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After a residence of seven years in Arbirlot, Dr
Guthrie was, in 1837, called to the metropolis. By this time "his fame was
in all the churches." He had established for himself a reputation as an
orator second to none in the Church of Scotland, Dr Chalmers alone excepted.
He had also been enabled to do the church some service. We have already
referred to his co-operation with Dr Chalmers in his Church Extension
Scheme. But he came still more prominently before the world in connection
with the Non-intrusion controversy. Whatever he undertook to do he did with
all his might, and this, added to his fervid burning eloquence, made him the
cynosure of the church. It was not difficult to foresee that he was destined
to become "a pillar in Israel;" and hence he was placed in a sphere where
his genius and energy could find the most ample scope. Old Greyfriars was
selected as the field of his future operations. A vacancy had occurred in
this collegiate charge by the death of Dr Anderson, and the Town Council
conferred on him the great honour and responsibility of giving him the
presentation. Arbirlot and its people had taken a great hold on his heart,
and to leave its fresh rural fields to work in the dingy closes and "lands"
of the Cowgate, was no easy trial. Impelled, however, by that overruling
Providence which so often urges men of power to leave an easy for a more
difficult spot, Dr Guthrie accepted the call to the collegiate charge of Old
Greyfriars.
It was no easy ordeal that he had to undergo in
being thus transferred from a small and isolated country parish, with little
more than a thousand souls, to a populous and stirring metropolitan charge.
Here, too, he had to till the place and maintain the unrivalled prestige and
reputation left behind them by such men as Robertson the historian and Dr
Erskine—the one the great leader of the moderate, and the other of the
evangelical party in their day and generation. Then, what soul-stirring
reminiscences belonged to that same old church! It had been associated with
many a manly struggle for spiritual independence. Within its walls, in 1638,
the national covenant was partly subscribed, and in the churchyard
surrounding it reposed the ashes of many of Scotland's most illustrious
sons. The population of the parish were, on the whole, illiterate and
wicked, and neglected the ordinances of God. Little wonder, then, that the
change produced a profound and lasting impression on Dr Guthrie's mind. "The
contrast," he has declared, "both morally and physically, between my present
and my former sphere, was such as, without God's help, to appal the stoutest
heart. My country parish had no papists; I had come to one that swarmed with
them. My country parish had only one public-house: and I had come to one
where tippling abounded, and the owners of dram shops grew like toadstools
on a public ruin. With one thousand inhabitants, my country parish had but
one man who could not read; and I had come to one with hundreds who did not
knew a letter. My country parish was not disgraced by one drunken woman; and
I had come to one where women drank, and scores of mothers starved their
infants to feed their vices. My country parish might show a darned, but had
not a ragged coat; and I had come to one of loopholed poverty, where men and
women were hung with rags, and the naked, cracked, red, ulcered feet of
little shivering creatures trod the iron streets. In my country parish there
was but one person who did not attend the house of God; and I had come to
one where only five of the first one hundred and fifty I visited ever
entered either church or chapel. My old country parish had not a house at
least without a Bible ; and I had come to one where many families had no
Bible on the shelf nor a bedstead on the floor. Inside and outside, the roll
might be written with lamentation, mourning, and woe." The great heart of
Guthrie was stirred to its inmost depths by the crime, wretchedness, and
poverty he saw around him. He was musing on the subject one day while
overlooking the Cowgate, and thinking how he could best deal with the
discordant and seemingly irreclaimable material around him, when some one
gently tapped him on the shoulder. On looking round he saw Dr Chalmers
standing before him. The latter evidently guessed what was passing in the
mind of his friend. Neither of them spoke for a few. moments, but stood in
silence contemplating the scene. "All at once," to quote the words in which
Dr Guthrie himself tells the story, "Chalmers, with his broad Luther-like
face glowing with enthusiasm, waved his arm, and exclaimed, 'A beautiful
field, Sir; a very fine field of operation!'"
There was much in common between these two men.
