23 February: Boreham on Thomas Guthrie

A Remunerative Investment
It is just a hundred years since Dr. Thomas Guthrie, the anniversary of whose death, in 1873, we mark today, startled the saints, the scholars, and the sobersides of Scotland by declaring that the waifs and strays of the Cowgate and the Canongate were as well worth saving as the daintily-dressed children of the Edinburgh West End. He soon proved by a practical experiment that the reclamation of the ragamuffins was not only a valuable item in the programme of social reform, but a sound financial proposition into the bargain. Mr. Gladstone always felt that Guthrie represented the most perfect combination of passionate evangelism and practical philanthropy of which he enjoyed any experience. The work that Guthrie did in Scotland stands for all time as a conclusive demonstration of the principle that it is infinitely better to build a fence round the top of a precipice than to provide an ambulance at the bottom. Guthrie himself regarded the money spent upon his work as a particularly remunerative gilt-edged investment. By the most incontestable statistics he proved that the saving to the public purse in penal and charitable expenditure more than offset the cost of his institutions.

Rugged in appearance, massive in figure, and billowy in eloquence, Thomas Guthrie was a typical representative of the best life of Scotland in that day. The twelfth child in a family of thirteen, he inherited from parents of superb character and robust piety, a profound reverence for his country's history and traditions. He loved to describe his first school. The teacher was a weaver who plied his shuttle whilst he instructed his pupils. The schoolroom was the weaver's workroom, sitting room and bedroom. The loom occupied one corner, a bed stood in the second, another bed monopolised the third, and a table graced the fourth.

Determination Overcomes Initial Failure
Having set his heart on the ministry, Guthrie completed his divinity course only to find himself "a stickit minister." Not a church would look at him. Resolved, however, to allow no grass to grow under his feet, he filled in the long period of waiting, first by taking a medical course, then by serving for a year or two in a bank and, finally, by running a farm. Later on, at the pinnacle of his great renown, he found all three of these attainments extremely useful, although, as he sometimes pointed out with a smile, they had their drawbacks. One busy evening, for example, when every moment was precious, a woman was shown into his study. Guthrie prepared himself for a poignant story of spiritual dereliction or emotional distress. But when she came to the point, his visitor explained that, as he had the reputation for raising the finest calves in the country, she would be very grateful if he would tell her his secret.

When he did at long last find a pulpit opened to him in his own native Forfarshire, his colourful rhetoric and his novel methods soon created a sensation, with the result that, eight years later, he was summoned to Old Greyfriars in Edinburgh. For a while, he was wretchedly homesick. Standing, one gloomy afternoon, on George the Fourth Bridge, looking down on the squalor, the filth, and the misery of the Cowgate, he felt appalled and paralysed by the stark horror of it all. Everything was foul, loathsome, revolting; the very smell of it sickened him. He mentally contrasted this with his old parish, with its singing larks, its daisied pastures, its decent peasants, its silvery streams, and the great blue sea rolling its lines of breakers on the sparkling shore. All at once a hand was laid on his shoulder, and, turning he found himself confronting the leonine head and finely-chiselled face of Dr. Chalmers. To his surprise, Chalmers congratulated him on the golden opportunity presented by his hideous environment. The unexpected words stirred him like a bugle-call and he determined on the spot to accept the challenge that Chalmers had suggested.

Humanity In Terms Of Finance
He applied himself to the artistry of preaching with such success that his church was soon crowded to the doors. The poorest of the poor delighted in his ministry, whilst, as his reputation spread, men like Gladstone, Ruskin, Lord John Russell, Lord Macaulay, and others figured in his congregation. He soon received overtures from the finest churches in the land, but nothing would lure him from Old Greyfriars. The longer he lived in the city, however, the more impressed he became by the fact that all around him swarmed tens of thousands of children who had never been given a chance. Circumstances beyond their control had marked them for a life of crime. Whilst still in the forties, Guthrie made his historic plea in their behalf. He founded schools at which the most destitute and abandoned city Arabs were taught, fed, clothed, and given vocational training.

The result exceeded his most sanguine expectations. Pointing to five hundred of his proteges, he claimed that if they had been allowed to drift into lives of vice and crime, they would have cost the nation £150,000. Shaped by his schools, their economic value was £200,000. So the country was making gold by the waggon-load, whilst, in addition, the children were being transformed and uplifted.

Guthrie died on February 23, 1873. Thirty thousand people followed the casket to its resting place in the Grange Cemetery. The children of his schools sang beside the grave. Among the eloquent tributes offered by the most eminent people of his day, Prof. John Stuart Blackie described him as:

A fine, strong-breasted, fervid-hearted man,
Who from dark dens redeemed,
and haunts of sin,
The city waifs, the loose, unfathered clan,
With
prouder triumph than when wondering Rome
Went forth, all eyes, to bring
great Caesar home.

Among the stalwarts of the nineteenth century there are few greater than he.

F W Boreham

Image: Thomas Guthrie