Glasgow’s economic growth was so spectacular that it has virtually monopolized the attention of historians to the exclusion of its Presbyterian pietism, the other remarkable fact of its eighteenth-century history. One contemporary put the paradox well when he wrote that in the middle of the century, ‘the chief objects that occupied the minds of the citizens were commerce and religion, the chief means of acquiring importance among them were wealth and piety’.7 This pietism had deep tap-roots which have never been properly studied. Before the Reformation, when Glasgow was merely a regional trading port, the city’s status in national life depended entirely on its archbishopric and its university. Thereafter, for reasons which are far from clear, the south-west of Scotland became the breeding ground for a radical Presbyterianism that held strict views about sin, grace and the salvation of the elect, and regarded secular and even ecclesiastical authority with the greatest distrust. Popular, revivalist preaching flourished there throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, deeply troubling the leaders of the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches alike. This was where the seditious covenanting movement had flourished during the Restoration period, threatening civil government as well as the Established Church, and it continued to spawn the radical, antinomian sects that troubled the restored Presbyterian Church after 1690. Most striking of all to Scots of Smith’s generation, this was where the Cambuslang Revival of 1742 began, a radical movement which seemed for a moment to threaten a reversion to the bloody sectarian guerrilla warfare of the previous century and troubled moderate Presbyterians like John Clerk of Penicuick, who, recalling the radical conventicles of covenanting days, feared that this new movement would once again encourage the people ‘to goe a gading after conventicles’.8
Inevitably, Glasgow became the focal point for this radical piety. It played host to the Kirk’s General Assembly of 1638, when it had voted for the abolition of episcopacy. During the Interregnum, the university became a notable covenanting seminary under the direction of its formidable Principal, Robert Baillie. During the Restoration the city acquired a reputation for conventicling which the town council and government were never fully able to eradicate. After 1688, its Dissenting population grew rapidly to the point that by the later eighteenth century, over 40 per cent of the population were Dissenters, most of them members of radical secessionist sects. Throughout the century the local presbytery and synod had a well-earned reputation for doctrinal orthodoxy and remained implacably hostile to any more ‘moderate’ attempt to develop a Presbyterianism which held less pessimistic views of human nature, civil society and the possibilities of redemption. The city’s culture was deeply influenced by this pietism. As Defoe noted, Glasgow’s sabbatarianism was exceptional even by Scottish standards.9 ‘People were prevented by authority from walking on the Lord’s Day,’ John Gibson, the city’s historian, noted in 1777. ‘No lamps were lighted on that evening because it was presumed that no one would be out of his own house after sun-set; the indulgences, and innocent amusements of life were either unknown or were little practised.’10
Glaswegian Presbyterian orthodoxy had always played an important direct or indirect part in shaping the history of the university and it continued doing so for the next century. Like the other post-Reformation universities, Glasgow’s primary responsibility had been to train boys for the parishes and schoolhouses of a newly reformed church, a task whose importance John Knox, for one, had never underrated. ‘Above all things,’ he had warned the General Assembly in 1572, ‘preserve the Church from the bondage of the Universities. Persuade them to rule themselves peaceably, and order their schools in Christ; but subject never the pulpit to their judgement, neither yet exempt them from your jurisdiction.’11 Knox’s words were meant as a warning. But they were also the words of a master strategist who well knew that universities had a key role to play in the making of a godly community, words that were never forgotten by the clergy or laity.
