John Cairns

“ Their faith bears its own signature, and they have only to look within to discover its authenticity. Philosophy must be guided by experience, and must rank the characters inscribed on the soul by grace at least as sacred as those inscribed by nature. Such persons need not that any man should teach them, for they have an unction from the Holy One; and to them applies the highest of all congratulations: 'Blessed art thou; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven.'"12
These words contain the true explanation of Cairns's life. ”

“ Doubts and fears sometimes arise lest I should be indulging in a false and presumptuous hope, and, as there is great danger lest we should be deceived in this momentous concern, we cannot be too anxious in ascertaining whether our hope be that of the Gospel, as set forth in His Word of truth. Still, through the grace and mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ, whom, I trust upon scriptural grounds, I can call my Saviour, I am enabled to view death as a friend and as deprived of its sting, and this is a source of great comfort to me and cheers my drooping mind. ”

“ This is a wish, a prayer, a fervent desire often expressed to the Almighty Former and Guide of the spirits of men, mingled with the hope that, if not already, at least some time, this accordance of faith will be attained, this living union realised with the great Teacher, Sacrifice, and Restorer of our fallen race. You will pardon this manifestation of the gratitude and affection of your pupil and friend, who, if he knew a higher, would gladly give it as a payment of a debt too great to be expressed. ”

“ David Cairns, who had fortunately arrived the evening before. His brother William, on account of his bodily infirmity, remained below. The end was evidently near, but he was conscious at intervals, and his voice when he spoke was clear and firm. "You are very ill, John," said his brother. "Oh no," he replied, "I feel much better." "But you are in good hands?" "Yes, in the best of hands." Then his mind began to wander, and he spoke more brokenly: "There is a great battle to fight, but the victory is sure ... God in Christ ... Good men must unite and identify themselves with the cause." ”

“ All the family were fond of books, and the small store of volumes, mostly of old Scotch divinity, in the little bookcase at Dunglass was well thumbed. But reading of a lighter kind was also indulged in, and on winter nights, when the mother was plying her spinning-wheel and the father had taken down his cobbler's box and was busily engaged patching the children's shoes, it was a regular practice for John to sit near the dim oil-lamp and read to the rest. ”

“ At the University, Cairns heard four or five lectures daily, taking among others the courses of Neander on Christian Dogmatics, Trendelenburg on History of Philosophy, and Schelling, the last of the great philosophers of the preceding generation, on Introduction to Philosophy. Of these, Schelling impressed him least, and Neander most. Through life he had a deep reverence for Neander, whom he regarded, with perhaps premature enthusiasm, as the man who shared with Schleiermacher the honour of restoring Germany to a believing theology. ”

“ A few weeks later he and his sister removed to Edinburgh, where they were joined in the autumn by their brother William. William Cairns, who had been schoolmaster at Oldcambus for thirty-two years, was in many respects a notable man. Deprived, as we have seen, in early manhood of the power of walking, he had set himself to improve his mind and had acquired a great store of general information. He was shrewd, humorous, genial, and intensely human, and had made himself the centre of a large circle of friends, many of whom were to be found far beyond the bounds of his native parish and county. ”

“ Neander is out of all sight the most wonderful being in the University. For knowledge, spirituality, good sense, and indomitable spirit of the finest discretion on moral subjects, the old man is a real marvel every way. In private he is the kindest but also the most awkward of mortals. His lectures on Dogmatik and Sittenlehre I value beyond all others, and I would gladly have come to Berlin to hear him alone. ”

“ But a course which he had on Biblical Theology seemed to be hampered by a too rigid view of Inspiration, which did not allow him to lay sufficient stress on the different types of doctrine corresponding to the different individualities of the writers. And when, after the death of Principal Harper, he took over the entire department of Systematic Theology, his lectures on this, the "Queen of sciences," while full of learning and sometimes rising to grandeur, gave one on the whole a sense of incompleteness, even of fragmentariness. ”

“ No one who is living in communion with Jesus Christ, and exercising that series of affections towards Him which Christianity at once prescribes and creates, can doubt the reality of that supernatural system to which he has been thus introduced; and nothing more is necessary than to appeal to his own experience and belief, which is here as valid and irresistible as in regard to the existence of God, of moral distinctions, or of the material world. He has no reason to trust the one class of beliefs which he has not, to trust the other.... ”

