THE Revolution of 1688, which brought the Dutch Calvinist Stadtholder William of Orange and his consort, Mary, to the English throne, was mainly a political event, led by Whig magnates provoked by royal encroachments on their liberties and property. But it also had important religious dimensions, and this was especially true of Scotland. From late December 1688, as news of the collapsing authority of James VII and II reached Scotland, bands of militant Presbyterians assaulted ministers of the established Church across much of Lowland Scotland, punishing them for their support of the Stuart monarchy by ‘rabbling’ them from their churches and manses; eventually some two hundred clergy were forcibly ejected. In March 1689 a Convention Parliament met in Edinburgh; it offered the Scottish Crown to William and Mary and ordered all ministers of the Church to pray publicly for the new monarchs. The Convention then turned to the religious settlement and the long-standing struggle between episcopacy and presbytery. In July 1689 it proclaimed that the new monarchs, with the advice of the Scottish Parliament, would establish in Scotland that form of Church government ‘which is most agreeable to the inclinations of the people’.
As Lionel Glassey has demonstrated, William was largely uninformed about the Scottish religious situation and evidently promised his support to both Scottish Episcopalians and Presbyterians. While the Dutch Church in which he had been raised was Presbyterian in organization, he was a pragmatist in religious matters; his main concern was to secure a religious settlement that would bring peace and stability to the northern kingdom. There would have been good reason to establish episcopacy and thus move towards uniformity between the established Churches of Scotland and England. But the Scottish Episcopalian cause was soon undermined, first by the refusal of the Scottish bishops to recognize William’s claim to the throne, and then by the open support of many Episcopalians for the ill-fated rising in support of James led by Viscount Dundee in the spring and summer of 1689.1 In the summer of 1690, after a year’s delay, the Convention established Presbyterianism as the form of government for the established Church, and the Calvinist Westminster Confession as the standard of faith. Significantly, the Convention made no reference to God’s will in this decision, nor did it renew the Covenants—neither the National Covenant of 1638 nor the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643—by which many believed the Scottish nation had bound itself before God to preserve and maintain the true Church.
As Alec Cheyne observed, ‘Generations of historians have made claims and counterclaims about the true balance of religious allegiances at the time of the Revolution’ and whether it was presbytery or episcopacy that was truly ‘most agreeable to the inclinations of the people’.2 There is probably no way of resolving this question. What can be said is that the establishment of Presbyterianism in 1690 proved the defining episode in a prolonged struggle over the nature of the Protestant Church and society in Scotland—a struggle that had brought revolutionary upheavals and civil warfare, and contributed to lasting perceptions of Scottish religion as intolerant, severe, persecuting, and divisive. King William’s hope was that this struggle would now be brought to a close. ‘Moderation’, he famously instructed the General Assembly in his King’s Letter of 1690, ‘is what religion enjoins, neighbouring churches expect from you, and we recommend to you.’3 To help promote this spirit, William endowed in 1694 a new Chair of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Edinburgh, to give Scottish Presbyterians a sense of perspective about their past. In this chapter, the current holder of that chair will seek to add to this sense of perspective, providing an overview of religion in modern Scotland up to 1900, with emphasis on the movement from a unitary Calvinist state, an aspiring ‘godly commonwealth’, to a multi-denominational, increasingly pluralist society.
The Reformation is discussed by Jenny Wormald in Chapter 9, so a few general observations will suffice here. The Reformation came to Scotland in 1560, some forty-three years after Martin Luther had nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, and nearly thirty years after the beginning of the English Reformation. The Scottish Reformation reflected the advanced thinking of the second generation of Reformers, especially the Geneva-based, French Protestant theologian and legal scholar John Calvin. It was a relatively non-violent affair, in comparison with Reformations elsewhere in Europe. The pre-Reformation Scottish Church, for all its versatility, learning, architectural achievements, and links with Scotland’s past, had also grown weak, increasingly ineffective, and unable to reform itself. The Crown, while it opposed the Reformation movement, had to rely on French military force to maintain its authority, and the French presence had become unwelcome among the population. The victory of the Protestant Reformers in Scotland was achieved with English military support against a crumbling resistance in both Church and State. With backing from the Scottish Parliament, the Reformers moved swiftly in the early 1560s to establish in Scotland a godly commonwealth, modelled largely on Calvin’s Geneva, with an emphasis on preaching, an innovative educational programme, public order based on biblical commands, and a poor-relief system rooted in parish communities. In 1560 Parliament ratified a new Confession of Faith, or ‘Scots Confession’.4 The Confession was Calvinist in tone and content, emphasizing the ‘inscrutable providence’ of God, who had determined all things by his ‘eternal and immutable decrees’; the total depravity of humankind, all of whom deserved eternal damnation; and God’s mercy in electing a portion of sinful humanity to salvation through grace alone. The new Church was loosely governed by a General Assembly of ministers and lay leaders, and by several ‘superintendents’, parish ministers who were also given the task of visiting parishes, supervising ministers, and planting churches in the surrounding region.
As the valuable work of Jane Dawson has demonstrated, the early phases of the Reformation brought new cultural expressions, including congregational singing, sophisticated musical settings of the Psalms, poetic, vernacular liturgies, the rich cadences of the Geneva Bible, devotional art, and an insistence on a learned ministry. Existing church buildings were adapted for the new forms of worship, with lengthened naves to accommodate seated congregations, high pulpits, and movable Communion tables replacing the old altars.5 Regular public worship every Sunday brought new patterns to social life, including the enforcement of a Sabbath day of rest for labouring people. The Reformers introduced a system of parish-based social discipline, by which offenders were tried before parish kirk-sessions (consisting of the minister and several laymen, or ‘elders’, selected for their piety and morals) for such infractions as extramarital sexual relations, drunkenness, brawling, and libel, and if found guilty were required to make public confession and assigned a public penance. The sentence of excommunication was rarely used; rather, the aim was to rehabilitate offenders and reconcile them to the community. The Reformers’ educational programme, including a primary school for boys and girls in every parish and a ladder of opportunity for the ‘lad o’ pairts’ (not lassies) to attend a burgh school and university regardless of social background, represented a potent ideal—even if it was never fully achieved. Despite a serious shortage of ministers in the new Kirk, the Reformation spread rapidly through the country, where its doctrine, worship, and social policies proved broadly popular.
