Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/448

428 Lothian's at Newbattle. He very soon, we are told, lost all hope of being able to build up the church by the means which the Government had set on foot, and his work, as he confessed to Burnet, “seemed to him a fighting against God.” He did, however, what he could, governing his diocese (that of Dunblane) with the utmost mildness, as far as he could preventing the persecuting measures which were in active operation elsewhere, and endeavouring to persuade the Presbyterian clergy to sink their differences and come to an accommodation with their Episcopal brethren. In this last matter he seems to have succeeded no better with the Presbyterians than Baxter in England did in a similar attempt with the Episcopalian party; and, after a hopeless struggle of three or four years to induce the Government to put a stop to their fierce persecution of the Covenanters, he at length determined to resign his bishopric, and went up to London in 1665 for this purpose. He told the king that “he could not concur in the planting the Christian religion itself in such a manner, much less a form of government,” and so far worked upon the mind of Charles that he promised to enforce the adoption of milder measures. In the hope that this would be carried into effect, he returned to his diocese, but it does not appear that any material improvement took place. In 1669 Leighton again went to London and made fresh representations on the subject, which were so far attended to, but, partly perhaps from faults on the Presbyterian as well as the Episcopalian side, little result followed. The slight disposition, however, shown by the Government to accommodate matters appears to have inspired so much hope into Leighton’s mind that in the following year he agreed, though with a good deal of hesitation, to accept the archbishopric of Glasgow. In this new and higher sphere he redoubled his efforts with the Presbyterians to bring about some degree of conciliation with Episcopacy, but all was of no avail, and the only result of his attempts was to embroil himself with the hot-headed Episcopal party as well as with the Presbyterians. In utter despair, therefore, of being able to be of any further service to the cause of religion, he at length in 1674 threw up the archbishopric and retired, after a short stay, probably with his successor in the divinity chair, William Colville, within the precincts of Edinburgh university, to the house of his widowed sister, Mrs Lightmaker, at Broadhurst in Sussex. Here he spent the remaining ten years, in all likelihood the happiest, of his life, and died somewhat suddenly on a visit to London in 1684, in the seventy-fourth year of his age.

It is difficult to form a just or at least a full estimate of Leighton’s character. He stands almost alone in his age. In some respects he was immeasurably superior both in intellect and in piety to most of the Scottish ecclesiastics of his time; and yet he seems to have had almost no influence in moulding the characters or conduct of his contemporaries. One is half inclined to think that he would have shown himself a greater or at least a more complete man if a few natural weaknesses and imperfections had intermingled with his nobler qualities. So intense was his absorption in the love of God that little room seems to have been left in his heart for human sympathy or affection. Can it be that there was after all something to repel in his outward manner? Burnet tells us that he had never seen him to laugh, and very seldom even to smile. One can hardly forgive him for regarding Episcopacy so purely under the dry light of human reason after the horrible treatment which his excellent father had suffered from it. In other respects, too, he gives the impression of standing aloof from human interests and ties. It may go for little that he never married, but it was surely a curious idiosyncrasy in the man that he habitually cherished the wish (which was granted him) that he might die in an inn, where there could be no loving hand to support, no loving heart to cheer him. In fact, holy meditation seems to have been the one absorbing interest of his life. At Dunblane tradition still preserves the memory of “the good bishop,” silent and companionless, pacing up and down the sloping walk by the river's bank under the beautiful west window of his cathedral. And from a letter of the earl of Lothian to his countess it appears that, whatever other reasons Leighton might have had for resigning his charge at Newbattle, the main object which he had in view was to be left to his own thoughts. It is therefore on the whole not very wonderful that he was completely misjudged and even disliked both by the Presbyterian and the Episcopal party. Some of the bitter expressions of hatred towards him, however, on the part of the former, sound very strange to us who now know how holy, humble, and blameless the man really was. Thus in Naphtali it is said, “Mr Leighton, prelate of Dumblain, under a Jesuitical-like vizard of pretended holiness, humility, and crucifixion