Formal letter to Rev. Alexander MacKid.

Archive

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Mississippi Valley Textile Museum

Name/Title

Formal letter to Rev. Alexander MacKid.

Entry/Object ID

1986.18.30

Scope and Content

3 page letter to Rev. Alexander MacKid from VERITAS. He was sent by the Colonial Committee of the Church of Scotland as a missionary with the privilege of accepting a call. This call was to Ramsay Church. The letter is a letter of complaint, and accusation on the Rev. Alexander MacKid's conduct. The letter very strongly worded. For example "...the mixture of malice, selfishness, and virulence, which compose your nature." Page 3 has a watermark (hold up to light). Unable to see details. It is oval shaped and topped with the king's crown. Transcription of artifact is as follows: To the Rev. Alexander MacKid. SIR,- As your dispute with the Session and Temporal Committee of the Ramsay Church is now the all engrossing topic of public conversation, and as there are many circumstances connected with the affair which are not generally known and properly understood, I have taken the liberty to address you in this manner upon the subject. - I have been induced to do so, from perusing some Editorial remarks upon the subject which appeared in a late number of the Banner*; and as the writer seems to have been but partially informed, I shall endeavor to give him a more comprehensive explanation of the matter than he seems to have been furnished with by his fair correspondent in Ramsay - and as some of my remarks may appear rather of a personal nature; should you or any other person wish to know what or whose authority or precendent I can quote for such a course, I can point to you and reply in the language of Nathan to David - “Thou art the man.” The origin of the dispute is substantially as follows: - You were sent out to Canada last summer by the Colonial Committee of the Church of Scotland, not to the Ramsay Church, but as a missionary in their pay, with the usual privilege of accepting a call if a suitable opportunity presented itself. Previous to leaving Scotland you understood, by private correspondence, that a vacancy had occurred in the Ramsay.- You called upon the Rev. J. Fairbairn, its late pastor, in Edinburch; after a few minutes conversation with you and some enquiries at the Agent of the Society, he gave you a letter, not of recommendation, but merely of introduction to certain parties in Canada - this letter did not contain one single syllable which could be construed into a recommendation from personal knowledge, but merely stated that from what he had seen and heard of you that he thought you might be a suitable person to fill the office of minister in Ramsay. It was, in fact, a mere act of courtesy from one member of the Church towards another, and as such, knowing, as he did, your relatives in Canada, could not avoid giving without some positive reason. Your departure, which took place almost immediately thereafter, prevented him from making that due and timely enquiry into your character and abilities which he would otherwise have done. After your departure circumstances came to his knowledge which led him to believe that he had been mistaken in his first impressions respecting you, in fact, giving him every reason to think that you was not, by any means, fitted to make an efficient and profitable pastor for the Ramsay congregation. His word being pledged to his late congregation to do all in his power to procure them an efficient and zealous pastor, and taking, as was his duty, a lively interest in the scene of so many arduous and, permit me to add, successful labours, he thought it his duty, as will every other man of honor and veracity, to warn the congregation, or rather the Session and Trustees as their acting representatives, of his unintentional error, and to recommend them to be cautious in making any agreement with you; stat that he had reason to believe, upon good grounds, that he had been mistaken in his first estimate of you. Fortunately, I consider, from your having delayed in the United States on your way hither (for what purpose we shall hereafter see), this letter had arrived in Ramsay before you and its substance been communicated to the Session. You arrived in Ramsay of Saturday afternoon, on Sunday you delivered a short discourse, pleading fatigue as an excuse for its shortness, an apology for which every person was willing to accept. During the ensuing week you were “hail fellow, well met” with some of the members of the session, their personal friends and relatives, all neighbours, acquaintances and companions of certain members of your own family circle. - They found that you did not consider it to be beneath your dignity to be seen, even in a Tavern, with members of your expected congregation. They doubtless thought that they had found a minister who, unlike the former one, if he did not countenance would at least wink at their follies, as he seemed to be of a kindred spirit with, and subject to the same failings as themselves - and concluding that no time should be lost in securing such a valuable acquisition to their social circle; one who, in the eyes of the world, from the sacredness of hi calling, would impart an air of respectability to their coterie; they actually on the next Sabbath, before sermon, and before one half of the congregation had seen or heard you (very few having heard your first sermon), agreed to call a meeting at noon of the following day, in defiance of the well known rules of the Church of Scotland, for the purpose of getting up a call for your acceptance. Perhaps one reason for their being in such a hurry to secure you, might be a report which was industriously circulated by some person that you had been offered a large stipend as assistant in a certain Church in New York. I do not pretend to say that this report originated with you, but I do not believe that one single member of your partisans knew that there was such a church in existence, and in the absence of proof to the contrary and judging from circumstances, “I am compelled to believe” that the report did not originate with them, and shall leave the public to draw the natural inference. This report, by the way, was afterwards flatly disproved; a person in Ramsay having written to New York to ascertain its truth or falsity, received for answer “that no such arrangement had ever been proposed to you; that you had preached one sermon in the church in question, and that it was generally considered as being very far below par.” A third and most powerful reason with many weak mind full of old-fashioned prejudices, was your professed abhorence of reading sermons, and before they discovered that you too could read your Sermons, their prejudices were so far enlisted in your favour that they could not believe the evidences of their own senses even when the saw the written sermon before you. *1st September last. [the following is written on the second page of the document] (2) The Session and Trustees finding remonstrance of no avail presented a Petition to the Presbytery, praying that time and opportunity be afforded them for hearing you, before coming to any decision. This respectable part of the congregation.