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THE PRAYING MEN OF GOD The Highland
Clearances are a shameful blot on the Christian church, both Protestant and
Catholic. Their respective clergy, with a few notable exceptions, were
fully prepared to stand by and watch the Highland Clearances happen
without complaint. Worse still were the clergy, the majority it must be
said, who actively aided and supported the landowners in their odious work
of evicting the people of the clans from their ancestral lands. How could any
Praying Man of God watch such an injustice take place and remain silent?
How could they also take advantage of the Clearances to increase their own
wealth and comfort, even amidst the dreadful horrors of crop failure and
starvation? How could they stay silent during the horrors of the potato
blight, when cereals were shipped out of the Highlands to fetch a better
price in the south whilst Highland people starved? How could they remain
mute when the landowners had armed men guard the salmon rivers as the
people went hungry? The evil shepherds In the early
years of the 19th century, when the evictions of tenants began to bite in
Sutherland, Donald Macleod from Strathnaver, a stone mason and literate
recorder of events, noted the willingness of the clergy to turn a
blind eye and make profit from the misery of their flocks. He wrote how
the landlords built new manses for the men of the cloth, with carriage
roads to their doors and granted them a few acres of sheep pasturage, in
order that they might turn a tidy profit. In return for this, the
churchmen gave God's authority to so-called 'improvement' and threatened
those tenants who resisted eviction with eternal damnation. This threat of damnation from the clergy was used as one of the tools to remove the people of Clan Gunn from Kildonan. This, along with the legal writs of eviction and the threat of the bayonets of the 21st Foot, was enough to force the people to leave - some for dire plots of land on the Scottish coast and some for Canada.
The greedy praying hypocrites who aided and abetted the Highland Clearances David
MacKenzie was another church minister who benefited from his aiding and
abetting the Highland Clearances. The Duke of Sutherland handsomely
rewarded him with the Parish of Farr, an impressive manse, a fine church
and a glebe consisting of the best land in the area. This in exchange for
telling his flock that it was God's will they leave the land of their
ancestors and obey those whom God had placed above them. The landowners
appointed Church of Scotland ministers in breach of the Treaty of Union,
and those ministers sold their souls to the devils of eviction in return. Perhaps the
most despicable act of all was the inaction of church ministers during the
great famine of the mid 1830's. In Sutherland, of all 17 parish ministers not
one was moved to action by the suffering of the starving people. In their
sermons they stated that the Lord had sent the famine as a punishment for
the wickedness of the people, in order to bring them to repentance. During
these times, David MacKenzie had increased his landholdings, and on this
new land he demanded the removal of the eight families living upon it.
They were promptly driven out. In Alexander MacKenzie's classic 1883 book on the Highland Clearances, he states that the clergy in their sermons of 1833 in Sutherland espoused the following ungodly view: "that the Lord had a controversy with the land for the people's wickedness; and that in his providence, and even in his mercy, he had sent this scourge to bring them to repentance" What foul cesspit had these disgusting men of the cloth crawled from? They should have been defrocked and whipped. Instead they were handsomely rewarded by the landowners and their factors, for their evil deeds in pursuit of their own material gain. The good shepherd To their great credit, there were some in the church who did stand up to the landowners. One such was Mr Eric Findlater, a Free Church minister. In a sermon he rounded upon the oppressors of the people, the landowners and their factors: 'A
ravenous spirit of avarice seems to have spread like an epidemic and
seized on all those who were the owners of property in the Highlands. They
hastened to be rich, and in the determination to succeed they cast away
all claims of gratitude and justice. They became so blinded with this lust
after riches that the strong bond which had for ages knit chieftain and
clan became as withes which were broken in a moment - ancestral
associations were cast to the winds - those whose fathers had bled and
fought and died for their fathers were henceforth to be cast out - and a
sheep was now to rank higher than a man.' The scattering of the Gael There can be
no better example of avarice and greed corrupting the calling of those who
were supposed to be serving God and protecting the weak against the
strong. The brutality of the Highland Clearances was a test for the moral
fibre of the church and its ministers, and with a few honourable
exceptions they were found to be badly wanting. Caught between the
grasping greed and betrayal of clan chiefs and landowners, and the eternal
damnation promised by the ministers of the church if they did not leave
their lands, the clansmen and their families had no choice but to bow to
the inevitable.
Eviction and Displacement - Scotland No More The clan chiefs and the church in Scotland must bear much of the blame for the destruction of the Highland way of life, and for the destruction and scattering of its Gaelic speaking peoples. As John Prebble states in the closing lines of his book 'The Highland Clearances' :- 'The Lowlander has inherited the hills, and the tartan is a shroud' |
