the scottish episcopal church

A New History, by gavin white

Preface

1
Tullochgorum

2
Eighteenth Century

3
Seabury

4
Worship

5
Edinburgh

6
Oxford Movement

7
Glasgow

8
Publications

9
Church or Province

10
'English Episcopal'

11
Schools

12
Social Service

13
Synods and Councils

14
Clergy Training

15
A Small Dog Barking

16
As Others See Us

17
Women

18
Society

19
Second World War and After

Selected bibliography

Links

They called him Tullochgorum, for he wrote the words to The Reel of Tullochgorum, which may still be found in anthologies of Scottish verse. But his real name was John Skinner. And near his grave at Longside there is a small housing estate called Tullochgorum, which is almost the only evidence that he is not entirely forgotten to-day. John Skinner was the maker of the Scottish Episcopal Church as we know it. A parish schoolmaster at Monymusk in Aberdeenshire, he visited the Episcopal chapel over the river at Blairdaff in 1739 or 1740, reputedly because he was courting a young lady of that persuasion. Perhaps so, but she is never heard of again, while he resigned his position, was re-baptised, trained under a minister at Orkney, and served the Episcopal chapel at Longside, near Peterhead, from 1742 until 1807. And if the young lady was fictional, it is not clear what the attraction was. We are told that he had long talks with the Episcopal minister whom he met in the library of Monymusk House. It is suggested that he was attracted by the English Prayer Book of which Lady Grant, wife of the laird and herself English, had presented copies to the chapel, but we do not know how much they were used, and Skinner never used the Prayer Book at Longside. As for the Jacobite cause, the continued devotion to the House of Stuart, Skinner was almost unique amongst northern Episcopalians in not being a Jacobite. He was to be mildly disciplined by his bishop for "qualifiying" by an oath to the Hanoverian succession in 1747. The attraction was probably something mystical or sacramental not to be found in the Church of Scotland as he knew it. (1)

Skinner's influence lay in his training of clergy by the apprentice system then in force, and for much of his ministry he trained most of the candidates, the remainder in later days going to Bishop Jolly at Fraserburgh. But there was a major difference between Skinner and Jolly; almost uniquely amongst the northern clergy, Jolly was not a Hutchinsonian, though his library contained almost every Hutchinsonian volume that could be had. And Skinner was not only a Hutchinsonian but probably the first disciple in the Scottish Episcopal Church.

He became such in 1753 while imprisoned at Aberdeen, together with his nine-year old son, the future bishop, who would not be separated from him. Skinner may have been loyal to the Hanoverians, but it had become an offence to take service for more than five persons. While in prison he could and did read as never before. And that was the year in which Hutchinsonian teachings came back from oblivion, and Hutchinsonian books were re-printed. The reason for this is grotesque; an act of the Union parliament had permitted the naturalisation of Jews, and this had led to the panicky notion that Britain would be flooded by Jews against whose propaganda only the Hutchinsonian learning would suffice. The act was duly repealed, but the Hutchinsonian teaching had revived. (2)

John Hutchinson was an English land-agent who ground out twelve great volumes of virtually unreadable phantasmagoria. There were several main themes in all this. First, the Old Testament said everything that was in the New, but the Jews had corrupted it by inserting vowel-points, and it was true that if you messed around with the vowels and put in what suited you, the most astonishing results could be achieved. And were. Second, Newton's theory of gravity was all wrong; if modern Jewish scholars are amongst the select few who study Hutchinsonianism, the others are historians of science. Thirdly, natural religion, the common eighteenth century reliance on what could be proved about God from nature, was all wrong - - God revealed himself directly, and did not have to be deduced. Fourthly, the three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, were signified in the Old Testament by Fire, Light, and Air, or by the ox, the lion, and the eagle in Ezekiel, with the "man" in Ezekiel being the humanity of Christ, loosely joined to the second person. This meant that Hutchinsonians were technically Nestorian, or, to put it plainly, they divided the divine from the human in Christ. And they rejected "eternal generation" of the Son; instead they tended to pull the three persons of the Trinity together so they were scarcely distinct. Which made it impossible for them to use the Athanasian Creed, or, except selectively, the English Prayer Book which contained it. (3)

