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