The History of Scottish Theology,

Volume III: The Long Twentieth Century

David Fergusson
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THE HISTORY OF SCOTTISH THEOLOGY
The History of Scottish Theology, Volume I
Celtic Origins to Reformed Orthodoxy
The History of Scottish Theology, Volume II
The Early Enlightenment to the Late Victorian Era
The History of Scottish Theology, Volume III
The Long Twentieth Century
 EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

PROFESSOR ALEXANDER BROADIE

(University of Glasgow)
PROFESSOR STEWART J. BROWN
(University of Edinburgh)
PROFESSOR SUSAN HARDMAN MOORE
(University of Edinburgh)
PROFESSOR COLIN KIDD
(University of St Andrews)
PROFESSOR DONALD MACLEOD
(Edinburgh Theological Seminary)
PROFESSOR CHARLOTTE METHUEN
(University of Glasgow)
PROFESSOR MARGO TODD
(University of Pennsylvania)
PROFESSOR IAIN TORRANCE
(University of Aberdeen)
The History of Scottish
Theology
Volume III

The Long Twentieth Century

Edited by
DAVID FERGUSSON
and
MARK W. ELLIOTT

1
 3
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 Acknowledgements

We wish to record our thanks to several people who have assisted with the
production of this three-volume work. Dr Sandy Forsyth has provided valuable
support with contracts, organization of conferences, and regular communication
with authors. As associate editor, he has contributed much to this project and we
are greatly indebted to him for his labours. Initial copy editing was undertaken by
Dr Cory Brock, Revd Craig Meek, and Dr Laura Mair. The indexes were prepared
by Richard Brash, PhD student at New College, who also provided valuable
support with proof reading. Three conferences were held which enabled contribu-
tors to present initial drafts of their work; these were held in 2016–17 at Princeton
Theological Seminary and New College, Edinburgh with financial support from
the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. We are also grateful to the
members of the Editorial Advisory Board for their advice and encouragement,
particularly during the early stages of the project.

David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott

 List of Contributors

Gary D. Badcock is the Peache Professor of Divinity at Huron University College, Western
University in London, Ontario. He studied in Edinburgh (BD 1987; PhD 1991), and taught
Systematic Theology at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh the 1990s, latterly as
Meldrum Lecturer in Dogmatic Theology at New College. He has, among other works,
previously published on the Edinburgh theological tradition in general, and on John
McIntyre in particular.
Linden Bicket is Senior Teaching Fellow in Theology and Ethics at the University of
Edinburgh. She is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagin-
ation (2017).
Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St
Andrews where he taught church history and practical theology from 1999 to 2017. He was
Principal of St Mary’s College, St Andrews, from 2013 to 2017. He is the author of over forty
books, including six on the theme of Celtic Christianity, the most recent of which is
Following the Celtic Way (2018). A regular broadcaster and contributor to national news-
papers, he is currently deeply involved in the promotion of pilgrimage in Scotland.

David Brown is Emeritus Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of
St Andrews and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. Two recent volumes
assess his work: Christopher R. Brewer (ed.), Christian Theology and the Transformation of
Natural Religion: From Incarnation to Sacramentality (2018); Garrick W. Allen et al. (eds.),
The Moving Text: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on David Brown and the Bible (2018).

Cairns Craig is Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of
Aberdeen. Among his books dealing with the Scottish intellectual tradition are Intending
Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (2009) and The Wealth of
the Nation: Scotland, Culture, Independence (2018). His books on Scottish literature include
Out of History (1997) and The Modern Scottish Novel (1999). He was general editor of the
four-volume History of Scottish Literature (1987) and is an editor of The Journal of Scottish
Thought and The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies.
David Fergusson is Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. A Fellow of the
British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has published Faith
and Its Critics (2009), based on his Glasgow Gifford Lectures (2008). His most recent book
is The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (2018).
Marlene Finlayson is an independent researcher, with a degree of Master of Theology with
Distinction in Inter-Faith Studies (University of Glasgow) 2009, and a PhD in Church
History (University of Edinburgh) 2015. Her research has been published as A Prophetic
Voice: David Smith Cairns (1862–1946) (2018). It is an intellectual biography of this
Scottish minister, academic, and writer, who made a significant contribution to the
x   

science–religion debates of his day, and to Edinburgh 1910, and published the Army and
Religion report that followed the First World War. Her main area of interest is the history of
the relationship of the Church of Scotland and the different world religions.
Alexander (Sandy) Forsyth is T. F. Torrance Lecturer in Theology and Mission at New
College, University of Edinburgh. His book Mission by the People: Re-discovering the
Dynamic Missiology of Tom Allan and his Scottish Contemporaries (2017) sought to derive
principles for mission by an historical retrieval of the post-war period in Scotland, viewed
through the lens of present-day missiology. His research interests lie in practical theology,
particularly in missiology, pioneer ministry and church planting, and in faith, church, and
society in Scotland.
Doug Gay is a Lecturer in Practical Theology at the University of Glasgow, where he is also
Principal of Trinity College. He is the author of Honey from the Lion: Christianity and the
Ethics of Nationalism (2013) and Reforming the Kirk: The Future of the Church of Scotland
(2017).
Jason A. Goroncy is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Whitley College, University
of Divinity, Australia. He is the author of Hallowed be Thy Name: The Sanctification of All
in the Soteriology of P. T. Forsyth (2013), and has edited Descending on Humanity and
Intervening in History: Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P. T. Forsyth (2013), and Tikkun
Olam—To Mend the World: A Confluence of Theology and the Arts (2014).
Gordon Graham was Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological
Seminary from 2006 to 2018, having previously taught at the Universities of St Andrews
and Aberdeen. He now lives in Edinburgh and is General Editor of Oxford University
Press’s History of Scottish Philosophy, and edited the volume on Scottish Philosophy in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2015) in the series.
Adam Hood is a parish minister of the Church of Scotland and an Honorary Research
Fellow of the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham. He
has published books and articles focusing on the work of John Baillie, John Oman, and John
Macmurray.
Bruce L. McCormack is the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton
Theological Seminary. He is the recipient of the Karl Barth Prize in 1998 and an honorary
doctorate from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 2004 for his book Karl Barth’s
Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (1995). He is currently the Frederick Crosson Fellow
in the Center for Philosophy of Religion (Notre Dame) working on a Reformed version of
kenotic Christology for Cambridge University Press under the title The Humility of the
Eternal Son.

William McFadden is a priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galloway in South West
Scotland. After studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and at Fordham
University in New York, he taught Fundamental Theology and Systematic Theology in
Scotus College, the National Seminary in Scotland, where he was rector from 2003 to 2008.
He has contributed to various publications and periodicals.
    xi

Johnston McKay is a writer, broadcaster, theologian, lecturer, and Church of Scotland

minister. For nearly ten years, he presented the popular weekly programme Personal Touch
on BBC Radio Scotland. He has written extensively on Scottish theological history and is
the author of The Kirk and the Kingdom (2012).

Peter Matheson is a Presbyterian minister. He taught in New College, Edinburgh; Knox

Theological Hall, Dunedin; and was Principal of the Uniting Church College in Melbourne.
His publications focus on the Reformation, the Third Reich, and New Zealand church
history. He was a member of the Iona Community and, with his German wife, Heinke,
strongly involved in the Peace Movement and in environmental issues.

Paul D. Molnar is Professor of Systematic Theology at St. John’s University, Queens, New
York. Most recently, he has published Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent
Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology, 2nd edition (2017), Faith,
Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary
Theology (2015), and Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (2009).
George M. Newlands is Professor Emeritus of Divinity in the University of Glasgow. He has
published widely in theology, including John and Donald Baillie: Transatlantic Theology
(2002), Christ and Human Rights (2006), and Hospitable God (with Allen Smith, 2010).
Paul T. Nimmo holds the King’s (1620) Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of
Aberdeen. His monograph, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision,
was awarded a John Templeton Award for Theological Promise in 2009, and he has more
recently published Barth: A Guide for the Perplexed (2017), co-edited The Cambridge
Companion to Reformed Theology (with David Fergusson, 2016), and edited the church
resource Learn: Understanding Our Faith (2017).
Lesley Orr is a historian and Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity, University of
Edinburgh. Her academic, policy, and third sector work has encompassed history, theology,
feminism, and gender justice. Research has focused on women in the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Scottish church, empire and civil society, war resistance and peace
movements, and gender-based violence. Her publications include ‘A Unique and Glorious
Mission’: Women and Presbyterianism in Scotland 1830 –1930 (2000) and (with Breitenbach
et al.) Scottish Women: A Documentary History 1789–1914 (2013).

George Pattison is Professor of Theology and Modern European Thought at the University
of Glasgow. He was a parish priest in the Church of England for thirteen years prior to
holding posts in the Universities of Cambridge, Aarhus, and Oxford. He is a visiting
professor at the University of Copenhagen and has been a Fellow of the Max Weber Centre
for Advanced Cultural and Social Research. He has published extensively on modern
theology, particularly with regard to the role of German Idealism and its critics. His
books include Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life (2013), Paul Tillich’s
Philosophical Theology (2015), and he has co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard
(2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (2013).
Alison Peden was a Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and now serves as Canon of
St Ninian’s Cathedral, Perth and Rector of St Modoc’s Church, Doune. As an historian of
xii   

medieval intellectual history studying the impact of Neoplatonism on Christian thought,

she published Abbo of Fleury, Commentary on the Calculus of Victorius of Aquitaine (2003).
Her current research interest is the Scottish Episcopalian theologians George Gleig
(1753–1840) and Bertrand Brasnett (1893–1988).

John Riches held the Chair of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at Glasgow University where
he taught from 1973 to 2003. He has written on the historical Jesus, Jesus and the
Transformation of Judaism (1980), on the Synoptic Gospels, Conflicting Mythologies
(2000), and on the reception history of Galatians, Galatians through the Centuries (2008).
He was one of the translators of Bultmann’s Gospel of John, editor of the translation of von
Balthasar’s Glory of the Lord, and worked closely with T&T Clark in the 1980s and 1990s,
editing the series Studies of the New Testament and its World. He is currently one of the
editors of the Expository Times. Since retirement he has had more time to pursue his
interests in development and fair trade and in 2009 founded a fair trade importing
company, Just Trading Scotland, which supports smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia.
Brian Stanley is Professor of World Christianity in the University of Edinburgh and from
2009–19 was Director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity. He has published
widely on the history of Protestant missions and the growth of Christianity as a world
religion. His most recent book is Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History
(2018).

Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart is Senior Lecturer in Material Culture and Gàidhealtachd

History at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands. As Senior
Researcher for the Carmichael Watson Project at the Centre for Research Collections,
Edinburgh University Library, he worked on the papers and material culture collections of
Alexander Carmichael, and edited The Life and Legacy of Alexander Carmichael (2008).
He has published widely on the history, literature, ethnography, and folklore of the
Highlands during the early modern and modern periods.
 1
The Theology of Carmina Gadelica
Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart

Carmina Gadelica, published as two volumes in 1900, is one of the most remark-
able Scottish books of its time: a luxury artwork with a price (three guineas) to
match, magnificently illustrated, expressly designed to remind readers of early
medieval illuminated manuscripts. Its contents are no less remarkable: 216
prayers, blessings, and charms recorded in the Highlands and printed in their
purportedly original Scottish Gaelic with facing English translations. The first
‘hymn’ offers a good illustration of Carmina’s style, dignified, polished, archaic,
and incantatory:

RANN ROIMH URNUIGH RUNE BEFORE PRAYER

OLD people in the Isles sing this or some other short hymn before prayer.
Sometimes the hymn and the prayer are intoned in low tremulous unmeasured
cadences like the moving and moaning, the soughing and the sighing, of the ever-
murmuring sea on their own wild shores.
They generally retire to a closet, to an out-house, to the lee of a knoll, or to the
shelter of a dell, that they may not be seen nor heard of men. I have known men
and women of eighty, ninety, and a hundred years of age continue the practice of
their lives in going from one to two miles to the seashore to join their voices with
the voicing of the waves and their praises with the praises of the ceaseless sea.

Ta mi lubadh mo ghlun I am bending my knee

An sul an Athar a chruthaich mi,
An sul an Mhic a cheannaich mi,
An sul an Spioraid a ghlanaich mi,
Le caird agus caoimh.
Tre t-Aon Unga fein a Dhe,
Tabhair duinn tachar n’ar teinn,
Gaol De
Gradh De,
In the eye of the Father who created me,
In the eye of the Son who purchased me,
In the eye of the Spirit who cleansed me,
In friendship and affection.
Through Thine own Anointed One, O God,
Bestow upon us fulness in our need,
Love towards God,
The affection of God,

Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, The Theology of Carmina Gadelica In: The History of Scottish
Theology, Volume III. Edited by: David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott, Oxford University Press
(2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198759355.003.0001
2   

Gair De, The smile of God,

Gais De, The wisdom of God,
Gras De, The grace of God,
Sgath De, The fear of God,
Us toil De, And the will of God
Dheanamh air talamh nan Tre, To do on the world of the Three,
Mar ta ainghlich us naoimhich As angels and saints
A toighe air neamh. Do in heaven;
Gach duar agus soillse, Each shade and light,
Gach la agus oidhche, Each day and night,
Gach uair ann an caoimhe, Each time in kindness,
Thoir duinn do ghne. Give Thou us Thy Spirit.1

The first volume of Carmina has four sections: an extended biographical and
ethnographical introduction; Achaine/Invocations, prayers and blessings mainly
associated with rising and resting; Aimsire/Seasons, mostly items from the litur-
gical year; while blessings ensuring the achievement of various tasks are recorded
in Oibre/Labour. There are three parts to the second volume: a substantial
selection of healing and protective charms and associated plant lore—and a
handful of maledictions too—in Uibe/Incantations; an indiscriminate assortment
of hymns, omens, and stray verses in Measgain/Miscellaneous; and an extensive
lexicon of unusual words and meanings blended with historical and ethnographic
lore, rounded off with an annotated list of reciters. The world of Carmina is
imbued with a simple faith; dignified, pious, ancient verses now recited clandes-
tinely for fear of scorn and derision; long lives lived in harmony with nature.
The editor of Carmina Gadelica, Alexander Carmichael, claimed its subject
matter, vouchsafed to him by ‘rare and . . . reticent’ pious reciters throughout the
Highlands, reached back centuries: ‘the blending of the pagan and the Christian
religions in these poems . . . to many minds will constitute their chief charm’ (I,
xxix). For one reviewer, the precious contents ‘reveal strata upon strata of religious
belief and superstition, stretching back into pre-historic and ante-Christian times’
(Jolly 1900). Such assessments have been echoed ever since in enthusiastic
responses from readers across the Anglophone world. For them, the English
translations in Carmina represent primary source material revealing a long-
neglected ‘Celtic’ vision of Christianity, romantic, ecumenical, mystic, contem-
plative, egalitarian, and nature-oriented.² Nevertheless, Carmichael’s book raises

¹ Carmichael (1900: I, 2–3).

