(Witch Wood by John Buchan, 1927)
I am glad to be back home for a while, even with the heat. In late June and early July, I redeemed some flyer miles and visited Ireland for the first time, and wrapped up some loose ends in England. Book-buying was my primary motivation for returning to the U.K. I realize that books can be purchased over here, just not the ones I am looking for. With postal rates being what they are, once I am there it was actually far cheaper for me to just bring them back on the plane. And so, I purchased a number ahead of time, and they were waiting for me at my host’s home, high up in the North Yorkshire Dales. Over the next few days, I added to that number, considerably, while in the North of England.
I spent one day rooting around bookstores in Sedbergh, a town trying mightily to become England’s third “book town,” after Hay-on-Wye and Wigton. I was joined there by my now old friends, the Valentines and the Parker-Russells. Between these two talented couples there are three authors, two publishers, and an artist. I exercised remarkable restraint and winnowed my book haul down to a modest ten volumes or so. But with the books I already had, those my friends gifted me, and the books I purchased later, all in all I ended up toting forty-four volumes back to East Texas. The frenzy spent itself in the first five or six days, and I did not look at another book for the last ten days.
I have been pleasantly surprised with one of my Sedbergh finds: Witch Wood by John Buchan. A Scottish native, he was a respected British diplomat and politician, ending his career as Governor-General of Canada. Along the way, he found time to write twenty-eight novels, over forty works of non-fiction, as well as a number of collections of short stories and poetry. He is, of course, most noted for his thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, adapted to film by Alfred Hitchcock. But I was surprised to learn that it is this little book from 1927 that is considered his masterpiece.
Witch Wood is a set in the Scottish Lowlands in the years 1644 and 1645. Of course, the backdrop for the story is the second phase of the English Civil War, that long-running mash-up that pit cluelessness against fanaticism. W. C. Sellars, in 1066 and All That, quipped that the Cavaliers were “Wrong but Wromantic,” while the Roundheads were “Right but Repulsive.” This is mostly correct, though I am far from convinced that the Roundheads were anywhere near “right.” Driven by religious extremism, it was the Scottish Covenanters who sparked this conflagration, and they were, at least at that point, firmly in the camp of their English Puritan compatriots.
In this story, an earnest young Covenanter minister is assigned to the kirk at Woodilee. At first glance, the parish is as pious as you could hope for. Rev. David Sempill throws himself into his work with all the enthusiasm and idealism of youth. He gains their respect early on, and the parishioners listen attentively to his Sabbath sermons. But Sempill soon begins to feel that there is an impenetrable wall that separates him from his flock, one that he can never pierce. In time, he learns that things in Woodilee are not quite as they seem, and he is ultimately broken by the experience.
As the tale unfolds, Buchan savages 17th-century Scottish Calvinism. This is noteworthy, given that he was a Presbyterian himself, a lifelong member of the Free Church of Scotland. The chart below, at first glance resembling an electrical circuit board, is actually a flowchart of Scottish Presbyterianism. To find Buchan’s Free Church you go past the First and Second Secessions, and follow the main line until arriving at the Disruptions of 1843, from which this sect separated from the Church of Scotland; though it is not to be confused with its own offshoots—the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing), the United Free Church, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland or the Associated Presbyterian Church.
I have some pretty definite views about the perniciousness of old-school Calvinism myself. I’m not sure how many people really hold to its tenets today, however. That, my Presbyterian friends, and my own family’s 150-year history with the church temper my inclinations for intemperate opinionating. But these people were swimming in the same waters as our New England Puritans, and that net is spread wide over our history and behavior. But I will let Buchan do the speaking.
He skewers at least three core beliefs that he finds central to Scottish Covenanter thinking: a) that the Scottish kirk was the chosen vessel of God, b) and as such, their Election was uncontestable, and finally c) their view of Scripture as a sort of blueprint for constructing a church. These ideas in and of themselves do not condemn Reformed theology. I have lived my life in the American South and I have seen ample examples of all three, and mainly by those who are either specifically non-Calvinist, or more likely, those who could not begin to tell you what Calvinism was. In fact, it is not the modern Calvinists that you will find propagating these views.
The last item is the one that I have seen up close and personal. If Scripture is seen as a mere blueprint, and with everything that is already in place either wrong, largely so, or tainted with dreaded Papism, then it is up to you, Mr. Righteous Reformer, or Mr. Righteous Restorer, to set things straight. And so you do and proclaim that it will forever be thus. Except that it never is. It is a fundamentally flawed concept, understood only within the precepts of Protestantism, one that has never, ever worked. Tens of thousands of denominations testify to its inherent fallacy. I spent twenty-five years in a church whose founder came out of the Auld Licht faction of the Anti-Burgher faction of the Associate Presbytery formed in the First Secession from the Church of Scotland. True, he was reacting against all this, but just threw his own particular template—the Scottish Enlightenment—over it and ended up giving birth to just one more faction among many.
