"An Impossibility" William Robertson Smith VI

Principal Robert Rainy of New College Edinburgh was the single most powerful man in the Free Church of Scotland in the later 19th Century. Based in Edinburgh as he was, Rainy was at the centre of a web of committees that had been evolved by the Disruption era leaders to deal in particular with the financial matters of the Church. Only Rainy fully understood this network, and his position in the Capital made it only natural that he should run the committees. A.L. Drummond and James Bulloch wrote of Rainy, "all he lacked was the triple crown" (The Church in Late Victorian Scotland [Edinburgh, St. Andrew's Press, 1978] P. 308). Presbyterianism's democratic element is supposed to preclude such a personal rule in the Church (no archbishops allowed!), but Rainy was an archbishop in fact, if not in title. The backing of Rainy could ensure that a motion passed the Assembly, and the absence of Rainy's backing could sink a promising motion.

At first Rainy had cautiously defended Robertson Smith, but Rainy's defence of the accused professor was not founded on any agreement between the two, rather it was based on Rainy's belief that Free Church scholars should be allowed academic freedom, not tightly controlled by the word of the Assembly. A Free Church professor had a perfect right to hold German Higher Critical views of Deutronomy, he held, even though he personally disagreed with those views. But, as the case went on, Rainy began to feel that Robertson Smith was teaching as facts critical views which had in fact a very slender basis indeed. So when Robert Rainy was asked to lecture at the English Presbyterian College (then located in London) in 1878, and chose as his subject The Bible and Criticism, all eyes were turned to London.

In his opening lecture Rainy explained (no doubt to the disappointment of his audience), "I am not to be understood as deciding questions which are at present awaiting decision before the courts of my own Church" (Robert Rainy, The Bible and Criticism [London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1878] P. 5. All subsequent quotations of Rainy are from this book unless otherwise stated). Yet Rainy was really far too canny to leave the questions entirely untouched, in fact dropping some pretty broad hints for Robertson Smith and his supporters.

For one thing, the lectures revealed that Robert Rainy was a decided conservative on the matter of Biblical criticism. If he was tolerant of Robertson Smith, he was not an ally whom Robertson Smith could rely upon. Rainy firmly believed that there was only one Isaiah (Pp. 115-6), while it was one of the 'assured results of Biblical Criticism' that the book of Isaiah was a composite work by at least two different authors many centuries apart. Secondly, Rainy's great aim in the lectures was to inculcate "a calm, self-restraining spirit, which compares results and does justice to other men's points of view" (P. 77). The words were a warning to Robertson Smith and his supporters. Rainy also thought that Robertson Smith's most deadly enemies were lacking in charity, but he reserved his harshest words for the more extravagant of the modern Biblical critics.
"There is an eagerness in the critic's nature; he would always be seeing something, especially something that common people cannot see, or at any rate have not seen. Therefore, unless he is exceptionally self-restraining, he may persuade himself that he is seeing something remarkable, when all the time he is deluding himself with mere arbitrary combinations." (P. 98).

Rainy was not impressed with Robertson Smith, and as he went on with his lectures the depth of that displeasure could almost be felt - it can still be felt across the centuries. What Rainy had to say to the young professor in particular we shall see, God willing, next time.