This book is designed to render to Scottish Churchmen the special service of presenting to them, in a brief but comprehensive survey, the record of their ecclesiastical history which is engraved in their ecclesiastical architecture. There is no record so authentic as that which is built in stone. There is none so sacred as that which attests and illustrates the religion of our forefathers. Much of that record has perished: enough remains to engage our reverent study and our dutiful care. Foreign war and rapine have wasted and destroyed our heritage of sacred places. Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose, and Haddington fell before the English invader. Iona was ravaged by the Dane, while yet the island formed part of a Scandinavian diocese. Internal lawlessness and tribal fury have wrought like disasters. Elgin, once “the fair glory of the land,” stands a forlorn monument of the savagery of a Highland chief. St. Andrews, Lindores, Perth, Paisley, and many others bear witness to the reckless outrage which cloaked its violence under the guise of religious zeal. Of all our spoilers this has been the most destructive. The pretence (for it often was nothing else) of “cleansing the sanctuary” not only robbed the Church of many a priceless possession, but begat, in the popular mind, a ruthless disregard of the sacred associations of places where generation after generation had worshipped God, and a coarse indifference to the solemnity of His ordinances, which made it easy for those who should have been the guardians of the churches to let them fall, unheeded, into decay.

It is not uncommon, even yet, to find people who ought to know, and perhaps do know, better, blaming Knox and his co-reformers for the dilapidation and desecration of our ancient fanes. The blame belongs to the “rascal multitude,” and to the rapacious laymen who were served heirs to the properties of the despoiled Church. What is the Church the better for their enrichment? What has religion gained by it? The Reformed Faith could have flourished none the less graciously if its purified doctrine had been preached, and its reasonable worship offered, under the same roofs that had protected priest and people in the days of Romanist error. Is the cause of pure and undefiled religion stronger in the land because Melrose and Crossraguel and Pluscarden are desolate; St. Andrews a roofless ruin; Iona as yet open to the Atlantic winds? Is the voice of praise and prayer sweeter in the North because Mortlach is effaced and Fortrose shattered, and the bells are silent which men on the mainland used to hear when the north wind blew from Kirkwall? Granted that ignorant superstition may have tainted the veneration in which our fathers’ holy and beautiful houses were held 400 years ago, the iconoclasm which devastated them was not the remedy for it. The revived interest in our old churches, which has asserted its influence in such restorations as those of St. Giles, Dunblane, Linlithgow, St. Vigeans, and Arbuthnott, is no revival of superstition. It is the outcome of a more reverent spirit; of a deeper sense of the honour due to God; of the conviction that we owe Him, in all that pertains to His worship, the offering of our very best; and of a deeper consciousness also of the supreme value of the Church’s national position and character, and of the duty of piously conserving whatever helps to illustrate the historical continuity which binds its present to its past. As regards this, nothing is so full of helpful stimulus as an intelligent study of our ecclesiastical architecture. In it we can read the lessons of the gradual growth of the Scottish nation from the loosely connected tribal conditions of the ninth and tenth centuries onwards to its consolidation under a settled monarchy; the development of its commercial and industrial progress; its expanding relations to the peoples of the Continent; and the vital changes in its political life, and its religious system and belief, thence resulting. All these have left their mark in those records which neither time nor revolution, neglect nor violence, have been able wholly to destroy the architecture of our cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries.

The primitive buildings of the early Celtic period of the Church have long since disappeared. Their clay and wattles could not withstand the wear and tear of time; only in a distant glen or lonely island can we discover scattered traces of the beehive cell or simple shrine of the anchorite or missionary. Few relics of the more substantial structures of that time survive.

The Roman era of Church organisation superseded the Celtic; and with the Roman dominance came the architecture of the Anglo-Normans, whom the presence and policy of Margaret, saint and queen, attracted to Scotland. It developed itself, always with some national characteristics of its own, until the War of Independence broke off all friendly intercourse with England.

Later came, in place of alliance with England, the alliance with France, which lasted till the Reformation, and left its mark on many of the pages of “The Great Stone Book,” which chronicle for us the vicissitudes of the past, the days of peace and prosperity, of war and penury, of reviving national health and energy, of new combinations and ideas in politics and statecraft, of spiritual decay and carnal pride and ostentation. These annals can be deciphered by the patient student of the walls and cloisters of the ancient churches and religious houses.

To the founders and the owners of the latter, and chiefly to the great orders of the Augustinians, the Benedictines, and the Cistercians, we owe many of our noblest remnants of the past all of them unhappily ruined; for the popular violence of the sixteenth century raged more fiercely against the monasteries than against the cathedrals. To the Episcopal system of government, introduced under Margaret, we owe the bishops’ churches or cathedrals.

