Notes from Travels in Europe. . .

OUR HERITAGE FROM SCOTLAND

You have heard about the high cost of travel for an American visiting Europe. Since my stay in Geneva had been within the conservative confines of an old Roman Catholic convent, partly remodeled into a conference center but still attended by austere sisters, I did not feel the economic pinch until I left for England, Scotland, and Ireland. My ticket home read “Shannon to Dallas,” which meant that I planned surface travel all the way from Switzerland to southern Ireland, which would put me with natives of four different countries in buses, trains, and steamers, and that is what I wanted.

As one Scottish bard, whose hometown I was to pass through, said, “the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft-a-gley,” I was unable to go by train or bus from Geneva to London and stay on schedule, so I had to fly. When I was told the price of the fare in Swiss francs., I could hardly believe it. And the attendant couldn’t have cared less that I could fly all the way from Dallas to New York for that, while London was barely 500 miles away. And I found food and hotel prices so high that I not only resented it but staged my own protest movement. My method was what Ouida and I call “the austerity plan,” and we are experts at it. There is no way of checking on it, but I doubt if any couple ever in our history made it through graduate school on less than we did. I was reminded of that recently when I shared the pulpit last summer in Sellersburg, Indiana with Antoine Valdetero of Jennings, La. He told of first meeting me during his days in the Navy up in Cambridge, Mass., where I was in Harvard and Ouida was a secretary. “Ouida and Leroy had me to their room for dinner, and Ouida had a chicken dinner — all wings!” He may not have realized it, but that was one of the times that we splurged!

Well, I’ll not reveal the details of my method here, but there is no way to do it without austerity, and it is best if one is traveling alone. But I will say that I beat the hotel game by consulting with local residents. In Leicester, England, for example, I eased up to a gentleman at the railway station, introduced myself (a college professor always has certain advantages outside the United States), and told him I was hopeful of a room in a small family hotel. “It only needs to be clean, and not more than 4 or 5 pounds.” That gracious soul took me in his own car (though he had no better sense than to drive it on the wrong side of the street!) and delivered me to a quaint little place that turned out to be one of the loveliest experiences of the trip. I got a warm, clean room, dined with some beautiful retired people, who told me of the war days in that part of England (“We got to where we could recognize the Nazi planes by their sound,” said one old business man, as he proceeded to illustrate with buzzing noises), and who gave me their version of “the Irish problem” in exchange for my views of Watergate, which always gives me a chance to say, “If one realizes the nature of man, then he’ll not be shocked when . . .,” and I sometimes get in some witnessing for the Lord along the way.

Anyway, I had a relaxing evening in the Rowan Hotel, and the next morning, Mr. Lewis, the proprietor served me the delicious breakfast that his wife had prepared. It was not the time of year for many guests, so he and I had a great time getting acquainted. And, bless his heart, before it was over, he extended to me the supreme honor. Escorting me beyond the door marked “Private,” I was soon in the inner-sanctum, where he played with great delight upon his American-made organ! I had far more fun and learned a lot more than if I had stayed in the new Holiday Inn up the street, and the cost, I figured, was about one-third.

I was not always that fortunate. In Limerick, Ireland I sought out a “bed and breakfast” deal near the rail terminal so that I’d be nearby for the a. m. train to Shannon airport. Once that lean and hungry looking owner led me up three flights of narrow, wooden stairs, I was left to wonder if I’d ever get out of the place alive in the event of a fire, which, by the looks of the dump, might start anytime. Convinced that I never would, I yielded myself to the Lord’s keeping, trusting that it wouldn’t burn that night. It was the kind of place where you pay an extra quarter for a bath, only at certain hours, and you bring your own soap. As I crawled onto the straw mattress I censured myself for overdoing it. “This is no way for a rich man to live,” I told myself. It reminded me of that night I spent in jail in Henderson, Tennessee at the request of Freed-Hardeman College, and the cost was about the same. A sure way to beat the present crunch, either go to jailor stay at that “bed and breakfast” layout in Limerick!

I flew to London with Dr. Barney Blakemore, dean of the Disciples Divinity House at University of Chicago, who was a leading light at the Geneva conference, and we talked about our common Restoration heritage. He invited us to have a unity session at his place in Chicago, giving a lot of the young Turks in the area from all three of our major wings a chance to be together.

London was and is suffering from the oppression of the Irish Republican Army, whose henchmen are setting off explosives all over the place. I could not leave my bag in the steel lockers at the railway terminal since that has been one more outlet for the IRA bombs. A special station has been improvised for the checking of bags, which have to be opened and searched before they can be left. Once I was in North Ireland the precautions were even more intense. It was sad to see troops in the streets with tommy guns and sections of peaceful towns barricaded. I could not enter a hotel without being searched, even to use a telephone.

