Jettisoning John Calvin

Presbyterians in Colonial Victoria by Malcolm Wood; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008, $44.

On being told that there was a new book on Presbyterian history in Victoria and that I should review it, my feelings were cool. There would be lots of grey-bearded old worthies, claimed as saintly or at least very wise, sandwiched between syrupy clerical jargon.

But no. This is a briskly and clearly written and information-packed piece of social history, with a lot to say about how an important part of Australian society has developed, warts—of which there are many—and all.

The author, a lapsed Presbyterian whose father was the last pre-Uniting Church Moderator-General of Australia, has turned in later years to a critical evaluation of his inheritance. He was also Assistant Director-General of the National Archives, and this background shows in his command of the records.

The Presbyterian Church of Victoria was established in 1859—just 150 years ago—with the amalgamation of earlier mission and unorganised activity, and lasted until 1901, when it was absorbed into a federal structure. It claimed the adherence of 16 per cent of the population, which closely equated to the Scottish background population, with a few per cent from Northern Ireland cancelling out the non-Presbyterian Scots. Victoria was its strongest colony, as Presbyterians were more like 10 per cent in New South Wales and 12 per cent in Queensland.

It absorbed in one body rival groups from its homeland. The big issues of the “disruption” there, such as relations with the state and landed patrons, did not apply here. Clergy of “Free Church” background were more numerous, however, usually more dogmatically Calvinist (and also populist in style) and this had some influence. About two-thirds of the clergy had been born in Scotland.

The association of Presbyterianism with Scottish identity gave it strong appeal and healthily boosted attendance numbers, as with the Irish and Catholicism and contrasting with the more sluggish colonial appeal of the Anglicans. In the early days it offered Gaelic services for the big minority of Scots who were from the Highlands, but interest dwindled with Australianisation.

The Presbyterian Church was stronger in numbers, fairly trouble-free and socially more comprehensive in the country. It included a disproportionate number of the grazing well-to-do, particularly in the Western District, but also many farmers and rural battlers, such as Scottish workers the squatters had recruited. In Melbourne, the working class tended to slip away while it disproportionately attracted the middle class and elite. Glasgow business had targeted the new colony and this enhanced the “establishment” element, though the rich were naturally limited in number. There were fewer lawyers, however, because of the different Scottish legal system.

This and the rigid moral code made it eminently “respectable”, but also, Malcolm Wood says, reduced its empathy with the working class and the marginalised.

For better or worse, Presbyterianism had been democratically governed since the Reformation, “sessions” of lay elders ruling each parish with the minister and electing representatives for the regional presbytery, who in turn sent delegates to the governing colonial assembly. The idea was every man a “presbyter”, or priest. It aspired to resemble the early church and to have the Bible as its source of authority.

It emphasised the individual and a search for piety of the “heart” without external aids (unlike the Catholic emphasis on the disciplined, hierarchical institution and in those days papal infallibility and a plethora of external aids to religious feeling). In the search for individual piety it stressed self-improvement, through a striving for good character, self-discipline and self-development, education and, for example, “not wasting God’s time”. It deplored avarice, but upward socio-economic mobility was often a consequence of its code.

There was considerable analytical criticism of Rome and a shrill “Orange” element, but Wood does not see this as a very big issue; it was a difference of process rather than product. The Presbyterian, as with the Catholic, God was ever present, highly interventionist in human affairs, stern and punitive as well as loving.

The Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 was the foundation document. Puritans drew this up at the high point of the Civil War period, as a binding doctrinal constitution for the British Isles, but only Scotland had enough public support for it to endure (to shorten a very long story).

Presbyterianism stressed a Jewish-style closed Sabbath. Many even wanted public transport closed to minimise Sunday work. In an era before cars and when Sunday was the worker’s only full day off, this not only helped to alienate the working class, but also attracted ridicule in the feisty secular press, particularly the hypocrisy-hunting satirical weeklies. The church preached “temperance”, or moderate use of alcohol, “God’s gift”. Wood notes that “fanatical” total abstainers captured the temperance cause only after 1900.

The trademark Calvinist doctrine of Predestination for salvation, as against Free Will, was poorly understood and not much referred to, Wood says, indicating that it may have been an embarrassment. Colonial Victoria exhibited a lot of free will. However, he says it might have been an indirect influence, enhancing a common feeling of saved righteousness among some of the economically successful. This is a revealing contrast with the nineteenth-century USA, where Baptists and Methodists argued out Predestination versus Free Will at great torchlit outdoor debates.

Much of the mid-Victorian confidence soon began to come unstuck. The Land Boom and bust of 1887–93 saw many a preachy, tall poppy Presbyterian businessman and politician, including the Premier and Speaker, lopped down in disgrace. More fundamentally, Darwin’s Origin of Species—published in the foundation year—and a host of other scientific studies, and in parallel the emerging Higher Criticism of the Bible undermined its also Jewish-like legalistic adherence to ancient Hebraic texts and the “ossified” Westminster Confession.

These developments were a crisis for all the churches, but Wood says the Melbourne Anglicans, led by the liberal Bishop Moorhouse, worked through it better than government by stubborn, defensive peers.

A small liberal Presbyterian faction arose, prepared to countenance the increasing evidence that the Bible should often be read as allegory, folklore and poetry, not always to be taken literally. It also opposed extreme sabbatarianism and wanted more missions, welfare and extension to the poor and a more ecumenical direction.

The most eminent liberal, young Glaswegian Charles Strong of Scots Church, Melbourne, resigned under pressure from the faction-riven Presbytery of Melbourne and the Assembly in 1883. He established the breakaway Australian Church, where he preached until he died in 1948, but he did not seek schism by taking other clergy with him. Strong was also active, to the dismay of colleagues, in the Sunday Liberation Society. He seems a hero to Wood, who says that after the Strong case Evangelical intolerance slowly diminished, but “avoidance of disquieting debate became policy”. The eventual split, when a majority only in 1977 formed the Uniting Church by union with the Methodists and Congregationalists, was “the Strong case’s unfinished business”.

Wood does not say so, but it is a common observation that this union would have been better done in the far more religious 1920s, when it was first mooted but failed, than amid the many aggressively competing “isms” fifty years later.

The strident moralism of nineteenth-century Christianity grates on the modern ear, but shorn of extremes and unselfconscious style, a lot of it seems common sense, particularly for an era without much birth control and with severe financial constraints. Excessive drinking was also a problem then, and still is.

The Presbyterian emphasis on individual character is interesting, given today’s preoccupation with communal sin, of governments, companies and society. Our age is unique in not using a quest for the Almighty and the words of those few who seemed to come closer to Him as a way to strengthen whatever natural human instinct there is for good behaviour. Concern for the after-life was also far more important to previous generations—throughout human history—when the early death of loved ones was much more common.

One moral seems to be that, as in most things, fundamentalism or excessive conservatism is counter-productive in the long term, as is the hasty embrace of the new.

Many of Robert Murray’s forebears were rural Presbyterians in colonial Victoria.