It had always been easy for the Kirk and Crown to interfere in university affairs; unlike many Oxbridge colleges, the tiny Scottish universities were too poor and politically vulnerable to resist political intrusion. What is more, the religious and political life of the country was so volatile in the century and a half after the Reformation that interference became a continuing fact of university life in Glasgow and elsewhere. Like the other Scottish universities, Glasgow was purged during the Reformation, in the later 1630s, after the Restoration and after the Glorious Revolution (the Aberdeen colleges were additionally purged after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715). In each case the university’s Principal, and the professors and regents who undertook all the teaching and who refused to sign the appropriate oaths of loyalty and confessions of faith, were removed, their ‘dictates’ often being scrutinized for evidence of heterodoxy or heresy. Strict Presbyterians were particularly assiduous in this task. After the re-establishment of Presbyterianism in 1638 and in 1690, the Scottish universities were purged of Episcopalians and an attempt was made to reconstruct the philosophy curriculum, on which the entire system of university education was built. The regents of the five universities were instructed to produce a new, doctrinally wholesome philosophy textbook for compulsory use in all of the universities. The first attempt in the 1640s never got off the ground. Later the project collapsed as authors squabbled about its contents. Nevertheless, the whole episode showed that the orthodox Presbyterians fully appreciated the importance of the universities and the philosophy curriculum in building a Godly state. Nor, as we shall see, was this message lost on their enemies. For one of the oddest paradoxes in the history of the university in Glasgow, this most strictly Presbyterian of cities, was that it became the intellectual powerhouse of a highly successful attempt by moderate Presbyterian professors to develop an alternative Presbyterian academic culture, which would be more in tune with the demands of a Whig regime and the polite manners demanded by a commercial age.
This remarkable exercise in rebuilding Glasgow University’s academic culture had its roots in the Glorious Revolution and the restoration of Presbyterianism in 1690. At one level the university did quite well out of the Revolution. Between 1690 and 1720, the Crown supplied two formidable and politically well-connected Principals. These two men, William Dunlop (1690–1701) and John Stirling (1701–28), were responsible for establishing chairs in Ecclesiastical History, Botany, Law and Medicine, and for extracting funds from the Crown for a better botanical garden and a new collection of scientific instruments. And although it took time and persistence, the two Principals succeeded in improving the university’s precarious finances. It is perhaps a measure of their success that the number of students rose from around 150 in the 1650s to around 400 in 1702, a significant number of whom came from Presbyterian communities in England and Ireland. During Stirling’s period of office, however, the university developed an increasingly uneasy relationship with the city. For one thing, Stirling’s firm and imperious style of management led to bitter infighting within the faculty and between himself and the students. This reached a climax in 1717 when he rashly attempted to deprive students of their constitutional right to elect the Rector, with whom many of the Principal’s powers of governing the university were shared – a measure which led to riots, expulsions, litigation and an appeal from the students to Parliament. What made matters worse was that these confusions became associated with well-founded clerical suspicions that the university was becoming a hotbed of heterodoxy. The Crown had been worried by Glasgow’s radical Presbyterian culture for a long time, and had encouraged the appointment of professors who would teach a moderate Presbyterianism that stressed the need for a more consensual, less adversarial relationship between the Kirk and civil society than that favoured by the orthodox.
No one was less orthodox than John Simson. He had been educated at Edinburgh and Leiden and was appointed to the Divinity chair in 1708. By 1715 he had become notorious among the radical clergy of the west of Scotland for daring to suggest that the principles of the foundat
ional credal document of the Kirk, the Westminster Confession of Faith, could be defended on rational grounds; as his enemies put it, he attributed ‘too much to natural reason and the power of corrupt nature’ and not enough to revelation and ‘the effectiveness of free grace’. Between 1716 and 1726 he became the bête noire of the orthodox. He was continually in trouble with the local presbytery and the General Assembly for fostering heresy in the forms of Arminianism, Socinianism and Arianism, in spite of strenuous efforts by the college to resist clerical intrusion into university affairs. In 1729, after protracted litigation and pressure from the Crown, Simson was finally ordered to stop teaching divinity. Throughout Smith’s student days, he was to be an elderly reminder of the hazards of teaching theology on rational principles in the heartland of orthodox Presbyterianism.
