The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
parsimonious heritors leaving their manses and churches in dilapidated
condition; as one minister from Argyllshire wrote in 1790, ‘with us of the
church of Scotland, many of our country kirks are such dark, damp and
dirty hovels, as chill and repress every sentiment of devotion’. 68 As a result,
the minister became one of the first ‘hero-victims’ of the Scottish novel
from the 1810s. Extremely influential in this was John Galt’s novel, Annals
of the Parish, published in 1821, in which the Revd Micah Balwhidder
relates the parishioners’ hostility to him for being ‘put in by the patron’
and how, on his installation, he was guarded by soldiers on the way to the
kirk: ‘The people were really mad and vicious, and flung dirt upon us as
we passed, and reviled us all, and held out the finger of scorn at me; but
I endured it with a resigned spirit, compassionating their wilfulness and
blindness.’ 69
Whilst clergy of established churches complained of low rates of pay
and parsimony on the part of powerful patrons, dissenter clergy (and their
wives) made moral capital out of frugality and thrift. The loss of church
members through schism is tackled in most biographies very diplomatically;
the Revd Fergus Ferguson of the Evangelical Union lost large sections
of his congregation twice in two years, and his biographer notes that ‘the
pastor acted in the kindest way, as they left and implored the divine blessing
on their enterprise’. 70 One remarkable and popular Scottish biography of
1877, The Life of a Scottish Probationer, was actually about a man who
failed, a ‘stickit minister’ who had graduated in divinity but who never
received ‘a call’ to a congregation; instead he wrote poems and ended his
life as an invalid. ‘It would be unjust to [Thomas] Davidson’, wrote his
biographer, ‘to represent him as having been a professional failure. The fact
that he did not receive a call is neither to be attributed to his lack of power
as a preacher, nor altogether to lack of ability, on the part of the congregations
to which he preached, to discover and appreciate his gifts.’ 71 At the
other extreme, some clergy formed family dynasties which were eulogised
in public esteem. From one generation to the next, they symbolised the
great urbanisation and industrialisation of the nation, spreading out with
each generation to new centres of industry and spiritual prosperity. 72 Each
clerical auto/biography was a personal melodrama against temptation and
congregational fickleness.
Piety never came easy to the clergy of the evangelical century. From the
1830s and 1840s, ‘model ministers’ were objects of public discussion in
the cheap, popular ‘improving’ magazine, the religious tract-magazine,
and the book-length autobiography. Thousands of ministerial biographies
appeared between the 1840s and the 1920s, with those of Nonconformist
and Scottish presbyterian clergy tending to make great play of lives begun
in godly and dignified poverty, often in rural cottages. One biographer said
of his subject: ‘It was no slight advantage to the future minister that his
education was thus begun at a common school and in the companionship
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