There was, to be sure, also a darker side to the godly commonwealth. In 1563 Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act, which gave the State the power to try and execute witches. In a superb study, Christina Larner discussed how kirk-sessions often took the initiative in seeking out witches, who could include local wise women skilled in the use of herbal remedies; some fifteen hundred women were executed before the odious act was finally repealed in 1735.6 As Julian Goodare has shown, the witch-hunt in Scotland was directed overwhelmingly against women and involved an intrusive effort by the godly commonwealth to control women and their sexuality.7 The Reformed authorities also persecuted Roman Catholics, who retreated to more remote parts of the country, especially the north-east, where a remnant survived through the protection of sympathetic noble families and intermittent visits from missionary Jesuits from the 1580s and Franciscans from 1619.8
Early Reformation hopes were shadowed by dissention over the relations of Church and State, and over the nature of Church government. The Reformers had intended to finance their ambitious programme for the godly commonwealth with the resources of the pre-Reformation Church. However, much pre-Reformation Church property, including monastic lands, friaries, and bishops’ properties, was seized by the Crown and landed classes, and the new owners had no intention of relinquishing their gains. The Reformation had been achieved against the opposition of Queen Mary. After her forced abdication in 1567, her successor, the hoped-for ‘godly king’, James VI, remained ever distrustful of the Reformed Church as a rival authority. For many, the best way to achieve the needed cooperation between the Crown, landed elite, and the Church would be for the Scottish Reformed Church to move in a similar direction as the Church of England, and establish government by bishops with the Crown as supreme head of the Church.
Under the leadership of Andrew Melville, however, the Scottish Church moved in a very different direction. From the 1570s, influenced by developments in the continental Reformed Churches, the Church adopted a new system of internal government through a hierarchy of ecclesiastical courts. Fundamental to the system was the classis, or presbytery—made up of the ministers and elders of several neighbouring parishes. Within this ‘Presbyterian’ system, all ministers were to be equal and none was to exercise individual authority over another. The Presbyterian Church, moreover, was to be independent of the State in its ‘spiritual’, or specifically religious functions, including the ordination of ministers, administration of the sacraments, and setting of its liturgies. In his seminal study of the Scottish Reformation, Gordon Donaldson portrayed this Presbyterian movement as a radical departure from the early Reformation, which he argued had been moving towards government by bishops as the practice of most of Christendom. He described the superintendents as embryotic bishops and argued that Church and State had been moving towards closer cooperation before the Presbyterian take-over.9 Others, however, including Alec Cheyne and James Kirk, have viewed Presbyterianism as a logical development of the early Reformation, with its elevation of the laity in Church government and its emphasis on the spiritual independence of the Church.10 They argued that the superintendents were never intended to be more than an interim measure. They further observed that the Reformers continually looked to Geneva, and not Canterbury, for their ecclesiastical models.
The tensions between presbytery and episcopacy—between the continental Reformed and Anglican models of Reformation—divided the Scottish Reformed Church from the 1580s. King James opposed the Presbyterian movement and sought, through persuasion and force, to bring the Scottish Church into greater conformity with the Church of England. Presbyterians, however, resisted the Crown’s efforts to introduce bishops and liturgical changes, perceiving them as moves to undermine Scotland’s Reformation. They began depicting Scotland’s Reformation in terms of the Old Testament ‘covenant’ between God and the Hebrew people; in 1596 the General Assembly called for a national ‘covenant’ to uphold the Presbyterian system.11 James’s moves against Presbyterianism intensified following the Union of the Crowns in 1603. The Crown successfully introduced bishops into the Scottish Church by 1610, and in 1618 it pressured the General Assembly of the Church into accepting liturgical changes (the Five Articles of Perth) that moved Scottish worship closer to that of England. As David Mullan has shown, many Scots believed these ceremonial changes were aimed at introducing an Arminian theology, emphasizing human freedom and an imperative of good works, against the predominant Scottish Calvinist doctrine of salvation by grace alone.12 During the 1620s Presbyterian ministers and laity, deeply opposed to the changes, began forming ‘coventicles’, or small groups that met clandestinely for prayer, preaching, and Bible reading. The divisions in the Church, to be sure, should not be exaggerated. Most Scottish Protestants were willing to compromise in the interest of Church unity and order, and in the parishes, ministers and kirk-sessions continued the work of preaching, administering the sacraments, pastoral care, supervising discipline and poor relief.13
The tensions, however, were real and they climaxed in 1637, with a popular revolt against efforts by the Crown to introduce further liturgical reforms. The revolt included the drafting of a National Covenant, which called for the restoration of Presbyterianism and which from 1638 was sent to parishes around the country for signature. With the Covenanters’ military success against the forces of the Crown in the ‘Bishops’ Wars’ of 1639–40 came a restoration of Presbyterianism. While the Covenanting movement is covered elsewhere in the volume, it is important here to highlight the rigorous Calvinism of the Covenanting period, and especially the Westminster Confession that was adopted in the 1640s and still remains the official standard of faith in the Church of Scotland.