But how should all this appeal to a good and sensible man such as John Skinner ? Much of it he probably took on trust because he believed in a few simple truths which seemed to be linked to the rest; most of us do this all the time. And the few simple truths were appropriate to his time. Eighteenth century thinkers relied heavily on nature, some relied exclusively on nature, and the church could respond in various ways. The usual one was to lean heavily towards the secular philosophy of the day, and to rely on nature to show that there was an intelligent power behind the creation, which nobody really denied, and then to show that that power was benevolent. This was not to deny salvation through the cross or a rising from the dead, but these weapons were not for that battle, and tended to be a bit neglected and in some cases forgotten. Similarly, the Trinity tended to be left on one side because it was God as a creator who mattered; this was the age in which God was described as "your Maker". And the way in which to leave the Trinity on one side was to regard Jesus Christ as a moral teacher and not God at all - - to separate the persons of the Trinity. This, after all, was the age that saw the rise of Unitarianism, a form of Christianity in which Christ was solely human.

But if this was the main way in which Christians responded, and successfully responded, to what we now call the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, there could be others, and Hutchinsonianism was one such. And in its 1753 revival it was not the full-flown teaching of John Hutchinson, who was really a product of seventeenth century fantasy, the world of the ranters, but rather a minority response for minority people to the problems of their day. It could never be a major doctrine with major drawing power; it could be the sort of thing that lived in a crack in the wall. And which, instead of accommodating the spirit of the age, rejected it altogether.

The age said that truth could be found in nature; Hutchinsonians said it came by direct revelation, and the Old Testament was full of it, and so was classical literature - - John Skinner even found the Trinity in Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto. The age said that only God the Father really mattered, and sent the other persons off to a distance; Hutchinsonians pulled them so closely together that they were really indistinguishable. And they did all this with a wealth of learning, or at least of pedantry, which so exhausted their critics that nobody could follow them in their tortuous reasoning, even if their critics had Hebrew, which few in those days had. Having Hebrew meant that you knew it all, and not having Hebrew meant that you did not. (4)

But why should it specifically appeal to Episcopalians ? There were three reasons, and the first was that Episcopalians were very largely, or had been, supporters of the Stuart cause. It is common to assume that this support was an accidental result of some meeting in London when Bishop Rose of Edinburgh made the wrong answer to William III, or was due to unthinking loyalty to a king to whom an oath had been sworn. It was probably deeper. Being a Jacobite was a way of looking at things, and accepting their finality and givenness. A king was a king by right, and this was directly given by God in the same way as night or day, and if it turned out to be disadvantageous, or downright dangerous, he was still the king. This was quite at variance with the doctrine that a king held his office by mutual agreement, and could be given notice at will - - this made kingship indirect and conditional. Those who held the Jacobite view, even if not acting upon it, could find something of the same givenness in the Hutchinsonian view of nature governed, not by a set of principles, but directly by God, and they could find the same givenness in the Old Testament according to John Hutchinson. They could keep their old way of looking at things, while transferring it from allegiance to a dynasty which was now an embarrassment to what seemed to them a scholarly and respectable system. But whatever the link between the Jacobite cause and Hutchinsonianism, it was undoubtedly there. Peter Nockles cannot be faulted when he writes, "Hutchinson's own psycho-theological theories had philosophical and political implications; the emphasis was on man's dependence on God, with political and social subordination one aspect of that dependence." (5)

Secondly, Hutchinsonianism was marginal, and those who had not accepted the new regime were pushed to the margins of society. Normal routes to success were closed to them, and normal security denied to them. That they retreated into a set of beliefs which was laughed at by society was only natural. And it is noteworthy that the later generations of English Hutchinsonians were not representative of the Church of England, even if they were in no way Non-Juror, as Jacobite clergy were called in that land. They were mostly men (there is no evidence that any woman was ever a Hutchinsonian) without a university education, clergy ordained in special circumstances, self-made merchants, or, in the case of those actually in Oxford, and after 1753 there were such, old men living on staircases and passing on the lore to the scorn of their betters. There was in Hutchinsonianism something of the spirit of those brave souls who meet together to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.

