conditions, the economy, intellectual life, and religion were all characterised by change. Perhaps the area of national life least affected was that of politics and government. Partly for that reason eighteenth-century Scottish history has been perceived in the popular imagination as centring around the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6, with little else of note apart from a ripple of Radical unrest in the 1790s. In recent years, however, general historical misconceptions are being revised as research into Scotland’s history during the century progresses, and as the significance of the various developments becomes more widely appreciated. Eighteenth-century Scottish history can no longer be comprehended within the twin romanticisms of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Robert Burns.

I

Fundamental to the life of the Scottish people was the process of agricultural improvement, a process which culminated in the widespread commercialisation of rural society. This development, which was most marked from the 1760s, contributed to the lowering of death rates which was to ensure the rising population behind urbanisation, and also improved the food supply which the urban development required. The transformation was achieved through increases in both production and productivity brought about by the reorganisation in farm structure, by more efficient labour organisation, and by higher yields derived from improved fallowing, adoption of root crops and new crop rotations.¹ Throughout the century agricultural improvement was carried out to varying degrees and in varying ways from locality to locality, and even from estate to estate. It sometimes involved the dispossession of tenant farmers as a result of the ending of the runrig system of cultivation. The process of improvement accelerated after the 1760s and was an extended one. But the Statistical Account of Scotland, published in the 1790s, reveals that even then it was incomplete; dramatic differences from one parish to the next were common. There were several reasons for both the delay and the variation: the granting of long leases on land was not really possible until new legislation was passed in 1770; large-scale development had to await the rise of new banking and credit systems, and that in turn required the growth of capital reserves from commercial and professional sources; and the large markets provided by urban growth were required to provide the stimulus for investment in improvement.

Agricultural improvement was much more marked in the south than in the north. With the exception of Aberdeenshire and the Laigh of Moray, heavy soils in the north required drainage techniques which were not developed until the nineteenth century. In the Highlands, thorough-going implementation of improvements initially foundered on the commitment of Highland society to the concept of duthchas, which postulated an obligation on the chief to provide security for his clansmen. The aura of this concept lingered on after the collapse of the traditional Highland social patterns and authority structures. Not until the nineteenth century was large-scale enforced clearance widespread, and by that time the economic advantages of a sheep-based estate economy were less marked.

The living conditions of the rural working classes, however, remained hard, although there were advances. In the Lowlands, agricultural housing improved, and the real wages of agricultural labourers increased during the century in spite of the rise in prices. At the beginning of the period, though, food scarcity, while by no means endemic, was not quite yet a thing of the past, and local conditions could cause significant problems especially in the more remote areas, notably the Highlands. Not until the end of the century did serious short-term scarcity completely disappear, not to reappear until the potato famines of the mid-nineteenth century which were mainly confined to the Western Highlands. This was the long-term result of improved poor relief, more sensitive response to emergencies, developments in transport and marketing, the possession of surplus income to purchase food abroad, and, from the 1770s, rapid agricultural improvements and the introduction of the potato in the Highlands. Only in the more, prosperous areas of the Lothians, the North-East, and the Laigh of Moray did farm labourers achieve reasonably secure living and working standards without needing to leave their home localities. In general, however, real wages rose in many areas of employment, especially after the 1760s, since the labour supply does not seem to have matched the demands for labour power. This certainly contributes to explaining the relative absence of agrarian unrest in Scotland in the latter part of the century.

There were also demographic changes. Throughout the whole of the period population moved from rural areas to the towns. In particular there was a marked three-way population shift: from the Highlands to the Lowlands, especially to the towns of the west-central belt; from the Highlands, though not exclusively from there, to the colonies; and, as yet largely on a seasonal basis, but especially significant after about 1780, from Ireland to the Lowlands.