The Covenanters were well into this behavior in Buchan’s telling. He faults their emphasis on Old Testament wraith, to the exclusion of just about everything else. Through he character Mark Kerr, he scolded them terribly; admonishing the Kirk that if this was their approach, they could not pick and choose. What they were doing was merely “playing at being ancient Israelites.”
If ye take the bloodthirstiness and the hewing in pieces, and the thrawness of the auld Jews and ettle it to shape yourselves on their pattern, what for do ye no gang further? Wherefore d’ye no set up an altar and burn a wedder on’t? What kind o’ kirk is this, when ye suld have a temple with gopher and shittim wood and shew-bread and an ark o’ the covenant and branched candlesticks, and bush your minister in an ephod instead of black gown? Ye canna pick and choose in the Word. If one ting is to be zealously copied, wherefore not all?…Ye fatted calves…ye muckle weans, that play at being ancient Israelites.
To be sure, Buchan’s story is an extreme case. The Covenanters of Woodilee were so secure in their own Election, that they were not at all troubled by the sinister rites in which they participated several times a year. Rev. Sempill, through an innocent love of nature and a disregard for native superstitions, stumbled upon his flock, decked out in animal skins and goat horns, participating in an orgiastic ritual before a Satanic altar, deep in the Witch Wood. Their faces were initially hidden, so he could not identify the particular members of his flock—but he knew that is who they are. Mark Kerr, the one confidant of Rev. Sempill, is Buchan’s real mouthpiece.
That Kirk of yours has so cunningly twisted religion that a man can grow fat in his own sins and yet spend his time denouncing the faults of others, for he is elected into grace, as they call it, and has got some kind of a title to Heaven. I’m a plain body that canna see how God and the Devil can be served at the one time, but theres many a chiel makes a trade of it. They’ve gotten one creel that holds their treasure in Heaven and one full of the lusts of the flesh, and though they ettle to coup the latter before the day of death, they are confident that it will not canker whats in the other creel. It’s a queer doctrine, and maybe I havena riddled it out right, for I’m loth to believe that an honest man can uphold it, though I’ve heard it often propounded with our unction that mad my flesh creep…The Kirk has made the yett of grace over wide for sinful man, and all ithers yetts over narrow. It has banned innocence and so made a calling of hypocrisy, for human nature is human nature, and if you tell a man that ilka honest pleasure is a sin in God’s sight he finds a way to keep the pleasure and yet keep the name for godliness…I tell you the Cities of the Plain were less offence to Almighty God than this demented twist of John Calvin that blasts and rots a man’s heart. For if it makes here and there a saint, it is like a dung-heap to hatch out sinners.
Rev. Sempill was determined to root out the Satanic hold over his village. He preached to his flock as he never did before, and yet, they stared placidly at him and complimented his sermon upon leaving. There was no contrition, no anguished confessions and repentance. It eventually dawned on him that they were not hypocrites at all, but saw nothing amiss in their behavior, due to their Election.
This man, secure in his election to grace, secure against common fear, was likewise secure against common reason. He was no hypocrite. To him the foulest sin would be no sin, its indulgence would be part of his prerogative, its blotting out an incident in his compact with the Almighty.
While maybe not as overtly demonic as Buchan’s tale, I have to think that we all play this game to some degree. We rank our sins, trying to convince ourselves that ours are of much lesser offence than all the rest, assuredly of no consequence when that Day comes. Hopefully we will never convince ourselves of such, because that puts us on the same path as the Woodilee Kirk. This story has given me quite a lot to think about.
I am reminded of the last few lines from St. Ephrem’s Hymn of Paradise, No. 5:
Have pity on me, O Lord of Paradise, and if it is not possible for me to enter Your Paradise, grant that I may graze outside, by its enclosure; within, let there be spread the table for the “diligent,” but may the fruits within its enclosure drop outside like the “crumbs” for sinners, so that, through Your grace, they may live!
This seems, to me, to be the wiser approach.
The "geneological Preysbyterian Church chart" is gold and yes, the "map analogy"... welll, also interesting to see the deep roots of it. But yes, I think our current culture (religious and not) cannot even self-critique our cultural zeitgeist formed by European Protestantism that persists in even our rejections of "Christianity".