The moral condition of Newmilns was terrible in the young pastor’s eyes, and he would sometimes despair, thinking that all his efforts were in vain. There was in him some touch of the divine yearning, ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!’ If he woke in the night-time, he communed with God. Far from flagging, the ambassador for Christ piled agencies on means, and, as it were, took the place by storm. The church was crowded to suffocation; he preached on week-days in various parts of the parish, instituted Sunday schools, prayer meetings, and meetings for young men; and, for the sake of the poorest of the poor, held services to which none were admitted who wore good clothes. In the course of a year he would visit several thousand families, and as in public he denounced evil-doers in general, in private he singled them out for rebuke and exhortation.
In his Loudoun ministry there is just perceptible an official smack, a note of externality; he has not yet entirely freed himself from the mechanical theory of salvation. For example, he was much taken up with the work of winning or, if need were, extorting confessions of repentance and faith from dying unbelievers. There was one with whom the zealous young ambassador strove hard, all to induce the invalid to speak. ‘Before I go have you nothing to say?’ The man lifted up his skeleton hand and panted out—’No, no, noth—nothing.’ At a later period Macleod would rather have sympathised with the poet, who wanted no priest—
‘—to canvass with official breath
The future and its viewless things,
That undiscovered mystery
Which one who feels death’s winnowing wings
Must needs read clearer, sure, than he.’
The manse of Loudoun is a little way out of Newmilns, in the direction of the castle, and overlooking the road; on one side, a pretty garden, and at the back the glebe, a beautiful brae. In that very house Robert Burns once spent a night. Coming down in the morning, he was asked whether he had slept well. ‘I have been praying all night,’ the poet answered; ‘if you go up to my room you will find my prayers on the table.’ He had been thinking of the sweet life of the household and all he might have been. But this tradition did not move Macleod; indeed, at that time he was unjust to the poet, as what cleric was not? Invited to take the chair at a Burns Festival in Newmilns, he replied (disloyal to Wordsworth for once) that he could not, dared not, as a Christian minister, commemorate such a man.
His life at Loudoun, notwithstanding his professional industry, was full of brightness and charm. Much of his leisure was passed among his flowers, or he went into the woods and sat listening to the birds. In the winter evenings, to his sister Jane, who kept house for him, he read aloud from the works of Shakespeare, Scott, and, a new writer, Dickens; and she in turn entertained him with German sonatas and Gaelic songs. At Loudoun Castle, then inhabited by the Dowager Marchioness of Hastings, widow of the celebrated Governor-General, he was not only a welcome guest, but a trusted friend. His conversational gifts might account for his acceptability at the tables of the great, but he was never the mere diner-out, still less the nice chaplain. In any company he would speak, when occasion offered, from the heart to the heart, and it was at first startling to see the laugh die out of the face of the big jolly parson, and hear sudden lessons or tales that shook the inmost soul, and drew the awkward tear. Lady Hastings gave him the key of a vault in Loudoun Kirk where lay the right hand of her dead husband, which had been sent from Malta; and, sure enough one morning, as the Marchioness lay dying, he was summoned to fetch the relic that it might be buried in her grave.
The ‘coffee-room fellows’ held reunions at Loudoun. Referring to one of these, Shairp says: ‘We wandered by the side of the Irvine Water, and under the woods, all about Loudoun Castle, and Norman was, as of old, the soul of the party. He recurred to his old Glasgow stories, or told us new ones derived from his brief experience of the Ayrshire people, in whom, and in their characters, he was already deeply interested. All day we spent out of doors; and as we lay, in that balmy weather, on the banks or under the shade of the newly-budding trees, converse more hearty it would be impossible to conceive.’
Through Shairp (who was now a student of Oxford) he was kept abreast of the Tractarian movement; not to his peace of mind, for he was protestant and presbyterian to the core. Once, while staying at Moreby, he had attended a magnificent confirmation ceremony in York Minster, but his raptures over the stained windows and ‘the great organ booming like thunder through the never-ending arches’ suddenly vanished in the recollection of a sacramental scene which he had witnessed in the Highlands—’no minster but the wide heaven, no organ but the roar of the eternal sea, the church with its lonely churchyard and primitive congregation.’ So far from having any leanings to High Churchism, he saw no harm in a layman administering the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Another sign is that, Highlander as he was, he had no sympathy with the Jacobites; he said that Charlie was never his darling, and spoke of the low cunning and tyrannical spirit of the Stuarts. The Anglo-Catholic movement he simply abhorred. ‘Well,’ he wrote to Shairp, ‘what think you of Puseyism now? You have read No. 90, of course,—you have read the article on Transubstantiation,—you have read it! Great heavens! is this 1841?’ Shairp, who wet his feet in the rising tide, piped in vain to his friend about the greatness of Newman. Macleod could not understand a beautiful soul who spent his mornings in idolatry, a sage of the nineteenth century for whom the only question was—Anglican Church or Roman?
Into what hole, Bezonian? speak or die.
Protestantism is more than a creed. Men may rail at the Scarlet Woman, and yet, in the matter of ecclesiastical claims, be little Beckets. In the non-intrusion controversy, such as it was in the end, Macleod’s attitude was partly determined by his dislike of sacerdotal pretensions. Since the law courts had declared the measures of the General Assembly illegal, the non-intrusionists intrusionists had set themselves up against the judges, and in the course of their defiance were justifying, by word and deed, Milton’s saying, that ‘new presbyter was just old priest writ large.’ The question was not now of patronage, but of the Headship of Christ, the crown-rights of the Redeemer; practically the old quarrel between priests and kings.
As to the necessity of checking the power of the patron there was not from the first any difference between the two sides. Everybody recognised that the people, having won political freedom, would have a voice in the appointment of ministers. To patronage, indeed, the Scots never consented, were never reconciled; they always looked upon it as a wrong, they could always say, ‘An enemy hath done this.’ Both Knox and Melville asserted the right of the people to elect their ministers, and the Kirk, as often as it had the chance, got rid of patronage. The evil seemed to be cast out for ever at the Revolution, but in 1712 it was surreptitiously restored. The Act of Queen Anne, which was nothing but a Jacobite intrigue, handing over the Kirk to the Pretender’s friends, was introduced behind the nation’s back, and passed in spite of the strenuous opposition of the General Assembly. For many years and in various ways the Kirk tried to get it repealed. In a single decade there were upwards of fifty disputed settlements before the courts, and about the middle of the century the dissenters numbered a hundred thousand. To make matters worse, the party which, under the name of Moderates, systematically championed the patrons, rose to absolute power in the Kirk. Before a presentee could be settled he had to receive the call, a document in his favour signed by the heads of families: