THE SCOTCH AND MR. GLA.DSTONE. T HE population of Scotland has
risen to the voice of Mr. Gladstone like the audience in an amphitheatre. His fortnight there has been a triumphal march, as well as a campaign. It commenced before he crossed the Border, but the enthusiasm which astonished the London reporters in the forenoon at Preston and Carlisle had risen to fever-heat before sunset at Galashiels, and it increased during the whole week in Edinburgh. Long before its close, half-crown tickets for his last meeting there were being offered—not privately, but advertised in the newspaper column.-for £2, £3, or even £5, and Scotchnaen from distant counties were still found eager to buy them. The ducal town of Dalkeith received him with a roar of acclamation. In the other end of Midlothian every village was en fete, and the crowd broke through all bounds, and nearly crushed their idol. In Edinburgh itself, faggot voters, newly put upon the roll and pledged to vote for his opponent, crowded to his meetings ; and the veteran statesman was forced to drive along the bitter splend- our of Prince's Street in winter bare-headed, and bowing in continual response to shouting and pursuing crowds. And then another chapter opened. On Monday, instead of return- ing south, he went off with Lord Breadalbane to Perthshire, a county where there is every prospect of a great Liberal victory ; and after a few days' rest, he was back yesterday in Glasgow. There some nominal Liberals have for a few years been rather backward in the cause ; but the mass of the people, and the younger men in the University, as well as those outside, are perhaps even more ardent and determined than the East of Scotland is. Accordingly, Mr. Gladstone'e arrival there has been like a torch of fire in a sheaf, and our latest news of his inaugural address as Rector, and of his political speech in the magnificent new hall, show that the proceedings in the West have formed a fitting climax to what he himself describes as his affectionate reception by the country. What is the explanation of it ? 'Where is the personal link between Scotland and Mr. Gladstone I Is it basis of tempera- ment, or similarity .of aim, or what is it, that kept the North faithful to him when his popularity, two years ago, was at its lowest ebb, and has now provoked this won- derful explosion? There are some things that make the fact a strange one. Mr. Gladstone was a Scotchman, no doubt, but he turned his back upon Scotland, and has risen high by moving away from it in the road which Scotchmen proverbially love to travel, but where their country does not love to see them go. An Oxford man and a High Churchman, and neither of them nominally, but both in strong earnest, where is the spell that binds to him the strong Presbyterians and the Radical Academic youth of the North ? A mere word will not solve it. Every one knows the grave enthusiasm of Mr. Gladstone's eloquence ; and most men admit that there is a grave and even grim enthusiasm some- where in most Scotchmen. But people who agree in being in earnest often agree in nothing else, and soon find it expedient to give each other a very wide berth. How is it that in the present case the grave enthusiasm of the one finds such glow- ing and unhesitating response in the grave enthusiasm of the other?
Well, in the first place, no distance breaks the tie of blood. And it is not enough to say, as Mr. Gladstone naturally said to his municipal admirers, that there is not a drop of blood in his veins that is not exclusively Scottish. There are two streams in Scottish blood, and they flow with different and occasionally deeply contrasted colouring. The paradox has entered into our literature and into the popular conception of our northern neighbours enter- tained by Englishmen. On the one hand, there is the shrewd, sagacious, and cool-headed type, a character capable of much passive and stubborn virtue, but when it declines, degenerating into what the Scotch themselves call "pawkiness " or "canni- ness." On the other, there is the romantic and ardent type with which Scott, while by no means forgetting the other, has made Europe familiar. It is the nature which is capable of the wildest devotion to a leader or a cause, and even to a lost leader or a fallen cause, hut which at all times requires the stimulus of an appeal to senti- ment or feeling. How can the native of one country so differ from himself ? The explanation is easy. The one type is the Scot and Teuton, the other the Celt and Gael. The one is the Lowland, the other the Highland nature. And in Mr. Glad- stone the two meet, and meet equally. His father, a Sir John Gladstone, was a Lowland Scot, born in Leith, but drawing his descent from a family of Gledstanes in the upper ward of the southern county of Lanark. But his mother was of the Celtic clan, which took the un-Celtic name of Robertson, and she was born either in the only town of remote Wester Ross, or in the still more distant Stornoway, in both of which her father at different times resided. So the tough fibre of the South and the more resonant tension of the North have been inter- twisted in this case, to form the strongest stalk of hemp which the barren Scottish soil is able to produce. The same con- trast of origin comes out in the autobiography of Hugh Miller, a man of genius, who will be remembered in the future, not by the works which attracted most attention during -his life, but by the truthful charm with which he reproduces down to its finest filaments of colouring, the whole web of his country's inner and outer life in the present century. Miller's father was a Lowlander, on the edge of a northern county, who could apparently speak no Gaelic ; while his mother was a Gael from the interior, who, if we remember the story aright, was almost equally destitute of