In the case of the Highlands, emigration to both Lowland and colonial destinations arose ultimately from lack of land, but after about 1730 more immediately from the higher rents which were being universally levied by the clan chiefs on tenants and through them on sub-tenants, as the chiefs became ever more aware of the correlation between status and wealth. This desire to maximise revenue led to the introduction of sheep-raising, which was widespread by around 1760 and which changed the patterns of landholding. The aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6, of course, accelerated this process by destroying finally any remaining ‘patriarchal’ authority of the clan chiefs and great magnates by transforming it into more conventional systems of land tenure. The people of the Highlands became tenants and cottars rather than clansmen and retainers. As yet, however, there were few enforced clearances of crofters from their lands. Large-scale colonial emigration did not arise in the eighteenth century as a result of pressure on land or from clearance. The first cause of significant emigration from the Highlands occurred after the disbanding of the Highland regiments at the close of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the subsequent favourable reports home of colonial life from veterans who had settled in North America; and this was increased as the tacksmen or main tenants were squeezed out of the traditional Highland landholding pattern by the landlords’ demand for economic rents. But throughout the century, in fact, both the governments of the day and the great Highland landlords strove actively to prevent emigration. In the case of the former, their opposition increased as a result of the manpower shortages which affected the armed forces during the war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

The other side of this process of migration and emigration was that of urbanisation. Between 1755 and 1801, the population of Scotland rose from 1.25 million to 1.6 million. In 1750 it is estimated that 9% of the population lived in towns with a population of 10,000 or more; by 1800 the figure had risen to 17%. It has been suggested that between 1760 and 1830 the pace of Scottish urbanisation was probably the fastest in Europe. Care should, however, be taken not to overestimate either the extent or the speed of the process of urbanisation: even at the end of the century, Scotland was still overwhelmingly a rural society. The process of urbanisation, however, as well as that of emigration, explains why some areas of the Highlands experienced a net population loss by the 1790s.²

In the same way that Scotland was a country in a state of social and demographic transition, so too was it in a state of industrial transition. The Union of 1707 had depressed the economy, as a result of Scottish inability to compete with England in the absence of protection, and in areas of economic activity which required government aid or legislation the picture was often one of half-hearted or delayed attention. Nevertheless, there were areas of progress. As a result of the 1742 Bounty Act and the founding in 1746 of the British Linen Bank, the middle of the century saw the struggling linen industry, which produced the only significant Scottish export, start to play an increasingly important role in the trade between the Clyde and the American colonies. By 1803, linen accounted for 64% of Scotland’s exports. After 1730 until 1800 linen production roughly doubled every twenty-five years. The middle of the century also saw the rise of a more varied commerce with North America, epitomised at its most successful in the Glasgow tobacco trade which peaked in the 1770s. The trade with North America, and the tobacco trade in particular, stimulated the entire economy and was especially important in that, for the first time since the Union of 1707, it made possible the accumulation of useful amounts of capital. These contributed to the emergence of a factory-based industrial system towards the end of the century.³

Starting to occur to a certain extent in the mid-century, furthermore, was the process of industrialisation. Spinning mills, iron works, and relatively small-scale chemical works were appearing in various parts of the country. Although there had been earlier small ventures at various sites from Inverness to Argyll, the most important of these, especially in view of its future significance for the Scottish economy, was the iron industry. The foundation of the Carron Company near Falkirk in 1759 is often seen as the watershed for such developments. It was to be followed within the next twenty years by several other ironworks in the west of Scotland. It should not be assumed, however, that this process was either widespread or large-scale. By 1796 there were only sixteen blast furnaces in the whole of the country. At the end of the century, there were only around a dozen ironworks and large segments of Scottish manufactures were owned by a relatively few families. Although there had been a start made to canal building, the Forth-Clyde-Monkland canal complex was not completed until 1792, and the full emergence of the industrial economy of Scotland had to await the transport and communications improvements of the next century. Until the 1780s, Scotland was still a rural society, but one in which transformation was imminent. It has been suggested that eighteenth-century Scottish economic development was in a ‘take-off’ phase, which made possible the emergence of an industrialised society, and this view has much to commend it.⁴

The urbanisation of the country, and its concomitant industrialisation, soon placed not only the structures of the Church, but also those of society and government, under enormous pressures. Politically, the embryonic modern parliamentary state which existed before the Treaty of Union with England in 1707 had been replaced with a conglomerate structure of somewhat incongruous institutions by means of which successive governments sought to implement centralised control from Westminster, while retaining the courts and administrative structures of the previous system. Increasingly, however, English forms and procedures hampered efficiency. In particular, the Court of Session, although its prerogatives were guaranteed by the union Treaty itself, experienced a process of anglicisation largely as a result of the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords, which overturned Court of Session decisions with little knowledge or concern.

