Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 56:223 (Jul 1899)
Article: Religious Thought In Scotland In The Victorian Era
Author: James Lindsay

BSac 56:223 (July 1899) p. 455

Religious Thought In Scotland In The Victorian Era1

Rev. James Lindsay

The present writer once received the more quaint than salutary advice for pulpit oratory—to have a good beginning and a good ending, what comes between mattering but little. Religious thought in the Victorian era conforms to these requisites; with bright beginning and lustrous ending, it has mid-spaces that yield but little. But, so apt is religious progress to proceed in seemingly spiral manner rather than in rectilinear fashion, that these apparently barren spaces were really fruitful of silent growths. When young Victoria stepped upon the throne at the close of the fourth decade (1837) of our century, the time was big with influences that made for enlarged charity and wholesome intellectual breadth. These influences proceeded largely from a pair of writers whom foreign theologians account two of the greatest dogmatic theologians of our country in this century. Of these the first was the quiet, contemplative, brooding layman of deeply religious turn, Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. Little known as his books now are, the independence of his work is memorable. Just before him had gone the influence of Schleiermacher in Germany, and of Coleridge in England. The inward or experiential aspects on which they laid stress were quite independently reached by Erskine. To him, as to Jacobi,

BSac 56:223 (July 1899) p. 456

religion was a thing of the heart. For him the truth of the gospel was proved by its suitability to man’s nature and needs. He loved to dwell on God as the loving Father of all men. He voiced the spirit of those who, as an English paper once put it, had become “insurgent against the dismal Calvinistic decrees.” Strong in spiritual insight and rich in religious feeling, Erskine was weak in dialectic skill or argumentative force.

The second influence was Dr. Macleod Campbell, whose deposition from the ministry of the Scottish Church every one now laments. It was Campbell’s aim to make the atonement more spiritual and more real to men. Christ had for him made a confession of our sins, which was a “perfect Amen in humanity” to the Divine judgment on our sins. He would have men brought into assurance of God’s love. Both he and Erskine put ethical inwardness before the forensic externality then so common. These influences—however we may judge of them—gave religious thought an impulse within Scotland such as it never lost, and there were fruitful results beyond. In England, they stamped the theology of Maurice with the best features it bore. This expansive feeling, this progressive spirit, is what first marks our era. We do not, of course, forget the evangelic zeal of Dr. Andrew Thomson, of Chr...