- I may pause here to remark, that had you at this stage of the proceedings, when you saw that you were likely to become a stumbling block and bone of contention, and that a division was likely to take place in the congregation on you account, instead of endeavoring to force your opponent into submission, come voluntarily forward and said that you did not wish any proceedings to be taken without due time for deliberation, and in the meantime endeavored to conciliate opposition by preaching the doctrines of peace and good will among the people, you would have disarmed your opponents of a principal objection, the suspicion of mercenary motives, and had you not finally succeeded in obtaining the church, you would now, at least, have had the satisfaction of reflecting that you had done your duty. But how different was the course your pursued! You opposed passion to prejudice, and instead of remembering that “Blessed are the meek”, you fulminated the anathemas of the church against all who were opposed to your irregular entrance into it. You mixed freely with the people, you were hand and glove with “all sorts and conditions of men” and by pampering their prejudices and declaiming against certain persons, who having, from superior abilities, succeeded a little better than themselves in the world, they were anxious to find a pretext for opposing and maligning, and they, being charmed with your apparent condescension, and not considering that it had degenerated into manners, lent you their sympathy and support, more from a spirit of opposition and enmity to those individuals, than from any love towards you- a conviction of the justice of you cause, or zeal for the Glory of God and the purity of the Church. You desecrated the house of God by making it the scene of disputes in which language was used, even by you, more fitted for the midnight brawls of a Tavern, than for the conveyance of the ideas of a Christian Minister, a professed follower of the meek and lowly Jesus; of him who, when he was reviled, reviled not again. You threatened its late Pastor, the Elders and Trustees with the visitation of legal punishments for having dared to enquire into your private character. You, a stranger, standing in the church built by the strenuous and indefatigable exertions of those very men! - and on every subsequent occasion of your preaching in the Township you profaned the Altar of the most High, by making it the vehicle of public and personal declamations, selecting the most inflamatory texts, and making the most pointed allusions and insinuations that you could venture upon, and doing all in your power to widen the breach and keep alive the spirit of animosity in the minds of your hearers. And what has been the result of this Machiavelian policy? - Where, but twelve months ago, respectable and still encreasing congregation, one of the largest in canada, there is now to be seen the spectacle of a congregation threatening dissent from the parent church - a community torn asunder by feelings of the bitterest enmity - neighbours, friends, relatives animated by feelings directly opposed to to the dictates of christianity - brothers and sisters, members of the same family, refusing to hold intercourse or speak with each other. Upon whom, I would ask, lies the responsibility of having brought about this state of things? Upon the Elders and Trustees of the Church, who scrupled at the admission without examination of a person whose character they had reason to doubt, and of whose disposition they had been warned by a person upon whose ability and sincerity they had every reason to depend, or upon the professed minister of the Gospel of peace who adopted such unwarrantable means to procure a settlement for life in a congregation? Be the responsibility where it may, it is certainly great, and well will it be for him who at the final settling of all things can free himself of it. With the proceedings of the famous Bytown Presbytery, it is not my business no is it any part of my intention to interfere - suffice it to say that when brought, in the person of the Mannikin who had the principal management of their affairs, before the supreme Church Judicature in Canada, to give an account of their deeds, or rather misdeeds, that body, composed of your fellow ministers who would naturally be inclined to judge as leniently as possible in a matter of this description, recorded its unanimous and unqualified disapprobation of their proceedings in your affair, many of them professing their astonishment that any body of men should be found who would act in such open and glaring defiance of decency order and Church discipline. Your share in this transaction was not brought prominently before their notice, but had it been so I have no doubt but that their detestation of it would have been as strongly marked, at all events it is known that from what they knew of the matter several of the members of Synod proposed sending a deputation to you to reason with you on the impropriety of your returning to Ramsay to carry on the contest, and it was only your abrupt departure for New York (I presume to see whether the old situation was still open) that prevented their resolution from being carried into effect. When you, contrary to the wishes of all good men, returned to Ramsay after the meeting of Synod, you, and the MAN of the Bytown Presbytery, by your remarks led the people to believe that your case had not got a fair hearing, that it had been left to the decision of Messrs. Campbell, Bell and Wilson, although you well knew that the Committee consisted of Dr. Cook of Quebec, Mr. George of Scarborough, and Mr. Gordon of Ganonoque, men, who are as far above the imputation of partiality as your imputations are beneath their notice. I will now take the liberty to ask you a few questions in connection with the subject, not that I have any hopes of obtaining a candid and dispassionate answer, but simply because they will serve to throw light upon some things that have not yet been mentioned. Is it true that some time last fall you got the Rev. T. C. Wilson to become security for you for the price of a Horse which you had purchased, and that after you had kept and used the horse for some time, you had the unparalleled meanness to return it upon Mr. Wilson’s lands, who would have been compelled to keep and pay for it had not the owner, seeing how Mr. Wilson had been inveigled into the business, thought fit to take back the horse? Is it true