The middle of the eighteenth century saw the government of Scotland evolve from a system in which power was maintained in the hands of the great noble families, most notably those of the duke of Argyll between 1715 and 1742, and his brother the earl of Islay until 1761, to one in which power was wielded by the ministers of the Crown through an intricate and all-pervasive system of interest and patronage. As the century progressed, the factional nature of English politics and government rendered the efficient marshalling of the Scottish parliamentary vote essential to the stability and survival of any ministry. Consequently, management of the Scottish electoral system became a crucial priority. The system which emerged was epitomised in the career of the ‘manager’ Henry Dundas who was the de facto ruler of Scotland from 1774 until 1801. Despite the change in the seat of power, however, the nature of Scottish government and political activity changed scarcely at all for practical purposes, and certainly not in so far as it impinged on the people as a whole. Legislation continued to have limited efficacy, and would not do so until transport and communications improved.

II

One of the most notable features of the political history of Scotland in the period between 1740 and 1800 was the extent to which few of the events in these years actually had a general impact on the life of the Church. At most they had limited effects. Even the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 caused scarcely a ripple in the Church nationally, though the Church’s opposition was a crucial factor in its defeat and numerous ministers in the north suffered personal hardship or difficulties. The Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 provoked little more than a few sermons on the duty of loyalty and expressions of thankfulness for victory. It did, however, give point to the agitation for a Scots militia in the 1750s and ’60s, which came to a head in 1757 with the passage of the Militia Bill excluding Scotland from its provisions. The establishment of a Scots militia became a cause célèbre of some of the leaders of the Moderate party, but it remained a matter of almost complete uninterest to the rest of the Church. Of much greater impact was the American War of Independence which broke out in 1776. Although it was the Seceders who were the first to become involved by passing a resolution in favour of conciliation, before long opposition to or support for the war against the colonists became a party issue between the Popular and Moderate parties in the Church.⁵ Because the American Revolution was linked in Popular eyes with what was seen as the Moderate-dominated General Assembly’s denial of religious liberty, the war years saw substantial publication concerning the issues of civil and religious liberty and church discipline.

Of more influence in the life of the Church, as in the life of the nation, was the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Initially, the Revolution was welcomed by most sections of British public opinion, but after the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, the excesses of the September Massacres in 1792 and the execution of Louis XVI, support waned, and it evaporated with the declaration of war on Britain by France in 1793. This pattern was reflected in the Church of Scotland. After initial support for the Revolution as a harbinger of liberty on the part of the Popular party, before long there was little opposition from any quarter to the suppression of any indication of support for the Revolution or of the promotion of reform in Britain. Public opinion in the Church, as in the country as a whole, became increasingly preoccupied with the pursuit of the war against France.

The years after 1740 saw the flowering of the great intellectual movement now known as the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. In 1739, David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature was published. This was rewritten as the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748, and was followed in the 1750s by the Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, the Natural History of Religion, and finally his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The late 1760s and ’70s saw the appearance of several works of intellectual significance: to name but a few, Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy of 1767, Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society of 1767, William Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles V of 1769 and History of America of 1777; and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations of 1776. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was also first published in Edinburgh between 1768 and 1771, and included among its contributors a considerable number of ministers.

The concept of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, however, is one which has aroused considerable controversy as to what it actually was. Definitions offered are sometimes general and sometimes restricted.⁶ Possibly the most workable is one which, among other features largely relating to social and political conservatism and concern for certain aspects of literary style, stresses the love of learning and virtue, faith in reason and science, and a dedication to humanism and humanitarianism, together with a distrust of religious ‘enthusiasm’.⁷ The Scottish Enlightenment, of course, was part of the wider European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which affected religion by stressing the significance of Reason in the pursuit of knowledge, by embodying belief in a law-governed universe, and by producing an essentially optimistic state of mind about the prospects of mankind. The particular emphases of the Scottish Enlightenment, however, lay in its interest in the social behaviour of man, and in political economy and moral philosophy.