² The centrality of Carmina to the contemporary Celtic Christianity movement is explored in Meek
(2000: passim, esp. 60–78).
      3

many questions. Carmina Gadelica is certainly one of the most magnificent

volumes of its time. It is also one of the most controversial.
The life of Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912) is as remarkable, and conten-
tious, as his book. For contemporaries, Carmichael’s reputation was bound up
with Carmina Gadelica, described by another reviewer as a ‘splendid consum-
mation of the love-labour of a whole diligent life-time . . . a great religious work,
piously perfected by a man, every fibre of whose body and being vibrates to the
beauty of holiness, and, as one might say, to the holiness of the beauty which he
found in the life of even the most humble of his own people’ (Gillies 1900).
Carmina represented the culmination of a lifetime’s collecting throughout the
Highlands. In Carmichael’s words, the book required three sacrifices: ‘the
sacrifice of time, the sacrifice of toil, and the sacrifice of means’ (1900–71: I,
xxxii). In less exalted terms, its compilation cost him over a decade of hard
work, and its publication cost him what little money he had.
Carmichael’s book excited admiration far beyond Scotland. Among Gaelic
scholars, however, discreet dissent prevailed until an irascible academic dispute
over its authenticity broke out in the late 1970s, ‘a debate’, according to Ronald
Black, ‘akin in some ways to the Ossianic controversy 200 years before’ (1999:
711). The uncomfortable fact was that oral fieldwork by Carmichael’s contem-
poraries and successors afforded nothing comparable in length or elaboration to
the items printed in Carmina. In the apparent absence of original field notes, the
scope of editorial interference could be inferred, but not assessed.
Carmichael’s field recordings were not missing. The quest for field notes (that
is, paper sheets), as well as Carmichael’s rebarbative handwriting, led scholars to
overlook some twenty-six field notebooks offering in-depth descriptions of his
collecting activities over half a century. Their rediscovery allows us to reassess
Carmichael’s life and his contribution to Carmina Gadelica, to understand how its
texts were polished, regularized, archaicized, extended, re-presented, and even
recreated by an editor collaborating with family members and a wider circle of
friends and assistants (Stiùbhart 2008: 23–32).
Undoubtedly, Carmichael’s vision draws upon his own experiences of the
spirituality of the very poorest islanders, those who had been left behind in the
dramatic transformations of Hebridean society and economy during his lifetime.
But far from offering fading echoes of an early Celtic church, a substantial portion
of Carmina Gadelica shares much in common with vernacular Christianity across
Europe: that is, it represents secular appropriations, translations, and elaborations
of benedictions, exorcisms, supplications, and blessings most likely derived from
late medieval Catholicism, from early modern Catholic missionary endeavours,
and maybe even from more recently printed tracts and prayer books. The role of
the Iona clergy in disseminating the earlier material is hinted at by the prominence
in these texts of St Columba—in the estimation of one of Carmichael’s informants,
‘ard dhotair Alba gu leigheas duine agus beothach’ (‘the greatest doctor in
4   

Scotland for healing man and beast’) (EUL CW MS 7 fo. 38v)—and unexpectedly
corroborated by evidence in a witchcraft trial of 1592:

it wes Auld Mackellar of Cruachan that lernit hir his charmis and that the said
M’Ellar lernit them at the pryoris of Icolmkill [Iona] . . . (MacPhail 1914: 166)³

As this chapter will demonstrate, wider, national and international nineteenth-

century contexts influenced the editing, presentation, and very concept of Car-
mina Gadelica. Most obviously, there are the influential opinions of Matthew
Arnold, based upon Ernest Renan’s theories concerning Celtic Christianity, medi-
ated through the contemporary ‘Celtic Renascence’ and inflected by late Victorian
organic evolutionist theories and rural communitarian ideals. But there is another,
perhaps less immediately apparent, theological influence to be reckoned with: in
its ritualistic nostalgia, its linking of private and communal devotion, its aesthetic
design, its opposition to contemporary evangelicalism, and even in its presenta-
tion of Carmichael in the guise of poet-priest, Carmina Gadelica can be read as an
unexpected late Highland flowering of Tractarian liturgical ideals—an inspiration
deriving not so much from Alexander Carmichael himself as from his wife, Mary
Frances MacBean.
* * * * *
Alexander Carmichael, Alasdair MacGilleMhìcheil in his native Gaelic, was born
in the Island of Lismore in 1832 (Stiùbhart 2008: 2–22, 30–3). In the late 1850s
Carmichael commenced his long career in the excise; he also began collecting
folklore in Islay and in Skye for John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West
Highlands (1860–2). After two years in Cornwall, Carmichael volunteered for a
posting to the southern Outer Hebrides, the richest area for folklore in the
Highlands. His occupation, hunting illegal whisky stills and gathering local
taxes, may appear inauspicious for an aspiring folklorist. But Carmichael was
required to travel systematically around the remotest corners of the islands,
becoming acquainted with every community under his supervision. He had to
know the people, and the landscape, thoroughly. He also had the bureaucratic
expertise necessary to produce and manage folklore files—as well as an essential
supply of paper. Carmichael conscientiously avoided prosecuting miscreant
islanders except as a last resort, in a tacit mutual agreement that surely assisted
his collecting. During the nearly two decades he spent in the Hebrides, Alexander
Carmichael would mature as collector, antiquarian, and naturalist.
In January 1868 Carmichael married Mary Urquhart MacBean (1838–1928),
the daughter of an exciseman, born in Kirkiboll, Sutherland, and brought up in
Montrose and Dundee. After her mother died of typhus in 1847, her father

³ See Bárth (2013); Pócs (2013); also Hyde (1906); Franz (1960).
      5

returned to his native Black Isle. Family lore records that Mary was adopted for a
while by her uncle the Rev. Arthur Ranken, Episcopalian priest of Old Deer, with
whose daughters she attended the newly opened St Margaret’s Episcopal College
for Girls at Crieff, sister school of Trinity College, Glenalmond (Carmichael
1900–71: IV, xli–xlii). If she did so, it was for months rather than years: Mary is
recorded working as an innkeeper’s servant in Rosemarkie in the 1851 census.
A restless and rootless upbringing, punctuated by a series of catastrophes, helps
explain Mary’s later drive, resourcefulness, and strength of character.
One of the teachers at St Margaret’s was the clergyman scholar the Rev.
George Hay Forbes (1821–75); Mary appears in the 1861 census employed as a
schoolmistress living in Burntisland parsonage with Forbes and his wife.
Today, George Hay Forbes is best known for the Pitsligo Press, based in the
parsonage, which under his painstaking supervision issued an eclectic selection
of journals, polemical tracts, sermons, and above all high-quality liturgical
works distinguished by outstanding scholarship, free from misprints, and set
in a bewildering variety of fonts. Although Forbes employed a printer, he was
assisted in his work by several women compositors, as well, it seems, as the
older boys and girls of the Church school (Skene 1876; Perry 1927, 1939;
Carnie 1955–71; Primrose 1955–71; Strong 2004).
As a young woman, Mary MacBean was employed by a clergyman driven by an
obsessive interest in liturgy, spurred by the acrimonious controversy over the
Episcopalian Prayer Book between the ‘Scottish’ and ‘English’ wings of the church,
the latter headed by George Hay Forbes’ brother Bishop Alexander Penrose
Forbes (1817–75). Fundamental to this dispute were questions concerning the
missals used in the medieval Scottish church: was its liturgical tradition principally
influenced by the English church, or might some of its features derive from
Gallican and Greek models? The story of Scottish Episcopalian engagement with
the Oxford Movement is a complex one, but the influence of Tractarian ritualism
and veneration of pre-Reformation liturgies is clear (Nockles 1996; Strong 2002:
26–32, 235–63; Brown 2012: 61–71).
Mary MacBean lived in the parsonage while the brothers Forbes prepared for
the press their edition of the magnificently illustrated Arbuthnott Missal (1864),
the only complete service book known to survive from pre-Reformation Scotland,
prefaced by a panoramic survey of extant early medieval liturgies from Britain and
Ireland (Forbes 1864). It is surely significant that Alexander Carmichael later drew
spurious parallels between Arbuthnott’s patron saint, Ternan, and a supposed
Benbecula saint Torranan, in an extended essay in Carmina Gadelica (1900–71: II,
80–3). Carmichael draws directly upon this edition, as well as upon Bishop Forbes’
later Kalendar of Scottish Saints (1872), in notes he made on St Ronan probably
dating from early 1886 (EUL CW MS 120 fo. 86). In addition to editing work,
George Hay Forbes was committed to a Gaelic ministry for Highland Episcopa-
lians, establishing the Gaelic Tract Society ‘for the purpose of educating and
6   

maintaining Highland churchpeople in fidelity to their Church’ and also printing

a Gaelic translation of the Scottish Communion Office (Perry 1927: 29, 31;
Nockles 1996: 675).
Mary Carmichael spent at least seven years working in the household of George
Hay Forbes, but this period remains obscure. Her husband later wrote that ‘[s]he
injured her health past recall I fear in the school at Burntisland’, though she was
‘much attached’ to Forbes’ wife Eleanor.⁴ It is notable that although later family
tradition made Bishop Alexander Forbes a ‘guardian of her early life’, for whom
she worked as ‘housekeeper and secretary’, and of whom, with Dean Ranken, ‘she
often spoke with affection and regard’, her erstwhile employer went unmentioned
(Carmichael 1900–71: IV, xli–xlii). Nevertheless, it is unthinkable that the years she
spent in a household focused upon researching and printing pre-Reformation
missals and hagiographies did not influence the conception and creation of Car-
mina Gadelica as a lost Gaelic liturgy of prayers and blessings. Its inspiration may
thus owe as much to east coast Episcopalianism—and, indirectly, to the sacramen-
talism of the Oxford Movement—as it does to west coast Hebridean Catholicism.
Mary entered George Hay Forbes’ household as Mary Urquhart MacBean; she
left as Mary Frances MacBean. This intriguing reinvention may be a tribute to
Forbes’ cousin, the Tractarian novelist and philanthropist Felicia Mary Frances
Skene (1821–99) whose brother the historian William Forbes Skene would play an
important role furthering her husband’s career. If so, Felicia Skene not only
supplied Mary with a new identity; she also gave her a practical vocation.
Mary’s subsequent tireless, self-abnegating charity work among the island poor
may draw upon the example of Felicia Skene, and of contemporary Tractarian-
inspired Anglican sisterhoods (Rickards 1902; Mumm 1999: 93–156; Sanders
2004). Such exemplars may also have influenced the Carmichaels’ later quietist
‘moderate conservatism’, their shunning of radical activism in favour of a prefer-
ence to effect change by example.
It was as an indirect result of his impending marriage that Alexander Carmi-
chael first became interested in charms. On 16 October 1867 he visited Anna
MacIsaac, née MacLellan (c.1808–83), in Ceann Langabhat, an t-Ìochdar, South
Uist. She and her husband Hector (c.1797–1878), one of the most celebrated
seanchaidhean or storytellers in Uist, had effectively adopted the young exciseman
following his arrival in Uist. In a later reminiscence, Carmichael recounted how Mrs
MacIsaac presented him with a Eàrna Mhoire or Molucca Bean, a tropical nut
carried on the Gulf Stream to the Outer Hebrides, cherished for its powers in
safeguarding women in childbirth as well as protecting houses and boats. This
particular object ‘has been in the family for many generations perhaps for many
centuries and has always been prized as a precious heirloom’:

⁴ National Records of Scotland GD1/126/8/1/128 (Carmichael to W. F. Skene, 3 February 1879).

      7

Chaidh an Arna bheannaichte so a bheannachadh air an altair leis an t-sagairt

agus ann an suilean Dhia agus dhaoine tha i naomh.
This blessed bean was blessed on the altar by the priest and in the eyes of God
and the people it is sacred.

Some months previously, Carmichael had met Mary Frances MacBean; the couple
would marry in Edinburgh on 13 January the following year. The Molucca bean
was thus Anna MacIsaac’s wedding present to Alexander Carmichael. The numin-
ous object did not come by itself, however; it had an invocation attached,
described by Mrs MacIsaac as a laoidh or hymn:

Faic a Mhoire a bhean See, o Mary, the woman

Us i eir fòd a bhais On the brink of death.
Faic fein i a Mhic See her, o Son,
O ‘s ann agad a tha For you are able
A chomas a thoirt dha’n leana To give the infant his power
Agus a bhean a bhith slan. et And to make the woman well.
al. Ceartas a thoirt dha’n leana and others: To give the infant justice
al. Comas a thoir dhan leana. others: To give the infant power.

This is to be said three times placing the Tearna to the lips and then in the hand of the
parturient woman who presses it hard in the palm of her hand while the child is being born (EUL
CW MS 87 fos. 17r–v).5

Given the importance of Mary Carmichael’s later charitable work in allowing her
husband access to some of his best informants from the very poorest stratum of island
society—such interactions effectively initiating him into a particular ‘gift economy’,
obtaining charms for charity—it is revealing to see how even before marriage their
relationship enabled him to record such items. Again, bearing in mind Alexander
Carmichael’s extensive ‘re-creation’ of such invocations in his Carmina Gadelica
volumes, it is telling that the very first charm he recorded came with variants.
Over the following decade, as a well-known figure in local communities and a
respectable married family man with a wife heavily involved in local charity work,
Alexander Carmichael was able to record from islanders personal, private, even
confidential material such as blessings, prayers, charms, and incantations, items
sometimes inaccessible to outside collectors. His interest was piqued by news-
paper columns written on the subject by his friend the Rev. Alexander Stewart
(1829–1901), ‘Nether-Lochaber’, as well as a relocation of his growing family to
Ìochdar in South Uist, then to Creag Goraidh in Benbecula, by the South Ford: an

⁵ See also EUL CW MSS 7 fo. 36v; 116 fo. 6; and Carmichael (1900–71: I, 70–1).
8   

ideal place for a folklore collector, perfectly situated to buttonhole potential

interviewees as they awaited the tides to change. In these overwhelmingly Catholic
districts vernacular blessings, prayers, and charms were recited more openly than in
Protestant North Uist. Carmichael’s new circumstances spurred his interest in
popular piety in all its forms: during his first year among Catholic tenantry he
recorded seventeen items relating to popular spirituality and calendar customs,
considerably more than he had previously collected (Stiùbhart 2013).
Despite the fact that during his final years in Uist Carmichael recorded few
charm texts, his interest in and appreciation of the genre continued unabated. In a
draft reply to a letter concerning folklore in The Highlander in 1881, Carmichael
begins by mentioning his work collecting charms:

I have always thought that a faithful account of these charms and incantations
would be interesting, and, properly considered, mayhap instructive. I have not
hitherto however, felt myself equal to the task congenial to me of giving them to
the public, although many scores, if not hundreds of them, lie scattered up and
down my manuscripts among masses of other rubbish . . . . These mystical beliefs
and observances with their hoary origin far back the stream of time, probably
contain interest possibly wisdom, had we only the industry of the bee to seek and
extract their treasures. (EUL CW MS 230 fo. 176)

If not ‘many scores’, far less hundreds, during his posting to the Hebrides
Alexander Carmichael nevertheless managed to collect at least sixty specific
charm texts, as well as numerous other prayers and blessings: a remarkable
store. Barely a year after drafting the piece above, Carmichael left the islands for
good, moving to a new excise post in Edinburgh. Henceforth he would do
fieldwork either during summer expeditions or through correspondents.

* * * * *
In November 1878 the brother of the novelist Felicia Skene, the historian William
Forbes Skene (1809–92), recruited Alexander Carmichael to compose a chapter on
traditional agricultural practices surviving in the Hebrides for the third ‘Land and
People’ volume of his tour-de-force Celtic Scotland. Through his excise work,
Carmichael collected agricultural returns; through his fieldwork, he knew commu-
nity history. The resulting account was of crucial importance for his later career
(Skene 1876–80: III, 378–93). A document dating from the early 1890s in the archive
of the Gaelic scholar Alexander Macbain claims that Carmichael’s paper for Skene:

was the means of turning the late Lord Napier’s attention to the condition of the
Crofters as well as of increasing his interest in measures which have greatly
alleviated their burdens. (EUL CW MS 510 n.f.)
      9

When, three years later, Napier was nominated to chair the parliamentary Royal
Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the High-
lands and Islands, he wrote to Carmichael asking him to compile a similar paper
for the Commission’s Report. Carmichael recapped his previous piece, adding, at
Napier’s request, two prayers, two charm blessings, two milking songs, and a love
song: very unorthodox adjuncts in a parliamentary paper (Carmichael 1884:
452–82). These items underlined the eirenic message of Carmichael’s ‘Grazing
and agrestic customs’: islanders had the strength and refinement of character to
govern themselves.
Carmichael’s account provided an unexpected spiritual oasis in what proved a
very contentious report. Whatever their political beliefs, readers could agree upon
the allure of the gracious verses presented by Carmichael:

At the last meeting of the Crofter Royal Commission, the members discussed the
various papers that had come before them. “Some praised one paper and some
another”, said Professor Mackinnon, “but there was only one opinion among us
all that your paper, Mr. Carmichael, is the paper of the Commission – a paper
which live as long as the English language lasts. I was asked to tell you this, and to
thank you for it”. (EUL CW MS 510 n.f.)

