After years of growing discontent, over a third of the clergy of the Church of Scotland (474 of 1,203) signed a Deed of Demission, left their manses and charges, and formed their own church, the Free Church of Scotland, under the leadership of Thomas Chalmers. They were an evangelical band who resented the legal right of landowners to choose the minister for a parish, regardless of parishioners’ wishes. As Argyllshire minister Mr McLean below makes clear, it was a highly emotional and anxious time. Seceding ministers were turning their backs on a secure income and were now dependent on the financial support of their new congregations. While some dissenters were firebrands, many were mild and unconfrontational men who were driven to join the Free Church on a point of principle. In 1929 the rift was healed, leaving only a few diehards in the Free Church.
When that now memorable event, the Disruption, began to cast its shadow before it, I was the happy pastor of a peaceful Highland parish. The population did not exceed a hundred families … Grouped prominently together, in this pleasant field of ministerial labour, are seen the manse with its garden, and the Church with its grave-yard. On every side, hills rise abruptly to a considerable height; while above, the blue vault seems to rest all round on their summits, and to roof in the whole scene …
Such were the external attractions of this quiet retreat, while, not less peaceful, and still more endearing, were the relations between pastor and people, from the highest to the humblest. And in these circumstances, so pleasing to my tastes, suited to my capacity, and satisfactory to my ambition, with a numerous family besides, all of us literally dependent on the benefice as our sole means of support, to imperil all, hastily or on light grounds (as we are sometimes accused of having done), to sacrifice it from any motive short of the inexorable constraint of conscience, would have been a folly, a sin, and a shame.
Such a constraint did, in the sovereign providence of God, unmistakably come. … I spared no pains from the first in publicly plying the people with week-day lectures on the great question at issue; but I could never bring myself to deal privately and personally with them, never asking even my elders what part they purposed to take in the approaching Disruption. … And so it was, that even so late in the day as the ‘Convocation,’ I did not know, on going to that meeting, of a single individual prepared to take the step to which I then pledged myself. The lowest ebb, however, was the turning point of the tide; and it flowed from that time forward. It was known what I had done, and it was not doubted that I would redeem my pledge. On my return home, a written assurance was sent me from all my elders … that, come what might, the session would remain unbroken. The great mass of the people, too, adhered. … All now gave good promise that, under God’s blessing, these principles had taken deep root in the land …
The gentleman, whom I may call the author and manager of the persecution in the Glen, the proprietor of more than one-half of the parish, called on me on the eve of the Disruption, and asked me, seemingly much affected, if there was no alternative, but that I must ‘go out.’ Nothing, he said, had ever so grieved him as the thought that such might be the case. He was on all sides congratulated on its being a model parish, educationally, as well as otherwise, under my auspices, and he had hoped for himself and his children long to enjoy the blessing of my ministry. He was pleased to say so, and much more which I will not repeat. But, finding that he had failed in the main object of his visit, he forgot all this; and from that day forth he exerted himself to the very utmost when we became houseless to keep us so, and have us exterminated altogether as a nuisance from the district. Even on his own showing, however, he could ‘find no occasion against us, except concerning the law of our God.’…
I pass on to the period of the Disruption in which I had the honour of bearing my humble part as a member of Assembly [General Assembly of the Church of Scotland]. So confident was I of that event being inevitable, that … I had, before leaving home, sold off all the stock and implements of a valuable glebe; and now, on my return, with those things out of the way, we at once set about packing furniture and preparing for instant removal. We had just finished our heavy task by Saturday evening. On Sabbath the church was to be preached vacant, while I was to address my flock on the green in front of the manse. On Monday morning we were to bid a final farewell to the sweet spot, and proceed to a temporary home, mercifully opened to us in a neighbouring parish, when unexpectedly (at this hour) a deputation of the heritors was announced. They found me pondering all these things in a dismantled apartment, and amid the heart-sickening desolations of an uprooted home. Without one softening word of sympathy, to their object they went hard and straight. And it was this – that either I should not preach at all on the morrow, or go away somewhere out of sight and hearing, lest I should disturb the feelings of the reverend gentleman who was to preach in the church and declare it vacant! This modest request, though little careful of my feelings, was certainly most considerately tender towards his. He had inducted me to the charge, introduced me to the congregation, held our principles all along till he must needs suffer for them, solemnly pledged himself to them at the Assembly of 1842, and at the Convocation of the same year; and now, having deserted the cause, he was the man whom its enemies delighted to honour in dealing the coup de grace to an old friend!
Many a solemn and touching scene did those trying times make us acquainted with. I am not sure, however, but that the Sabbath meeting on the green was the most trying of all in my experience. Not only did most trying circumstances, inseparable from such a meeting, concur to impart to it a deep and painful interest, but special care was taken to produce the impression among the people that, if I ventured to preach, measures were all ready and constables at hand for my forcible removal. … Entirely disregarding the threats, I felt it to be my duty to take my stand there; and there, accordingly, in the presence of my persecutors, who kept walking round about us, speaking loudly within earshot, and with significant looks, I conducted public worship, with such emotions as I may never feel again; while my poor flock, apprehensive every moment of what might happen, sat closer and closer together, like a fluttered covey when the hawk sails overhead …
I shall not dwell on our ‘quitting the manse.’ Monday came, with all the dreary accompaniments of such a ‘flitting’ as ours. Nearly twenty carts mustered on that morning – not all actually needed, perhaps, but not the less tokens of their owners’ sympathy and respect. In silence and with subdued air, like men on solemn and affecting duty, each took his allotted share of the disjecta membra of our home, and formed into line. Our six children, the oldest just eight … took their places in the rear; and all things being now ready, we quenched our hearth, took a last look through the deserted apartments … and, having turned the key in the door of our once happy but now desolate dwelling, slowly and sadly the long procession moved on. Immediately, by the hands of a messenger-at-arms, a farewell shot was fired after us in the shape of a very formidable interdict, which, fortunately for me, would not, as I have said, go off till after the Sabbath …
Shortly previous to the crisis, with no prospect of accommodation in the district for my family, I fully expected to be separated from them by a long distance and for a considerable time, when, unsolicited, a farm-house, providentially vacant for a season, was placed at my disposal by a noble-minded benefactor of the cause. More than that, he gave me not only a house, but a church also, which he had built for his tenantry in that neighbourhood; and they welcomed me to be their pastor with a cordial call. Nor was this all. In the Glen, which still engaged my chief interest, a suitable site was obtained, and steps taken for the erection of a church. An elder of mine possessed a small property, completely surrounded by wide territories, on which we dared not have set foot for God’s worship, no, not even on their lone heathery fells; and there, in a spot suggestive of the sweet description of the Psalmist, ‘We found a place for the Lord, we found it in the fields of the wood.’ There, till we could ‘go into His tabernacles,’ we worshipped on His footstool, the green earth, heaven alone our canopy, and He whose throne it is, our glory and defence. These my two congregations being ten miles apart, and it being desirable, for a time at least, that they should have regular supply, in Gaelic and English, I travelled twenty miles and preached four sermons every Sabbath for two summers. My hearers had increased in numbers, instead of being diminished, by the Disruption; while a mere handful was left in both parishes in connection with the now Erastianized Establishment.