In 1643 Scottish Presbyterians entered into the Solemn League and Covenant with the English parliamentary party against the Crown, providing Scottish military assistance in return for an English promise to adopt Calvinist Presbyterianism within the Church of England. As part of this agreement, an Assembly of English Puritan divines (with several Scottish observers) met at Westminster and between 1643 and 1647 prepared a Confession of Faith and Directory of Worship for what was to be a British Presbyterian Church. The Westminster Confession of Faith provided a systematic, logical, and comprehensive expression of Calvinist doctrine, including the governance of all things by God’s eternal decrees, the total depravity of humanity, salvation by grace alone, God’s predestination of a portion of humanity for salvation, and God’s predestination of the rest for eternal damnation. The Westminster Directory provided for simple, austere worship, centred upon the sermon, Bible readings, and singing of the Psalms. It required that baptism and marriage take place in the presence of the congregation, while it disallowed funeral services or prayers at the graveside, as these might promote the erroneous belief that prayers could have any effect on the eternal prospects of the deceased, whose fate had been predestined from before all time.14 While never adopted by the English Parliament, the Westminster Confession and Directory were adopted by the General Assembly of the Scottish Church in 1647 and by the Scottish Parliament in 1649. More work is needed on parish life during the Covenanting era; however, it appears that the rigorous Westminster patterns of thought, worship, and government soon became embedded. This Westminster Calvinism, for all its harshness, could instil an inner strength based on certainty of God’s providential ordering of all things, and on a fear of God and none other. As Gordon Marshall has argued (drawing on the work of Max Weber), the Calvinist self-discipline, asceticism, and sense of worldly vocation (or work ethic) shaped national character and contributed to the emergence of a spirit of capitalism in Scotland, evident in commerce and manufactures by the final decades of the seventeenth century.15
Following the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 under Charles II, the Crown reimposed episcopacy within the Scottish Church, proscribed the Westminster Confession, and declared royal supremacy over the Church. The Episcopal settlement was imposed from England, with little sensitivity to Scottish feelings. Some 270 ministers, nearly a quarter of the total, refused to conform to episcopacy and were in consequence deprived of their church livings. Some Presbyterians, mainly in the south-west, again formed conventicles for clandestine worship, holding services on hillsides or in secluded glens. The Crown viewed these conventicles as nests of political rebellion and ‘seminaries of treason’ and compelled conformity through fines and imprisonment. Presbyterians responded with armed revolts in 1666 and 1679; these were speedily crushed but they left martyrs and popular resistance continued. During the ‘killing time’ of the 1680s, Covenanters were summarily executed. While the numbers killed were not great—probably fewer than two hundred—some deplorable incidents, including the shooting of John Brown of Priesthill before his wife and children in 1685, or the alleged judicial drowning of two women in the same year at Wigtown (the facts are disputed), became part of a Presbyterian folklore, as did the tales of Covenanting field-preaching on the hillsides, with guards watching for the approach of troopers. The older Presbyterian historiography, which received its classic expression in Robert Wodrow’s History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (1721–2), has been long discredited. The Crown and ecclesiastical authorities were, after all, responding to armed resistance, and by the declarations of indulgence (in 1669, 1672, 1679, and 1687) the authorities did offer a degree of toleration to Presbyterian beliefs and forms of worship. None the less, the perceptions of an unpopular and persecuting episcopacy, maintained by a despotic State, were compelling in parts of the Lowlands, and these perceptions go far to explain the sweeping away of the Episcopal system and the re-establishment of Presbyterianism in 1689–90.
The early eighteenth century was for many Presbyterians the golden age for the Scottish Church, when they believed that the Reformation aspirations for godly commonwealth, based on the preaching of the Word, administration of the sacraments, and enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline, were at long last being achieved. The Presbyterian settlement of 1690 was confirmed at the Union of 1707, when guarantees were given that the predominantly Anglican Union Parliament would not in future interfere with Scotland’s Presbyterian establishment. The relative ease by which Scottish Presbyterians gained these guarantees indicates the pragmatism of the leading politicians, who were more concerned with political stability than with religious uniformity throughout the Union State.16 The politicians believed that the majority of Scots wanted Presbyterian Church government and the Westminster Confession, and by 1707 they were probably correct. There would, to be sure, be major Jacobite risings, with religious motivations and significant support (mainly from Highlanders and Episcopalians) in 1715 and 1745–6. As Murray Pittock has shown, Jacobites embraced a doctrine of sacred kingship, and believed that the Stuart ‘king over the water’ represented God’s anointed; for them, God’s favour had been withdrawn from a corrupt and sinful people, and would not be returned until the Stuarts were restored to the throne.17 However, for much of the Scottish population, Presbyterianism was shaping beliefs and forging a social order that was increasingly ‘agreeable to their inclinations’.
The Presbyterian system, including the hierarchy of Church courts, was by the 1720s in operation throughout Scotland, with the ministers supported by teinds (a notional 10 per cent of agricultural produce) and rentals on seating. The heritors, or principal landowners in each parish, were responsible for the upkeep of church and manse. Each of the country’s approximately one thousand parishes had its incumbent minister and its kirk-session. The kirk-sessions had responsibility for the maintenance of social order, education, and poor relief. The next level of ecclesiastical government was the presbytery, made up of the ministers and elders of several neighbouring parishes. There were sixty-nine presbyteries, which normally met monthly to review the work of kirk-sessions and discuss regional and national issues. Above the presbytery was the synod, which consisted of the minister and one elder from each parish within a province representing several presbyteries. There were sixteen synods, and they met twice a year to review presbytery decisions and discuss larger provincial and national issues. At the apex of the system was the General Assembly, made up of commissioners selected by the presbyteries, royal burghs, and universities. The General Assembly met once a year in Edinburgh, and served as both the supreme ecclesiastical court and the highest legislative assembly, considering overtures for new Church laws from the lower courts. This system of representative Church courts, including lay members, provided valuable opportunities for the debate of national issues following the removal of the Scottish Parliament in 1707.