English. A still more remark- able parallel is Brougham, whose parent on the one side was of that Border race which is Scot or Northumbrian, as you choose to extend Northumbria to the Forth, or Scotland to the Humber, while his mother, strange to say, was of the same name and clan of Robertson, which has furnished some of the fiercest pages to the history of the Highlands. But the struggle and fusion of the two principles in Mr. Gladstone are more striking than in Brougham or any other individual, or than they have yet become in Scotland, at this point of its development. Yet in him and in them the two sides are separately recognisable. The relation is obvious between the canny Scot, with his predilection for facts and passion for figures, on the one hand, and the great financier, who even now prints upon his flag in Midlothian "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform." Scotland, no doubt, has never been governed by the purely negative or secular Radicalism. Yet, over since the days of Hume, the moral of the Church Association's triumph would in- duce a man to become incumbent of a church which has probably as good as no endowment, and from which every contribution that has helped to make the district a centre of good works would at once be withdrawn. The whole congregation would, as a matter of course, betake themselves elsewhere, and Mr. Mackonochie's successor would find him- self with an empty church and not a farthing of money, and with the additional discomfort of being regarded by the Ritualist party as a mere interloper, who had degraded himself to become the instrument of a persecuting faction. How difficult it may be to fill the place of a Ritualist incumbent was shown not very long ago in the case of All Saints', Margaret Street. When Mr. Upton Richards died, it was understood that the Bishop of London was exceed- ingly desirous of finding a successor who would undertake to keep within the law as regards ritual, and at the same time not hopelessly alienate the congregation. The combination proved unattainable, and in the end a High Church- man was appointed, under whom everything has gone on unchanged, to the great satisfaction of those who have made the church in Margaret Street what it is, and it may be presumed of the Bishop also. What is to prevent a similar conclusion in the case of St. Alban's, Holborn ? A patron who thinks ritual a matter of small importance will not care to drive away a congregation, and reduce a district to that primi- tive nakedness in the matter of good works from which it has slowly been rescued by years of patient self-devotion and un- ostentatious sacrifice.
Let it be granted, however, that by lapse, or by some other means, .a Low Churchman is appointed to St. Alban's ; that by the aid of the Sheriff he makes good his entry; and that, having stripped the fabric of its illegal ornaments, he begins to minister to a congregation composed of such members of the Church Association as can be induced to come to listen to him for a few Sundays, in order to disguise the fact that all the Church Association has been able to do is to turn a crowded church into an empty one. Still, what will the success of the prosecutors be worth ? Just this much, that they will have virtually closed one Ritualist church. The value of this success will greatly depend on the proportion which the one church in which Ritualism has been put down, bears to the churches in which it will still be rampant. Judging by the rate at which the victories of the Church Association have been won, the century will have come to an end before the last of the exist- ing Ritualist churches in London alone has been declared free of the plague, while how many new ones will have been set up in that time can only be conjectured. Ritualism has evid- ently got too strong a hold of the Church of England to be fought to any purpose in detail. The Church Association must devise some plan which shall have a larger and more rapid operation. In other words, it must have recourse to new legis- lation. If the use of a specific ceremonial is not only a breach of the law, but so mischievous a breach of it, that it cannot be tolerated in a Church which has hitherto called herself the most comprehensive in Christendom, Parliament must be in- voked to put it down. In that case, it can be no hardship to make it a condition of admission to or retention of a benefice or curacy that the incumbent or curate shall declare his readiness to obey the decrees of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in certain named suits. In the meantime, those who have no wish to see the boundaries of the Church of England made narrower cannot do better than consider whether some reasonable measure cannot be introduced into Parliament which shall protect congregations who dislike ceremonial against having it forced down their throats. At the time of that singular 64 understanding" with the Bishops, which neither side seemed to understand, the Ritualist leaders de- clared that they had no wish to impose any particular cere- monial on congregations which had been accustomed to a different one. It may be assumed, therefore, that they would raise no objection to restrictions directed solely to this end. We see no reason why High Churchmen generally should not meet them upon that ground, and bring the whole in- fluence of the party to bear in favour of legislation which should only lay restrictions on those who like ceremonial, when to do so happens to be indispensable to the proper protection of those who do not like it. This is the only reasonable way out of the difficulty, and we refuse to admit that it has yet been proved to be impracticable. How can that be said, until the experiment has actually been tried ?
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