The discreetly diplomatic route that Carmichael had chosen for his submission,
stressing islanders’ innate piety, cooperation, and self-regulation, in contradistinc-
tion to common prejudices depicting Highlanders as barbaric, uncouth, and slavish
in their esteem for authority and tradition, was a powerful one. But adopting this
approach entailed losses as well as gains. Against his friends’ counsel, Carmichael
eschewed an active role in the crofters’ struggle. Rather, he became an advocate and
mediator of Gaelic culture to English-speaking audiences.
On 24 December 1888 Alexander Carmichael delivered to the recently formed
Gaelic Society of Glasgow perhaps the most important paper of his career: ‘Old
Uist Hymns’, an extension of his Napier Commission paper (Carmichael
1887–91). The article was composed at a time of hectic debate concerning radical
land redistribution, when it seemed as if the Free Church, who had recently held
their General Assembly in Inverness, might adopt a leading role advocating the
cause of Highland crofters and cottars (Cameron 1996:47–56, 62–76; MacColl
2006: 179–211; Newby 2007: 146–62). Carmichael’s refined Uist verses suited the
cause: not only for their literary value but also—at a time when the Highland
congregations of the Free Church were widely charged with bigotry, dogmatism,
and Sabbatarianism—to illustrate how, for their composers, religion ‘was not
intended merely for church on Sundays, but was one continued round of religious
aspirations, from the time when they woke till they sought repose at night’
(Carmichael 1887–91: 46).
10   

Manuscript evidence suggests that Carmichael was galvanized by his paper’s

enthusiastic reception (EUL CW MSS 1, fos. 1–11; 124 fos. 27–30, 32v–34v).
During the following decade, however, rather than making lengthy expeditions
to the Highlands, he lived in Edinburgh, carrying out undemanding excise work,
while spending summers in a rented house in Taynuilt. He had embarked upon
the mammoth task of researching, collating, editing, and recreating texts gathered
over thirty years in several thousand folios. Given the difficulties Carmichael had
faced in compiling even relatively concise pieces for Forbes and Napier, the
psychological and intellectual challenges now confronting him were forbidding.
It is hardly surprising that his original publishing contract, signed with the
Clarendon Press, fell through (Campbell 1978–81: 183). Carmichael would pub-
lish on his own; but he would not work on his own.
In Edinburgh Alexander Carmichael became a Victorian sage: a mature, authori-
tative personality, possessed of great experience and endowed with a treasure-trove
of anecdotes from the decades he spent in the Hebrides; a central figure in the Gaelic
diaspora community in Edinburgh, and a link to an increasingly remote past.
Around him gathered a series of assistants and advisers ready to assist with
composition, and to publicize his work where necessary. For them, Carmichael
was not only a sage, but a guru, whose arduous life in the Hebrides, crowned by his
being entrusted with archaic, esoteric rituals and lore by ancient islanders, may have
suggested intriguing parallels with the demanding rites of initiation into the exclu-
sive secret societies of occult adepts that proliferated in fin de siècle London Bohemia
(Verter 1998: 205–74; Owen 2007: 1–185; Walters 2007: 1–112).⁶
Carmichael kept up a correspondence with the two other major Highland
cleric-folklorists: the Rev. John Gregorson Campbell (1834–91) of Tiree, and,
following Campbell’s death, Father Allan McDonald (1855–1905), then newly
transferred to the Isle of Eriskay (Campbell 2005: 668–9, 674–81, 685, 687). Father
Allan, himself to become an icon of the Celtic Revival movement before his
untimely death, is significant not only because he collected comparable lore in
the same districts as Carmichael—as the latter acknowledged, ‘you and I have
taken down many things in common, showing that many things interested us in
common’—but because of his Gaelic Hymnal of 1893, Comh-chruinneachadh
de Laoidhean Spioradail. This unassuming little volume of spiritual verse by
McDonald and earlier bards, leavened by a handful of prayers culled from oral
tradition, was a precursor to Carmina Gadelica regarding its content, and some-
thing of a negative example regarding its austere appearance (McDonald 1893).
Although Carmichael’s acolyte George Henderson found ‘much to be praised’
with the hymns, particularly their ‘very pleasing at times, and very beautiful’
phraseology, he censured the austere presentation, the texts lacking introduction

⁶ For Yeats’ contemporaneous Celtic Mystical Order project, see Foster (1998–2003: I, 101–7, 186–7,
196–7); and Kalogera (1977).
      11

and context, as well as the book’s overall appearance: ‘[t]he cover is too meagre
and lacks the dignity worthy of it’.⁷ Like the Rev. John Gregorson Campbell before
him, Father Allan was wary of committing himself to Carmichael’s project, not
only because of its ambition—he was then recovering from a nervous breakdown
brought on by overwork—but also because of Carmichael’s romanticized perspec-
tive on island informants, very different from his own rather more sceptical and
worldly standpoint (Black 2002: 8–9, 39–46; Hutchinson 2010: 127–9; Roberts
2010: 218–19).
George Henderson (1866–1912) was probably the most able Gaelic scholar of
his generation. During the years that his mentor created Carmina Gadelica, he
undertook a doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna, then postdoctoral
research at Jesus College, Oxford. Henderson’s extensive lexicographical assist-
ance added scholarly depth and historical perspective to Carmichael’s vision; he
relentlessly encouraged, chivvied, and promoted the older man; the work’s very
title arose from one of Henderson’s characteristically quirky suggestions
(Campbell 1978–81: 214–16). One other Gaelic scholar was involved in creating
Carmina Gadelica: Carmichael’s daughter Ella (1870–1928), newly matriculated
as a student of Celtic, one of the first women undergraduates at the University of
Edinburgh (Carmichael 1900–71: I, xxxi; III, xxi–xxiii). Ella Carmichael’s hand is
visible throughout the surviving fragments of Carmina Gadelica editing papers. In
fact, Alexander Carmichael had become a brand, with family and friends revising
and rewriting pieces under his own name.
Five years into the editing process, Carmichael came into contact with the circle
of the charismatic polymath Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). In February 1894
Carmichael wrote to Father Allan McDonald:

Professor Geddes is desirous to get up Celtic lectures in connection with his

Universities Extension classes. He has asked me to analyse many for his proposal.
We are anxious to bring Celtic to the front . . . ⁸

Embarking on an ambitious publishing venture, Geddes had seized upon the

notion of Celtic culture as a vehicle for his commitment to spiritual renewal
through arts, crafts, and nature, as an antidote to the anomie of urban industrial
life (Macdonald 2005; Cumming 2006: 4–12, 30–46; Pittock and Jack 2007;
Ferguson 2011; Shaw 2015). The artistic design and Celtic ornamentation of
Geddes’ ‘Celtic Library’ publications, such as his seasonal journal The Evergreen
(1895–7), the miscellany Lyra Celtica (1896), the centenary Poems of Ossian
(1896), and Songs and Tales of Saint Columba and His Age (1897), gave

⁷ George Henderson to Alexander Carmichael, 15 August 1893.

⁸ Alexander Carmichael to Father Allan McDonald, CH2/1/1/13/110, 15 February 1894 (typescript
copy, Canna House).
12   

Carmichael’s project a new impetus. He could thus reimagine his book not only as
a storehouse of traditional prayers and charms, but also as an aestheticized work
of art illustrating Geddes’ ideal, influenced by the organic evolutionism of Herbert
Spencer, of communities living in a harmonious relationship with nature—and as
a textbook for Geddes’ admonition that ‘it is not for London to educate Iona, but
for Iona to educate London’ (University of Strathclyde Archives T-GED 5/2/7,
‘Keltic Art’: 8; Ferguson 2011: 136; also Macdonald 2008: 143–4; Renwick 2009).
Suitably inspired by a visit to Iona, Ella Carmichael’s companion Jane Hay
(1864–1914) had written in the ‘Summer’ issue of The Evergreen how ‘it is only
when men have grown away from Nature, when they have shut themselves in cities
and grown aliens in their proper home-land that they cease to feel themselves her
children, and fear to meet her in death’ (Hay 1896: 35). The stimulus Geddes’ ‘Celtic
Renascence’ gave Carmichael’s project comes through in the frequent queries he
subsequently directed to Father Allan McDonald in Eriskay concerning the names,
natures, and uses of island plants: nature was now to the fore.⁹ It is also seen in the
aesthetic redirection of Carmina Gadelica under the supervision of Mary Frances
Carmichael, responsible not only for the basic liturgical concept of the book, but
also, in her designing and tracing its decorated initials, for its final appearance
(Carmichael 1900–71: VI, xxxi–xxxii; Macdonald 2008: 136–41).¹⁰
On 27 December 1895, a paper on Celtic art was read at the Celtic Union, the
student association founded by Ella Carmichael: ‘The tying and untying of a Celtic
knot’ by James Archibald Campbell of Barbreck (1854–1926), mystic, acquaint-
ance of John Ruskin, and close family friend of Patrick Geddes. Its theme was
particularly topical given that Celtic art was also the subject of Arthur Evans’
recent Rhind Lectures. Campbell, however, went beyond far beyond art history.
He outlined an artistic education programme teaching Highland children a Celtic
decorative style established before the Reformation, even before the coming of
Christianity; and also:

the beautiful names and legends and usages connected with the plants thus
brought into service, as much ‘superstition,’ or sen[s]e of unseen presences and
powers, as still lingers among the hills. And, out of the concentration and
stimulation of feeling which spring from living art, I am sanguine enough to
believe, would arise once more some day an exulting and dignified religious
ritual, expressive, not of doctrines and dogmas, but of the affections and rever-
ences which underlie all doctrine, and a simple life, fuller than at present, both of
sacred memory and of good cheer. (Campbell 1895)

⁹ Correspondence of Alexander Carmichael with Father Allan McDonald, CH2/1/1/13/1101893–9

(typescript copies, Canna House).
¹⁰ Note how contemporary Irish Gaelic literature was still usually printed in Gaelic rather than
Roman characters, thus displaying visual continuity with the manuscript tradition without requiring
illustrated ‘Celtic’ initials to do so: Ó Conchubhair (2009: 145–68).
      13

Such a vision, a spiritual, Highland inflection of the communitarian tenets of the

Arts and Crafts Movement, left a deep impression upon Carmina Gadelica.
The long-awaited completion of Carmina Gadelica was eventually taken in
hand by Walter Biggar Blaikie (1847–1928), a close friend of the Carmichaels.
Blaikie had assisted in the design of Geddes’ Evergreen, and arranged its printing
by his firm T. & A. Constable, then possessed of ‘some of the highest design and
production values in the world’ (Macdonald 2008: 135–6, 142). As well as being
engaged in Celtic Renascence circles, Blaikie’s interest in Jacobitism involved him
in Gaelic scholarship; indeed, Alexander Carmichael forwarded him island tradi-
tions for his Itinerary of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1897) (Blaikie 1897: xii,
53n). Blaikie may also have had family reasons for taking up Carmina Gadelica.
His father, the Rev. Prof. William Garden Blaikie (1820–99) is best known today
as a paternalist social commentator and campaigner; Free Church Professor of
Apologetics and Pastoral Theology at New College from 1868 until his death, in
1892 he served as the last Moderator who had taken part in the Disruption
(Cheyne 1983: 119–22). This last distinction may have owed much to the concili-
atory stance adopted by Blaikie Senior at a time when the Free Church, perhaps
the central institution in Victorian Scottish intellectual life, was being torn asun-
der in a long-deferred internecine struggle, waged against a background of
dramatic social change and the rise of higher criticism and Darwinian evolution-
ary theory, between conservative evangelical, Gaelic-speaking ministers and elders
on the one hand, and, on the other, liberal, urban, middle-class English-speaking
clergy. Over and above issues regarding the strict Sabbatarianism and austere
worship espoused by Gaelic congregations, and Highlanders’ growing disquiet
regarding the perceived manipulation of ecclesiastical administration by super-
cilious adversaries, the confrontation took shape around doctrinal questions of
scriptural infallibility and the traditional authority of the Westminster Confession.
Intemperate debates at Free Church General Assemblies, particularly concerning
the passing of the 1892 Declaratory Act during William Garden Blaikie’s own
moderatorship, brought about the precipitous secession of two overwhelmingly
Highland breakaway denominations: the Free Presbyterian Church in the ‘Second
Disruption’ of 1893, and the dissenting ‘continuing Free Church’ who parted
from the majority in the wake of the latter’s union with the United Reformed
Church in 1900 (MacLeod 2000: 14–22, 125–78, 231–50; Ross 1989: 27–41,
154–254, 298–300).
In the liturgy of Gaelic folk belief presented in Carmina Gadelica, Carmichael
offered a rebuttal to contemporary stereotypes of Highland beliefs as either mired
in primitive superstition or else characterized by harsh, bigoted, joyless authori-
tarianism, dogmatic Sabbatarianism, and an uncompromisingly literal approach
to biblical truth. He himself had been brought up in an island where the estab-
lished church minister had retained his congregation during the Disruption; early
experiences in Skye, where his collecting was frustrated by an evangelical revival
14   

backed by clergy who ‘are much against sean sgeulachdan [old stories] and
denounce them as “ungodly” &c.’, were compounded by later incidents, in
particular a dismal visit to a staunch Lewis household where he was informed
that ‘[t]he people have forsaken their follies and their Sabbath-breaking, and there
is no pipe, no fiddle here now’ (National Library of Scotland Adv. MS 50.1.12 fos.
123r–v; Carmichael 1900–71: I, xxvi).
Drawing upon the speculations of Ernest Renan, as mediated through the
romantic primitivism of Celtic Renascence circles, Carmichael set forth an alter-
native genealogy for the deep piety associated with Highland worship within the
late nineteenth-century Free Church. This genealogy stretched back centuries
before the onset of evangelicalism over much of the Highlands during the early
nineteenth century, to a spirituality grounded in a supposedly indigenous, het-
erodox interpretation of Christianity infused with older pagan nature-beliefs. In
this perspective, the Disruption, and even the Reformation itself, were milestones
on Scottish Gaeldom’s long decline into cultural decadence, self-alienation, phil-
istinism, and ignorance. If Carmichael’s book was purposely conceived to remind
its readers of early Gaelic Christian manuscripts, so also its creator deliberately
presented himself as following the example of Renan’s Hibernian monks: a
dedicated transcriber, keeping the flame alive in a time of darkness: ‘le travail de
la plume devint une œuvre sainte’ (Renan 1859: 441; also Balcou 1997: 63–72;
Leerssen 2006; Balcou 2017: 136–8).
Carmichael’s idea of Celtic Christianity may be traced back to Renan but, as has
been suggested, the concept of Carmina Gadelica as a liturgy of Gaelic folk belief
may owe rather more to Oxford Tractarianism. Carmina Gadelica partook in a
broad, burgeoning interest in liturgical history and the nature of the ‘Primitive
Church’, and a reclamation of Scotland’s pre-Reformation traditions of worship,
manifested in the Tractarian-inspired ‘Scoto-Catholic’ reform movement in the
Church of Scotland. Carmichael’s great work bears comparison not only to the
successive editions of the Church Service Society’s eclectic Euchologion, or a Book
of Common Order, but also to Professor Thomas J. Crawford’s collection of
Prayers for Social and Family Worship (1859), and even to the series of hymn
books published by all main Presbyterian denominations, culminating in the joint
Church Hymnary of 1898 (Barkley 1977; Rees 1980: 87–439; Murray 1997; Brown
2012: 71–7). Indirectly, Carmina Gadelica draws upon the ecclesiastical liberalism
and innovation that at the same time were instigating tensions, and eventual
schisms, among Free Church Highland congregations. Indeed, with its veneration
of ‘ancient forms’ of ritual, and its regulated, repetitive, dignified, and emotionally
soothing verses, Carmina Gadelica bespeaks of a dissatisfaction with existing
patterns of worship—particularly the growth of evangelical dissent—that is
strongly reminiscent of Victorian devotional poetry (Blair 2012: 85–121).
Appreciating contemporary political, religious, and artistic contexts, and rec-
ognizing the contributions of a close-knit group of family and younger devotees,
      15

