Irvine

At this time a new preacher the Reverend Hugh White had settled in The Relief Kirk at Irvine. He was very popular because of the freshness, fluency and fierceness of his preaching. In the pulpit he ruled with a rod of iron but was regarded by his brethren as a rather unsafe guide in the mines of divine truth. He was a native of St Ninians in Stirlingshire and originally a preacher in the Church of Scotland but he was unable to make a living at this and went to America where he managed to find work as a professor of Logic at one of the budding colleges. This stood him in good stead on his return to Scotland where he joined the Relief Church and settled in Irvine on the 3rd July 1782.

Elspeth Buchan had already heard of his fame so when it was announced that he would be one of the preachers at a sacramental occasion in Glasgow she went to hear him. It appears she was well impressed with the Reverend and shortly after seeing him wrote him a very flattering letter in which she cunningly appeals to his vanity with plausible phrases of an ardent Christian whose spirit had long chafed under the general coldness of the times and was eager to respond to a kindred spirit.

Glasgow17th Jan 1783
Rev Dear Sir whom I love in our sweet lord Jesus.
I write to you as a friend, not after the flesh, but as a child of another family that has lain in the womb of the everlasting decree from all eternity-a promised seed born from above……I have met with my disappointments from ministers who were neither strangers nor pilgrims on the earth, and I can say by sad experience that I have been more stumbled by minister than by all the men in the world, or by all the devils in hell. But I have rejoiced many times by the eye of faith to see you before I saw you with the eyes of my body. On Saturday night when your discourse was ended a friend said to me “what do you think of Mr White?” I answered “what do you think of Jesus Christ?” for I have lost sight of the minister and myself…………

She goes on to comment about what appears to be the content of Mr White’s sermon. According to Andrew Innes this was not the first letter she had written to Hugh White. It appears she had been writing to him for some four months prior to this. White had shown the letters to his colleagues in the church who at first approved and encouraged the correspondence so it would seem these letters were of a “harmless” nature. This last letter gives the first hint of her peculiar beliefs and doctrines: she claims him as a “predestined child” a “promised seed” seen by her eye of faith even before she had seen him in the flesh.

As mentioned earlier the Reverend White had recently returned from America and while he was there the land had been ringing with the doings of the Shakers and the death of Mother Lee, their founder, three years before. We can therefore assume that he would have discussed the Shakers views on marriage and free love, and out of this it would be easy to evolve the idea of forming a similar community. It is reasonable to assume that The Rev White and Mrs Buchan had elaborated their belief that she was the woman in Revelation xii “clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet” and giving birth to a “wonderful man child” during their correspondence before and after their first meeting. These were two unscrupulous individuals with loose and mystical tendencies, one of them already believing she was born to a great religious mission and the other fresh from the scenes of the Shaker Delusions could not fail to produce a similar development and suggest the idea of Scottish rivals.

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