The parish church formed the centre of local communities; it was the place where they assembled and exchanged news, where the ancestors rested in the churchyard, and where the rites of passage—baptism, first communion, marriage, and burial—were marked. Sunday services, conducted according to the Westminster Directory, normally lasted about two hours, and included a long sermon and/or lecture on a Scriptural passage, extempore prayer, Bible readings, and the singing of the Psalms without musical accompaniment (organs were expressly banned). The Sabbath was strictly enforced as a day of worship, prayer, and family devotions—while the other holy days of the Christian year (including Christmas and Easter) were not observed. Infants were baptized and marriages celebrated before the congregation, and the dead were buried without religious services or prayers. Parish ministers were expected to visit the homes of all their parishioners regularly, to provide pastoral supervision and religious instruction, and to encourage families to conduct daily household devotions—normally a reading from the family Bible and a prayer.
Parish churches normally celebrated the Lord’s Supper once or twice a year, in ‘occasions’ that continued for four or five days, and brought together the ministers and people from neighbouring parishes. The occasions included a day of fasting and preparation, when communicants were urged to confess their secret sins and be reconciled with their neighbours, a day of examination, in which would-be communicants were examined in doctrine, manners, and morals, and the day of Communion, when communicants were served at table, normally in groups of twelve, while different ministers preached in succession to waiting crowds. All this was followed by a day of thanksgiving. As Leigh Schmidt has shown, these ‘holy fairs’ were communal festivals, providing opportunities for socializing and exchange of news; people might attend several occasions each year, in their own and in neighbouring parishes. The occasions could also be times of profound psychological tension and all-night prayer. In the address known as the ‘fencing of the table’, ministers warned would-be communicants, in often terrifying language, that to take the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy state was to eat and drink their own damnation, while not to take the sacrament if worthy was to demean the divine grace purchased by Christ’s sacrifice and to insult God. It is little wonder that the Communions could foment great inner turmoil. Schmidt has demonstrated how the rituals of the Scottish ‘holy fairs’ contributed to the emergence of the ‘camp meeting’ revivals, initially among Scots and Scots-Irish Presbyterian settlers along the western frontier of the United States.18 In the Scottish Highlands, lay leaders, known simply as the ‘Men’, emerged from the Communion occasions; they were venerated for their religious knowledge, assisted in examining would-be communicants, dressed in a distinctive manner, and exercised an authority rivalling that of the clergy.19
The kirk-sessions maintained communal order. Elders were to search out infractions—including Sabbath-breaking (which could include any form of work or enjoyment), drunkenness, extramarital sex, brawling, or libel—and bring the offenders for trial before the kirk-session. According to the Form of Process adopted in 1707, kirk-sessions had the power to compel evidence under oath. If found guilty, offenders were admonished and required to pay a fine and perform a public penance, which often involved standing in sackcloth before the congregation for a number of Sundays; to refuse the fine and penance could lead to excommunication and alienation from the community.20 By the testificat system, people could not move from parish to parish to seek work without a letter from a minister testifying to their moral character, which meant there was additional pressure to conform to kirk-session demands. While the grim picture of stultifying parish discipline presented in Grey Graham’s classic account, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, is exaggerated, it contains some truth. In close-knit communities with long memories, the shame of public penance could be worse than death. Some women murdered their infants, and were hanged for this, rather than endure ‘standing the session’.21 Work on session records by Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison has demonstrated that the system was largely directed to limiting extramarital pregnancies by controlling women’s sexuality.22 Parish discipline could be severely oppressive, banning theatrical performances, discouraging ‘frivolous’ popular songs, fiddling and dance, and, in the view of some, throwing a shade over the creative arts in Scotland that would remain into the late nineteenth century, and beyond.
Kirk-sessions managed Scottish poor relief, with funds raised through church-door collections and the rental of the parish mortcloth used to cover coffins when carried for burial. In times of economic crisis, kirk-sessions and heritors were empowered to impose an assessment, or tax on property, to supplement the poor fund.23 The Scottish poor law restricted relief to those genuinely unable to work, and kirk-sessions determined who qualified and the amounts given. Kirk-sessions and heritors also exercised joint authority over education. Most parishes had a parish school, which represented the twin Reformation aims of universal literacy and a ladder of opportunity for boys of talent. Schoolmasters, appointed by the heritors, had to subscribe to the Westminster Confession; many were able to teach Latin and even Greek. The parish school was periodically examined by the minister and kirk-session, to ensure both quality of instruction and Calvinist orthodoxy. Boys from poorer backgrounds frequently proceeded to a bursary at one of Scotland’s five universities. Indeed, it has been a long-standing assumption in Scottish history that the parish school system, a legacy of the Reformation, assured nearly universal literacy, opened careers to talent, and lay behind the extraordinary achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish industrialization. This interpretation no longer commands the confidence it once did. R. A. Houston’s quantitative research has raised doubts about whether eighteenth-century Scottish literacy was any higher than other Western European countries, while Robert Anderson has questioned the impact of parish schools on social mobility.24 None the less, for all their failings, the parish schools did represent the ideal of universal literacy, and in much of Scotland they promoted the self-discipline and respect for learning that would, as Richard Saville has argued, provide needed intellectual capital for Scotland’s economic development.25 The whole parish system formed what Tom Devine has described as the ‘parish state’, in which the established Church exercised authority over vital social functions, including education, poor relief, and the maintenance of order, and helped ensure an unprecedented level of social peace and order.26