Both were the sons of country merchants; commenced their ministerial labours
in country parishes; and were thence translated to city churches. Chalmers
made it the great aim of his life to reorganise the parochial system of
Scotland, so that the destitute and outcast might be visited and reclaimed,
and the young instructed in the lessons and duties of religion. Guthrie took
a different road to reach the same goal. Chalmers, towards the close of his
life, set on foot a scheme for reclaiming the inhabitants of the West Port
district in Edinburgh—a locality notorious alike for physical squalor and
moral degradation; Guthrie laboured assiduously in the same field. Both were
mixed up with, almost every phase of the memorable Non-intrusion contest,
both before and after the passing of the veto law by the General Assembly,
to the Disruption in 1843; and they generally thought, spoke, and voted in
the same way. Both were expert financiers; and Guthrie did as much for the
Manse Fund as Chalmers achieved on behalf of the Sustentation Scheme of the
Free Church. In other respects the two men were "similar, though not the
same." Both possessed not only the tricks but also the genius of oratorical
power, although the perfervid, burning eloquence of the one presented a
marked contrast to the more stately periods and finished rhetorical
embellishments of the other. They were much together; and it will be readily
understood that Chalmers exercised, both by precept and example, a powerful
influence over his younger colleague; so that to Chalmers' zeal and sympathy
it is no doubt, in great part, due that Guthrie undertook and carried
through his manifold and useful labours among the destitute and degraded in
Old Greyfriars' parish.
It requires a high motive, and the exercise of
no ordinary self-denial, to induce a man to labour as Dr Guthrie did among
the wynds and closes in the parish of Old Greyfriars. It is not merely that
he remembered the case of the poor: that is saying little, he consecrated
his whole energies to the moral, social, and educational amelioration of his
parishioners. He spent the silent watches of the night, as well as the broad
noon-day, among his flock. And such a flock! Neither Shoreditch nor St
George's in the East could produce more loathsome and degraded specimens of
humanity. It was not their poverty alone; although they could have rivalled
Falstaff's ragged regiment in that; but the coarse brutality, the worse than
heathen ignorance, the demoniac instincts of the men and women with whom he
came in contact, would have made any one inspired with a less lofty and
resolute purpose shrink from the work which he undertook. He exposed himself
to perils from violence, from disease, and from foul contagion in his holy
mission. But he never forgot that, although
"The trail of the serpent was over them all,"
these wretched people had claims upon him as a
minister, as a Christian, and as a man. To effect the reclamation of the
rising generation was his great aim; he could make little of the
hoary-headed sinners. His face was as familiar in the dens of iniquity that
abounded in and around the Cowgate, as those of the broker's man and the
constable. But while he was often compelled to hear blasphemy, he seldom was
the victim of personal abuse. The young, especially, "found their comfort in
his face." He had always a word of sympathy or encouragement for them. He
regulated his conduct by the sentiment which he has himself expressed in the
following striking words:—"Keeping out of view the depravity of human
nature, which is common to all, these children are very much what you choose
to make them. The soul of the ragged boy or girl is like a mirror. Frown
upon it, and it frowns on you; look at it with suspicion, and it eyes you in
the same manner. Lift your arm to strike, and there is an arm lifted against
you. Turn your back, and it turns its back on you. Turn round and give it a
smile, and it smiles again in return. It will give smile for smile, kindness
fur kindness."
From, the first, Dr Guthrie took rank as a
preacher of singular vigour and vivacity. In Edinburgh, no less than in
Arbirlot, he was resolved not to let his people sleep. If at first his
manner and illustrations had a certain homespun character, he came
by-and-bye to see the advantages of adapting himself even to the most
cultivated taste, and took much more pains with his style. His labours in
the Greyfriars were divided between preaching on Sundays in the parish
church and "excavating" on week-days in the parish purlieus. It was not long
before the parish church became crowded with hearers, many of them persons
of the first position and influence in Edinburgh. Among his regular hearers
were Lords Jeffrey and Cockburn. The story is told of Cockburn that, being
asked by a friend who met mim one Sunday where he was going to church, he
answered, "Going to have a greet wi' Guthrie." Lord Rutherford was also
among his regular hearers, and so was Lord Cunningham, whose views on church
controversies were diametrically opposite. Hugh Miller joined his
congregation when he came to Edinburgh, and continued through life his warm
and admiring friend. At first, however, this influx of ladies and gentlemen
from the New Town was rather embarrassing. When he came to Edinburgh the
Voluntary controversy was raging, and the reproach was flung out on the one
side, and repudiated on the other, that the Established Church was the
Church only of the gentry, and that the odious annuity-tax was levied on the
poor to support the ministers of the rich. Mr Guthrie at that time believed
in the Established Church as the church of all classes, and besides he was
diligently working in his parish, and was annoyed at the Town Council laying
on seat rents, which really went to exclude the poor, and furnished some
reason for the reproach of the dissenters. Under the influence of these
views he promoted the uncollegiating of Old Greyfriars' Church, and in 1840
got a new church and parish erected close to the Cowgate, called St John's,
in which it was intended to try the experiment of allocating one portion of
the sittings to the people of the parish, and allowing the rest to be let to
the public at comparatively high rates. The experiment proved highly
successful, but he had not occupied his church long before events occurred
that led to a revolution in the ecclesiastical arrangements of St John's and
of the whole of Scotland. |