“ It was not only the brilliance of his University career that led to this expectation, for, remarkable as that career had been, there have been many men since his time who, so far as mere prize taking is concerned, have equalled or surpassed him—men who never aroused and would not have justified any high-pitched hopes about their future. But Cairns, in addition to gaining academic distinctions, seems to have impressed his contemporaries in a quite exceptional degree with a sense of his power and promise. ”

“ This living contact with a living person by faith and prayer is, like all other life, ultimate and mysterious, and must be accepted by him in whom it exists as its own sufficient explanation and reason, just as the principles of natural intelligence and conscience, to which it is something superadded, and with which, in this point of view, though in other respects higher, it is co-ordinate. ”

“ I got yesterday sent me, per post, a lecture by John Cairns on 'Rationalism, Ritualism, and Pure Religion,' or some such title, and have read it with interest, attention, and a good deal of admiration of its ability and, on the whole, of its spirit. But I can see from it that he is not the man to grapple with the scepticism of the age. He has not sufficient sympathy with it, he has not lived in its atmosphere, he has not visited its profoundest or tossed in its stormiest depths. ”

“ Be that as it may, every Whitsunday term-day sees the country roads thronged with carts conveying furniture and bedding from one farm to another. In front of the pile sits the hind's wife with her younger children, while the hind himself with his older boys and girls walks beside the horse, or brings up the rear, driving the family cow before him. In some cases there is a flitting every year, and instances have even been known in which anxiety to preserve an unbroken tradition of annual removals has been satisfied by a flitting from one house to another on the same farm. ”

“ The economy of the race is visible in their measure for the dead, and contrasts wonderfully with the roominess and delicate adornment of German churchyards in general. The hoar antiquity of the place is increased by a wilderness of alders which grow up around the walls and amidst the stones, twisted, tangled, stunted, desolately old and yet renewing their youth, a true type of the scattered, bruised, and peeled, yet ineradicable Israel itself. ”

“ Among his fellow-students at the Hall were several young men of brilliant promise, such as John Ker, who had been first prizeman in the Logic class in Hamilton's first session, W.B. Robertson, Alexander MacEwen, Joseph Leckie, and William Graham. Of these, Graham, bright, witty, versatile, the most notorious of punsters and the most illegible of writers, was his chief intimate, and their friendship continued unbroken and close for half a century.
But meanwhile the shadow was deepening over the home at Dunglass. All through the autumn and early winter his father was slowly sinking. ”

“ It was to the ministry, as thus understood, that Cairns had devoted himself at the close of his University course and again just before he took license as a probationer, when for a short time, as we have seen, he had been drawn aside by the attractions of "sacred literature." He never thought of becoming a minister and was putting his main strength into philosophy and theology. ”

“ But Cairns was no mere preacher and teacher. He put out his full strength as truly in his pastoral work as in his work for and in the pulpit. He visited his large congregation statedly once a year, offering prayer in each house, and hearing the children repeat a psalm or portion of Scripture which he had prescribed the year before. He timed these visits so accurately that he could on one occasion banter one of his elders on the fact that he had received more than his due in one year, because the last visitation had been on the 1st of January and this one was on the 31st of December. ”

“ It was but the outer world, the non-ego, standing at the mercy of speculation, waiting to be confirmed or abolished in the next debate; while the inner world, in which truth, beauty, and goodness had their eternal seat, should still survive and be all in all. ”

“ No language can give an idea of its first impression. At one end one sees innumerable masses of grey weather-beaten stones in every grotesque angle of incidence and coincidence, but all rude and mean, covered with mystic Hebrew letters and half-buried amid long grass, nettles, and weeds. ”

“ In the United Presbyterian Synod there was a small minority of sturdy Voluntaries who, while not opposed to Union, were apprehensive that the price to be paid for it would be the partial surrender of their testimony in behalf of their distinctive principle. They did not wish to impose their beliefs on others, but they were anxious to reserve to themselves full liberty to hold and propagate their views in the United Church, and they were not sure that, by accepting the Articles of Agreement, they were in fact doing this. ”

“ Wherever he went he attracted large crowds, on whom his rugged natural eloquence produced a deep impression. It has been recorded that on one occasion, while a vast audience to which he had been preaching in an Edinburgh church was dispersing, a man was overheard expressing his admiration to his neighbour in language more enthusiastic than proper: "He's a deevil o' a preacher!" ”