to the world, hath studied to seem to creep upon the ground, but always up the hill, toward promotion and places of more ease and honour, and as there is none of them all hath with a kiss so betrayed the cause and smitten religion under the fifth rib, and hath been such an offence to the godly, so there is none who by his way, practice, and expressions giveth greater suspicion of a popish affection, inclination, and design.” So also in the continuation of Robert Blair’s life by his son-in-law, William Ross, the most innocent of Leighton’s acts have a malicious interpretation put upon them. When he resigned Newbattle, he “pretended insufficiency for the ministry”; when he returned to Edinburgh as bishop and expressed an opinion in favour of the English liturgy and ceremonies, “it was suspected that he was popish and Jesuited”; when he refused the title of lord, and in other respects carried himself modestly and humbly, he was simply “a pawky prelate.” When he spoke in parliament in favour of the outed ministers, and thought that they ought to be “cherished and embraced” instead of persecuted, offending all the other prelates by the course he took, “it was difficult what to judge of his actings or sayings, he carried so smoothly among the ministers of his diocese.” Some, indeed, we are told, thought well of him, but others thought “that he spoke from a popish principle.” When he behaved sweetly and gently to the clergy of his diocese, telling them to hold their presbyteries and sessions as before, and suggesting without commanding any thing, it was “thought that he was but straking cream in their mouths at first.” When disgusted with the proceedings of the other bishops in “outing so many honest ministers and filling their places with insufficient and for the most part scandalous men,” and intimating his wish to demit his office in consequence, he was only “pretending to be displeased.” When the king wrote to the council that some of the most peaceable and moderate outed ministers might have liberty to preach, and Leighton pleaded that all might have the like liberty, it was “thought that he did this of purpose to oppose and crush it.”" Nothing that the good man could say or do brought upon him anything but suspicion and calumny. Even Wodrow, who generally gets credit for fairness and candour, tells us that “he was judged void of any doctrinal principles,” and that he was regarded “as very much indifferent to all professions which bore the name of Christian.” It is worth while to set over against these uncharitable and malignant insinuations the estimate which his intimate friend Bishop Burnet formed of him. At the conclusion of his Pastoral Care, he says, “I have now laid together with great simplicity what has been the chief subject of my thoughts for above thirty years. I was formed to them by a bishop that had the greatest elevation of soul, the largest compass of knowledge, the most mortified and heavenly disposition, that I ever yet saw in mortal; that had the greatest parts as well as virtue, with the perfectest humility that I ever saw in man, and had a sublime strain in preaching, with so grave a gesture, and such a majesty of thought, of language, and of pronunciation, that I never once saw a wandering eye where he preached, and have seen whole assemblies often melt in tears before him; and of whom I can say with great truth that, in a free and frequent conversation with him for above two and twenty years, I never knew him say an idle word, or one that had not a direct tendency to edification; and I never once saw him in any other temper but that which I wished to be in, in the last minutes of my life.” No one can study Leighton’s works without feeling that Burnet’s judgment of the man must have been the true one. We know not if anywhere, except in Holy Scripture, there is to be found so much of what seems to breathe the very breath of heaven, or to be the expression of a life quite apart from the life of this world. It was characteristic of him that he could never be made to understand that anything which he wrote possessed the smallest value. None of his works were published by himself, and it is stated that he actually left orders that all his MSS. should be destroyed after his death. But fortunately for the world this charge was disregarded. Like all the best writing, it seems to flow from his pen without effort. It is simply the easy unaffected outcome of his saintly nature, and hence it always carries the reader along with it without arresting the current of his thoughts or diverting his attention by brilliant flashes of imagination or curious turns of expression like what we find in Jeremy Taylor, Dr Donne, and others of that time. Throughout, however, it is the language of a scholar and a man of perfect literary taste; and with all its spirituality of thought there are no mystical raptures, and none of that luscious sensuousness which sometimes intermingles itself in the Scottish practical theology of the 17th century. No writer conveys a clearer or more elevated idea both of what Christian religion is and what 