These academic wranglings gave the rising man of Scottish politics, the Earl of Islay, the opportunity to strike. His close connections with the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, ensured that his power would grow rapidly during the 1720s, to the point that he became known as ‘the uncrowned king of Scotland’. He was an intelligent and cultivated man, with a genuine interest in experimental science and letters and in the future of the Scottish universities. In 1726 he arranged a Visitation to overhaul the university’s constitution and curriculum. New chairs in Logic and Metaphysics, in Moral Philosophy and in Natural Philosophy were established and the teaching duties of every university professor were carefully defined to prevent jurisdictional squabbles within the new professoriate. From thenceforth until his death in 1761, Islay was to keep a watchful eye on the affairs of the university. His advice was sought on the election of most professors and was generally decisive. His support for Francis Hutcheson’s appointment to the Moral Philosophy chair in 1729, and for Smith’s to the Logic and Metaphysics chair in 1751, was crucial; so was his opposition to David Hume’s bid for the Logic and Metaphysics chair in 1752 following Smith’s move to the chair of Moral Philosophy. He was a relentless opponent of orthodox, high-flying Presbyterians, whom he thought of as ‘Levites’, and an equally committed supporter of the moderates. During the 1730s Islay carefully built up a party of supporters in the university, including Francis Hutcheson, Alexander Dunlop, the Professor of Greek, Alexander Rosse, the Professor of Humanity (or Latin), and Robert Simson, the Professor of Mathematics, the professors who were to be responsible for much of Smith’s university education.12
Hutcheson’s appointment to the chair of Moral Philosophy in 1729 was the most important moment in the shaping of this new academic culture. This was not simply because he was the undisputed leader of the moderate Presbyterian group in the university but because he was able to give ideological and intellectual definition to a new philosophy curriculum. His was the voice of a new sort of academic philosophy, tolerant in its attitudes to religion, consensually minded in its views about the relationship between the Church and civil society, radical Whig in its attitude to politics, and committed to a new approach to the problem of educating the laity and clergy of a modern Christian state. Indeed, it was as an exemplary professor as well as a moral philosopher of the first rank that his teaching was to appeal to Smith. Hutcheson was one of the many Ulstermen who had studied for the ministry at Glasgow University. He had been introduced to moral philosophy by his predecessor, Gersholm Carmichael, a highly intelligent, orthodox Presbyterian of some originality who had given him a sophisticated introduction to Pufendorf’s natural jurisprudence, and to modern theology by John Simson, who had showed him the dangers and difficulties of trying to develop a system of Christian apologetics based on natural law rather than revelation. Hutcheson returned to Ireland in 1717, ran an influential dissenting academy in Dublin and became a leading member of an intellectual circle that revolved round Viscount Molesworth, one of the most influential Whig ideologues of the day and one of the most important advocates of university reform.
Molesworth encouraged Hutcheson to set his theological interests in a wider ideological framework, and to think about the role of university education in a free state. He was a radical Whig who was deeply preoccupied with the problem of preserving and perfecting the liberties the British had won in 1688. ‘Must frequent Blood-lettings be indispensably necessary to preserve our Constitution?’ he wrote. ‘Is it not possible for us to render vain and untrue that Sarcasm of Foreigners, who object to us that our English Kings have either too little Power, or too much, and that therefore we must expect no settled or lasting Peace? Shall we for ever retain the ill Character they give us of the most mutable and inconstant Nation of the World?’ In an age in which Britain was becoming ‘more considerable’ in the world, it was time for Britons to broaden their knowledge of the world and attend to the culture and education of their political leaders. This meant reforming the country’s universities, which had become hotbeds of priestcraft and provided an education only fit for schoolmasters. Molesworth was contemptuous of most modern university teachers, their teaching and their politics:
The weightier Matters of true Learning, whereof one has occasion every hour; such as good Principles, Morals, the improvement of Reason, the love of Justice, the value of Liberty, the duty owing to ones Countrey and the Laws, are either quite omitted, or slightly passed over: Indeed they forget not to recommend frequently to [their students] what they call the Queen of all Vertues, viz. Submission to Superiors, and an entire blind Obedience to Authority.13