that under the supposition that the Rev. J. Fairbairn had written a certain Letter which was read at the meeting of Presbytery in November last, you used language respecting him highly derogatory to his character as a Gentleman and a Clergyman, and now when you have openly and publicly disavowed your belief of his having done so, is it not your duty to apologise to him for the disrespectful manner in which you then spoke to him, and have you done so? Is it true that you came to Ramsay in direct violation of your instructions as a servant of the Missionary Society, and that all you credentials were made out with reference and addressed to the Hamilton Presbytery? Is it true that during the early part of the present Summer, complaint, upon Oath, was [the following is written on the third page of the document] (3.) Made before a Justice of the Peace, that you had by your countenance and advice been aiding and abetting at one of those disgraceful scenes commonly called a Charivari - that the bells of your Harness were lent to assist in the melodious concert, - that you sat smoking your cutly and apparently enjoying the disgraceful outrage, with only the breadth of the road separating you from the scene of the action,- that when asked by the insulted party to speak to the actors in the outrage, and told that a word from you would disperse them you sneeringly refused to do so,- that some of the people with whom you have even left their bed to supply the Banditti with materials to carry on their hellish sport, and that some of them were actually dressed in the clothes and by the hands of certain members of you family? Is it true that the writers of some of your far famed certificates were so hardly beset to find matter of commendation in you, that they were obliged to refer to your personal appearance and to the sound of your voice? Is it true that you never upon a single occasion endeavored to allay and conciliate the strife and heartburnings which your presence had excited among the people, and was it not your imperative duty to do so? Is it true that at the last sermon you preached in Ramsay before your departure for the Synod, you commenced public worship (?) - by reading and singing a part of the 140th Psalm, and this in a congregation already in a state of almost unequalled excitement; that your Sermon contained personal allusions to persons, both absent and present, and that it was, in every sense of the word, as inflamatory in its general tendency as the veriest political language ever got up for party purposes? Is it true that you told Mr. R. - (whose name has been somewhat notorious in the business) that when you became minister of Ramsay, you would “show up” some of those who had been most energetic in opposing you? Would it not have been much more reconcilable with your profession as a christian and a teacher of Christianity, when you saw that your settlement in the Ramsay Church was opposed by a large, a respectable, and intelligent part of the congregation, and that your very presence would keep up the division among them, to have given up all pretensions to the church as your right, and to have gone to some place where your labours were likely to be blessed in the building up and consolidating of the Church of Christ on Earth, more especially after saying, as you did, that you would have nothing to do with the Ramsay Church if any division took place in the congregation?- You know that all these things are so, and that they should have benn otherwise - you know that you gave publicity to an evident untruth in saying that you were “compelled to behave” that the letter before referred to was not written by Mr. Fairbairn; one of your own most zealous supporters having asserted his willingness to certify to the handwriting upon Oath, and another of them (the “fabricator” of the celebrated resolutions) who was perfectly conversant with the handwriting, having looked over the shoulder of the person who read it, and it having been impossible for you to live for many months in the same house with him, without learning his opinion of its authenticity. Your partisans have imputed mercenary motives to the Trustees in opposing you - any of the Trustees who could be at all supposed to entertain such motives, have, instead of benefitting, materially injured themselves in a business point of view by their opposition to you, thereby proving the sincerity of their motives. Is it not much more probable that the mercantile portion of your own party have been actuated by such motives; one to bolster up a declining, I had almost said, a deceased business; another to raise his business from its present state of original obscurity and nothingness. It has been said that all the poor favoured you, and that all the more wealthy were opposed to you - this is not the case. Your party numbers in its ranks half of the storekeepers, half of the Millers, and two-thirds of the Innkeepers in the Township, which is a sufficient refutation of this assertion. Had it been said that those who can go forward to the Sacramental table on the Sabbath, their heads still light and their limbs still reeling with the effects of the Saturday evening’s debauch - all those who cannot pass a Tavern door - all the simple and ignorant part of the congregation were in your favour; and that all the respectable and intelligent part of the congregation were opposed to you, the assertion would not have been so far from the truth; for altho’ there are both intelligent and respectable persons among your adherents, still the majority are as I have described them upon the other side In conclusion, I would remind you that you have come here, a stranger; you have entered into another man’s labours; you have united with his personal enemies in endeavoring to raise up hatred and ill will against him; you have created divisions, strifes, and heartburnings in the Church of Christ; and you have, as we may infer from your sneering expression in one of your late letters, done all this through your “zeal for the Glory of God” - but every person who will take a candid and impartial view of your conduct, must be “compelled to believe” that this is unknown to you; in fact it is something entirely beyond your sphere of comprehension; that even the dictates of common decency are unknown to you, or at least that they are not sufficiently strong to contend successfully with the mixture of malice, selfishness, and virulence, which compose your nature. Should you find fault with anything contained in this sketch, the public press is open to you to reply; and you seem to have no scruples respecting making use of this means of diseminating your grievances; this however, may have arisen from your previous associations as Editor of an obscure paper, the John O’Groat’s Journal, as “I am compelled to believe.” Your Obediant Servant, VERITAS.