The unity of the Presbyterian commonwealth, however, began to unravel as the eighteenth century progressed. In part, this resulted from the growth of religious toleration. The reprehensible execution of the Edinburgh University student Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy in 1697 was the last execution of its kind in Scotland, while the last woman was burned for witchcraft in Scotland in 1727. Increasingly, Scottish government and society (if not the Church courts) were influenced by the notion, advanced by such thinkers as the English philosopher John Locke, that toleration was a virtue, rather than a crime against religious truth and a necessary evil at best. The new attitudes came to include toleration for those who would not conform to the established Church. The process began with the Episcopalians, who had been forced out of the established Church after the Revolution (the process became a gradual one after the initial ‘rabblings’ of 1688–9), but for whom there was considerable sympathy, especially in England. In 1712, therefore, soon after the Union of 1707, the British Parliament passed a Toleration Act for Scotland, granting legal rights of worship for Scottish Episcopalians who would pray for the monarch and use the English Book of Common Prayer. While it was limited in scope, the Toleration Act meant that the British State would no longer enforce full conformity on the established Church of Scotland.27
In 1712 the British Parliament passed another act that would have momentous effects for the established Church and swell the numbers of non-conformists. This was the Patronage Act, which restored lay patronage in the appointment of parish ministers. Patronage had first emerged in the medieval Church; it allowed the original founder of a parish church, and the founder’s descendants, to present a clergyman to minister in that church. Patronage had a tempestuous history in the Reformed Church, with the Crown and landed classes, who held nearly all patronage rights, supporting patronage, and committed Presbyterians, with their emphasis on the spiritual independence of the Church, strongly opposing it. Parliament had abolished patronage in 1690, replacing it with a system of election by kirk-sessions and heritors, and its reimposition in 1712 was felt as a blow against Presbyterianism. Lay patrons tended to present ‘moderate’ ministers, who were less strict about discipline and Calvinist doctrine. For zealous Presbyterians, such ministers were ‘worldly’ and lukewarm, and their intrusion into parishes would undermine Scotland’s Reformation heritage. The result was popular rage and frequent mob violence to halt the induction of a patron’s candidates, and confusion in the Church courts about how to respond to the contentious law.
In 1733 a small group of ministers, including the brothers Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, seceded from the Church of Scotland, together with most of their congregations, in protest against both patronage and what they perceived as a moderate, worldly ethos among Church leaders. They formed an ‘Associate Presbytery’ made up of the godly; they alone were the true heirs of the Reformation and the Covenants. They famously informed the English evangelical George Whitefield, that he should preach only to their members, as the ‘Lord’s people’, when he visited Scotland in 1741. More and more disaffected ministers and congregations, angered over patronage, joined what became known as the Secession Church. The Seceders split in 1747 over whether their members should take oaths of loyalty to the un-Covenanted British State; both sects claimed to be the one true Church in Scotland, and both continued to grow. Each of these two sects split again in the 1790s over the question of whether or not the union of Church and State, as taught in the Westminster Confession, was God’s will. In 1761, meanwhile, there had emerged still another Presbyterian denomination, the Relief Church, which offered a home to Scots who opposed patronage but who were more inclusive in their attitudes to other Christians than the Secession Churches. By 1801 there were over three hundred Secession or Relief congregations, with perhaps 150,000 adherents, representing almost 10 per cent of Scotland’s population.28 They added to the small numbers of Episcopalians and Roman Catholics who were outside the established Church, and also to some little Scottish sects of Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Reformed Presbyterians, and Glassites. What is significant about all this is that Scotland was becoming a multi-denominational society. Considerable numbers were making individual decisions to step out of the parish community, with all its historic associations and social functions, and to worship in dissenting churches that were essentially voluntary associations.
This growth of denominationalism coincided with a movement of liberal theological thought within the established Church of Scotland. During the 1760s a group of moderate, learned, urban-based clergymen, including William Robertson, Hugh Blair, and Alexander Carlyle—with support from prominent members of the landed and professional classes—came to control the General Assembly and exercise leadership over the Church of Scotland. They embraced the designation of ‘Moderate’. They advised the Crown and landed classes on Church patronage, were active in the learned societies and intellectual pursuits of the Enlightenment, promoted toleration, and called for more openness to the theatre, literature, and the other arts. Their sermons appealed to polite sensibility and virtue for its own sake, rather than preaching on divine judgement and the afterlife. The Moderate leadership helped create a liberal social environment in the urban centres in which the Enlightenment could flourish. The Moderate ministers were the subject of a superb book by Richard Sher in 1985 and by a series of studies by Sher, Ian D. L. Clark, Nicolas Phillipson, Alexander Stewart, John Dwyer, Jeffrey Smitten, and others, many of these studies originating in the conferences of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.29 David Allan has demonstrated the important connections between Renaissance humanism, the Scottish Reformation, and the Enlightenment.30 John McIntosh has explored how the ethos of the Enlightenment gradually influenced the opponents of the Moderates—who were known variously as the ‘Orthodox’, ‘Evangelical’, or ‘Popular’ party.31 During the ‘Leslie controversy’, which involved a hard-fought contest for an Edinburgh professorship in 1805, it was the ‘Popular’ party that championed freedom of enquiry among professors.32 The growth of toleration and liberal theological views ensured that the established Church was relatively quiet when Parliament removed most remaining civil disabilities on Scottish Episcopalians in 1792 and most civil disabilities on Roman Catholics in 1793.