assist us in understanding how and why Carmichael’s book came to be. In the end,
however, its spiritual vision was one mediated through Alexander Carmichael
himself. A candid, empathetic, dedicated interviewer, during two decades he had
been vouchsafed private, esoteric lore by aged islanders. But the many prayers,
blessings, and charms he noted down frequently appeared incomplete, imperfectly
remembered, patched up, and crowded with variant readings. For Carmichael,
‘[t]he fragments recalled by their families, like the fragments of Greek or Etruscan
vases, indicated the originals’ (Carmichael 1900–71: I, xxviii). Using his unparal-
leled knowledge of his native language and culture, as well as imagination,
romanticism, and historical preconceptions, Alexander Carmichael took it upon
himself to synthesize the various different versions he had gathered in the field,
creatively reworking and reimagining them, before assembling the resulting
longer, more polished, archaic ‘originals’ into an ancient lost liturgy.
In Carmina Gadelica readers have a treasure-trove of traditional lore, a mag-
nificent artwork, and a crucial modernist text. But, as contemporary reviews
suggest, during its decade-long gestation the book travelled far from its original
conception as a premeditated intervention at a specific political juncture, relying
upon the agricultural credentials and technical experience of its author. Affected
by the spiritual concerns and artistic aspirations of the Celtic Renascence, the
fervent religious debates then racking the Free Church, and the viewpoints of well-
wishers and disciples in the urban middle-class Gaelic diaspora, Carmina Gade-
lica, and the authorial persona of Alexander Carmichael himself, were reworked,
aestheticized, spiritualized, and abstracted. Sub specie æternitatis, his three-guinea
masterwork certainly won an extensive, enduring, global readership—but that
readership did not include the island crofters and cottars who had entrusted
Carmichael with their store in the first place.

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 2
Scottish Kenotic Theology
Bruce L. McCormack

Introduction

In its origins, what is called ‘kenotic Christology’ was a powerful movement in

German Lutheran theology in the mid-nineteenth century—which presented itself
as the best possible way to preserve the commitments resident in the classical
Lutheran Christology of the Formula of Concord from the corrosive acids of ‘life of
Jesus’ research. That being the case, it is necessary that we begin with a brief
description the older Christology—and how it came to be—so that we can better
understand why ‘life of Jesus’ research would constitute a threat to it.
Orthodox Lutheran Christology was born out of a controversy which erupted
in the mid-1520s over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper; a
controversy which quickly passed over into a heated debate over basic issues in
Christology. The positions taken on both sides were church-defining, which
meant that the Protestant Reformation would henceforth be carried forward by
two separated evangelical churches: the Lutheran churches in Germany and
Scandinavia and the Reformed churches in Switzerland, Holland, parts of Hun-
gary, Romania, Poland, the England of King Edward VI—and, of course, Scotland.
The occasion for the initial disagreement over the Lord’s Supper was provided
by the publication of Zwingli’s On True and False Religion in 1525. In that work,
Zwingli set aside every understanding of the Lord’s Supper as entailing a ‘sacra-
mental eating’ (Zwingli 1981: 205) of the body and blood of Christ and argued
instead that the Supper is a ‘joyful commemoration’ (Zwingli 1981: 200) by which
the death of Christ is declared in its saving significance and thanksgiving and
praise are given to God. His most persuasive argument (at least to later Reformed
theologians like Calvin) was that the risen body of Christ is still a real body, in
essential continuity with his historical body. And it belongs to bodies that they
should have extension in space (‘locality’) in one place only; bodies cannot be in
more places than one at the same time. So given that Christ’s risen body ascended
into heaven (Acts 1:6–11) and is ‘seated’ at the ‘right hand’ of God the Father, that
is the only place where the risen body can be locally present (Calvin 1960: 1393).
Martin Luther was passionately committed to a real local presence of Christ’s
body and blood in the elements of bread and wine. But he needed a way to explain
how Christ’s body can be in more than one place, i.e. on multiple Eucharistic

Bruce L. McCormack, Scottish Kenotic Theology In: The History of Scottish Theology, Volume III.
Edited by: David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford
University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198759355.003.0002
20  .   

tables simultaneously. His response to Zwingli consisted in a doctrine of the

‘ubiquity’ of Christ’s body (that Christ is present wherever the Logos is in both
heaven and earth) which found its ontological condition of possibility in a
Christological novelty, the so-called genus majestaticum (or ‘genus of maj-
esty’)—in accordance with which the divine nature so penetrates the human
nature of Christ as to allow for a ‘communication’ to it of the divine attributes
of omnipotence, omniscience, and, most importantly for the sacramental contro-
versy, omnipresence (Heron 1983: 118).
In its most radical rendering—that of Johannes Brenz (sixteenth-century
Reformer of the Duchy of Württemberg in south-west Germany)—participation
by the human Jesus in the omni-attributes was the immediate consequence of
the union which took place in the womb of the Virgin. Jesus made full use of the
omni-attributes during the course of his earthly ministry, on this view, but did so,
for the most part, in secret. That meant that Jesus of Nazareth could already in the
days of his earthly ministry have been in Rome at the same time he was in
Jerusalem. It also meant that omniscience was his from birth—if not already in
the womb (Strauss 1840–1: I.142). ‘He [Brenz] does not hesitate to say that the
ascension and the session at the right hand of God took place, not after the
resurrection, but from the very beginning, from the moment when the hypostat-
ical union of the two natures took place. Incarnation and exaltation are in his view
identical’ (Bruce 1900: 92). And so: ‘The earthly Christ combined in himself, so to
speak, two humanities, a humbled one, and an exalted one’ (Bruce 1900: 93).
An alternative conception to this radical form of the communication had to
emerge—and did, in the writings of Martin Chemnitz. Chemnitz affirmed the
possession by Jesus of the omni-attributes from birth but argued that they were
only used by him where and when the Logos willed. This allowed space not only
for real growth and development during the course of Jesus’ childhood and
adolescence; it also created space for his voluntary but real experience of the
‘infirmities’ to which the Fall had made human beings susceptible (illness among
them) and the temptation and suffering to which such infirmities give rise (Bruce
1900: 96). It was Chemnitz’s view of willed non-use of the omni-attributes which
found its way into the Formula of Concord.
For their part, the Reformed rejected any inter-penetration of the natures (or
perichoresis), thereby completely removing the Christological ground required for
the thought of a genus majestaticum to gain plausibility. They saw in it a ‘mixture’
and ‘confusion’ of the natures which had been rejected by Chalcedon. And so: the
Reformed allowed for only two genera of ‘communication’—the communication
of the attributes of both natures to the ‘whole Christ’ (the divine and human
‘person’) and a ‘communication of works’ (which held that the energies of
operation proper to the two natures flow together so as to appear outwardly as a
single work). The Lutherans accused them of ‘Nestorianism’ for refusing the inter-
penetration of natures; the Reformed accused the Lutherans of teaching a docetic
    21

view of Christ’s incarnation. And so matters stood in confessional circles until the
nineteenth century.
The occasion which spurred the creation of modern kenoticism was the
publication in 1835 of David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus: Critically Examined.
For in this work, the method of critically comparing stories and sayings in the four
Gospels in an attempt to show irreconcilable differences and the resultant need for
critical judgement in establishing the truth with regard to the ‘life of Jesus’ led
quickly to focused attention on questions surrounding Jesus’ emotional and moral
development and growth and/or changes in his understanding of his mission.
Such developments had to bring the ‘full humanity’ of the orthodox Lutheran
Christ into question sooner or later—sooner, as it turned out. Strauss followed his
first great work with a second whose motto might well have been ‘the true critique
of dogma is its history’ (Strauss 1840–1: I.71). In it, he subjected the Lutheran
Christology to scathing criticism, drawing with both hands on classical Reformed
sources while adding his own quite modern objections. A response was imperative
if Lutheran confessional theology was to remain vital and church-defining. It came
from the kenoticists.
Not content with the thought of a willed non-use of divine properties ‘pos-
sessed’ by the human Jesus, the kenoticists would push the logic of the classical
two-states theory a step further so that the ‘self-emptying’ (ekenosen) spoken of
Phil. 2:7 was made to be an act performed by the Logos asarkos as an ontological
in precondition to becoming incarnate—through a willed ‘depotentiation’ (the
surrender or ‘reduction’ by the Logos of precisely those divine attributes which, if
retained, would make a thoroughly human way of being in the world impossible to
Jesus). The thought was: the Logos can take them up again in the state of
exaltation and share them with Jesus and, in this way, the Lutheran genus
majestaticum would be protected from further erosion. Gottfried Thomasius of
Erlangen was the first to offer a full-blown kenotic theory in his Beiträge zur
kirchlichen Christologie in 1845. He was followed in this endeavour by his col-
leagues in Erlangen, Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann, Franz Hermann
Reinhold Frank, and August Ebrard—but also inter alios by Theodor Albert
Liebner (Kiel and Leipzig), Hans Lassen Martensen (Copenhagen), and Wolfgang
Friedrich Geß (Basler Missionshaus). Perspicuous criticism also followed quickly.
The arch-opponent of kenoticism in all of its variants was Isaak August Dorner
whose review of Thomasius’ Beiträge appeared already in 1846. Thus, the lines
along which the battle over kenotic thinking would be fought over the next thirty
years in Germany were in place quite early.
From the distance of a century and half, it is not at all surprising that Lutherans
would have felt it necessary to introduce modifications into their received Christ-
ology; the surprising thing is that any Reformed theologian would have been
drawn into this controversy. As has already been made clear, the sixteenth-century
Reformed had removed the ontological ground from beneath the Lutheran genus
22  .   

majestaticum through their rejection of a perichoresis of the natures. One might

have thought that the nineteenth-century Reformed would have been content to
let the fires of historical criticism rage, secure in the knowledge that their way of
distinguishing the ‘natures’ would prove immune to any ‘assured results’ of such
criticism. But that is not how things turned out. Why the Reformed should have
taken an interest will become immediately clear as we turn now to Scottish
kenoticism.

The Mediator of Kenotic Christology to Scotland: A. B. Bruce

Alexander Balmain Bruce (1831–99) served the Free Church of Scotland as a

parish minister from 1859 to 1875. His book The Training of the Twelve in 1871
drew attention to his scholarly abilities and so it came to pass that he was
appointed the Cunningham Lecturer in Edinburgh in 1874. The lectures bore
the title ‘The Humiliation of Christ’. A year later, he was appointed to a profes-
sorship in the Free Church Hall in Glasgow. His Cunningham Lectures were
published in 1876 by T&T Clark and went through five editions over the next
quarter century.
The Humiliation of Christ was Bruce’s magnum opus. It was a work of aston-
ishing erudition, ranging widely over patristic, medieval, Reformation, and mod-
ern sources. It is also a work of great historical significance in that it introduced
kenotic Christology to Scotland (and, more broadly, to the United Kingdom).
Bruce’s knowledge of German-language source materials pertinent to the kenotic
Christology remains to this day without parallel. All who came after built upon his
interpretation—though differing in many ways in the conclusions drawn.
What, then, drew Bruce to engage in sympathetic if critical mediation of
German Lutheran kenoticism? He was intimately acquainted with sixteenth-
century Christological debates and he made it clear that he sided with his
Reformed forebears. His criticism of the Lutheran genus majestaticum can be
summarized in a word: docetism! So why kenotic Christology? One answer is that
he regarded the German kenoticists as drawing nearer to classical Reformed
Christology insofar as they took the so-called ‘state of humiliation’ with a serious-
ness not possible for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutherans. Whether they
would have agreed is doubtful, but that Bruce was convinced it was so is
significant.
Even more important is Bruce’s emphasis on the ‘practical’ (Bruce 1900: 7)—on
what he called ‘applied theology’ over against the speculative—and this, for two
reasons. First, Bruce held it to be a very good idea to reverse the traditional loci
treating of the ‘person’ of Christ and a ‘two states’ theory, beginning with two
states, of which it would be the state of humiliation which merits virtually the
whole of the theologian’s attention; ‘ . . . as the main business of Christology is to
    23

form a true conception of the historical person Jesus Christ, we may confine our
attention chiefly to the earlier of the two states which belongs to history and falls
within our observation, concerning which alone we possess much information’
(Bruce 1900: 8). The ‘practical’ also meant a primary focus on the ethical or moral
value of doctrinal teaching (Bruce 1900: 6). Bruce was well aware of the criticism
which had befallen metaphysical treatments of doctrine since the Enlightenment;
demonstrating their moral value was essential in his view to the ongoing viability
of ‘orthodox’ teachings. Protesting that every exegesis of the so-called ‘Christ
hymn’ in Phil. 2 presupposes a doctrine of God (so that none can be regarded
as completely objective), he candidly admitted: ‘ . . . I avow my wish to arrive at a
particular conclusion with respect to the interpretation of the passage; one, viz.
which should assign a reality to the idea of a Being in the form of God by a free act
of condescension becoming man. I am desirous to have ground for believing that
the apostle speaks here not only of the exemplary humility of the man Jesus, but of
the more wonderful, sublime self-humiliation of the pre-existent personal Son of
God’ (Bruce 1900: 110–12).
There was also the spiritual value of the theme of Christ’s humiliation to be
considered. The Jesus of the Epistle to the Hebrews who ‘learned obedience
through the things he suffered’ (Heb. 5:8) is a friend to sinners, a man capable
of understanding what it is to be tempted to sin, a ‘brother’ to those who
experience life as a trial to be endured.

