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WE cannot allow the speech of Dr. Norman Macleod uttered on Thursday week to the Presbytery of Glasgow to pass without a word. Almost the courage of a martyr was required to deliver a discourse of which the most learned theologian might be proud. Dr. Norman Macleod is a minister of the Established Church of Scotland, who is so far as we know absolutely orthodox, but who lies under some suspicion of heresy. The writer took some trouble, when the charge was first levelled against him, to discover in what the heresy consisted, and could find nothing beyond a faint suspicion that Dr. Macleod, orthodox on most points as John Knox, had lived among laymen till some faint tincture of the layman's creed had permeated his mind, till he questioned whether it were possible that Christ had descended in vain, whether it were conceivable that Almighty God had doomed the majority of mankind to penalties for which we should execrate an earthly King. That was the whole of his offence, and even that we believe, in the sense we put upon the words, he would in great part repudiate, preferring, with Tennyson, to " faintly trust the larger hope," rather than reduce his half- formed thoughts into mistakable words. At all events he is under suspicion. The Record, with the malice which characterizes that journal and Le Monde only among newspapers, endeavoured to ruin his publication Good TVords—a very orthodox, very clever, but somewhat snippety magazine, with a vast circulation—the orthodox world shrieked anathemas, his brethren looked coldly on him, and Scotchmen generally thought it needful, with a slight glow of pride at the visible answer to Buckle, to pronounce him " exceptional." Well, this man has dared in a Scotch Presbytery, with reporters in the room—without reporters one may say any- thing in Scotland—not only to refuse the Scotch theological Shibboleth, but to make fun of it, to tell comic stories about it, to declare point-blank, in most undeniable English, with a racy ring in the words, that in the matter of " Sabbath " observances he is a Christian, and not a Jew, a believer in Jesus, and not in Moses. He even ventured to tell the following story :— " When Lord Palmerston was here, I had the honour to receive an invitation to meet him on the Sunday at dinner ; and the fact becoming known, an old and excellent lady came to me in a state of dreadful tribulation and said to me, I have to ask you one question. Did you go out to dine with Lord Palmerston on Sunday?' I said, No, I did not.' She said, 'I am thankful for it. I am sure yea would not do it.' I said to her, in explanation, 'It happened to be one of my nights for preaching to the working classes—a custom which I have kept up dar- ing the winter. I accordingly said to myself I thought it would at least be wretchedly bad taste in me to give up my ordinary work merely to go to dine with such a remarkable and excellent person as Lord Palmerston. But if I had gone, where was the harm ? Did not our Lord Himself go to dine with the Pharisee? "But,' said she, was that on the Sabbath ?' To which I replied, have never heard it contradicted. It was, at any rate, the evening after the Sabbath was over, and this was at half-past six, too.' (Laughter.) Sho said, ' You do not mean to say so ? It is not true.' I said, It is certainly mentioned.' But do not go away from this thinking we are all to have dinner-parties on Sunday."
It needs a minute study of Scotland and its religious ideas, an appreciation of the way in which Sabbatarianisui has worked itself like a bad virus into the blood of the people, rather than into its intellect or its heart, to comprehend the full bravery of this confession. If Dr. Macleod had been stoned in Glasgow next morning, or had vitriol flung in his face, or been declared a man unfit to live, or expelled summarily from his pulpit, no one who knew Glasgow would have been surprised. The Sabbatarians have promised to prosecute him, and as they are said to have scuttled holes in a Sunday steamer, in order that its destruction might appear a judgment, we cannot doubt that they will keep their word. Dr. Macleod might well have shrunk from such an ordeal, and bidden his countrymen go on believing what he did not believe, but he has an English reverence for truth, like Juhn Knox can see in a reverenced lie " just a pented bredd," and so delivered his soul, fearless of mankind. We are not going to support him. Anybody who wants to read a fine burst of eloquence in favour of the Christian view of the " Sabbath " will find it in his speech, but any repetition or extension of his argument written by an Englishman would in Scotland be annoying, and in England superfluous. We content ourselves with re- cognizing that in Scotland there is one minister who dares say what is in him to say without fear of man, and pass on to a point which he brought out incidentally with such power, the main falsehood behind which timid men defend their habitual concealment of the truths they yet perceive. Dr. Macleod, in the course of his speech, related a little incident which happened recently to him- self. " Upon this very subject-matter, a person sitting next me at a dinner-table once said to me, Do you mean to say that you state publicly in your church that a man might walk on Sunday ?' 'Yes.' He said, 'I am thankful for it. I always did it, but I went out of the back door.' The rebuked man, if at all a cultivated man—which he probably was, for it ruses Scotch charity, even Dr. Macleod's, to quote a man who did not know Latin—would defend himself in a moment, and in the ears of most Englishmen satisfactorily. He would say that he took his walk because he needed it, but went out by the back door because he wished to avoid giving scandal. And if any incautious person in his Christian faithfulness called the practice "sneaking," he would silence him with a text, —" If meat cause my brother to offend, I will eat no meat while the world standeth."