Along with the Enlightenment and Moderatism, the second half of the eighteenth century also witnessed an ‘evangelical revival’ in Scotland. This was part of a larger movement across the North Atlantic world of vital, emotive, personal religion, with an emphasis on the conversion experience and Christ’s atonement on the Cross for the sins of all humankind. Evangelical converts gave less attention to the ‘parish state’, or the doctrines of the Westminster Confession, and more to a simple religion of the heart, an inner assurance of salvation through faith, and the expression of faith through good works. The evangelical movement was connected with the democratic influences associated with the American and French Revolutions, which emphasized the innate moral sense of the common people rather than deference to the established order in Church and State. The years between 1790 and 1830 brought a burgeoning of dissent until, as Callum Brown has shown, it represented perhaps a third of Scotland’s population.33 While Emma Vincent Macleod and Colin Kidd have both explored the Scottish Churches and the French Revolution, more work is needed on the growth and impact of evangelical and voluntary religion during these years.34
With industrialization and rapid urbanization from the late eighteenth century, the established Church of Scotland confronted new challenges, including urban overcrowding, mass deprivation, rising crime, prostitution, and unrest among the industrial working classes. There were not enough parish churches for the burgeoning populations of Glasgow and other urban centres, and by 1815 some parishes had populations of ten thousand or more. Under the pressure of such numbers, the urban parish system, including regular church attendance, pastoral visiting, kirk-session discipline, parish poor relief, and parish education, broke down—despite the efforts of some energetic ministers, such as Thomas Chalmers in Glasgow between 1815 and 1823, to sweep back the tide with innovative new methods of urban ministry aimed at reviving the ‘parish state’ through the mobilization of lay volunteers.35 By the 1830s, the institutions of the ‘parish state’ were not coping with the new urban conditions. Moreover, many people were publicly questioning the reasons for maintaining the established Church. Following the expansion of the franchise in 1832, middle-class dissenters launched a political campaign to disestablish the Church of Scotland and end the connection of Church and State.
In 1834 the established Church, under Chalmers’s leadership, responded to both the urban challenge and the disestablishment campaign with a series of reforms. These included tackling the vexed patronage issue by giving congregations the power to ‘veto’ candidates presented by patrons to the parish ministry (the aim was to increase the popular voice in the selection of ministers). Supporters of the veto became known as ‘non-intrusionists’, because they opposed the ‘intrusion’ of unpopular patrons’ candidates into the parish ministry. There was also a national ‘church extension’ campaign to build more churches for Scotland’s growing population, and new initiatives in extending education and overseas missions. Financial donations to the Church increased fourteenfold between 1834 and 1839, and it appeared that the Reformation ideal of the godly commonwealth might be achieved in an industrializing Scotland. Then in 1838 these hopes were dealt a fatal blow when the Scottish civil courts ruled that the Church’s veto act was an illegal infringement upon the property rights of patrons. When the Church insisted on enforcing the veto act despite this civil ruling, the result was a constitutional confrontation between Church and State. The civil courts threatened presbyteries with fines and imprisonment if they enforced the veto act, while the Church courts threatened presbyteries with ecclesiastical discipline if they refused to enforce the veto. The Church became divided between non-intrusionists, who were predominantly evangelical in their piety, and a constitutional party, who were largely heirs of eighteenth-century Moderatism and insisted the Church must relinquish the veto. Non-intrusionists viewed the constitutional conflict as another episode in the long-standing struggle between the Presbyterian Church and State, going back to the 1570s; they perceived themselves to be the heirs of the Reformers and Covenanters, struggling once again for the spiritual independence and authority of Scotland’s national Church.
The conflict climaxed with the great Disruption of 1843, when the non-intrusionists—about a third of the ministers and perhaps half the lay membership left—the established Church of Scotland and formed the new Free Church. This Church had particular strength in lowland towns and cities, where as Allan MacLaren has shown, a rising entrepreneurial middle class, opposed to the dominance of the older landed and mercantile elite, found in Free Church evangelicalism an expression of a dynamic new Scotland. Another area of strength was the Highlands, where Free Church membership was associated with both Calvinism and opposition to the landlord class.36 The Disruption was one of the most important events in Scottish history, and it is the subject of a large literature, much of it highly polemic, but including a number of balanced recent studies.37 What needs more exploration, however, is the aftermath of the Disruption. Within five years the Free Church had built, through private donations, some 730 new churches, 400 manses, 500 schools, and it was erecting a grand New College on the Mound in Edinburgh. At the same time, as Tom Devine has shown, the Free Church provided more famine relief than any other Scottish denomination during the failure of the potato crops in the later 1840s, and its relief effort spared the western Highlands and Islands massive deaths from famine.38 How did it manage to raise the funds for all this during arguably the worst economic downturn of the nineteenth century?
The Disruption broke up the Presbyterian establishment, and the Church of Scotland would never recover its national influence and authority. The established Church, which represented only about 32 per cent of churchgoers in 1851, now lacked the resources to fulfil its social roles on a national scale. Two years after the Disruption, Parliament enacted a new poor law for Scotland, which greatly diminished the role of the established Church in poor relief. The Church’s authority over education was severely weakened after 1843 and would be largely removed by Parliament in 1872. Kirk-session discipline steadily declined during the nineteenth century, as offenders chose simply to leave the Church of Scotland rather than submit to the humiliation of public admonishment and penance. After 1901, kirk-session discipline was effectively replaced by private counselling by ministers.39 During the nineteenth century, moreover, the distinctive Scottish Communion occasions of four or more days’ duration ceased in most of Scotland, a victim in part of the demands of industry and commercial agriculture for more regular hours of work. The strict public observance of the Sabbath, however, would continue until late in the twentieth century, as one of the last expressions of the godly commonwealth.
The years following the Disruption coincided with another set of events that had momentous effects on Scottish religion. This was the great Famine of 1845–50 in Ireland, which brought tens of thousands of Roman Catholic migrants to Scotland, where they joined (though often with ethnic tensions) the small Scottish Catholic population that had survived since the Reformation. Significant Irish migration had begun early in the century, driven by demand for cheap labour in Scotland’s industrializing economy. But migration soared during and after the Famine. Migrants arrived impoverished and often ravaged by disease and traumatized; they encountered ethnic and sectarian hatred, and found they had to look to their own communities for support. Many embraced what Emmet Larkin has described as a post-Famine ‘devotional revolution’, with an emphasis on preserving identity through regular mass-attendance, confessions, Catholic schools, church-building (with sumptuous, ‘Italianate’ interiors), and frequent missions.40 Catholics had received nearly full civil rights within the British State with the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, and the Catholic migrants proved politically adept, aligning themselves with the Liberal Party from the 1860s, and later, in the 1920s, with the Labour Party. By 1850, there were an estimated 150,000 Catholics in Scotland, by 1878, 332,000, and by 1901, 433,000—which by the latter date represented some 10 per cent of the Scottish population.41 The territorial Catholic hierarchy in Scotland was restored in 1878. Many Scottish Protestants viewed the growing Catholic population as an intolerable challenge to the Reformation heritage, but found they were powerless to do much about it. Zealous Protestants, such as James Begg of the Free Church, cried ‘no Popery’, formed a Reformation Society, issued tracts and periodicals, and inflamed the occasional anti-Catholic riot. The Catholic population, however, remained, and gradually became less Irish and migrant, and more Scottish and settled.
More work is needed on post-1850 Scottish religion, which we now know—largely through the seminal scholarship of Callum Brown—remained robust and socially important up to the 1950s, despite the gradual eroding of the parish state. There were by 1850 three main Presbyterian denominations—the established Church of Scotland, the Free Church, and the United Presbyterians (a denomination formed in 1847 by a union of most of the Secession Churches and the Relief Church). According to the State’s Census of Religious Worship in 1851, about 85 per cent of those attending church in Scotland were Presbyterian.42 However, although they shared the same theology, Church organization, and liturgy, the Presbyterian denominations were bitter rivals. Between the early 1870s and the early 1900s, the Free Church and United Presbyterians revived the political campaign to disestablish the Church of Scotland and have the State appropriate much of its property. The aim was to end all connection between Church and State, and it gained the support of the Liberal Party. But the campaign was conducted with a sectarian rancour that alienated much of the public; as a result disestablishment never became a national cause in Scotland (unlike disestablishment in Ireland and Wales) and the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful.43 Another reason for the failure of disestablishment was a remarkable revival of the established Church from the 1850s, a phenomenon that needs further research.
The religious landscape became more complex. From 1850, the Scottish Episcopal Church grew in numbers and confidence, benefiting from a steady influx of English and Irish Anglicans. There were also growing numbers of Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers, along with new evangelical denominations, such as the Catholic Apostolic Church (with its belief in the imminent Second Coming of Christ in glory), the Brethren (with their efforts to return to the practices of the primitive Church before the emergence of an ordained clergy), and, after 1878, the Salvation Army (with its brass bands, uniforms, simple gospel message for the poor, and, from 1890, soup kitchens and hostels). There were non-denominational city missions, holding services in rented rooms, and independent mission halls, such as Carrubber’s Close Mission in Edinburgh, which appealed to working people with informal services, short racy addresses, and rousing gospel songs. After 1881, and the wave of pogroms in Russia, there was a sizeable influx of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. There were some ten thousand Jews in Glasgow by 1900, about fifteen hundred Jews in Edinburgh, and smaller Jewish communities in other towns.44
Later nineteenth-century Scotland had a vigorous evangelical culture—what Callum Brown has described as a ‘salvation economy’. Churches reflected the entrepreneurial ethos of nineteenth-century Britain by aggressively seeking members, while individuals gave increased emphasis to personal narratives of spiritual growth and redemption.45 The evangelical culture found expression in a vigorous temperance movement, which sought to combat the destructive impact of hard drink on families. The movement involved all denominations, and reached its peak of activity and influence between 1870 and 1914.46 There were national revival movements in 1859–62 and 1873–4, which affected most of the Protestant denominations, claimed thousands of converts, and became associated with large, orchestrated meetings, a simple message of personal salvation through acceptance of Christ, sentimental gospel songs, and charismatic preachers, including such visiting American revivalists as James Caughey, Charles G. Finney, and Dwight L. Moody. During the nineteenth century, hundreds of new churches were built, many in the popular neo-Gothic style. From the 1880s, more and more churches also added church halls, to provide accommodation for a growing number of church-based activities through the week, including Sunday schools, mothers’ meetings, women’s guilds, temperance societies, choirs, sewing circles, literary societies, savings banks, young people’s guilds, reading rooms, games rooms, boys’ brigades, charitable societies, nursery schools, and boxing clubs. For many young people, especially young women, church-based activities provided their main social outlet.47 Intense denominational competition, meanwhile, led to an over-building of churches; congregations often believed that a grand church, with a towering steeple, would attract members from neighbouring churches. However, as Robin Gill has argued, many of these ambitious Victorian edifices were never more than half-filled, and they burdened future generations with crippling costs of debt repayment and maintenance.48
Churches made their worship more attractive, so as to compete effectively for members in the free marketplace of religion. In the Presbyterian churches stained glass was placed in windows, services grew shorter, sermons were reduced to an average of thirty minutes, and lively hymns were introduced. Beginning in the 1870s, the long-standing ban on instrumental music was set aside and churches began installing organs and developing trained choirs. By 1904, the large majority of Church of Scotland congregations had both an organ and a choir.49 According to Alec Cheyne’s indispensable study, there was a loosening of adherence to the harsher doctrines of the Westminster Confession of Faith, including the total depravity of humanity, predestination, and eternal punishment, while more emphasis was placed on the incarnate Christ, his moral example and human flourishing in this world.50
The Scottish Churches produced a number of exceptionally able theologians and biblical scholars, including A. B. Davidson, Robert Flint, William Robertson Smith, John Tulloch, and the brothers John and Edward Caird; these figures worked to adapt the Reformed Faith, often amid conflicts with traditionalists, to the new scientific understandings of the universe, new historical understandings of the ancient Near East, and new anthropological understandings of world cultures. The openness of such dominant figures as Robert Rainy, Principal of the Free Church’s New College, to Darwinism helped ensure there was no major conflict between religion and science in Scotland. As Donald Smith has shown, Church leaders also developed a powerful Bible-based social criticism of Scotland’s industrial capitalism, emphasizing the dehumanizing effects of unrestricted competition and the need for state intervention in the economy to achieve greater equality.51 This fervent ‘social gospel’ would help position the Church of Scotland to welcome the emergence of the social welfare state in the coming century.
