James Begg as a Philanthropist
Rev Allan MacColl
In his own day Dr Begg was a household name in Scotland, a popular preacher, a prominent contributor to the ecclesiastical and political debates of the time and – as this article highlights – a tireless campaigner for the amelioration of the harsh material conditions in which so many of his fellow Scots spent their lives. Begg’s approach to social issues was rooted in a compassionate outlook based on the scriptural principle of philanthropy. This principle is seen in the moral law which requires the love of our neighbour as ourselves, in the specific legislation of the Mosaic economy which required a concern for the physical welfare and protection of mankind and, above all, in the teaching and example of the Lord Jesus Christ, who went about doing good, healing the sick and having compassion on the multitudes. Furthermore, the history of the Reformed Church in Scotland furnished Dr Begg with a good number of examples of leading ministers who raised their voices on behalf of the widow and the orphan, such as John Knox and Samuel Rutherford. Whilst Begg is best remembered today as a trenchant opponent of theological liberalism and Roman Catholicism his contribution in the social sphere should not be overlooked.
Begg’s Scotland
The Scotland in which James Begg lived was then at the height of its influence on the world stage, a small nation making an unprecedented contribution in the realms of science, industry and religion. The wealth and pre-eminence of the wider British Empire provided the stimulus and outlet for a great deal of this activity. Having undergone a remarkable transition from a rural and agricultural society to a modern industrial and urban economy in a very short period the Central Lowlands of Scotland became the scene of tremendous contrasts between wealth, industry, respectability and opulence on the one hand, with poverty, squalor, disease and widespread drunkenness and immorality on the other.
Having been brought up in a rural parish in Lanarkshire, Begg always held to an ideal of the parochial system where the Church’s influence on the wider society was to be exerted for the good of the whole community from the local level upwards. His early ministry in Paisley and Liberton, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, convinced him of the need for aggressive action to tackle the social problems which he witnessed so readily all around him. His gifts as an orator and pamphleteer were employed in arousing public sympathy for his solutions. Dr Thomas Smith, Begg’s biographer, wrote, ‘he never regarded religion as designed to be separate from the daily life of men, but as necessarily bearing upon all educational, economic, social and moral relations never a man had a stronger conviction that the same godliness which is profitable for the life which is to come, is profitable also for the life which is now.’ Begg did not, of course, intend to mix politics with religion in an unscriptural manner in the pulpit; rather he believed it was incumbent on preachers and private Christians alike to help their poor neighbours through influencing those in positions of power. ‘All that ministers can do in the secular field is only to throw out suggestions;’ he once wrote, ‘others must execute.’
Housing and public amenities
A major problem which blighted Victorian cities was the poor condition of the houses in which industrial workers lived. Overcrowded slum tenements with little or no sanitation were a hazard to public health and decency. As Begg observed, ‘How can we wonder that human nature, in such circumstances, is found at the lowest point of degradation, defying ordinary means of cure, and spreading moral as well as physical evil like a pestilence?’ The provision of decent housing became the social issue which Begg campaigned for more than any other over the course of his life. Through Dr Begg’s efforts a building society, the ‘Edinburgh Co-Operative Building Company Ltd.’ was set up in 1861 to finance the purchase of new houses for working class families. Several of these fine buildings are still standing today.
It was widely acknowledged that Begg’s campaign for the National Census to contain a question regarding the number of apartments in each dwelling was of the utmost importance in bringing to light the extent of overcrowding in urban areas. He spoke out against the ‘bothy system’ of accommodation for indentured farm labourers and ploughmen in the rural Lowlands which he believed to be a prime contributory factor in the high incidence of illegitimacy in these areas. Begg was also instrumental in having public parks such as Princes Street Gardens and the Meadows open free of charge for working class people in Edinburgh and he also campaigned for shorter hours for shop assistants and working men on Saturdays in order that they could attend to the duties of the Sabbath with due preparation.