Probably the seminal influence in the Scottish Enlightenment was Francis Hutcheson, who was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University from 1729 to 1746. Influenced by the liberal or even latitudinarian views of Professor John Simson and of the English rationalist Samuel Clarke, he had come to hold that philosophy and theology could only be pursued by means of rational enquiry. In particular, he espoused the ideas of the English deist writer Shaftesbury from whom he acquired the notion that benevolence is the criterion of morality. This concept was to have a profound impact on Scottish theological endeavour. As important as Hutcheson, however, was the work of David Hume. Postulating that all knowledge was based on experience, and thence arguing that at bottom all knowledge was nothing more than mental impressions, Hume rejected the possibility of religious knowledge and adopted a position of scepticism. While his philosophy has remained vastly influential until the present, however at the time, Hume’s line of reasoning, although arousing much antagonism amongst orthodox theologians, made few inroads into the perceptions of the faithful. That this was so was the result of the development of the Scottish ‘Common Sense’ philosophy propounded initially by Thomas Reid of Aberdeen. His work was readily accepted by all sections of the Scottish Church, irrespective of their theological inclinations, as embodying the negation of Hume’s principles.

III

The position of the established Church of Scotland, and in particular its presbyterian constitution explicitly guaranteed in the Treaty of Union, has now to be considered. The system of Presbyterianism involved a complex relationship of ecclesiastical and civil bodies. At the parish level the basic institution of the Church was the kirk session. This body, consisting of several ‘ruling elders’, met regularly under the chairmanship of the minister who, when acting in that capacity, assumed the title of ‘moderator’, the term applied also to ministers when they act as chairmen of presbyteries, synods, or General Assemblies of the Scottish Presbyterian Churches.⁸ The kirk session had within its remit all matters relating to the faith and practice of the members of the congregation. It controlled admission to membership and thus to the sacraments, it oversaw the morals of the parish, it arranged the times of public worship and the dates of communion seasons, and it distributed relief to the needy from the collections taken at public worship. Technically, it had the right to decide whether an infant should be baptised, but generally speaking this was left in the hands of the minister unless the child was illegitimate. In that case the mother and father were brought before the session to confess their fornication or adultery, and thereafter to accept public rebuke on six successive occasions before the child would be baptised. By the latter third of the century, however, public confession and admonition became less often required by sessions and presbyteries, and first offences at least were dealt with in private and often by the minister alone.

The fabric of the church and manse buildings, and the payment of the minister’s stipend, as also the school and schoolmaster’s salary, were not the responsibility of the kirk session, however, but of the heritors, who were the landholders of the parish. If the church door collections were inadequate for poor relief, the heritors were more or less obliged to raise a voluntary or even a compulsory assessment for an additional sum. Failure to honour their obligations, which was by no means uncommon, could be taken up by the presbytery and referred, if necessary, to the Court of Teinds, a branch of the civil jurisdiction. Problems were often caused by heritors who were non-resident in the parish, or who were members of another communion, most commonly Episcopalian.

The central body in the Presbyterian system, of course, was the presbytery, from which the whole system derives its name. While in part a court of reference and appeal from the kirk sessions of the congregations within its boundaries, the presbytery had a range of matters in which it was the court of first instance, such as the oversight of ministers, and the provision for congregations during vacancies by means of the appointment of one of its ministers as interim-moderators. It admitted and examined divinity students and probationers for the ministry, it conducted or ‘moderated’ calls and admissions to vacant charges, and it decided on overtures which were referred by it to the synods and to the General Assembly and vice versa. It also had a general oversight over the adequacy of ministerial stipends and church property within its bounds. The minister and one ruling elder from each of its congregations attended its monthly meetings; all its members were expected to attend meetings of the provincial synod to which it belonged; and each of the eighty-two presbyteries which existed from 1740 to 1800 sent commissioners to the General Assembly in proportion to their numerical strength (in most cases a minister and a ruling elder).

Next, there were the sixteen provincial synods. These have always had a somewhat unclear status in the practice of the Church of Scotland, but in general terms they were courts of reference and appeal from the presbyteries, and they were obviously responsible for dealing with matters which were of a more than local concern to one presbytery, but which were not necessarily of national importance. They met twice a year, and in practice they functioned as a filter between the presbyteries and the General Assembly, although it could be argued that in the course of the eighteenth century they filtered out very little, since most cases went on appeal to the General Assembly in any case.

