Popular Religio Ie Lighte Me T Scotla D, 1712-1791 A
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“I A AGE SO ELIGHTEED, ETHUSIASM SO EXTRAVAGAT”: POPULAR RELIGIO I ELIGHTEMET SCOTLAD, 1712-1791 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Luke G. Brekke IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY James D. Tracy, advisor May 2009 © Luke G. Brekke, 5/2009 ACKOWLEDGEMETS AD DEDICATIO Archival research for this project was made possible by the generosity of the Center for Early Modern History’s Union-Pacific Dissertation Grant, the Thesis Research Grant of the University of Minnesota’s Graduate School, and by the Hedley Donovan Research Fellowship. A year of writing was made possible by the University of Minnesota’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Thanks are also due to Irene O’Brien and her staff at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow and to the archivists at the National Archives of Scotland, for their assistance in my research; to Anna Clark, who pointed me to the Wodrow-Kenrick correspondence, an invaluable source for this study; and to Nick Williams, with whom I lived in Edinburgh in January and February 2008. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents and my grandmother Lydia Gallup, who tolerated and even facilitated my intellectual eccentricities from an early age; to Laurel Carrington, who helped me begin to think about early modern Europe; to Jim Tracy, who taught me to be a historian; to all the family and friends on whom I have inflicted stories of ornery Scots these three years; and to the congregation of St. Columba’s Free Church in Edinburgh, among whom I was able to experience something like Scottish folk Calvinism in the twenty-first century, and who proved to be warmly hospitable rather than gloomy and puritanical. Most of all, it is dedicated to Julianne and Daniel. S.D.G. i TABLE OF COTETS Introduction 1 1. Folk Calvinism in the west of Scotland 15 2. Lived religion in the parishes of the Strathclyde 36 3. The fraying of the parish community 86 4. “Reformed and always reforming”: the new scheme of divinity 120 5. “Like Jeremy’s two figs” 147 6. “The giddy multitude”: the forced settlements in the Strathclyde 203 7. After the settlements 241 8. Light and darkness 296 Conclusion. “In an age so enlightened, enthusiasm so extravagant”: the making of modernity in eighteenth-century Strathclyde 329 Bibliography 353 ii ITRODUCTIO Contemporaries and strangers. Scotland is a small and poor country, as marginal to Europe’s cultural life as to its geography, in spite of the more grandiose claims of popular historian Arthur Herman1 and the boasts one hears from inebriated speakers at Burns Night suppers. Scotland covers 30,414 square miles, slightly smaller than South Carolina, or not quite a third the size of Minnesota. Those Scots who have made substantial contributions to the main stream of European intellectual life have by and large been either expatriates, like Duns Scotus in Oxford and Paris, or else ambivalent or embarrassed about their provincial background, like Hume, who, according to the contemporary joke, on his deathbed in 1776 repented not of his sins but of his Scotticisms. Scotland would therefore seem an inauspicious setting for posing large questions about the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the nature of modernity. However, in puzzling over those two critical movements in the culture of early modern Europe, Reformation and Enlightenment, it does strike me that Scotland is a useful case for studying the dynamics of the two, having undergone a powerful and fairly successful variant of each. Scotland, practically alone in Europe, saw the Calvinist wing of the Reformation able to realize its ambitions to guide and superintend a large-scale society for an extended period of time. (By contrast with city-states like Geneva, minority status in France, the unique situation of the “public” but not established church in the Dutch Republic, and the abortive rule of the saints in interregnum England.) Two centuries later, Scots made what was, in proportion to their numbers, an impressive contribution to the European Enlightenment: Hume, Smith, founders of sociology like Ferguson and Millar, philosophers like Hutcheson and Reid whose influence would extend to the nineteenth century and far from their ivory towers. But these men, though most were theists and some even Christian clergymen, seemed to bear little visible trace of the Calvinist society which the Reformation had bequeathed. In studies of the “Scottish Enlightenment,” Scottish Calvinism is prominent by its absence. It had been superseded, apparently: part of an earlier stage of development, as Ferguson might say. 1 How the Scots Invented the Modern World: the true story of how Europe’s poorest nation created our world and everything in it (New York: Crown Business, 2001). 