For what sorrow-laden men need is not an Apollo, the aesthetically perfect
embodiment of manly beauty, but a Christ in whom they confidently recognize
a veritable Brother; and for this purpose a body like a broken earthen vessel, and
a vision marred more than any man, may be better qualifications than the most
classic beauty of face and form that ever Greek sculptor hewed out of marble.
(Bruce 1900: 262)

And Bruce made it quite clear that for Jesus to experience life as he did was not
because the Logos ‘allowed’ him to do so through an act of will; temptation and
suffering are natural to human life in the fallen world into which the Logos
entered (Bruce 1900: 23).
In any event, Bruce had ample reason to be interested in the German kenoticists
even if his motivations were quite different. Ironically, he was not finally a
‘kenoticist’ in the strict sense. None of the models elaborated in Germany was
finally convincing to him; indeed, it may most accurately be said that he regarded
the ‘person’ of Christ as an ‘insoluble problem’ (Bruce 1900: 192). And so, he
refused to choose amongst his ‘types’ (Bruce 1900: 190), even though he had a
favourite in the German-speaking Dane, H. L. Martensen. It would have violated
Bruce’s emphasis on the ethical to have made a decision with regard to what he
regarded as a metaphysical issue—at least, that was how he saw it. The important
24  .   

thing, he thought, was to sketch the broad outlines of what may and should be said
on the basis of the ‘Christ hymn’ and the Epistle to the Hebrews—without going
so far as to develop a Christological ‘theory’.
Since Bruce’s influence on later Scottish theology had less to do with his own
Christology than it did in making the German kenoticists accessible, it is import-
ant that his typology be set forth here in brief outline, together with his criticisms
of the figures he made representative of each type. The four types are: the ‘absolute
dualistic’, the ‘absolute metamorphic’, the ‘absolute semi-metamorphic’, and the
‘real but relative’. Each ‘type’ is reduced to a single representative, though pre-
sumably Bruce believed each to have its adherents. The first is represented by
Gottfried Thomasius, the second by Wolfgang Geß, the third by August Ebrard,
and the fourth by H. L. Martensen.
Thomasius’ theory rests on a speculative foundation consisting in a distinction
between the ‘essential’ and the ‘relative’ attributes of God (Bruce 1900: 143n1).
The ‘relative’ attributes are those which God has only as a consequence of having
made a free decision to create a world. They are not ‘necessary’ to God, since the
decision to create is not necessary. The ‘relative’ attributes are omnipotence,
omniscience, and omnipresence. The ‘essential’ attributes are absolute power
(presumably without relation to anything outwith God but concentrated wholly
in itself ), absolute truth, absolute holiness, and absolute love (Bruce 1900: 143).
The reason for this distinction is clear though Bruce fails to engage in an analysis
of it. It is designed to allow for surrender of the omni-attributes by the Logos in the
act of assuming human nature while preserving God’s essential immutability. In
other words, Thomasius claimed that his understanding of the divine self-
limitation entails no change in the being of God as such. On this showing, the
Lutheran genus majestaticum is applicable only to the state of exaltation; it has no
applicability in the state of humiliation. Again, Bruce does not inquire into the
motivations informing the Thomasian theory. The closest he came was to
acknowledge that Thomasius believed his Christology to be consistent with the
Lutheran axiom ‘ “The Word not outside the flesh, nor the flesh outside the Word”
(nec verbum extra carnem, nec caro extra verbum)’ (Bruce 1900: 141).
Examined more closely, the kenosis as taught by Thomasius is an act of
depotentiation. Divine power is ‘contracted to its innermost ground, fulness
concentrated in itself . . . ’ (Bruce 1900: 144). At this point, an ambiguity in the
Thomasian theory arises since Thomasius wanted also to be able to say that this
concentrated power is revealed from time to time in the human existence of
Christ. The ambiguity consists in the fact that if the concentrated power cannot
reveal itself, Thomasius has created a dualism: ‘Revelation’ would, however,
require free self-determination on the part of the Logos consistent with the
thought that the Logos alone is ‘person-making’. But such a view would under-
mine what Thomasius says about the nature of the kenosis itself, for it would
render impossible a real depotentiation. A more consistent view would make
    25

power to be present only ‘in itself ’ and not as revealed—while accepting the
dualism that would then arise, and making the Holy Spirit the power by which
Jesus’ divinity is revealed both to himself and through him to others.
Omniscience is, if anything, an even more challenging problem—and it creates
a problem for the distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘relative’ attributes. For the
essential attributes are the description of a fully self-consciousness Subject, as
Dorner had pointed out long before.

Herr Dr. Thomasius crashes on these rocks. For he makes the kenosis to reach
even to the divine consciousness of the Logos . . . Or is the love which John
identifies with God’s essence still possible if the Logos gives up His
consciousness . . . ? One can, with justification, say that the writer had caused
the Logos to surrender His essence as well. (Dorner 1846: 42)

Bruce shows that he is aware of this problem though he brushes over it fairly
quickly without mentioning its consequences for the distinction between ‘essen-
tial’ and ‘relative’ attributes (Bruce 1900: 175).
The most telling of Bruce’s criticisms is also one he learned from Dorner. If the
Logos were truly depotentiated in order to be united with human nature and if
such depotentiation extended even to his divine self-consciousness, then what we
have in effect is the union of the Logos made human with the human Jesus; a
human soul with a human soul. Such a union cannot, in the very nature of
the case, achieve a unity of ‘person’ (Dorner 1846: 45). He would later add:
such a conception is a clear violation of the Chalcedonian ‘without division,
without separation’ clause (Dorner 1853: 1266). Bruce’s concern, not surprisingly,
is a more practical one. ‘Why two human souls to do the work of one? for,
ex hypothesi, the depotentiated Logos is to all intents and purposes a human
soul . . . . [W]hy not just say at once the Logos became a human soul?’ (Bruce 1900:
177). That question would lead later Scottish kenoticists simply to abandon the
two-natures logic of Chalcedon altogether in favour of the singularity of a Logos
‘self-reduced’.
Wolfgang Geß represents Bruce’s second ‘type’, the ‘absolute metamorphic.’ On
Geß’s view, the Logos became a human soul in becoming incarnate. This is
Apollinaris turned on his head. The human soul is still replaced (as in Apollinaris)
but in Geß’s case, by a Logos who has become a human soul. ‘The only difference
between the Logos and a human soul was that he became human by voluntary
kenosis, while an ordinary human soul derives its existence from a creative act [of
God]’ (Bruce 1900: 148). How does the kenosis take place? The leading thought for
Geß is that the eternal life which flows from the Father to the Son is cut off at its
source. The perichoresis of Father and Son remains intact, but the life that is
originally the Father’s is suspended for a time until it be restored—gradually over
the life of the human Jesus but fully only in the resurrection (Bruce 1900: 144).
26  .   

The great advantage of this theory over that of Thomasius lay in its overcoming of
‘dualism’; there is only one soul here, that of the Logos made human (Bruce 1900:
148). It also faced a number of challenges, several of which Geß anticipated and
addressed head on. What becomes of the ‘integrity of Christ’s assumed humanity’
on this view? Geß’s answer was to suggest that how a human soul comes into
being has no relevance for understanding its integrity. What, then, of the doctrine
of divine immutability? ‘How is it possible . . . that a Divine Being can thus all but
extinguish himself ?’ (Bruce 1900: 149). Here Geß suggests that the Son’s reception
of the life flowing from the Father is ‘His own deed’, an act of volition. So the
power of God was a ‘power over himself ’ before it was a power over other things
and persons (Bruce 1900: 150). And so, if divine Love moves God to redeem the
human race and incarnation is necessary to that end, then self-extinguishing must
be possible. To say only that much demonstrates the need to revise the traditional
account of immutability, but Bruce does not explore that issue further. What
happens to the inter-Trinitarian relation of Father and Son when the life that is in
the Father ceases to flow to the Son? Geß did not shrink from saying that the Son
is not a participant in giving life to the Spirit while in the state of humiliation (i.e.
the relation depicted by the term filioque is suspended). The Son ceases to uphold
and govern the universe during the state of humiliation, that work being done by
the Father through the Spirit (Bruce 1900: 151). And, finally, the Logos does not
cease in some sense to be human even in the exaltation (however repotentiated),
so that the being of the Son is somehow enlarged—which again raises questions
about the precise nature of divine immutability.
Bruce adds two more criticisms, one having to do with God’s subjection of self
to the dominion of matter (solved by repotentiation in the exaltation); the other
having to do with Christ’s sinlessness. The latter is a very real problem for Bruce
himself, one that he feels biblical testimony forces upon us and is not the
consequence of speculation. If sin was a real possibility for the Logos made
human, how are we to account for the fact that this possibility was never
actualized? He is not convinced that Geß has an answer to this question. It is
one that he will consider at some length in the context of setting forth his own
reflections on the lived history of Jesus Christ.
August Ebrard, representing the ‘semi-metamorphic’ type, was in agreement
with Geß that the Logos takes the place of the human soul. The difference is that
Ebrard wanted to say that no divine attributes are simply surrendered in the
kenosis; all are retained. And yet, with the assumption of human nature, divine
attributes were expressed:

not in reference to the collective universe, but only in reference to particular

objects presenting themselves to his notice in time and space. Omnipotence
remained but in an applied form, as an unlimited power to perform miracles;
    27

omniscience remained in an applied form, as an unlimited power to see through

all objects which he wished to see through; omnipresence remained in an applied
form as an unlimited power to transport himself whither he would.
(Bruce 1900: 153)

Such a view would seem to lie close to Chemnitz’s idea of a willed non-use (in
certain respects) of divine attributes—in spite of the fact that Chemnitz would not
have approved the idea that the Logos took the place of Christ’s human soul. It is
clear that Bruce found Ebrard obscure in his writing style and inconsistent in his
claims. It is not surprising that those who used Bruce’s book as a road map to the
kenotic movement in Germany found little to attract them here.
Bruce’s fourth type is denominated ‘real but relative’—which tells us little
with respect to its representative figure, H. L. Martensen. Martensen is typically
identified in histories of nineteenth-century theology as belonging to the ‘medi-
ating school’, influenced by both Schleiermacher and Hegel (Stephan and Schmidt
1973: 236–7; Hirsch 1949: 389). Crucial to Martensen’s conception is the implied
claim that it is essential to God to become human—much in the way that God’s
act of positing himself over against himself in finite form in an act of self-
differentiation is essential, in Hegel’s thinking, for attaining absolute self-
consciousness. God remains God even as God ‘goes forth’ from God to become
human; or, in Martensen’s language, the Logos continues to fill heaven and earth
even as he also exists concretely as human. The ‘Logos-revelation’ through world
unity and governance is supplemented by a ‘Christ revelation’ (Bruce 1900: 160).
Bruce understands the act of kenosis in Martensen to be ‘voluntary’ (Bruce 1900:
187), but he is mistaken in this. And so, he is also wrong in thinking that
Martensen offers an ethical theory (grounded in the divine love) rather than a
theory of absolute or partial ‘metaphysical kenosis’ (Bruce 1900: 187–8).
Bruce’s conclusion with respect to the four types of kenotic theory? ‘It is not
necessary to adopt any one of them; we are not obliged to choose between them;
we may stand aloof from them all . . . ’. Any one of them might be used ‘as a prop
around which faith may twine’ (Bruce 1900: 190). But none should be taken with
the kind of seriousness which would make theology captive to metaphysics. Bruce
himself is content to say—along the lines of the ethical theory he prefers—that
kenosis involves a change of ‘state’ on the part of the Logos; that the ‘personality’ of
the Logos remains the same in and through that change so that the ‘kenosis and
tapeinosis were two acts of the same mind dwelling in the same Subject’; and that
kenosis, as finding its root in the divine love, must be a free act. He denies that
kenosis could mean ‘self-extinction or metamorphosis of a Divine Being into a
mere man’ (Bruce 1900: 22, cf. 35 for a list of Bruce’s ‘axioms’ governing thinking
about kenosis). The fact that the divine Subject also lives a human life, subject to its
limitations, implies a ‘double life’ is something he can live with.
28  .   

The Later Scottish Kenoticists

As a consequence of the penetrating criticisms of I. A. Dorner in particular and the

emergence of the anti-metaphysical program of Albrecht Ritschl in the 1870s, the
kenotic movement had suffered eclipse in Germany by the 1880s—just as it was
becoming a force in Scottish theology. Despite the penetrating criticisms levelled
by theologians from the established church (Caird 1899: 127–34; Paterson 1912:
230–2), it maintained its hold, particularly amongst the theologians of the
(United) Free Church. By the time that Donald Baillie pointed out that the Christ
of the kenoticists could only be a ‘temporary theophany’, not God incarnate
(Baillie 1948: 96–7), the spell cast by kenotic Christology in Scotland had been
broken. The heyday of Scottish kenoticism may be judged to have stretched from
1897 to 1912; from the publication of Forrest’s The Christ of History and Experi-
ence to Mackintosh’s The Person of Jesus Christ.

David W. Forrest

David W. Forrest (1856–1918) was a minister of the United Presbyterian Church.

While still a minister, he gave the Kerr Lectures at the Free Church College in
Glasgow, named after the merger of the United Presbyterians with the Free
Church in 1900: the United Free Church College. The lectures were, as already
noted, published in 1897. Largely on the strength of this volume, Forrest was called
to the Chair of Systematic Theology in the United Free Church College in 1914.
Unlike Bruce, Forrest embraced the idea that the Logos took the place of a
human soul (Forrest 1897: 198, 204). That would seem to be a fair conclusion to
draw from the fact that it is the Logos which, Forrest says, had to ‘pass through all
the stages, unconscious as well as conscious, of a human life’ (Forrest 1897: 197).
And that meant that Forrest also accepted the understanding of kenosis as
involving metaphysical ‘change’—the surrender of the divine attributes of omnis-
cience, omnipresence, and omnipotence (Forrest 1897: 194–5). Thus he could
embrace the ancient anhypostasia of the human, so long as its ‘personality’ was
that of the divine Subject stripped of divine attributes—and, temporarily, of divine
self-consciousness. With French exegete Frédéric Godet, Forrest argues that the
Logos only regained his divine consciousness (i.e. awareness of his deity) subse-
quent to his child’s (normal) development of human consciousness—and in a way
appropriate to the integrity for the latter. ‘[T]here was but one consciousness in
him, as there was but one personality – that of the Word made flesh. But it was a
consciousness which had a double quality, or at least a double reference’ (Forrest
1897: 199–200).
Forrest does not give any attention whatsoever to the German kenoticists. His
guides are Bruce, the English bishop Charles Gore, and (most especially) Godet.
    29

He shares with Bruce a preference for the concrete ‘facts’ of Jesus’ life over
speculation, for the ethical over against the metaphysical. He (quite wrongly)
suggests that Chalcedon treated the ‘natures’ as ‘abstractions’—even suggesting
that there is an ‘abstract opposition’ between them (Forrest 1897: 198). That much
is clearly not the case, insofar as created being participates, according to the
Fathers, in uncreated being by virtue of its creation; otherwise, created being
would not ‘be’ at all. So there is no ‘opposition’. Nor was the purpose of Chalcedon
merely a negative one, that of warding off errors on all sides without advancing a
positive solution (Forrest 1897: 194). Still, the crucial point here is that Forrest
believed that the kenotic Christology was much to be preferred to Chalcedon.
Allegiance to the tradition had its limits.

P. T. Forsyth

Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848–1921) was a Scot who served as a minister to Con-
gregationalist churches in England before becoming Principal of Hackney College
in London in 1901. Initially trained at the University of Aberdeen, he also studied
under Albrecht Ritschl in Göttingen. Early in his ministerial career, he underwent
a conversion which led him to abandon ‘liberal’ theological ideas in favour of a
more nearly evangelical faith.

Forsyth’s version of kenotic Christology is briefly set forth in his The Person and
Place of Jesus Christ (1909). Though he was clearly familiar with the leading
versions of German kenoticism as well as with criticisms like those found in
Dorner’s history of Christology, he did not engage directly with any of this
literature, contenting himself instead to simply present his own positive account
which bore great similarity to the depotentiation theory of Thomasius. The
difference between them is minimal, consisting finally in an attempt to clarify
the depotentiation as applying not just to so-called “relative attributes” but most
fundamentally to divine self-consciousness . . . if the renunciation were carried so
far as to part with a divine self-consciousness and will, it is not clear what is left in
the way of identity or continuity at all. What is there, then, in common between
the eternal Son and the man Jesus? What remains of the divine nature when we
extinguish the immanent ethical and personal qualities in any absolute sense?
(Forsyth 1946: 307)

The importance of this question for Forsyth had to do with his belief that the
‘ethical’ attributes were more basic (‘immanent’) in God than were the ‘metaphys-
ical’ (which, while not lacking in God prior to creating as sheer potencies are, in
fact, made to be what we know them to be through the relation of God to the
world given in the act of creation). ‘The nature of the Godhead is Holy Love. There
30  .   

lies the region, the nature, and the norm of its omnipotence . . . . It can do, not
everything conceivable to freakish fancy, but everything prescribed by Holy Love’
(Forsyth 1946: 313). And so, ‘omnipotence’ is defined as a power to do all that God
wills to do. So defined, the step back from actuality into potency can also be
subject to the divine willing. Similarly with omniscience: though the knowledge of
God in its actuality is an eternal act of comprehensive and perfect intuition (the
knowledge of all things in an instantaneous gaze), retraction into potency requires
a willed act of knowing discursively as humans do, building new knowledge
on knowledge already acquired. Forsyth was committed to the notion that the
retreat of divine knowledge into potency gradually gave way to the return of divine
self-consciousness as Jesus grew and matured into adulthood. The presence of the
love of God animating his soul was necessary to the atoning work he would
accomplish.
Unlike A. B. Bruce, Forsyth was content to let go of the idea of a ‘double life’
(divine and human). He seems to think of the incarnate Logos as a Logos made
capable of the human through depotentiation—which requires no assumption of a
human nature. His break with Chalcedon is thus more complete than was the case
with Bruce. ‘Let us cease speaking of a nature as if it were an entity; of two natures
as two independent entities; and let us think and speak of two modes of being . . . ’
(Forsyth 1946: 307). ‘Nor were there two streams parallel while unmingled. There
could not be two wills, or two consciousnesses, in the same personality, by any
psychological possibility now credible. We could not have in the same person both
knowledge and ignorance of the same thing’ (Forsyth 1946: 319).
One gets the feeling when reading Forsyth that the theological problems which
first gave rise to modern kenoticism are no longer living problems for him. Nor
are the criticisms marshalled against kenoticism in its more developed, theoretical
forms of much interest to him. He proceeds as if the magic spell cast by the then
current emphasis on the significance of moral striving rooted in love as basic to
the emergence of ‘personality’ were the only thing that matters and that its
proclamation would be sufficient to awaken a positive response. Conspicuous by
its absence is the orthodox Reformed understanding that it is the Holy Spirit who
was the source of Christ’s knowledge of his mission and its empowerment. The
‘moral heroism’ of Bruce’s Christ remains (Bruce 1900: 12) but not Bruce’s
sensitivity to the Reformed tradition.