The English are a remarkable and impressive people, and it is always a delight for me to be with them. After all, they are probably our best friends among the Europeans, and the most like us. One comment on Watergate especially interested me, “Because of the agony of the American people we were glad to see the ordeal end.” Inflation, unemployment, recession, and international tensions are more serious for them than for us, but they are a people of indomitable will, and they will make it. I visited with English people from all walks of life on an all-day train trip from London to Glasgow. I wanted to see rural England, and I saw wide stretches of it as the train moved through Nottingham, Chesterfield, Sheffield, Rotherham, and on up to Dumfries and Leeds. Now there was the great steel country, then there were the rolling hills dotted with picturesque dairy farms. One middle-aged salesman, who was returning home after being in a one-car accident, and I shared a long while about the changing values of our people. Commenting upon the ever present church spire as we moved through the villages, he reminisced. “When I was a boy these churches were comfortably filled each Sunday, with as many as 100 to 150 even in these villages, and the rector was taken good care of.” He added, shaking his head regretfully, “But now the rector has to speak to as few as three or four old people, and he is having a hard time of it financially.” He attributed the changing values to a loss of a sense of history and to a lack of discipline and hardship over the past few decades.

Old Scotia is an intriguing land, and once more as I sat with her sturdy people as the day drew old and we moved on toward Glasgow, I prayed as did her famous poet:

Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil

      Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!

And oh, may Heaven their simple lives prevent

      From Luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!

Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,

      A virtuous populace may rise the while,

And stand a wall of fire around their much loved isle.

They are a proud and stubborn people. Visiting the Castle in Edinburgh and looking down on the encased crown of Mary, Queen of Scots, who ruled Scotia for a fourth of the turbulent 16th century, I asked an old guard standing by if perhaps the likes of Elizabeth II might one day wear that crown. He bristled at the thought. “You can be sure, sir, that if anyone ever wears that crown, he’ll be a Scot!” I thought that an elegant expression of national pride, and I was really putting him on, for I knew that when Queen Elizabeth visited Scotland following her coronation, that she reached out and touched Mary’s old crown, but would do no more. When the Scots became a part of the British Commonwealth, it was agreed that no English monarch would ever wear Mary’s crown. I felt some pity for the guard when he went on to say, with head bowed as if he were talking as much to himself as to me, “It shows that we were once a nation in our own right.”

The Scots don’t especially mind being British so long as you keep it straight that they are Scots first. I erred but once, referring to a gourmet dish as British. I was told in no uncertain terms that “It is Scottish!” I learned long ago, of course, that a native is a Scot and not Scotch, the latter being whiskey rather than a person.

In Glasgow I visited with Prof. and Mrs. William Arthur, whom I knew when he was a visiting professor at Bethany during my years there. He is an elder of the Coplaw Church of Christ, where I met with the saints the only Sunday a. m. I was in that country. This is an “Associated” church, what we would call Disciples. That same evening I assembled with the Castlemilk Church of Christ (“American” non-instrument), where Dan Mitchell was my host, who is supported by a congregation in my hometown. These two churches, while having so much in common (as I see it), have no contact with each other. A third kind of Church of Christ is known as the “Old Paths” group, which is the old-line non-instrument brethren that broke away from the “Associated” churches very much as we did from the Disciples in this country, though considerably later. The “American” churches are the ones plied with U. S. dollars, and some resentment remains toward what these saints refer to as “the American imposition” on their congregational way of life, individual cups being the symbol of this infringement. While in Scotland I was with all three of these groups, ignoring the lines that separate them, just as I do everywhere I go. This was strange conduct to them, even for an American, but it was my way of claiming all of them equally as my brothers. With the possible exception of the Associated brethren, I figure that none of them would use me for anything since I also love the others.

One brother told me that if I spoke in his church, an Old Paths congregation, that all the old Scots would get up and walk out. What makes this ironical is that it is the Old Paths group that I feel the closest to, for they have all these years been faithful to the concept of mutual ministry as taught by our Restoration pioneers. But Scotland is like Texas in one respect: unless you identify with one particular sect none of them will have much to do with you. But I was with them all, in their homes if not in their churches, and I loved them all so dearly. There wasn’t much they could do about it except sit there and try to figure me out!

Prof. Arthur, referred to above, is now in his 80’s and retired from the University of Glasgow. He knows Prof. William Barclay, who is widely read by our folk in this country and who himself retired recently. There is the story around the university that when Barclay was a young minister for the Church of Scotland he was counseling with a distraught woman. As he was leaving her home she blurted out in her frustration, “I think I’ll just kill myself!” Having always had a hearing problem, young Barclay did not quite get what she said. He replied, “Oh, yes, a splendid idea. The sooner you do that the better!” This so surprised the woman that she went into gales of laughter, and was soon on her way to recovery.

Since I visited with Dr. Barclay when I was in Scotland in 1963, I thought I should at least call him by phone, which I did from the Arthur home. He remembered our hotel visit 12 years earlier, and we talked for sometime about his work and his church. Now that he is retired he is beginning an extensive treatment of the Old Testament much like he has done the New. The state church of Scotland is in a bad way, he says, for it is losing an average of 17,000 members a year. But this may be a blessing in disguise, he grants, for it may leave the church with a more committed membership. He is talking these days about the importance of the church recovering what it had at the outset in “the church in thy house.”