At the apex of the presbyterian system, and in the course of the eighteenth century accruing more status and power than constitutionally it was entitled to, was the General Assembly. This body met once a year in Edinburgh, usually for a fortnight in May, and, strictly speaking was the court of final reference and appeal in the Church of Scotland. Each presbytery sent at least a minister and a ruling elder as commissioners, and to this number each royal burgh was entitled to send another elder to represent it. Ruling elders made up approximately 40% of the official membership of the Assembly. The universities were also entitled to send one representative each, who was invariably a minister. In judicial matters, the decision of the General Assembly was final, although a formal dissent was permitted. In other affairs, such as changes in the constitution of the Church, or any matters of legislation, the General Assembly had no executive or prescriptive power. Action had to be taken by means of overtures from the Assembly to the presbyteries requesting their approval of the proposed legislation, and the majority of them had to concur before the proposed legislation became the law of the Church at the General Assembly of the following year.

One of the most significant phenomena of the eighteenth-century General Assembly was the predominance of Edinburgh lawyers among the ruling elders who were commissioners at the Assembly. One of the problems facing many commissioners was the difficulty of getting to Edinburgh owing to bad weather or transport problems. This was especially true of those from remote presbyteries. For example, for most of the eighteenth century, the membership of the General Assembly nominally should have numbered around 360. In practice, it never exceeded 300, it rarely exceeded 200, and it was often less than 150. At the vote on the important Schism Overture of 1766, for example, only 184 individual votes were cast.⁹ Partly to offset such problems, many presbyteries regularly nominated, as their ruling elders, Edinburgh lawyers who frequently had no real connections with the presbyteries they represented. This had profound consequences in the dispute over patronage.

Another object of increasing concern to many was the operation of the Commission of Assembly. This body, in effect a committee of the General Assembly, was set up each year to complete unfinished Assembly business and to implement the detail of Assembly decisions. In the period around 1750 and after, however, it became increasingly involved in the enforced settlement of vacant congregations. It was almost universally believed to be ‘packed’ with nominees favourable to patronage, and to be arrogating to itself executive powers which even the General Assembly itself did not possess. It certainly had a marked disproportion of Edinburgh lawyers. Judges of the Court of Session were often appointed to it as a courtesy, although it is not clear whether they were accustomed to avail themselves of the privilege. Much of the hostility of the opponents of ecclesiastical patronage came to be aimed at the Commission of Assembly as much as at the Moderate-dominated Assembly itself.

Although nominally free from any intervention by the State in its affairs, for most of the century the Church was wracked, or so it has seemed to subsequent historians, by the problem of patronage. This was the system, restored by the Patronage Act of 1712, whereby the ‘patron’ had the right to nominate a ‘presentee’ to a vacant parish, who was then to be accepted or rejected by the congregation. The patron was most commonly the largest landowner in the parish, but in between a quarter and a third of the parishes it was the Crown in the person of the government minister responsible for Scottish affairs. The right of patronage was a civil possession, and was therefore under the jurisdiction of the civil courts. At the same time, however, the presbytery had the ecclesiastical obligation to ensure that the person inducted to the parish was acceptable to the kirk session and to the heads of families of the congregation. There was thus great potential for clashes, so much so that the life of the eighteenth-century Church of Scotland, and indeed much of the life of the nation as a whole in the period, was frequently dominated by the bitter struggles over patronage.

Questions of patronage and of political influence on the Church have often been seen as the predominant issues in the life of the eighteenth-century Church of Scotland. Ecclesiastical patronage came to be regarded as an extension of the system of political patronage, in that politicians saw the presentation to vacant parishes of families or friends of political allies as a means of preserving or extending their own power. Governments of the day were also aware of the advantage to be derived from having a Church which refrained from criticism of their policies. In the eighteenth century, acquisition of political power in London inevitably led to changes in the ‘management’ of the Church. The minister of the government responsible for Scottish affairs tended to seek the advice of an influential minister of the Church regarding who should be nominated to those vacant parishes where the right of presentation belonged to the Crown. For example, from 1736 to the fall of Walpole in 1742, Argyll and Islay entrusted the management of Church business in the government’s interest to Rev. Patrick Cuming; from then until the resignation of Lord Tweeddale in 1746, Rev. Robert Wallace was the government manager; and he was replaced by a reappointed Cuming. Later in the century, Principal William Robertson was the central figure in the relationship between Church and State.