Scotland’s major contributions to overseas missions are discussed by Esther Breitenbach in Chapter 28. Suffice it to say here that a Scottish missionary public emerged in the early part of the century; men, women, and children of various denominations devoured missionary publications, supported anti-slavery efforts, joined mission societies, subscribed money, attended lectures, signed petitions in support of missionary causes, participated in circles of prayer, and thrilled to the stories of missionary adventures, and martyrdoms, in exotic lands.52 Scotland’s international reputation in mission work was recognized when it was chosen to host the Edinburgh World Mission Conference of 1910, arguably the most influential conference for planning coordinated Protestant missionary effort and also a formative event in the modern ecumenical movement.
With the waning of the Presbyterian state, there also emerged new expressions of interest in Scottish folk beliefs, many with origins in a pre-Christian past, which had survived witch-hunts, pulpit denunciations, and kirk-session scrutiny. These included beliefs in earth spirits or fairies, second sight (or the ability to see into a spiritual realm), doppelgängers and ghosts, the evil eye (the envious glance that could wither and kill), and healing wells. The scholarly collection of folk beliefs began in the late 1870s, and it is interesting that some of the most avid collectors were Highland Presbyterian ministers, including John Gregorson Campbell of the Free Church and James McDougall of the Church of Scotland. The late nineteenth century also witnessed a new interest in ‘Celtic spirituality’, a conception inspired in part by writers of the Irish literary renaissance who claimed that Celtic peoples lived more closely to spiritual and otherworldly dimensions. Within this ‘Celtic twilight’, some also discerned, and sought to revive, a distinctive ‘Celtic Christianity’, with an intuitive grasp of a luminous divinity that infused the natural world.53 For some, Celtic spirituality was linked with alternative religious beliefs, including spiritualism, or communication with the spirits of the dead through mediums. Modern spiritualism reached Scotland in the 1850s, and found considerable popular interest; in Daniel Dunglas Home, Scotland produced one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated mediums. Some professed ‘secularists’, moreover, openly rejected any belief in God, but their numbers remained small before the new century.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, religion remained a vital force in Scottish public life. The majority of Scots were Presbyterian: according to the Registrar General’s return, nearly 72 per cent of couples were married in a Presbyterian church between 1901 and 1910. Of these, over 45 per cent were married in the established Church of Scotland, which had experienced a significant revival in its numbers and influence after 1850.54 The legacy of Presbyterian Calvinism, its work ethic, respect for learning, belief in equality before God, moral certainty, lack of deference to human authority, and a certain dourness—all remained recognizable Scottish traits. By 1900, moreover, Presbyterians were putting their rivalries behind them; indeed, a movement had begun that would culminate in the reunion of the three main Presbyterian denominations by 1929. And yet, in crucial ways, the historic social authority of Scottish Presbyterianism, as expressed in the godly commonwealth and parish state, had been irretrievably eroded. The role of the Presbyterian Church in poor relief, education, and maintaining public order had ceased in much of Scotland, and, despite the dreams of some Presbyterian leaders, the Reformation ideal of the godly commonwealth was fading among the population.
The Scottish people were religious, and overwhelmingly Christian, but their Christianity was now more diverse in nature, with choice from a plethora of denominations competing in a free marketplace of religion. Religion was also becoming less communal and more private, less parish-based and more conscience-based. With the waning of kirk-session discipline, it was also less oppressive to women. The nineteenth century, as Callum Brown has argued, saw women making up the majority of congregations and reshaping religion around notions of spiritual growth and nurture (although they would be denied the right to hold office in most Churches until late in the twentieth century).55 The larger issues of gender and religion in Scotland need further exploration. Another highly significant development of the nineteenth century was the emergence of a large and increasingly confident Roman Catholic Church, whose presence was regarded by probably most Protestants as both alien and a fundamental challenge to Scotland’s Reformation heritage, but which was destined by the end of the next century to rival Presbyterianism in numbers and influence.
Brown, C. G., Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh, 1997).
Brown, S. J., Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford, 1982).
Burleigh, J. H. S., A Church History of Scotland (Oxford, 1960).
Cheyne, A. C., Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh, 1999).
—— The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland’s Religious Revolution (Edinburgh, 1983).
Donaldson, G., The Faith of the Scots (London, 1990).
Drummond, A. L., and Bulloch, J., The Scottish Church 1688–1843: The Age of the Moderates (Edinburgh, 1973).
—— The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874 (Edinburgh, 1975).
—— The Church in Late Victorian Scotland 1874–1900 (Edinburgh, 1978).
Kirk, J., Patterns of Reform: Continuity and Change in the Reformation Kirk (Edinburgh, 1989).
Marshall, G., Presbyteries and Profits: Calvinism and the Development of Capitalism in Scotland, 1560–1707 (Oxford, 1980).
Orr MacDonald, L. A., A Unique and Glorious Mission: Women and Presbyterianism in Scotland 1830–1930 (Edinburgh, 2000).
Schmidt, L. E., Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 1989).
Sher, R. B., Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, 1985).