Land Reform
Land Reform was another area in which Begg was involved throughout his public career. He conceived it as being closely bound up with the housing problem and sought to give industrial workers in the cities the opportunity to live on their own small-holdings in the country in order to relieve the pressure on housing in the urban areas. For this to take place however, large tracts of land would have to be broken up and redistributed. Begg principally had in mind waste ground and uncultivated land on the edges of the towns and cities but even this proposal would have involved a considerable change in the attitudes and policies of landlords at the time. Needless to say, Begg was resolutely and vocally opposed to the great wave of evictions which swept over the West Highlands and Hebrides in the aftermath of the potato failure in 1846-7. He argued that if his vision of a self-reliant ‘peasant proprietorship’ was in existence whereby sufficient land were available to each family then the effects of the crop failure would have been much less drastic. ‘The causes which led to the present depressed state of the Highlands’, he stated, ‘were such as could be removed, and it was the duty of all to use every means in their power to do so.’
At the 1860 Free Church General Assembly Begg responded to those who argued for the economic necessity of larger farms regardless of the loss of smallholders that this consequently entailed:
‘let us have crofts and small farms interspersed between these large farms. This will do much to cure an intolerable evil, and to raise that class of men in Scotland who were its glory in former days. Go back to the time of the Covenanters, who fought the great battle of liberty in this country, and you will find that they consisted of this very class of men, of small properties, but with stout hearts and strong arms. They were the men that bore aloft the flag in the days of the Covenant; and I am persuaded that, by the diffusion of this class among the community, we shall do much to restore the state of things which existed in former days.’
Christian education
All the way through Begg’s career as a social reformer we see the ideas of self-reliance and community interrelated. His concern was to see an independent, industrious and morally-upright population infused with Christian principles. In his view this was the best way of alleviating the worst effects of sin in the social sphere. It would avoid the danger of a violent revolution provoked by extreme poverty and would be the best means of guaranteeing the centrality of the Christian religion in Scottish national life. It is easy to see therefore why Begg was committed to the extension of educational provision. A Christian education system would be a bulwark for the faith in the nation. His model was the parochial school system set up by the Reformers with a curriculum founded on the Word of God and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. The Disruption had made it necessary for the establishment of separate Free Church schools but the growing population made it inevitable that a more comprehensive system be adopted. Begg was quick to recognise this, although he perhaps underestimated the potential dangers of handing control of the schools over to local boards without adequate legislative guarantees for the future preservation of Christianity as the foundation of the whole educational system.
A Christian nation
James Begg was fiercely patriotic and the idea of Scotland as a covenanted nation runs strongly through his thought and actions. Only through the maintenance of the faith of the fathers would Scotland yet flourish and this explains his continued and tenacious adherence to the principle of the establishment of the Church by the State as late as forty years after the Disruption. Begg’s vision for a just, Christian Scotland necessitated the maintenance of the Church’s prominence in national life. Unlike the liberalising party in the Free Church which came to dominance by the end of Begg’s life, he recognised that by loosing the doctrinal moorings of Scottish Presbyterianism the whole role and position of the Church in the nation would soon be eclipsed, the blessing of the Most High would be lost and the Church grievously divided and weakened.
In his own forthright and eloquent manner Dr Begg brought Christian principles successfully to bear upon the pressing social issues of his day. Begg’s philanthropy was one strand in his overall vision and it was a part of his witness and ministry which attracted much favourable comment during his lifetime. John Murdoch - a radical land reformer and journalist in the Highlands - even desired Begg to stand for Inverness-shire at the 1874 election and later hailed him as ‘one of the ablest and most enlightened social and economic reformers in Scotland’.
It is now a long time since James Begg’s contributions to social reform were made and the nation is completely different from the thoroughly-Presbyterian Scotland which he loved so dearly. Material conditions in our land today are immeasurably superior to those of Begg’s day but these blessings have been received without any real public acknowledgement of their Divine source. We have gained material prosperity as a people but have plunged ourselves into the deepest spiritual poverty. It is not difficult to suggest that had Begg’s wider religious concern for the nation been acted upon and maintained, the spiritual impoverishment and destitution of our nation in the twenty-first century would not be so all-pervasive.
This article first appeared in The Bulwark July-Sept 2008