Of all the misapplied texts of the New Testament there is, we believe, no single one which in its popular misreading has done so mach direct harm as this. It is the universal apo- logy for every kind of cowardice, and hypocrisy, and wilful concealment of truth. If a man enjoys an opera, but is afraid of his neighbour's seeing him there, he quotes St. Paul to excuse his own cowardice in staying away. If a clergyman thinks a particular dogma doubtful or false he conceals his doubts or certainties, lest perchance he should be misinterpreted into doubting the truths of Christianity. If he thinks cricket perfectly lawful, he abstains from a healthy recreation, lest some old woman should be " offended," i. e., in the parochial dialect, induced to play cricket against her conscience. Thousands listen to sermons lest " weaker brethren " should be offended by their departure, scores of thousands debauch their consciences by observances which they have ceased to believe, lest people sillier than them- selves should intermit them while still believing in their necessity. The defect of honesty produces a defect of force, until the masses, who have a sort of animal instinct of truth, who know when a man is in earnest, as a dog knows, from some- thing other than words, come to the conclusion that as the teacher obviously does not believe one part of the thing taught he does not believe any, and as he does not believe, the thing itself is a lie. A sense of unreality is introduced into religious teaching, and the gulf between layman and clerical, always deep, is daily widened. Upon this subject of Sunday the evil rises to a most serious height. Men who will, for example, read anything from Miss Braddon to the Observer without a scruple, will not read secular books in their sitting-rooms lest their servants should do likewise, and thereby be injured, the servants, if they consider the matter at all, being ten times as much injured by the hypocrisy. As a rule, the English clergy are at heart very mild upon this matter of Sunday, never thinking it, for example, an irreligious thing to shave, but in thousands of parishes the incumbent shuts himself up all day, or, like Dr. Macleod's Scotch friend, walks out by stealth, lest his open assertion of his own right should induce some labourer to think it lawful for him to visit the public-house. Occasionally the mischief goes deeper, and cases occur of men deliberately preaching dogmas in which they have ceased to believe, lest perchance some weaker mind should lose a necessary buttress,—perhaps the most injurious, though not the most evil, of all conceivable forms of lying. It is hardly necessary to say that St. Paul, one of the bravest of men, who resisted Judaizing practices even when they might have won over his whole nation, intended no such teaching. What he did intend was to saythat in matters absolutelyindifferent he would'break down no accidental guard to morals. The Jewish world, living in the centre of a magnificent paganism; had contracted a feeling about some accidents of idolatry precisely like the Hindoo feeling about caste. Not only would they attend no sacrificial ceremony, which was right, but they would not eat meat which had been offered to idols. They felt rather than thought that such meat conveyed a physical contamination, made them worse by merely being in the mouth, the precise feeling which a Hindoo entertains about beef. To eat was to be degraded, to become as it were incapable of virtue, to lose a safeguard such as, for example, personal asceticism is to many natures. Absti- nence was not good in itself, any more than asceticism, but without it their souls never could rise to the temper befitting servants of God. St. Paul, thinker by nature and gentleman by mental habit, rather despised these narrownesses, but seeing that they protected feeble natures, advised that they should not be broken down. Many of the best missionaries in Asia have tried to make from time to time similar concessions about caste, and only failed because caste is not a thing indifferent, but radically anta- gonistic to the whole teaching of Christ. But St. Paul did not eat the sacrificial meat on the sly, and call that piece of imbecility religions. Still less did he conceal or pervert his own opinions on the matter, but clearly announced that in his judgment meat offered to idols remained meat, neither more nor less, and might as well be eaten as any other portion of cooked flesh. The whole intent of his instruction on the subject was in matters indifferent to tell the truth openly, and then leave the pupil alone. The Hin- doo is not to be made to eat beef as a proof of faith. He is to be plainly told that eating or not eating matters nothing, and then if he chooses left to abstain as long as he likes. But beef is not to be denounced in public and eaten in private, and the hypocrisy sanctified by a quotation from St. PauL There are three absolute conditions before the text can be applied at all, except by a per- version of its sense,—that the thing to be avoided shall be absolutely indifferent to the enlightened, that it shall be a real protection to the weak, and that the truth shall be told about it in all cases boldly. Suppose, for example, a clergyman to hold Christ's opinion about the Sabbath, but to feel no particular need for his liberty on that day, and to see that rigorous observance tones some parishioner's mind, then, after telling him the truth, he is not bound to break down that particular buttress, may even without offence abstain himself from what he himself knows to be lawful. But St. Paul would have withstood to his face the man who, needing a walk for his body or a secular book for his mind, declined either,—would have poured out scathing irony on him who took them but in secret, and would have told him who concealed the truth in the pulpit in very plain terms that he was as bad as a liar. He would have done this frankly, as he did do it about the meats, even though in his time the danger was of licence, of a reaction against the oppressions of the law which might lead to a reaction against law itself. What he would have said had he lived now, when the one forgotten doctrine is that implied in the two words " Christian liberty," can only be con- jectured ; but if deduction is of any value, his utterance would have differed only in its incisive force and power over the con- sciences of men from that just delivered by Dr. Norman Macleod.
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