Chapter X
Religious Observances—Sunday Attendance at Church—Sunday Books—Breakdown of the System—Alleged Infidelity among Professors—Low State of Morality—Increase of mixed Population—Provincialism.
The externals of religion in Edinburgh underwent a radical change during the boyhood of Walter Scott. The generation that was then retiring from the scene was a generation devoted, in all externals at least, to the cultivation of the religious duties. Rich and poor, old and young, they attended church with unfailing regularity. They held to the strict Puritanic idea of the Sabbath Day. That is, they thought devotion the only proper employment of that day, and considered even a casual appearance on the street during the hours of worship as a disgrace. With them family worship was a general and honoured practice. The reading of any but definitely religious books on Sunday was forbidden in every respectable family. In fact, the Sunday at home in such a family as Scott’s was a day of discipline, of which even his good-nature was inclined to complain. What vexed his young soul was ‘the gloom of one dull sermon succeeding to another.’ The Sunday books were to him a relief and a delight. He retained all his life a favour for Bunyan’s Pilgrim, Gesner’s Death of Abel, Rowe’s Letters, and a few others. Still, in his opinion, the tedium of the day did the young people no good. The scene soon changed. Even in the early eighties we find it noted as ‘ungenteel’ to go to church in a family capacity. Amusements and idle recreation began to be common. The streets were now crowded during the hours of service. On Sunday evenings they became scenes of noise and disorder. Family worship was abandoned, even, as was whispered, by the clergy themselves. And, as a striking evidence of this rapid declension, it is recorded that church collections had fallen from £1500 to £1000 a year. Critical seniors loudly wailed, but their outcry was as useless as it was earnest. Old times were changed, old manners gone, never to return. The decent, staid, and dignified generation was being hustled from the scene by a flippant, noisy crowd of loose and licentious innovators. Conduct which the elders would have regarded and punished as criminal was no longer atoned for even by the blush of shame.
Such a view of Edinburgh’s religious state at the end of the eighteenth century was at all events maintained by certain praisers of the past. It has also been stoutly asserted that infidelity was rampant, under the ægis of the redoubtable David Hume. The University especially was accused of being tainted with infidelity, but the charge is denounced by Lord Cockburn as utterly false. ‘I am not aware (he says) of a single professor to whom it was ever applied, or could be applied, justly. Freedom of discussion was not in the least combined with scepticism among the students, or in their societies. I never knew nor heard of a single student, tutor, or professor, by whom infidelity was disclosed, or in whose thoughts I believed it to be harboured, with perhaps only two obscure and doubtful exceptions. I consider the imputation as chiefly an invention to justify modern intolerance.’
As to the comparative religiousness of the present and the preceding generation, any such comparison is very difficult to be made. Religion is certainly more the fashion than it used to be. There is more said about it; there has been a great rise, and consequently a great competition, of sects; and the general mass of the religious public has been enlarged. On the other hand, if we are to believe one-half of what some religious persons themselves assure us, religion is now almost extinct. My opinion is that the balance is in favour of the present time. And I am certain that it would be much more so, if the modern dictators would only accept of that as religion, which was considered to be so by their devout fathers.’
On the whole, with due heed paid to possible qualifications, it is clear that the standard of life and conduct must have been low between, say, 1780 and 1820. We have Scott’s express statement that domestic purity was in general maintained in Edinburgh society, but scandalous exceptions were by no means unknown. Among the lower classes the freedom from wholesome, if irksome, restraints was, of course, marked by greater lapses. Among them a generation grew up, practically ignorant of the elementary ideas of religion. As a contemporary quaintly puts it, they were as ignorant as Hottentots, and as little acquainted with the decalogue as with repealed Acts of Parliament. The streets, which formerly a lady might have traversed in perfect safety at any hour, now became notoriously unsafe. Doubtless all this was increased, and to some extent occasioned, by the constant influx of a new and shifting population, attracted by the rapid extension of the city. The vices and easy manners of a modern city soon concealed what remained of the old Scottish habits and character. In short, Edinburgh in those years passed from the state of a national capital to that of a big provincial centre, such as Colonel Mannering beheld it, ‘with its noise and clamour, its sounds of trade, of revelry and licence, and the eternally changing bustle of its hundred groups.’