Our heritage from Scotland is considerable. Both Thomas and Alexander Campbell were educated at Glasgow. That impressionable year that Alexander spent there, following his shipwreck in the Irish Sea, brought him in contact with reformatory and philosophical elements that would long influence his thinking. Then, too, he returned there in 1847 for extensive work in the cause of reformation, leaving further marks of his remarkable life. These were the places that interested me most, and I was fortunate in having two native Scots as my guides, Jack Paton, a young convert to the Lord, of Glasgow, and Andrew Gardiner, of Edinburgh, whose life as a preacher goes way back into the history of the Old Paths movement, and who has traveled and spoken extensively among Churches of Christ in this country.

Jack and I circled and recircled the old part of Glasgow, where the old buildings of the university still stand almost in ruins. It was here that Thomas Campbell studied from 1783-86, where he was influenced by the likes of Thomas Reid, that grand old philosopher of common sense. Study in Glasgow impressed upon both of the Campbells the importance of language structure and the meaning of words, and of the significance of ancient learning. One of their teachers, John Young, has an epitaph in the Glasgow Cathedral, which I chanced to visit, that reads “With the profoundest subtlety he explored and with the happiest talent laid open to the minds of his students the whole structure of language, and restored the majesty of ancient learning.” Where else but Scotland would one find an epitaph like that!

One only needs to read his debate with Robert Owen, that deterministic-materialistic atheist, to see that Alexander Campbell was impressed with the common sense philosophy originating in Scotland. He quotes Reid’s Essay on the Human Mind and draws upon David Hume to support the view that ideas come only through sensations and reflection, which became a crucial point in setting forth a Bible-centered faith in preaching on the American frontier, rather than the subjectivism that long dominated Calvinism.

It was while at Glasgow that young Campbell slipped away from his Seceder Presbyterian friends to sit under the influence of the reforming Greville Ewing, who in turn was influenced by the Haldanes, the Glasites, and the Sandemanians, all of whom were moving away from creedal religion toward a priesthood of all believers centered in a biblical faith. And it was in Glasgow that Campbell finally refused to break bread with the Seceders in that it was restricted only to themselves, excluding even other Presbyterians. His biographer, Robert Richardson, says that when Alexander dropped his token in the plate, which allowed him to the table, and walked out without partaking, that was the beginning of the Reformation Movement.

Jack and I stood at the old docks, now long famous for their shipbuilding, where the Campbell family left Scotland to join their father in America, in 1809. Across the Clyde river we could see the old mansions, made romantic by the riches their lords made on tobacco trade with the slave-labor Virginia plantations. We circled the block where once stood the old Duke Street prison, where Campbell was imprisoned during his return to Glasgow, precipitated by an event growing out of the rumor that he was a Virginia slave owner. High rise apartments now stand there. I could see those attentive sisters making their way in and out of the prison at regular intervals, carpeting and draping the cell of its renowned inmate, wining and dining him, and seeing that his every need was met. That Campbell impressed women can hardly be questioned. After all, one Scottish sister followed him home all the way to Bethany!

In Edinburgh I met with several missionaries of the “American” churches, some of whom are serving pulpits and others of whom are in the university, or both. I was impressed with their openness and their fertile, growing minds. Andrew Gardiner showed me around the city, both old and new, the “new” being only 200-300 years old. John Knox, the Thundering Scot, walked the old streets and preached repentance to Queen Mary Stuart. I sensed all that history as we drove by his old home, and I felt I had made some connection by also visiting on the same trip the chapel in Geneva where he thundered forth as a younger man. Brother Gardiner pointed out the townhouse where Campbell lectured while he was there and the place where once stood a tabernacle of James and Robert Haldane, the restorationists of Scotland. We stood under the sign of one of the two remaining houses of the old Sandemanians. It read: “Meeting Place, Church of Christ, Commonly Called Glasites or Sandemanians.” It gave the hours of assembly and cited Acts 2:42 as the order of worship, which means they follow, in order, the four things mentioned in that passage. We have in this country a small sect of the Church of Christ who believes and practices the same, and for the most part makes this a test of fellowship. The Glasite movement in Scotland separated from the state church, the reasons being similar to those that later launched the Restoration Movement in this country.

Out from Edinburgh at a nook called Longniddry I had a delightful visit with John and Freda Kneller, whom I met through Restoration Review. They are of “Old Paths” background and persuasion, but in a sweet and open way. Young, intelligent, spiritual, they are like many in the States, too much like Jesus to be confined to any sectarian mould. Remaining where the Lord has dropped them down, they work and pray for the one church, holy, catholic and apostolic. They are our future, here as well as there.

In the heart of Edinburgh stands a glorious monument to one of her most illustrious sons, Sir Walter Scott, who is credited with inventing the historical novel. But he also, like Robert Bums, wrote poems about his native land. And when we in America look back to Scotland and realize what a splendid heritage she has bequeathed to us, we can identify with these lines from Scott.

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said,

      This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,

As home his footsteps he hath turned

      From wandering on a foreign strand? — the Editor