H. R. Mackintosh

Not since Bruce’s The Humiliation of Christ had Scotland produced an academic
work on Christology of the quality of that found in Hugh Ross Mackintosh’s The
Person of Jesus Christ (1912). Mackintosh (1870–1936) was born in Paisley to a
Free Church minister father who preached in Gaelic. Having graduated from New
    31

College, Edinburgh, he went abroad to study in Germany, most importantly in

Marburg, where he became close to Wilhelm Herrmann. From Herrmann, he
acquired a knowledge of and appreciation for Schleiermacher. Upon his return, he
became a Free Church, then United Free Church minister in Tayport (1897–1901)
and Beechgrove in Aberdeen (1901–4). He was installed in the chair of systematic
theology at New College in 1904. With the reunion of 1929, his ordination was
now to the Church of Scotland, whose Moderator he became in 1932. Mack-
intosh’s book is a learned one, traversing most of the ground covered by Bruce
with his own fresh insights and conclusions. The Christology set forth in it
consisted in a merging of Schleiermacher and Thomasius.
In leading later theology to start with the ‘present experience of the new life as
immediately dependent upon Jesus’, Schleiermacher had set forth a starting point
for Christological construction ‘whose depth and value can scarcely be overesti-
mated’ (Mackintosh 1927: 254). Schleiermacher’s great shortcoming was that he
made less of his starting point than he ought to have done. For Schleiermacher,
‘Redeemed men [sic] are men liberated from the oppression of finite causes, and
dependent solely on the Absolute Causality, rather than forgiven sinners, living in
fellowship with God the Father’ (Mackintosh 1927: 254). But like the great
Berliner, Mackintosh wanted to trace the effects of Christ’s redemptive work in
believers back to their source in a conception of Christ’s redemptive work—which
in turn would lay the foundation for consideration of Christ’s person.
The order here is important. To begin with the experience of redemption is to
begin with the theme of ‘union with Christ’ since ‘ . . . union with Christ is a brief
name for all the apostles mean by salvation. For St. Paul and St. John oneness with
Christ is to be redeemed, and to be redeemed is oneness with Christ’ (Mackintosh
1927: 334). And so: ‘ . . . if by its very nature all Christian theology is an interpret-
ation of believing experience from within, this oneness with Christ, of which we
are conscious, is our punctum stans’ (Mackintosh 1927: 332–3). ‘Union with
Christ’ is to be conceived as a ‘reciprocal appropriation and interpenetration of
spirit by spirit . . . . Our solidarity with Christ is such that in his death we also die;
in his grave we are buried; with the Risen Lord, and in him, we too rise to newness
of life’ (Mackintosh 1927: 335). Even more important, perhaps, is the claim that
union with Christ is union with God (Mackintosh 1927: 338). To establish this
claim, however, he understands the work of Christ in a particular way and tailors
his understanding of the person of Christ to it.
Central to the work of Christ, as viewed by Mackintosh, is the forgiveness of
sins. The key claim in this regard is that only one who is God can forgive sins. The
Christ who condemns sin in his flesh is one with his Father; his own judgement
upon sin was God’s judgement. ‘This judgment then . . . is a Divine judgment;
at the same time, it is pronounced through the medium of perfect manhood’
(Mackintosh 1927: 331). But if Christ’s death constitutes divine judgement upon
sin and guilt (there is a hint here of John McLeod Campbell’s notion of vicarious
32  .   

repentance), then there is no antagonism at work between the Son as sin-bearer

and his Father and the older Reformed penal substitution theory is to be rejected
(Mackintosh 1927: 333). Christ is never more at one with his Father than
in his death.
It should be clear on the basis of this all too brief account of atonement that the
kenotic idea of God reduced to a human form of existence—God living
humanly—is thoroughly compatible with it. The eternal Son remains one with
himself and with the other members of the Godhead even in his humiliation. His
identity as God is preserved even as expressed in human form.
Mackintosh’s Christology does not differ in essentials from that of Forsyth.
Holy love is the most basic attribute of God and governs God’s use of power.
Mackintosh’s version of the Son’s self-imposed depotentiation does not involve
the surrender of any divine attributes but their adaptation to new conditions of life
as taken on by the divine subject (Mackintosh 1927: 477). For this reason, he
thinks his view superior to all of the more speculative treatments like those of
Thomasius and Geß (Mackintosh 1927: 468).
It should be observed that none of this is intended as a repair of Chalcedon (as
was the case with the Germans). Chalcedon’s two natures logic has been replaced
by the singularity of a divine subject self-reduced (Mackintosh 1927: 292–9). And
with that, a link with classical Reformed Christology has also been severed.
Mackintosh’s achievement was to give to the combination of Thomasian depo-
tentiation as ‘self-reduction’ with Geß’s insistence that the Logos made human is
the one self-conscious person (affirmed by both Forrest and Forsyth) an empirical
rather than a metaphysical foundation.

Conclusion

A lengthier presentation might well have considered the responses of the kenoti-
cists to anticipated and/or already instantiated objections. None were particularly
bothered, for example, by the implications of their teaching for divine immut-
ability. A Logos self-reduced is still the Logos; it mattered little to them if he had
undergone change. That only made him more attractive to them, precisely because
more ‘human’. But there are two problems they did not address which bear
mention in closing. First, if it is the case that the human Jesus could not function
humanly if possessing the omni-attributes (which was the reason given all along
for the alleged depotentiation), then it is not at all clear how the risen Christ who
reacquires them could remain human. If the incarnation is in perpetuity (as most
agree), that is a real problem.
A second drawback is one that comes from the pressures of our own ecumen-
ical age. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches remain deeply committed
to Chalcedon. To fail to honour the logic of Chalcedon at the very least (if not the
    33

categories employed) would be most difficult for a Protestant working today in the
field of dogmatics. That was not yet a constitutive issue for the Scottish kenoticists.
By the time we get to Mackintosh, there no longer remains a sense (which was still
alive in Bruce) of the need for a theology that would mediate between the ancient
and modern worlds. Kenoticism, in Mackintosh’s hands, is a strictly modern
enterprise.

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 3
Theologies of the Cross
Denney and Forsyth
Jason A. Goroncy

Europe’s long nineteenth century was marked by extraordinary social, intellectual,

and political transformation. The Church was not impervious to such, and the
best of its theologians critically embraced the new mood. Among these were two
Scots, P. T. Forsyth (1848–1921) and James Denney (1856–1917), who in their
own ways were determined to unleash the reserve of the ancient evangelical faith
with a modern pronunciation.

* * * * *
Forsyth was a high-Victorian Congregational minister and theologian turned
Edwardian college principal.¹ He was born and educated in Aberdeen, and at
the close of the academic session in 1872, undertook a semester of study with
Albrecht Ritschl and Carl Stumpf in Göttingen before returning to Britain to train
for the Congregational ministry at New College, London. He exercised pastoral
charges—in decreasingly eccentric and increasingly public modes—at Spring-
wood, Shipley (1876–9), at St Thomas’ Square, Hackney, London (1879–85), at
Cheetham Hill, Manchester (1885–8), at Clarendon Park, Leicester (1888–94),
and at Emmanuel Church, Cambridge (1894–1901).
In 1901, Forsyth was called to the principalship of Hackney College, London.
The years of his principalship were marked by a growing and prolific public
ministry at home and abroad, and by an extraordinary fertility in terms of his
maturing theology and literary output. In 1905, he served as Chairman of the
Congregational Union of England and Wales. In 1907, he delivered the Lyman
Beecher Lectures at Yale (subsequently published as Positive Preaching and [the]
Modern Mind), and during the following year addressed the Third International
Congregational Council in Edinburgh, where he gave the Congregational Lectures
on ‘The Person and Place of Jesus Christ’.
While visiting London in October 1910, Denney stayed with Forsyth. Writing
to his sister around the same time, Denney described his host as ‘an extremely

¹ For a fuller biography, see Bradley (1952) and Goroncy (2013a: 1–66). Substantive bibliographies
are available in Benedetto (1993) and McCurdy (1995).

Jason A. Goroncy, Theologies of the Cross: Denney and Forsyth In: The History of Scottish
Theology, Volume III. Edited by: David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott, Oxford University Press
(2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198759355.003.0003
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 THE FREEBOOTER OF LOCHABER.

By Sir Thomas Dick Lauder.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, there lived a certain

notorious freebooter, in the county of Moray, a native of Lochaber, of
the name of Cameron, but who was better known by his cognomen of
Padrig Mac-an-Ts’agairt, which signifies, “Peter, the Priest’s Son.”
Numerous were the “creachs,” or robberies of cattle on a great scale,
driven by him from Strathspey. But he did not confine his
depredations to that country; for, some time between the years 1690
and 1695, he made a clean sweep of the cattle from the rich pastures
of the Aird, the territory of the Frasers. That he might put his
pursuers on a wrong scent, he did not go directly towards Lochaber,
but, crossing the river Ness at Lochend, he struck over the mountains
of Strathnairn and Strathdearn, and ultimately encamped behind a
hill above Duthel, called, from a copious spring on its summit, Cairn-
an-Sh’uaran, or the Well Hill. But, notwithstanding all his
precautions, the celebrated Simon Lord Lovat, then chief of the
Frasers, discovered his track, and despatched a special messenger to
his father-in-law, Sir Ludovick Grant of Grant, begging his aid in
apprehending Mac-an-Ts’agairt, and recovering the cattle.
It so happened that there lived at this time, on the laird of Grant’s
ground, a man also called Cameron, surnamed Mugach More, of
great strength and undaunted courage; he had six sons and a
stepson, whom his wife, formerly a woman of light character, had
before her marriage with Mugach, and, as they were all brave, Sir
Ludovick applied to them to undertake the recapture of the cattle. Sir
Ludovic was not mistaken in the man. The Mugach no sooner
received his orders, than he armed himself and his little band, and
went in quest of the freebooter, whom he found in the act of cooking
a dinner from part of the spoil. The Mugach called on Padrig and his
men to surrender, and they, though numerous, dreading the well-
known prowess of their adversary, fled to the opposite hills, their
chief threatening bloody vengeance as he went. The Mugach drove
the cattle to a place of safety, and watched them till their owners
came to recover them.
Padrig did not utter his threats without the fullest intention of
carrying them into effect. In the latter end of the following spring, he
visited Strathspey with a strong party, and waylaid the Mugach, as he
and his sons were returning from working at a small patch of land he
had on the brow of a hill, about half-a-mile above his house. Padrig
and his party concealed themselves in a thick covert of underwood,
through which they knew that the Mugach and his sons must pass;
but seeing their intended victims well-armed, the cowardly assassins
lay still in their hiding-place, and allowed them to pass, with the
intention of taking a more favourable opportunity for their purpose.
That very night they surprised and murdered two of the sons, who,
being married, lived in separate houses, at some distance from their
father’s; and, having thus executed so much of their diabolical
purpose, they surrounded the Mugach’s cottage.
No sooner was his dwelling attacked, than the brave Mugach,
immediately guessing who the assailants were, made the best
arrangements for defence that time and circumstances permitted.
The door was the first point attempted; but it was strong, and he and
his four sons placed themselves behind it, determined to do bloody
execution the moment it should be forced. Whilst thus engaged, the
Mugach was startled by a noise above the rafters, and, looking up, he
perceived, in the obscurity, the figure of a man half through a hole in
the wattled roof. Eager to despatch his foe as he entered, he sprang
upon a table, plunged his sword into his body, and down fell—his
stepson, whom he had ever loved and cherished as one of his own
children! The youth had been cutting his way through the roof, with
the intention of attacking Padrig from above, and so creating a
diversion in favour of those who were defending the door. The brave
young man lived no longer than to say, “Dear father, I fear you have
killed me!”
For a moment the Mugach stood petrified with horror and grief,
but rage soon usurped the place of both. “Let me open the door!” he
cried, “and revenge his death, by drenching my sword in the blood of
the villain!” His sons clung around him, to prevent what they
conceived to be madness, and a strong struggle ensued between
desperate bravery and filial duty; whilst the Mugach’s wife stood
gazing on the corpse of her first-born son, in an agony of contending
passions, being ignorant from all she had witnessed but that the
young man’s death had been wilfully wrought by her husband. “Hast
thou forgotten our former days?” cried the wily Padrig, who saw the
whole scene through a crevice in the door. “How often hast thou
undone thy door to me, and wilt thou not open it now, to give me
way to punish him who has, but this moment, so foully slain thy
beloved son?” Ancient recollections, and present affliction, conspired
to twist her to his purpose. The struggle and altercation between the
Mugach and his sons still continued. A frenzy seized on the unhappy
woman; she flew to the door, undid the bolt, and Padrig and his
assassins rushed in.
The infuriated Mugach no sooner beheld his enemy enter, than he
sprang at him like a tiger, grasped him by the throat, and dashed him
to the ground. Already was his vigorous sword-arm drawn back, and
his broad claymore was about to find a passage to the traitor’s heart,
when his faithless wife, coming behind him, threw over it a large
canvas winnowing-sheet, and, before he could extricate the blade
from the numerous folds, Padrig’s weapon was reeking in the best
heart’s-blood of the bravest Highlander that Strathspey could boast
of. His four sons, who had witnessed their mother’s treachery, were
paralyzed. The unfortunate woman herself, too, stood stupified and
appalled. But she was quickly recalled to her senses by the active
clash of the swords of Padrig and his men. “Oh, my sons, my sons!”
she cried; “spare my boys!” But the tempter needed her services no
longer,—she had done his work. She was spurned to the ground and
trampled under foot by those who soon strewed the bloody floor
around her with the lifeless corpses of her brave sons.
Exulting in the full success of this expedition of vengeance, Mac-
an-Ts’agairt beheaded the bodies, and piled the heads in a heap on
an oblong hill that runs parallel to the road on the east side of Carr
Bridge, from which it is called Tom-nan-Cean, the Hill of the Heads.
Scarcely was he beyond the reach of danger, than his butchery was
known at the Castle Grant, and Sir Ludovick immediately offered a
great reward for his apprehension; but Padrig, who had anticipated
some such thing, fled to Ireland, where he remained for seven years.
But the restlessness of the murderer is well known, and Padrig felt it
in all its horrors. Leaving his Irish retreat, he returned to Lochaber.
By a strange accident, a certain Mungo Grant, of Muckrach, having
had his cattle and horses carried away by some thieves from that
quarter, pursued them hot foot, recovered them, and was on his way
returning with them, when, to his astonishment, he met Padrig Mac-
an-Ts’agairt, quite alone in a narrow pass, on the borders of his
native country. Mungo instantly seized and made a prisoner of him.
But his progress with his beasts was tedious; and as he was entering
Strathspey at Lag-na-caillich, about a mile to the westward of
Aviemore, he espied twelve desperate men, who, taking advantage of
his slow march, had crossed the hills to gain the pass before him, for
the purpose of rescuing Padrig. But Mungo was not to be daunted.
Seeing them occupying the road in his front, he grasped his prisoner
with one hand, and brandishing his dirk with the other, he advanced
in the midst of his people and animals, swearing potently that the
first motion at an attempt at rescue by any one of them should be the
signal for his dirk to drink the life’s-blood of Padrig Mac-an-
Ts’agairt. They were so intimidated by his boldness that they allowed
him to pass without assault, and left their friend to his fate. Padrig
was forthwith carried to Castle Grant. But the remembrance of the
Mugach’s murder had been by this time much obliterated by many
events little less strange, and the laird, unwilling to be troubled with
the matter, ordered Mungo and his prisoner away.
Disappointed and mortified, Mungo and his party were returning
with their captive, discussing, as they went, what they had best do
with him. “A fine reward we have had for all our trouble!” said one.
“The laird may catch the next thief her nainsel, for Donald!” said
another. “Let’s turn him loose!” said a third. “Ay, ay,” said a fourth;
“what for wud we be plaguing oursels more wi’ him?” “Yes, yes!
brave, generous men!” said Padrig, roused by a sudden hope of life
from the moody dream of the gallows-tree in which he had been
plunged, whilst he was courting his mournful muse to compose his
own lament, that he might die with an effect striking, as all the
events of his life had been. “Yes, brave men, free me from these
bonds! It is unworthy of Strathspey men,—it is unworthy of Grants to
triumph over a fallen foe! Those whom I killed were no clansmen of
yours, but recreant Camerons, who betrayed a Cameron! Let me go
free, and that reward of which you have been disappointed shall be
quadrupled for sparing my life.” Such words as these, operating on
minds so much prepared to receive them favourably, had well-nigh
worked their purpose. But “No!” said Muckrach sternly, “it shall
never be said that a murderer escaped from my hands. Besides, it
was just so that he fairly spake the Mugach’s false wife. But did he
spare her sons on that account? If ye let him go, my men, the fate of
the Mugach may be ours; for what bravery can stand against
treachery and assassination?” This opened an entirely new view of
the question to Padrig’s rude guards, and the result of the conference
was that they resolved to take him to Inverness, and to deliver him
up to the sheriff.
As they were pursuing their way up the south side of the river
Dulnan, the hill of Tom-nan-Cean appeared on that opposite to
them. At sight of it the whole circumstances of Padrig’s atrocious
deed came fresh in to their minds. It seemed to cry on them for
justice, and with one impulse they shouted out, “Let him die on the
spot where he did the bloody act!” Without a moment’s farther delay,
they determined to execute their new resolution. But on their way
across the plain, they happened to observe a large fir tree, with a
thick horizontal branch growing at right angles from the trunk, and
of a sufficient height from the ground to suit their purpose; and
doubting if they might find so convenient a gallows where they were
going, they at once determined that here Padrig should finish his
mortal career. The neighbouring birch thicket supplied them with
materials for making a withe; and whilst they were twisting it, Padrig
burst forth in a flood of Gaelic verse, which his mind had been
accumulating by the way. His song and the twig rope that was to
terminate his existence were spun out and finished at the same
moment, and he was instantly elevated to a height equally beyond his
ambition and his hopes.
 AN HOUR IN THE MANSE.

