The Moral Education of Mankind: Character and Religious Moderatism in the Sermons of Hugh Blair

Abstract

“Character” very often had a significant religious dimension, which was not separate from its other, more secular, moral aspects but intimately related to them. This chapter will focus on the relationship between the religious and the moral philosophical uses of character in the writings of one of the most prominent clergymen of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hugh Blair (1718–1800), a minister of the High or New Kirk in St. Giles’s Church in Edinburgh from 1758. Blair was one of the so-called Moderates in the Presbyterian Church, a group whose members were distinguished firstly by their advocacy of lay patronage in the appointment of ministers, whereby a candidate for the ministry was presented to the congregation by a secular patron, who sometimes was not even a Presbyterian. The purpose of this measure, which had been reintroduced into Scottish ecclesiastical life by the Patronage Act of 1712, was to prevent the appointment of dangerous religious “enthusiasts” and “fanatics” as Presbyterian ministers. The Moderates were opposed by the “orthodox” or “Popular” party, who favored the election of ministers by local congregations, without external interference.¹ Aside from these controversies over ecclesiastical procedures, however, the Moderates are also considered representatives of a more enlightened and polite culture that incorporated many recent philosophical ideas, whereas the orthodox have been associated with an old-fashioned, inflexible, and dogmatic Calvinism.