1 The germ of this study was planted when I learned through Leigh Schmidt’s marvelous book Holy Fairs2 about the Cambuslang revival of 1742, which brought 30,000 pilgrims to a small town outside of Glasgow to hear the fervently conversionist preaching of George Whitefield. At once it struck me as curious that such an event should take place in such proximity, in both time and place, to men like Hutcheson (Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow 1729-46) and Smith (Professor of Logic at Glasgow 1751-2 and of Moral Philosophy 1752-63). When I was able to read the 110 conversion narratives from this event compiled by its clerical producers, I found men and women who seemed neither aware of nor at all interested in the Scottish Enlightenment. They lived in a world of wonders, of divine messages and signs, one saturated with biblical imagery and the language of the Psalms. Their problems were not Enlightenment problems. Before their “conversions” they had been disturbed, not by questions of theodicy, the injustice of imputed sin and righteousness, the contradictions of the Trinity, but by the question of whether they themselves were among the elect for whom Christ had died. From the Cambuslang “work,” and the ghetto of pietistic literature it generated from later sympathizers,3 I learned that undiluted Scottish Calvinism did not go away during the eighteenth century. The men and women of the Cambuslang narratives seemed (at least at first glance) to live during the Scottish Enlightenment but not really to take part in it—to live under it rather than in it. As such they were of little interest to most historians of eighteenth-century Scotland, who saw them as outdated relics of Scotland’s past.4 They were obsolete if not literally superseded: though their true home was in an earlier stage of development, they had somehow hung on into the eighteenth century, no doubt until the modern thought of Hutcheson and Smith could be diffused to the plebs. As I began learning more about the world that undergirded the Cambuslang narratives, however, I came to believe that the 1742 revival was not, in Christopher 2 Holy Fairs: Scottish communions and American revivals in the early modern period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 3 Fawcett, The Cambuslang Revival (1971); Couper, Scottish Revivals (1918); MacFarlane, The Revivals of the Eighteenth Century (1847). 4 The Popular party in the Kirk is almost absent from the accounts of the eighteenth century in, e.g., Lenman (1981) and Devine (1999), though Devine does find room to discuss the presbyterian dissenters, whom he characterizes as “of rigidly puritan inclination,” 73. 2 Smout’s words, “hysterical but ephemeral,”5 a last gasp of the old culture, but a more visible manifestation of a much larger religious world, one which thrived right to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. Moreover, this religious culture was not one that remained static, but had its own history, and one of some significance to the larger social history of Scotland, as I learned from Callum Brown.6 For the “age of Enlightenment” was also the age in which the modern condition of ecclesiastical pluralism came about in Scotland. In 1700, despite the presence of small Episcopalian and ultra-Covenanter minorities, the Church of Scotland was simply the Church, the only legally recognized religious body and, in the Lowlands at least, truly comprehensive. By 1766, there were perhaps 100,000 adherents of dissenting presbyterian churches which had sprung up in the last thirty years. The new churches of the Scottish dissenters, I further learned— unlike English Dissent, which was moving towards unitarianism during the same period7—were staunchly Calvinist and evangelical in their beliefs. So the reactionary rubes of Cambuslang and their ilk seem to have played a crucial role in the origins of religious pluralism in Scotland, a condition we normally view as constitutive of modernity. This also appeared to call for some explanation. The image of an ocean of Cambuslang faithful swooning at the preaching of Christ crucified, mere miles from Hutcheson’s lecture-hall, led me initially to imagine two cultures in eighteenth-century Scotland carrying on independently of each other: Enlightenment above, old-time Calvinist piety below, and never the twain shall meet. But how could such a thing have happened? The ideas and culture of the Scottish Enlightenment must at some point have come to the attention of the men and women in McCulloch’s manuscripts, even if they apparently had not by 1742. My project then became one of trying to find out how ordinary Scots experienced the age of enlightenment, revival, and secession. The records of the Church of Scotland, painstakingly kept by generations of session and presbytery clerks at both local and 5 History of the Scottish People 1560-1830 (1970), 234. In fairness to Professor Smout, he was later among the few historians of eighteenth-century Scotland to examine these events seriously in his 1982 article “Born again at Cambuslang,” Past and Present 97.