4 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 



rather wildly asserts ' the clergy of England to have pro- 

 duced the most valuable works in theory and practice.' 

 It might fairly have been retorted on Johnson that, 

 were this so, the physicians at least had ministered but 

 poorly to themselves, by quoting to him his own 

 remark that he had never once met with a sincerely 

 religious English clergyman; but Bozzy, patriotic for 

 once, fell upon the defence of faithful discharge of 

 pulpit ministrations and poor endowments. It might 

 have been wiser to have fallen back on the long and 

 militant struggle of the Church of Scotland for her 

 existence, wiser still to have based the defence on 

 national and psychological grounds. Nothing in the 

 Scottish character is more remarkable than the absence 

 of the feeling that led Luther and Wesley to a constant 

 introspection, or at least to its frank outward expression 

 and effusive declaration of their spiritual state. Some 

 little knowledge of this national trait we think would 

 have saved much windy and remote declamation about 

 fanaticism, gloomy austerity, and enthusiasm that 

 mental bugbear of the eighteenth century, and well-nigh 

 sole theological stock-in-trade of the gentlemanly and 

 affected school of Hume and Robertson. The absence 

 of anything like mysticism either in the nation or in 

 its theology has been, therefore, unfavourable to the 

 appearance of any cheap or verbal pietism. Calvinism, 

 it may be added, is poor in comparison with Luther- 

 anism, poorer still when contrasted in this respect with 

 the Roman Church ; for, while the former has Behmen 



