199 CHAPTER VII. REPUTE WITH THE RELIGIOUS WORLD AND RELATION TO ON LAWS OF NATURE.-REFERENCE BIBLE.-DIARY. "Mean men, in their rising, must adhere; but great men, that have strength in themselves, were better to maintain themselves indifferent and neutral.”BACON Essays-Of Faction. By the time of which we have been speaking, Dr. Lee had become almost entirely isolated from the most of his fellow-clergymen in Edinburgh. They had no sympathy with him; he had none with them. He could not stand what appeared to him their narrow-mindedness -their dull and supine conservatism. They could not stand his liberal views-his love of progress-his indifference to the shibboleths of party, and the time-worn dogmas of the current interpretations of religious truth. He could not be troubled with their little gossiping interests, and with their peddling ways of managing the general affairs of the Church. These affairs are very much in the hands of certain ministers and elders in Edinburgh. The Church has six chief missionary schemes-home and foreign—and all the head offices of these were at this time in Edinburgh. Instead of a Central Board of Missions, with a paid Chairman, there are six Committees, with unpaid "Conveners," charged with the : A management of the schemes. The convener, with a few dexterous friends, practically controls each scheme. bustling clergyman, with a love of committees, is frequently a member of half a dozen at a time, and scuffles about from one to another with an air of "general missionariness" very impressive to the beholder. Much eloquence is poured forth over these committees' tables; and the cleric, who expends the greater portion of his time beside them, is generally himself under the impression-and persuades his admiring friends, in word or print, that he is "doing a great work," and that his shoulders bend beneath "the care of all the Churches." Dr. Lee had no taste for this sort of thing. He was too sharp a man of business not to see that the committees were in general no models of intelligence or dispatch; but he had not patience enough to give that attention to the details of their transactions, and to their little arts and jobberies, which alone could have enabled him to control them. Besides, it was very uphill work to fight single-handed against a compact committee, and he honestly did not think it worth his while. On one occasion he attempted to alter the policy of a committee, and being steadfastly opposed, he completely failed; and thereafter he almost entirely withdrew from any interference, and his name was soon dropped out of the lists of committees. This was to be regretted. He ought to have taken a more patient interest in the schemes of the Church, even although he disapproved of their management. The majority of the six chief schemes did not recommend themselves to his co-operation. He had grave doubts about the scheme for the "Conversion of the Jews." He did not like the "Endowment" scheme, advocated with such noble enthusiasm by his greathearted colleague, Professor Robertson. The design of this scheme to provide a parochial endowment of £120 a year for every unendowed chapel and district— appeared to him to be practically the creating of a set of poor incumbencies, of which there was already plenty. To create these with one hand, and to collect funds for enriching impoverished livings with the other, seemed to him folly. He would have preferred a scheme for endowing a few large prizes in the Church, the effect of which, he believed, would be to elevate the general standard of clerical income, and the whole status of the clergy. He sympathized with the objects of the "Education" scheme, but felt himself hampered in his support of it by its necessary adherence to the principle of religious instruction. The "Home Mission" and the "Colonial Mission" were more to his mind. But as regarded the Home Mission, he thought far too much money was spent on stone and lime, and too little on providing suitable evangelists and teachers for the half heathen masses of our towns and large mining and manufacturing populations. He really felt also that the Church did not offer to the ignorant at home, in whose behalf the "Home Mission" laboured, or to the pagans abroad, to whom the "India Mission" devoted itself, such unexceptionable instruction or so pure an example of high and united Christian life, as to make it worth a man's while to give her much aid in her enterprise, in Scotland or in India. He writes in February, 1854 "I confess I have little sympathy with their schemes of missions, education, and Church extension. The things to be propagated are so poor, narrow, and ineffectual, that I cannot feel zealous to extend them. To multiply preachers who are no true ministers of the Word, who fancy there is no Word of God but in the Bible, and show daily that they have no faculty to find it even there-who have the word neither in their mouth nor in their heart-who preach us farther and farther away from the true and living God, and send us out of the Church with even less faith than we carried into it-to multiply such preachers till they cover the land is, I think, a very small benefit. Should we not have more religion if half the preachers whose sermons we now suffer were sent to honest mechanical trades, which, no doubt, they might exercise powerfully and profitably for the community and themselves also-with pleasure, too, and good conscience? Is "A man who does not know more and cannot see farther than common men, why should he be elevated in a pulpit and be the only man in a whole parish authorised to teach in the name of the Lord? Infinite controversies have been how ministers should be appointed? But the great question is how, being discovered to be no ministers, they should be removed? there no remedy for this sore evil under the sun? Shall a whole generation be starved because a patron or a bishop, or a set of pew-holders, or a Kirk Session, made a mistake, wanting the gift of discerning spirits, and sent a man to minister who wanted inspiration like themselves? Would people submit so tamely to any other grievance of so huge a magnitude?" Again he reverts to the same subject, in connection with the evils of sectarianism: "People are discouraged from missionary enterprise by the sectarianism which prevails. They doubt whether the Christianity which is current is worth sending to the heathen; whether that which sows such seeds among us is worth labouring to diffuse among other nations. The same that makes Christianity less worth to ourselves renders it less worth the sending to others. If we feel little the better, no wonder if we ask, Why should we make sacrifices to diffuse this? And when we have made it as worthless as possible at home, we have supplied the strongest objection against transporting it abroad. Moreover, we have prepared the most formidable obstacle against its success abroad, if we do attempt to plant it among heathen nations; for we have provided an objection for the heathen: Why ask us to embrace a religion, respecting whose nature you, who profess it, maintain fifty or sixty different theories ? Who are the authors of this evil? The clergy. Generally speaking, they,—their ignorance, pride, intolerance, &c., &c., have produced very much of this directly by themselves— indirectly through the Governments. And who are to remove it? Not they. If the people wait till they agree in making a religion for them, they will wait for ever. Let the people know they need not wait till their clergy shall concoct a religion which may unite them." The open expression of these opinions vexed the clerical mind, and did him harm in the esteem of those good people who are apt to judge a clergyman's worth and usefulness by the exactness of his conformity to the ordinary professional standard, and by the amount of work which he performs in the accepted routine. Dr. Lee might extend the Church's influence to persons whom it had not before reached, and might enforce the great duties of charity, and liberality, and tolerance, and admirable lessons of moral purity and social wisdom, upon those who had been unaccustomed to hear these from the national pulpit; but all this availed him little, if he dared to disbelieve in the Church's missions, or to express a doubt of the wisdom of the "conveners." About this period also, evil tongues were wagging scandalously over his alleged heterodoxies. We have noticed how he had seen cause to charge a co-presbyter with traducing him in 1849. Since that time, the dirty work had had no need of a co-presbyter's help or connivance. His honest frankness of speech, his sharp satiric power, his practical preaching on moral and social questions, and his political liberalism, all loomed before |