Collection

Almonte

Cataloged By

Paul, Nancy

Lexicon

Nomenclature 4.0

Nomenclature Secondary Object Term

Letter

Nomenclature Primary Object Term

Correspondence

Nomenclature Sub-Class

Other Documents

Nomenclature Class

Documentary Objects

Nomenclature Category

Category 08: Communication Objects

LOC Thesaurus for Graphic Materials

Churches, Religion

Search Terms

Almonte, Ramsay, The Church of Scotland, Ramsay Church

Location

Location

Container

Box 5

Shelf

Shelf 19

Room

Collections Room

Building

M.V.T.M.

Category

Permanent

Date

November 7, 2023

Location

Container

Archive Box 1

Shelf

Shelf 1, Shelf 1

Room

Collections Room

Building

M.V.T.M.

Category

Permanent

Moved By

Whit, Elizabeth

Date

August 7, 2016

Location

Container

Box 5

Shelf

Shelf 19, Shelf 19

Room

Collections Room

Building

M.V.T.M.

Category

Permanent

Moved By

Whit, Elizabeth

Date

August 7, 2016

Location

Building

In File

Category

Permanent

Location

Building

Archive Box 1

Category

Permanent

Relationships

Related Person or Organization

Person or Organization

MacKid, Alexander Rev.

Person or Organization

Fairburn, J. Rev.

General Notes

Note

Status: OK Status By: Cotter, Ellen Status Date: 2022-02-08

Created By

admin@catalogit.app

Create Date

May 9, 1986

Updated By

admin@catalogit.app

Update Date

November 11, 2023