By Professor Wilson.

In a few weeks the annual sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was to

be administered in the parish of Deanside; and the minister,
venerable in old age, of authority by the power of his talents and
learning, almost feared for his sanctity, yet withal beloved for
gentleness and compassion that had never been found wanting,
when required either by the misfortunes or errors of any of his flock,
had delivered for several successive Sabbaths, to full congregations,
sermons on the proper preparation of communicants in that awful
ordinance. The old man was a follower of Calvin; and many, who had
listened to him with a resolution in their hearts to approach the table
of the Redeemer, felt so awe-stricken and awakened at the
conclusion of his exhortations, that they gave their souls another
year to meditate on what they had heard, and by a pure and humble
course of life, to render themselves less unworthy to partake the
mysterious and holy bread and wine.
The good old man received in the manse, for a couple of hours
every evening, such of his parishioners as came to signify their wish
to partake of the sacrament; and it was then noted, that, though he in
nowise departed, in his conversation with them at such times, from
the spirit of those doctrines which he had delivered from the pulpit,
yet his manner was milder, and more soothing, and full of
encouragement; so that many who went to him almost with quaking
hearts, departed in tranquillity and peace, and looked forward to that
most impressive and solemn act of the Christian faith with calm and
glad anticipation. The old man thought, truly and justly, that few, if
any, would come to the manse, after having heard him in the kirk,
without due and deep reflection; and therefore, though he allowed
none to pass through his hands without strict examination, he spoke
to them all benignly, and with that sort of paternal pity which a
religious man, about to leave this life, feels towards all his brethren
of mankind, who are entering upon, or engaged in, its scenes of
agitation, trouble, and danger.
On one of those evenings, the servant showed into the minister’s
study a tall, bold-looking, dark-visaged man, in the prime of life,
who, with little of the usual courtesy, advanced into the middle of the
room, and somewhat abruptly declared the sacred purpose of his
visit. But before he could receive a reply, he looked around and
before him; and there was something so solemn in the old minister’s
appearance, as he sat like a spirit, with his unclouded eyes fixed upon
the intruder, that that person’s countenance fell, and his heart was
involuntarily knocking against his side. An old large Bible, the same
that he read from in the pulpit, was lying open before him. One
glimmering candle showed his beautiful and silvery locks falling over
his temples, as his head half stooped over the sacred page; a dead
silence was in the room dedicated to meditation and prayer; the old
man, it was known, had for some time felt himself to be dying, and
had spoken of the sacrament of this summer as the last he could ever
hope to administer; so that altogether, in the silence, the dimness,
the sanctity, the unworldliness of the time, the place, and the being
before him, the visitor stood like one abashed and appalled; and
bowing more reverently, or at least respectfully, he said, with a
quivering voice, “Sir, I come for your sanction to be admitted to the
table of our Lord.”
The minister motioned to him with his hand to sit down; and it
was a relief to the trembling man to do so, for he was in the presence
of one who, he felt, saw into his heart. A sudden change from
hardihood to terror took place within his dark nature; he wished
himself out of the insupportable sanctity of that breathless room;
and a remorse, that had hitherto slept, or been drowned within him,
now clutched his heartstrings, as if with an alternate grasp of frost
and fire, and made his knees knock against each other where he sat,
and his face pale as ashes.
“Norman Adams, saidst thou that thou wilt take into that hand,
and put into those lips, the symbol of the blood that was shed for
sinners, and of the body that bowed on the cross, and then gave up
the ghost? If so, let us speak together, even as if thou wert
communing with thine own heart. Never again may I join in that
sacrament, for the hour of my departure is at hand. Say, wilt thou eat
and drink death to thine immortal soul?”
The terrified man found strength to rise from his seat, and,
staggering towards the door, said, “Pardon, forgive me!—I am not
worthy.”
“It is not I who can pardon, Norman. That power lies not with
man; but sit down—you are deadly pale—and though, I fear, an ill-
living and a dissolute man, greater sinners have repented and been
saved. Approach not now the table of the Lord, but confess all your
sins before Him in the silence of your own house, and upon your
naked knees on the stone-floor every morning and every night; and if
this you do faithfully, humbly, and with a contrite heart, come to me
again when the sacrament is over, and I will speak words of comfort
to you (if then I am able to speak)—if, Norman, it should be on my
deathbed. This will I do for the sake of thy soul, and for the sake of
thy father, Norman, whom my soul loved, and who was a support to
me in my ministry for many long, long years, even for two score and
ten, for we were at school together; and had your father been living
now, he would, like myself, have this very day finished his eighty-
fifth year. I send you not from me in anger, but in pity and love. Go,
my son, and this very night begin your repentance, for if that face
speak the truth, your heart must be sorely charged.”
Just as the old man ceased speaking, and before the humble, or at
least affrighted culprit had risen to go, another visitor of a very
different kind was shown into the room—a young, beautiful girl,
almost shrouded in her cloak, with a sweet pale face, on which
sadness seemed in vain to strive with the natural expression of the
happiness of youth.
“Mary Simpson,” said the kind old man, as she stood with a timid
courtesy near the door, “Mary Simpson, approach, and receive from
my hands the token for which thou comest. Well dost thou know the
history of thy Saviour’s life, and rejoicest in the life and immortality
brought to light by the gospel. Young and guileless, Mary, art thou;
and dim as my memory now is of many things, yet do I well
remember the evening, when first beside my knee, thou heardst read
how the Divine Infant was laid in a manger, how the wise men from
the East came to the place of His nativity, and how the angels were
heard singing in the fields of Bethlehem all the night long.”
Alas! every word that had thus been uttered sent a pang into the
poor creature’s heart, and, without lifting her eyes from the floor,
and in a voice more faint and hollow than belonged to one so young,
she said, “O sir! I come not as an intending communicant; yet the
Lord my God knows that I am rather miserable than guilty, and He
will not suffer my soul to perish, though a baby is now within me, the
child of guilt, and sin, and horror. This, my shame, come I to tell you;
but for the father of my babe unborn, cruel though he has been to
me,—oh! cruel, cruel, indeed,—yet shall his name go down with me
in silence to the grave. I must not, must not breathe his name in
mortal ears; but I have looked round me in the wide moor, and when
nothing that could understand was by, nothing living but birds, and
bees, and the sheep I was herding, often have I whispered his name
in my prayers, and beseeched God and Jesus to forgive him all his
sins.”
At these words, of which the passionate utterance seemed to
relieve her heart, and before the pitying and bewildered old man
could reply, Mary Simpson raised her eyes from the floor, and
fearing to meet the face of the minister, which had heretofore never
shone upon her but with smiles, and of which the expected frown
was to her altogether insupportable, she turned them wildly round
the room, as if for a dark resting-place, and beheld Norman Adams
rooted to his seat, leaning towards her with his white, ghastly
countenance, and his eyes starting from their sockets, seemingly in
wrath, agony, fear, and remorse. That terrible face struck poor Mary
to the heart, and she sank against the wall, and slipped down,
shuddering, upon a chair.
“Norman Adams, I am old and weak, but do you put your arm
round that poor lost creature, and keep her from falling down on the
hard floor. I hear it is a stormy night, and she has walked some miles
hither; no wonder she is overcome. You have heard her confession,
but it was not meant for your ear; so, till I see you again, say nothing
of what you have now heard.”
“O sir! a cup of water, for my blood is either leaving my heart
altogether, or it is drowning it. Your voice, sir, is going far, far away
from me, and I am sinking down. Oh, hold me!—hold me up! Is it a
pit into which I am falling?—Saw I not Norman Adams?—Where is
he now?”
The poor maiden did not fall off the chair, although Norman
Adams supported her not; but her head lay back against the wall, and
a sigh, long and dismal, burst from her bosom, that deeply affected
the old man’s heart, but struck that of the speechless and motionless
sinner, like the first toll of the prison bell that warns the felon to
leave his cell and come forth to execution.
The minister fixed a stern eye upon Norman, for, from the poor
girl’s unconscious words, it was plain that he was the guilty wretch
who had wrought all this misery. “You knew, did you not, that she
had neither father nor mother, sister nor brother, scarcely one
relation on earth to care for or watch over her; and yet you have used
her so? If her beauty was a temptation unto you, did not the sweet
child’s innocence touch your hard and selfish heart with pity? or her
guilt and grief must surely now wring it with remorse. Look on her—
white, cold, breathless, still as a corpse; and yet, thou bold bad man,
thy footsteps would have approached the table of thy Lord!”
The child now partly awoke from her swoon, and her dim opening
eyes met those of Norman Adams. She shut them with a shudder,
and said, sickly and with a quivering voice, “Oh spare, spare me,
Norman! Are we again in that dark, fearful wood? Tremble not for
your life on earth, Norman, for never, never will I tell to mortal ears
that terrible secret; but spare me, spare me, else our Saviour, with all
His mercy, will never pardon your unrelenting soul. These are cruel-
looking eyes; you will not surely murder poor Mary Simpson,
unhappy as she is, and must for ever be—yet life is sweet! She
beseeches you on her knees to spare her life!”—and, in the intense
fear of phantasy, the poor creature struggled off the chair, and fell
down indeed in a heap at his feet.
“Canst thou indeed be the son of old Norman Adams, the
industrious, the temperate, the mild, and the pious—who so often sat
in this very room which thy presence has now polluted, and spake
with me on the mysteries of life and of death? Foul ravisher, what
stayed thy hand from the murder of that child, when there were none
near to hear her shrieks in the dark solitude of the great pine-wood?”
Norman Adams smote his heart and fell down too on his knees
beside the poor ruined orphan. He put his arm round her, and,
raising her from the floor, said, “No, no, my sin is great, too great for
Heaven’s forgiveness; but, oh sir! say not—say not that I would have
murdered her; for, savage as my crime was, yet may God judge me
less terribly than if I had taken her life.”
In a little while they were both seated with some composure, and
silence was in the room. No one spoke, and the old grayhaired man
sat with his eyes fixed, without reading, on the open Bible. At last he
broke silence with these words out of Isaiah, that seemed to have
forced themselves on his heedless eyes:—“Though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be as white as snow: though they be red like
crimson, they shall be as wool.”
Mary Simpson wept aloud at these words, and seemed to forget
her own wrongs and grief in commiseration of the agonies of
remorse and fear that were now plainly preying on the soul of the
guilty man. “I forgive you, Norman, and will soon be out of the way,
no longer to anger you with the sight of me.” Then, fixing her
streaming eyes on the minister, she besought him not to be the
means of bringing him to punishment and a shameful death, for that
he might repent, and live to be a good man and respected in the
parish; but that she was a poor orphan for whom few cared, and who,
when dead, would have but a small funeral.
“I will deliver myself up into the hands of justice,” said the
offender, “for I do not deserve to live. Mine was an inhuman crime,
and let a violent and shameful death be my doom.”
The orphan girl now stood up as if her strength had been restored,
and stretching out her hands passionately, with a flow of most
affecting and beautiful language, inspired by a meek, single, and
sinless heart that could not bear the thought of utter degradation and
wretchedness befalling any one of the rational children of God,
implored and beseeched the old man to comfort the sinner before
them, and promise that the dark transaction of guilt should never
leave the concealment of their own three hearts. “Did he not save the
lives of two brothers once who were drowning in that black mossy
loch, when their own kindred, at work among the hay, feared the
deep sullen water, and all stood aloof shuddering and shaking, till
Norman Adams leapt in to their rescue, and drew them by the
dripping hair to the shore, and then lay down beside them on the
heather as like to death as themselves? I myself saw it done; I myself
heard their mother call down the blessing of God on Norman’s head,
and then all the haymakers knelt down and prayed. When you, on
the Sabbath, returned thanks to God for that they were saved, oh!
kind sir, did you not name, in the full kirk, him who, under
Providence, did deliver them from death, and who, you said, had
thus showed himself to be a Christian indeed? May his sin against
me be forgotten, for the sake of those two drowning boys, and their
mother, who blesses his name unto this day.”
From a few questions solemnly asked, and solemnly answered, the
minister found that Norman Adams had been won by the beauty and
loveliness of this poor orphan shepherdess, as he had sometimes
spoken to her when sitting on the hill-side with her flock, but that
pride had prevented him from ever thinking of her in marriage. It
appeared that he had also been falsely informed, by a youth whom
Mary disliked for his brutal and gross manners, that she was not the
innocent girl that her seeming simplicity denoted. On returning from
a festive meeting, where this abject person had made many mean
insinuations against her virtue, Norman Adams met her returning to
her master’s house, in the dusk of the evening, on the footpath
leading through a lonely wood; and, though his crime was of the
deepest dye, it seemed to the minister of the religion of mercy, that
by repentance, and belief in the atonement that had once been made
for sinners, he, too, might perhaps hope for forgiveness at the throne
of God.
“I warned you, miserable man, of the fatal nature of sin, when first
it brought a trouble over your countenance, and broke in upon the
peaceful integrity of your life. Was not the silence of the night often
terrible to you, when you were alone in the moors, and the whisper of
your own conscience told you, that every wicked thought was
sacrilege to your father’s dust? Step by step, and almost
imperceptibly, perhaps, did you advance upon the road that leadeth
to destruction; but look back now, and what a long dark journey have
you taken, standing, as you are, on the brink of everlasting death!
Once you were kind, gentle, generous, manly, and free; but you
trusted to the deceitfulness of your own heart; you estranged yourself
from the house of the God of your fathers; and what has your nature
done for you at last, but sunk you into a wretch—savage, selfish,
cruel, cowardly, and in good truth a slave? A felon are you, and
forfeited to the hangman’s hands. Look on that poor innocent child,
and think what is man without God. What would you give now, if the
last three years of your reckless life had been passed in a dungeon
dug deep into the earth, with hunger and thirst gnawing at your
heart, and bent down under a cartload of chains? Yet look not so
ghastly, for I condemn you not utterly; nor, though I know your guilt,
can I know what good may yet be left uncorrupted and
unextinguished in your soul. Kneel not to me, Norman; fasten not so
your eyes upon me; lift them upwards, and then turn them in upon
your own heart, for the dreadful reckoning is between it and God.”
Mary Simpson had now recovered all her strength, and she knelt
down by the side of the groaner. Deep was the pity she now felt for
him, who to her had shown no pity; she did not refuse to lay her light
arm tenderly upon his neck. Often had she prayed to God to save his
soul, even among her rueful sobs of shame in the solitary glens; and
now that she beheld his sin punished with a remorse more than he
could bear, the orphan would have willingly died to avert from his
prostrate head the wrath of the Almighty.
The old man wept at the sight of so much innocence, and so much
guilt, kneeling together before God, in strange union and fellowship
of a common being. With his own fatherly arms he lifted up the
orphan from her knees, and said, “Mary Simpson, my sweet and
innocent Mary Simpson, for innocent thou art, the elders will give
thee a token, that will, on Sabbath-day, admit thee (not for the first
time, though so young) to the communion-table. Fear not to
approach it; look at me, and on my face, when I bless the elements,
and be thou strong in the strength of the Lord. Norman Adams,
return to your home. Go into the chamber where your father died.
Let your knees wear out the part of the floor on which he kneeled. It
is somewhat worn already; you have seen the mark of your father’s
knees. Who knows, but that pardon and peace may descend from
Heaven upon such a sinner as thou? On none such as thou have mine
eyes ever looked, in knowledge, among all those who have lived and
died under my care, for three generations. But great is the unknown
guilt that may be hidden even in the churchyard of a small quiet
parish like this. Dost thou feel as if God-forsaken? Or, oh! say it unto
me, canst thou, my poor son, dare to hope for repentance?”
 The pitiful tone of the old man’s trembling voice, and the motion
of his shaking and withered hands, as he lifted them up almost in an
attitude of benediction, completed the prostration of that sinner’s
spirit. All his better nature, which had too long been oppressed under
scorn of holy ordinances, and the coldness of infidelity, and the
selfishness of lawless desires that insensibly harden the heart they do
not dissolve, now struggled to rise up and respect its rights. “When I
remember what I once was, I can hope—when I think what I now am,
I only, only fear.”
A storm of rain and wind had come on, and Mary Simpson slept in
the manse that night. On the ensuing Sabbath she partook of the
sacrament. A woeful illness fell upon Norman Adams; and then for a
long time no one saw him, or knew where he had gone. It was said
that he was in a distant city, and that he was a miserable creature,
that never again could look upon the sun. But it was otherwise
ordered. He returned to his farm, greatly changed in face and person,
but even yet more changed in spirit.
The old minister had more days allotted to him than he had
thought, and was not taken away for some summers. Before he died,
he had reason to know that Norman Adams had repented in tears of
blood, in thoughts of faith, and in deeds of charity; and he did not
fear to admit him, too, in good time, to the holy ordinance, along
with Mary Simpson, then his wife, and the mother of his children.
 THE WARDEN OF THE MARCHES:
A TRADITIONARY STORY OF ANNANDALE.