IV

Much of what has been mentioned thus far concerns the life of the Church in its official manifestations and has little to do with the life of the ordinary members. The piety of the ordinary men and women in the pews, far less of those who, in the cities especially, were not to be found regularly among the ranks of the faithful at public worship, is as yet little known. What is known is that during the eighteenth century there was clearly a voracious demand for printed sermons. Not only were the great devotional writers, such as Thomas Boston of Ettrick and John Willison of Dundee, in demand for most of the century and until well into the next, but also the sermons of even unknown parish ministers were regularly published in what were usually small local editions. Sometimes, no doubt, they were intended to bring the preacher to the notice of a wider audience; while at other times they were published in response to local demand. The subject matter was sometimes devotional, sometimes practical, sometimes evangelistic, though rarely exegetical in the modern sense of the term. If systematic exegesis of Scripture was the practice in the pulpit, there is little sign of that in what found its way into print.¹⁰ There is some evidence, too, that some works of the leading seventeenth-century English Puritans were read in the homes of ordinary members of the Church of Scotland.

Apart from regular attendance at public worship, which was enforced to varying degrees throughout the country, the main occasions of religious observance were the great communion seasons. Although one should probably hesitate to assume that Robert Burns’s satirical picture of one such occasion in his Holy Fair was a typical example of all such observances in all parishes across the country, there can be no doubt that there was at least a modicum of truth in it. Probably, too, the estimates of attendances for such gatherings should be treated with considerable reserve, such is the difficulty of accurate assessment of crowd size. Nevertheless, the celebration of a communion season probably attracted several hundreds from neighbouring parishes as well as from the parish in which it was being held, and this was certainly increased substantially when a famous preacher was to be heard. This, of course, was entirely within the intentions of the fathers of Scottish Presbyterianism. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not the preserve of one parish, but was on the contrary a means of strengthening the unity of the whole Church through the united observance of it by representatives of the different sections of the Church.

The relationship between Church and people in eighteenth-century Scotland is also to be seen in the holding of ‘Fast Days’ at times of local or national crisis. These days of ‘humiliation and prayer’ were not infrequent additional observances at times other than the regular fast day before a communion season, and were held in situations of drought, famine, or war. Often the proclamations of these fast days, issued usually by presbyteries, displayed the wide-ranging concerns which provoked them. For example, in 1742 the Presbytery of Stirling argued in support of its decision to call a fast:

The Presbytery of Stirling … deeply affected with our present circumstances in that we are engaged in a dangerous and expensive war abroad, and that we are pinched with scarcity at home so that the number of the poor are increasing, hunger and famine appearing in many faces … our manifold abounding sins among us, particularly Infidelity, contempt of Christ and his ordinances, profanation of the Lord’s Day, neglect of public and family worship, profanation of the Sacred Name of God, and perjury abounding … excessive prodigality and profuseness abounds with some, while their fellow brethren are groaning under want and poverty.¹¹

The role of the Church in the lives of the people, however, transcended the forms and patterns of piety. The Church of Scotland played a vital social role in the day-to-day events of the community as a whole. There were three basic assumptions which marked the relationship of the Church to the people of Scotland in the eighteenth century. First, it was assumed that Scotland was a Christian country, and that the established Church was to be seen as the embodiment of that reality. This perception did not imply that the social and ecclesiastical divisions caused by the secessions from the established Church were disregarded. In fact, in a way they were institutionalised because for most of the century the Secession Churches maintained the principle of establishment by holding to the duty of secession from a false establishment in order to preserve a true one. In theory, at least, the possibility of return to a purged establishment was always open. It was this point which Thomas Chalmers was to assert so unequivocally at the Disruption of 1843, when a third of the ministers and around half of the membership of the Church of Scotland left it to form the Free Church of Scotland. The second assumption was that within the Christian community that was Scotland, there were some who had fallen into sins such as atheism and ‘infidelity’, as well as immorality. Such sinners were the responsibility of the Church unless they could credibly claim to be the adherents of the Secession Church or of another denomination. And, thirdly, there was the assumption, especially in evangelical sections of the Church, that the answer to such problems lay in renewed personal and collective devotion.

It