By the 1730s Molesworth’s disciples were well positioned in the Scottish universities: George Turnbull in Marischal College, Aberdeen, William Wishart in Edinburgh and Hutcheson in Glasgow, all sharing the ambition to ‘promote the interests of liberty and vertue and to reform the taste of the young generation’ in what Turnbull described as ‘this narrow and bigoted country’.14 The new curriculum, like that of David Miller’s school at Kirkcaldy, was to be based on the study of the ancients who, as Molesworth put it, ‘were deservedly look’d upon as Supports of the State, they had their dependence wholly upon it: and as they could have no Interest distinct from it, they laid out themselves towards the advancing and promoting the good of it, insomuch that we find the very good Fortune of their Commonwealth often lasted no longer than they did’.15 This gratifying portrait of professors and philosophers as the custodians of the liberties of modern Britain was one with which Hutcheson sympathized and one which would attract Smith profoundly. Hutcheson quickly established himself as a reforming, imaginative and immensely hard-working professor. He abandoned the age-old practice of dictating lectures in Latin and turned his moral philosophy lectures into celebrated rhetorical performances that attracted students from England, Ireland and Edinburgh. Hugh Blair, the first Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Letters at Edinburgh, was one of his pupils:
Besides his constant lectures five days of the week on natural religion, morals, jurisprudence and government; he had another lecture three days of the week, in which he explained some of the finest writers of antiquity, both Greek and Latin, on the subject of morals, and every Sunday-evening, he gave a weekly lecture on the truth and excellency of the Christian religion, to a very crowded auditory. Fond of well-disposed youth, entering into all their concerns, encouraging and befriending them on all occasions, he gained the esteem and affections of the students in a very high degree. To his honour it will be ever acknowledged, that he raised and supported an excellent spirit, and a high taste for literature in that university; and was particularly happy in reviving the study of antient learning, especially the Greek, which had been much neglected. Such an ardour for knowledge, and such a spirit of inquiry, did he spread every where around him, that … the usual conversation of the students, at their social walks and visits, turned with great keenness upon subjects of learning and taste.16
Hutcheson’s friend and colleague William Leechman commented that this ‘rational enthusiasm for the interests of learning, liberty, religion, virtue and human happiness’ penetrated all of Hutcheson’s teaching. In teaching natural theology and moral
philosophy, ‘when he led [his students] from the view of the external world to the contemplation of the internal one, the soul of man, and showed them like instances of Divine Wisdom and benignity in the contrivance of its moral constitution, they were filled with fresh delight and wonder, and discerned new and encreasing proofs of the glorious perfections of the Father of our spirits’. His lectures on politics emphasized ‘the importance of civil and religious liberty to the happiness of mankind’ and set out to awaken and shape his pupils’ love of public spirit. For ‘public spirit in him was not a vague and undetermined kind of order, for something unknown or not distinctly understood; but it was an enlightened and universal zeal for every branch of human happiness, and the means of promoting it.’17 In a celebrated sermon delivered on 7 April 1741, a year after Smith had left for Oxford, Leechman left a portrait of the moderate Presbyterian minister which nicely catches the elements of the civic personality that Glasgow’s Molesworthians set out to inculcate in lay as well as clerical students. The modern minister, Leechman observed, must be set apart from the world by his personal integrity, his manners and an ‘unbyass’d state of mind’. He must be able to move freely and easily in the world, retaining as much purity of mind ‘as if he were living outside the world’. He must be wary of the blandishments of the great for, ‘while we shew all due regard to their stations and characters, it must appear at the same time, that we have a greater regard for truth, virtue, piety, and decency: while we avoid everything like insolence and pertness, on the one hand, and abject cringing on the other’. In a word, Leechman concluded, using an expression which orthodox Presbyterians regarded as an abomination, he must cultivate a ‘friendship’ with God.18
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