The predatory incursions of the Scots and English borderers, on

each other’s territories, are known to every one in the least
acquainted with either the written or traditional history of his
country. These were sometimes made by armed and numerous
bodies, and it was not uncommon for a band of marauders to take
advantage of a thick fog or a dark night for plundering or driving
away the cattle, with which they soon escaped over the border, where
they were generally secure. Such incursions were so frequent and
distressing to the peaceable and well-disposed inhabitants that they
complained loudly to their respective governments; in consequence
of which some one of the powerful nobles residing on the borders
was invested with authority to suppress these depredations, under
the title of Warden of the Marches. His duty was to protect the
frontier, and alarm the country by firing the beacons which were
placed on the heights, where they could be seen at a great distance,
as a warning to the people to drive away their cattle, and, collecting
in a body, either to repel or pursue the invaders, as circumstances
might require. The wardens also possessed a discretionary power in
such matters as came under their jurisdiction. The proper discharge
of this important trust required vigilance, courage, and fidelity, but it
was sometimes committed to improper hands, and consequently the
duty was very improperly performed.
In the reign of James V. one of these wardens was Sir John
Charteris of Amisfield, near Dumfries, a brave but haughty man, who
sometimes forgot his important trust so far as to sacrifice his public
duties to his private interests.
George Maxwell was a young and respectable farmer in
Annandale, who had frequently been active in repressing the petty
incursions to which that quarter of the country was exposed. Having
thereby rendered himself particularly obnoxious to the English
borderers, a strong party was formed, which succeeded in despoiling
him, by plundering his house and driving away his whole live stock.
At the head of a large party he pursued and overtook the “spoil-
encumbered foe;” a fierce and bloody contest ensued, in which
George fell the victim of a former feud, leaving his widow, Marion, in
poverty, with her son Wallace, an only child in the tenth year of his
age. By the liberality of her neighbours, the widow was replaced in a
small farm; but by subsequent incursions she was reduced to such
poverty that she occupied a small cottage, with a cow, which the
kindness of a neighbouring farmer permitted to pasture on his fields.
This, with the industry and filial affection of her son, now in his
twentieth year, enabled her to live with a degree of comfort and
contented resignation.
With a manly and athletic form, Wallace Maxwell inherited the
courage of his father, and the patriotic ardour of the chieftain after
whom he had been named; and Wallace had been heard to declare,
that although he could not expect to free his country from the
incursions of the English borderers, he trusted he should yet be able
to take ample vengeance for the untimely death of his father.
But although his own private wrongs and those of his country had
a powerful influence on the mind of Wallace Maxwell, yet his heart
was susceptible of a far loftier passion.
His fine manly form and graceful bearing had attractions for many
a rural fair; and he would have found no difficulty in matching with
youthful beauty considerably above his own humble station. But his
affections were fixed on Mary Morrison, a maiden as poor in worldly
wealth as himself; but nature had been more than usually indulgent
to her in a handsome person and fine features; and, what was of
infinitely more value, her heart was imbued with virtuous principles,
and her mind better cultivated than could have been expected from
her station in life. To these accomplishments were superadded a
native dignity, tempered with modesty, and a most winning
sweetness of manner. Mary was the daughter of a man who had seen
better days; but he was ruined by the incursions of the English
borderers; and both he and her mother dying soon after, Mary was
left a helpless orphan in the twentieth year of her age. Her beauty
procured her many admirers; and her unprotected state (for she had
no relations in Annandale) left her exposed to the insidious
temptations of unprincipled villainy; but they soon discovered that
neither flattery, bribes, nor the fairest promises, had the slightest
influence on her spotless mind. There were many, however, who
sincerely loved her, and made most honourable proposals; among
whom was Wallace Maxwell, perhaps the poorest of her admirers,
but who succeeded in gaining her esteem and affection. Mary and he
were fellow-servants to the farmer from whom his mother had her
cottage; and, on account of the troublesome state of the country,
Wallace slept every night in his mother’s house as her guardian and
protector. Mary and he were about the same age, both in the bloom
of youthful beauty; but both had discrimination to look beyond
external attractions; and, although they might be said to live in the
light of each other’s eyes, reason convinced them that the time was
yet distant when it would be prudent to consummate that union
which was the dearest object of their wishes.
A foray had been made by the English, in which their leader, the
son of a rich borderer, had been made prisoner, and a heavy ransom
paid to Sir John, the warden, for his release. This the avaricious
warden considered a perquisite of his office; and it accordingly went
into his private pocket. Soon after this, the party who had resolved
on ruining Wallace Maxwell for his threats of vengeance, took
advantage of a thick fog during the day, succeeded by a dark night, in
making an incursion on Annandale, principally for the purpose of
capturing the young man. By stratagem they effected their purpose;
and the widow’s cow, and Wallace her son, were both carried off as
part of the spoil. The youth’s life might have been in considerable
danger, had his capture not been discovered by the man who had
recently paid a high ransom for his own son, and he now took instant
possession of Wallace, resolving that he should be kept a close
prisoner till ransomed by a sum equal to that paid to the warden.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say whether the grief of
Widow Maxwell for her son, or that of Mary Morrison for her lover,
was greatest. But early in the ensuing morning the widow repaired to
Amisfield, related the circumstance to Sir John, with tears
beseeching him, as the plunderers were not yet far distant, to
despatch his forces after them, and rescue her son, with the property
of which she had been despoiled, for they had carried off everything,
even to her bed-clothes.
Wallace Maxwell had some time before incurred the warden’s
displeasure, whose mind was not generous enough either to forget or
forgive. He treated Marion with an indifference approaching almost
to contempt, by telling her that it would be exceedingly improper to
alarm the country about such a trivial incident, to which every
person in that quarter was exposed; and although she kneeled to
him, he refused to comply with her request, and proudly turned
away.
With a heavy and an aching heart, the widow called on Mary
Morrison on her way home to her desolate dwelling, relating the
failure of her application, and uttering direful lamentations for the
loss of her son; all of which were echoed by the no less desponding
maiden.
In the anguish of her distress, Mary formed the resolution of
waiting on the warden, and again urging the petition which had
already been so rudely rejected. Almost frantic, she hastened to the
castle, demanding to see Sir John. Her person was known to the
porter, and he was also now acquainted with the cause of her present
distress; she therefore found a ready admission. Always beautiful,
the wildness of her air, the liquid fire which beamed in her eyes, from
which tears streamed over her glowing cheeks, and the perturbation
which heaved her swelling bosom, rendered her an object of more
than ordinary interest in the sight of the warden. She fell at his feet
and attempted to tell her melancholy tale; but convulsive sobs stifled
her utterance. He then took her unresisting hand, raised her up, led
her to a seat, and bade her compose herself before she attempted to
speak.
With a faltering tongue, and eyes which, like the lightning of
heaven, seemed capable of penetrating a heart of adamant, and in all
the energy and pathos of impassioned grief, she told her tale,—
imploring the warden, if he ever regarded his mother, or if capable of
feeling for the anguish of a woman, to have pity on them, and
instantly exert himself to restore the most dutiful of sons, and the
most faithful of lovers, to his humble petitioners, whose gratitude
should cease only with their lives.
 “You are probably not aware,” said he, in a kindly tone, “of the
difficulty of gratifying your wishes. Wallace Maxwell has rendered
himself the object of vengeance to the English borderers; and, before
now, he must be in captivity so secure, that any measure to rescue
him by force of arms would be unavailing. But, for your sake, I will
adopt the only means which can restore him, namely, to purchase his
ransom by gold. But you are aware that it must be high, and I trust
your gratitude will be in proportion.”
“Everything in our power shall be done to evince our gratitude,”
replied the delighted Mary, a more animated glow suffusing her
cheek, and her eyes beaming with a brighter lustre,—“Heaven reward
you.”
“To wait for my reward from heaven, would be to give credit to one
who can make ready payment,” replied the warden. “You, lovely
Mary, have it in your power to make me a return, which will render
me your debtor, without in any degree impoverishing yourself;”—and
he paused, afraid or ashamed to speak the purpose of his heart. Such
is the power which virgin beauty and innocence can exert on the
most depraved inclinations.
Although alarmed, and suspecting his base design, such was the
rectitude of Mary’s guileless heart, that she could not believe the
warden in earnest; and starting from his proffered embrace, she with
crimson blushes replied, “I am sure, sir, your heart could never
permit you so far to insult a hapless maiden. You have spoken to try
my affection for Wallace Maxwell; let me therefore again implore you
to take such measures as you may think best for obtaining his
release;” and a fresh flood of tears flowed in torrents from her eyes,
while she gazed wistfully in his face, with a look so imploringly
tender, that it might have moved the heart of a demon.
With many flattering blandishments, and much artful sophistry,
he endeavoured to win her to his purpose; but perceiving that his
attempts were unavailing, he concluded thus:—“All that I have
promised I am ready to perform; but I swear by Heaven, that unless
you grant me the favour which I have so humbly solicited, Wallace
Maxwell may perish in a dungeon, or by the hand of his enemies; for
he shall never be rescued by me. Think, then, in time, before you
leave me, and for his sake, and your own future happiness, do not
foolishly destroy it for ever.”
 With her eyes flashing indignant fire, and her bosom throbbing
with the anguish of insulted virtue, she flung herself from his hateful
embrace, and, rushing from his presence, with a sorrowful and
almost bursting heart, left the castle.
Widow Maxwell had a mind not easily depressed, and although in
great affliction for her son, did not despair of his release. She was
ignorant of Mary’s application to the warden, and had been revolving
in her mind the propriety of seeking an audience of the king, and
detailing her wrongs, both at the hands of the English marauders and
Sir John. She was brooding on this when Mary entered her cottage,
and, in the agony of despairing love and insulted honour, related the
reception she had met from the warden. The relation confirmed the
widow’s half formed resolution, and steeled her heart to its purpose.
After they had responded each other’s sighs, and mingled tears
together, the old woman proposed waiting on her friend the farmer,
declaring her intentions, and, if he approved of them, soliciting his
permission for Mary to accompany her.
The warden’s indolent neglect of duty was a subject of general
complaint; the farmer, therefore, highly approved of the widow’s
proposal, believing that it would not only procure her redress, but
might be of advantage to the country. He urged their speedy and
secret departure, requesting that whatever answer they received
might not be divulged till the final result was seen; and next
morning, at early dawn, the widow and Mary took their departure for
Stirling. King James was easy of access to the humblest of his
subjects; and the two had little difficulty in obtaining admission to
the royal presence. Widow Maxwell had in youth been a beautiful
woman, and, although her early bloom had passed, might still have
been termed a comely and attractive matron, albeit in the autumn of
life. In a word, her face was still such as would have recommended
her suit to the king, whose heart was at all times feelingly alive to the
attraction of female beauty. But, on the present occasion, although
she was the petitioner, the auxiliary whom she had brought, though
silent, was infinitely the more powerful pleader; for Mary might be
said to resemble the half-blown rose in the early summer, when its
glowing leaves are wet with the dews of morning. James was so
struck with their appearance, that, before they had spoken, he
secretly wished that their petitions might be such as he could with