“ When James left home, the shepherding at Ayton Hill was taken up by his brother John. Though only a lad in his teens, he was in every respect, except in physical strength, already a man. He was steady and thoughtful, handy and capable in farm work, especially in all that concerned the care of sheep, for which he had a natural and probably an inherited instinct. He was also held in great regard by the Rev. David Ure, the earnest and kindly minister of the Burgher Meeting-house, which stood behind the Castle woods at the lower end of Ayton village. ”

“ Above the road-bridge, and to the right of the wooded dean, are the noble trees and parks of Dunglass grounds. The mansion-house, a handsome modern building, part of which rises to a height of five storeys, is built only some eight or ten feet from the brink of the dean, on its western or East Lothian side. About fifty yards farther west are the ivy-covered ruins of a fine Gothic church, whose massive square tower and stone roof are still tolerably complete. This church before the Reformation had collegiate rank, and is now the sole remaining relic of the ancient village of Dunglass. ”

“ It has been truly said of him that "he never all his life got away from David Inglis and Stockbridge any more than Carlyle got away from John Johnston and Ecclefechan." According to the Seceder view, there is no more sublime calling on earth than that of the Christian ministry, and that calling is one which concerns itself first and chiefly with the conversion of sinners and the edifying of saints. This work is so awful in its importance, and so beneficent in its results, that it must take the chief place in a minister's thoughts and in the disposition of his time ”

“ His three nephews, who during the Edinburgh period were staying in town studying for the ministry, always spent Saturday afternoon at Spence Street, and sometimes a student friend would come with them. Dr. Cairns was usually free on such occasions to devote an hour or two to his young friends. He was always ready to enter into discussions on philosophical problems that happened to be interesting them, and the power and ease with which he dealt with these gave an impression as of one heaving up and pitching about huge masses of rock. ”

“ The father's wages rarely exceeded £30 a year, and they never all his life reached £40. They were mostly paid in kind. So many bolls of oats, of barley and of peas, so many carts of coals, so many yards of growing potatoes, a cow's grass, the keep of two sheep and as many pigs, and a free house,—these, which were known as the gains, were the main items in the account. This system gave considerable opportunity for management on the part of a thrifty housewife, and for such management there were few to surpass the housewife in the shepherd's cottage at Dunglass. ”

“ Russell was the son of a Perthshire parish minister, but his parents were dead, and he lived with an uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Wilson, whose own family consisted of two sons and three daughters. Cairns was introduced by Russell to the Wilson family, and soon became intimate with them. His special friend—at last the dearest friend he had in this world—was the younger son, George, afterwards the well-known chemist and Professor of Technology in the University of Edinburgh. No two men could be less alike—George Wilson with a bright, alert, nimble mind ”

“ It is true that there was nothing in the nature of things to prevent the Free and United Presbyterian Churches coming together in presence of an Established Church. As a matter of fact, they have done so since Dr. Cairns's death, though not without secessions, collective and individual. But experience had shown that it was the existence of an Established Church, towards which the Anti-Union party had turned longing eyes, which was the determining factor in the wrecking of the Union negotiations. ”

“ The greatest increase which it admits of is its sympathetic kindling in the hearts of others, not least of those who know by experience the pain of speculation, the truth that he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. I know you will indulge these expressions to one more in earnest than in former years, more philanthropic, more confident that he knows in whom he has believed, more impressed with the duty of bearing everywhere a testimony to the convictions which have given him a positive hold at once of truth and happiness. ”

“ These lives, otherwise commonplace and unlovely, have been lighted up by a perpetual vision of the unseen and the eternal; and this has stimulated their intellectual powers and has so widened their whole outlook upon life as to raise them high above those of their own class who lived only for the present. ”

“ In truth, we had much of the character of childhood in these pursuits—light-heartedness, wonder, boundless hope, engrossment with the present, carelessness of the future. Our old world daily became new ”

“ But it does not appear that either his heart or his conscience were ever fully engaged in the work. He never seemed as if he were fighting for his life, because he always seemed to have another and an independent ground of certainty on which he based his real defence. There is a passage in his Life of Clark which bears upon this point so closely that it will be well to quote it here:—
"The Christian student is as conscious of direct intercourse with Jesus Christ as with the external world, or with other minds. This is the very postulate of living Christianity. ”