The life and thought of the Church at the present day, move far enough apart from either prelacy or monasticism to allow us to look at each with an impartial eye, and to consider whether in its abolition we have parted with aught that it would have profited the Church to retain.

The monasteries, at first the homes and shelters of charity and learning, had, before the sixteenth century, waxed fat with unduly accumulated wealth, become enervated with luxury and corrupt through bad government. They were swept away, their possessions secularised, and their communities broken up. But with them disappeared two things which were of great price: a large and liberal provision for the poor, and a comprehensive scheme of Education. The monastery gate was never shut against the suffering and the needy. The monks were indulgent landlords and kind neighbours; the sick benefited by their medical skill; the indigent could always look to them for eleemosynary aid; the houseless wanderer was never sent empty away. Those great centres of friendly helpfulness and charity were planted all over the land. No doubt the gift of indiscriminate alms to every applicant would tend to abuse and lazy beggary; but a scheme of sympathetic and well directed aid thoughtfully administered would not. Abusus non tollit usum. The scandals of the monasteries did not justify the robbery of the destitute for the benefit of the secular supplanters of the monks. The Kirk-sessions of the Reformed Kirk did their best to take the place of the former guardians and kindly benefactors of the poor, but their funds were scanty; the old wealth had fallen into tenacious hands; and schism and sectarianism finally necessitated the transfer of the care of the poor from the Church to the State.

Could the ancient system have been reformed and not destroyed, the poverty of the country would have been less grievous than it is to-day; the Church’s relation to the poor more intimate; and the method of relief pleasanter to the recipients than that which makes them familiar with the grim charity of the Poor’s House, the Inspector, and the Parochial Board.

The monasteries were the seats of a general system of higher education. The burghs had their own independent seminaries; the “song schools” were more closely connected with the churches in town and in country; but the highest grade of education was found in the monasteries. Before the foundation of any of the universities they supplied the place both of secondary school and university, and trained the youth, especially of the higher ranks, until prepared to go out into the world, as they constantly did, speaking the “lingua-franca” of all scholars, and carrying Scottish energy, genius, and scholarship into the halls and cloisters of many a college and many a monastery, from Coimbra to Cracow, from Salerno to Upsala. These schools all perished with the downfall of the monasteries; and consequently we cannot, to this day, cope with the great public schools of England, or adequately supply the blank in our educational system created by their spoliation and abolition. Here, too, wise reform might have spared and remodelled what misguided zeal, allied with unprincipled greed, destroyed.

With the ruination and impoverishment of the cathedrals, an element in the Church’s life inseparable from them, and most salutary and useful, ceased to be. The bishops’ deprivation of an authority they had too often disgraced and misused, vested the government of the Church in the presbyterate; and the national sentiment approved of the change. But there was no necessity for upsetting the whole cathedral system, and rooting out the whole cathedral staff, because the bishop was turned adrift. Had the Canonries been spared, an immense boon would have been secured for the Reformed Church. Had the stipends attached to them not been alienated, the Church would have possessed, at all its most important centres, a staff of clergymen chosen for their ability and worth, for their learning and power of government and organisation, aiding the minister in his work, or enriching the theological literature of their time. With them might have been associated younger men, either under their supervision as candidates for the ministry, or as probationers acquiring practical knowledge of its duties and requirements. The cathedral would have stood out, in its city, great or small, as the Mother Church holding forth the model of devout ritual, of earnest and learned teaching, of zealous work. How vastly superior its influence would have been, spiritually, intellectually, socially, to that of struggling quoad sacra churches, with their ill-paid clergy, or “missions” in charge of worse-paid probationers, it is, I think, needless to point out. But the possibility of such an institution passed away when the cathedrals were desecrated, and their revenues were “grippit” to use Knox’s phrase by the ungodly robbers of the Church.

I have written these few pages to serve as an introduction to what follows, from the hand of my friend, Mr. Butler. The Committee of the Guild asked me to prepare a volume on the most notable of our ancient churches; and finding that other engagements stood in the way of my doing so, I recommended that the work should be entrusted to Mr. Butler, of whose ability to do it well I felt confident. Having read what he has written, I find my confidence was not misplaced, and that his treatment of the subject is most instructive, thorough, and exact. It will add to the reputation he has already gained by his history of his own parish of Abernethy on Tay, and his books on Wesley in Scotland, and on Henry Scougal; and will prove an invaluable guide to all students of our historic churches, cathedral, collegiate, and monastic.

R. H. S.