Thirdly, there was a genuine spiritual core to the belief. John Wesley sniffed that Hutchinson "had not the least conception, much less experience, of inward religion", that anyone could prove what he liked from Hebrew without vowels, and the system was "unsupported by any solid proof". It was typical of Wesley to expect proof; the Hutchinsonians were not as committed to Enlightenment standards as he. But he was probably wrong about inward religion. There are devout oases in the barren deserts of Hutchinson's writing, and the basic belief in God working directly through everything could not help but lead to a sacramental view of life. John Skinner believed that the Shechinah, or Divine Presence, was Christ himself, but others held it to refer to be the Eucharistic elements. Hutchinsonianism appealed to churchmen, Scottish or English, who were sacramental in outlook. (6)

Yet the reign of Hutchinsonianism in Scottish Episcopal circles was relatively short-lived. Even John Skinner moderated his adherence; his 1788 Ecclesiastical History of Scotland was rather cool in its advocacy of the developed teaching, though heated on the advantages of studying Hebrew. And the teachings could not be widely spread when a knowledge of Hebrew was necessary even to read Hutchinson, whose works were mostly in English embellished with Latin but studded with nuggets of Hebrew. Archbishop Tait had a story of a lay Hutchinsonian who taught his coachman Hebrew so he could discuss the teachings with someone. Skinner's son John, who became Bishop of Aberdeen, and his grandson William, who was in turn Bishop of Aberdeen, were not of that faith, though we are told that another clerical grandson, John Skinner of Forfar, was. There were probably not more than thirty Hutchinsonians in the Scottish Episcopal Church, the last of them being John Murdoch, the clergyman of Keith, who died in 1848, still refusing to use the Athanasian Creed. But the influence of those who had learned Hebrew and waded through the books, or at least the Abstract, was more widespread. Laity could not follow the evidence, but they could rejoice in the sort of religion which flowed from the preaching of those who had done so. And it is said that the sermons of the two principal English Hutchinsonians, William Jones of Nayland and Bishop George Horne of Norwich, were much quarried by Aberdeenshire Episcopal clergy. But they were also much quarried by many high churchmen in England who were in no sense Hutchinsonian themselves, but approved of the devout and sacramental tone of those writers. Finally, the teachings were only found amongst the northern clergy. The southern clergy were either English and in Qualified chapels, or were Scottish but pursuing the more normal reaction to the perils of the day. Such was George Gleig of Stirling, who poured scorn on the notions of the Hutchinsonians, and developed his own theory of original sin, for both of which reasons he was refused consecration by the other bishops on the first four occasions of his election, only becoming Bishop of Brechin in 1806. The Skinner faction, if it were not more of a clan, did not run everything in the Episcopal Church of that day, but they ran most things. (7)

But perhaps the deepest significance of the Hutchinsonian connection was that it drew the Scottish Episcopalians into fellowship with the Hutchinsonian remnant in the Church of England. F.C.Mather, in his biography of the high church Bishop Horsley of St. Asaph, says that late eighteenth century attempts to repeal the Penal Laws against Episcopalians began "with a small committee of correspondents in London consisting of Hutchinsonian friends in the English Church, William Stevens and George Gaskin, together with the lawyer, J.A.Park." There were others, and there were some who were not Hutchinsonians, such as Horsley himself, who did so much to win over Lord Thurlow. But of the nine men who are famed as having worked for the repeal which occurred in 1792, Horsley was clearly not of the teaching, John Bowdler of Eltham probably was, and the other seven, Bishop Horne, William Jones, James Allen Park, William Stevens, Dr. Berkeley, Jonathon Boucher, and Dr. Gaskin, certainly were. But putting it the other way round, we do not know the identity of any English Hutchinsonian of that decade who was not active in assisting the Scottish Episcopalians. The Penal Laws would have been repealed without them, but perhaps not until much later, and perhaps without bringing them into a relationship with the Church of England when they accepted the Thirty Nine Articles at Laurencekirk in 1804. Had the Stuart line become barren earlier in history, when there was a Hutchinsonian presence in the Church of Scotland, and had Scottish Episcopalians ventured into those murky waters at the same time as their Presbyterian neighbours, the northern Episcopalians might have been drawn back into the national church - - though that calls for many possibilities which did not, in fact, occur. (8)

Lastly, there is a link with the high church Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century. In 1836 Dr. Thomas Arnold, of Rugby fame, wrote a spirited attack on leaders of the new movement, whom he called the "Oxford Malignants", and identified them with "the formalist Judaising fanatics...who have ever been the disgrace of the Church of England." Did he mean Hutchinsonians ? If he did, then it is ironic that what was revived in 1753 as an anti-Jewish defence should become identified with Judaism. But the result of Skinner's imprisonment was to be an alliance with the coming element in the Church of England, and an early step into the sacramentalist world of the next century. (9)