As the title indicates, this volume covers two distinct but closely related themes: social conditions in Dundee in the 1830s, and the religious revival associated with the ministry of Robert Murray McCheyne in the city's St Peter's parish during these same years. The first part draws on some contemporary documents relating to the local history of Dundee, and the resulting picture is a sombre one. The Victorians may have prided themselves on being ‘people of the Book’, but the Book had little influence on industrial and commercial practices. Wages in the city's linen and jute industries were low, bread was dear, housing was scarce, rents were high and working conditions grim. Jobs in mill and factory went to women and children because they cost less, the resulting role-reversal left many men with little to do apart from drinking and brawling, and the lives of generations of youngsters were blighted by atrociously long working hours. It is hardly surprising that many never reached the age of 20.
Overtaken by the mass displacements of the Industrial Revolution, the church was overwhelmed. The impossibly large size of parishes, the shortage of church buildings, seat-rents which placed the pews beyond the reach of the poor, the laid-back attitude of many of the clergy, all combined to ensure that the urban poor quickly dropped below the church's radar. Patronage, too, had played its part, McCheyne going so far as to claim that it had cursed the nation's pulpits with ‘dumb dogs’. But, then, his own attitude was hardly above criticism. ‘The lower orders are very well in their way,’ he once wrote, ‘but should be kept in their place.’
It was into this situation, well described by McLennan, that McCheyne was inducted in November 1836. He faced a daunting task. St Peter's was a new charge, erected within the historical parish of St John's, and its managers defined very bluntly what they expected of their first minister: he was to ‘excavate’ a congregation for himself out of the surrounding district of 4,000 souls, many without even the most tenuous church connection. He rose to the challenge, and quickly began to make an impact, not only by his preaching, but by his policy of systematic visitation, his infectious sense of spiritual urgency and (above all, as he would have said) by unceasing prayer, which was ‘more powerful than preaching’.
McCheyne was actually in Palestine as a member of a Church of Scotland Mission of Inquiry when the revival began under his temporary replacement, William Chalmers Burns, and when he returned it was already in full flood. The simplest definition of a revival is that it is a movement in which a large number of people undergo a religious conversion within a short space of time, and what happened in Dundee certainly matches this definition, though McCheyne was always reluctant to give even an estimate of the numbers affected. He would speak only of the number counselled. In the autumn of 1839, for example, six to seven hundred people had sought counselling; many others under serious spiritual concern had never approached anyone; and many who had shown concern had ‘gone back’.
The story of the revival is already a path well-trodden, and McLennan's account has little new to add, though modern readers will find themselves transported into a world that spoke a very different religious language from our own; and many will be repelled by the accounts of swoonings, shrieks and other ‘excesses’. Neither McCheyne nor Burns ever encouraged these, nor did they view them as signs of real spiritual power. Indeed, their initial policy was that anyone afflicted by such distress should be removed from the meetings, but this was abandoned when they realised that the physical symptoms were no more than the natural effects of the strong emotions which were inevitable when people saw themselves as sinners facing judgement to come. However, the shrieks and swoonings affected only a minority. More often the feelings were expressed in quiet sobbings and ‘meltings’ evoked, not by the fear of hell, but by ‘the most tender gospel invitations’.
McCheyne and Burns were hardly stereotypical ‘revivalist’ preachers. Both were possessed of profound theological insight, Burns was a brilliant linguist and McCheyne a keen and competent Hebraist. They never held ‘revival meetings’ and never deviated from their determination to limit themselves to preaching ‘the pure gospel of the grace of God’. It was no ‘simple’ gospel, any more than was that of Jonathan Edwards, but it proved itself ‘the saving power of God’ (Rom 1:16).
