Explanations
Like a good Enlightened scholar, Dr Meek set out three explanations for the events of the Cambuslang Work. He did not mention modern explanations – the distress of tailors and shoemakers following the bad harvests of 1741, the tradition of Holy Fairs, the growing interest in Calvinist theology among many people, especially weavers (who read at their looms), including the country wide interest in what was happening in New England. Instead, he argues that this striking event was either natural or supernatural. If it had been natural (and he seems to suspect it was) he thinks it was caused by "sympathy and example" or what would be known today as "mass hysteria". If it had been supernatural, it either came from God or from the devil. The ministers in the Church of Scotland who belonged to the Evangelical Party – like those who had preached at Cambuslang – were convinced it was a "glorious work of God". However, many of similar Calvinist views had recently left what they thought of as an "ungodly" church and had set up a rival Associate Presbytery. They were convinced that God could not have operated so spectacularly in the Church they had just left, and condemned the Cambuslang Work as "the delusions of Satan, attending the present awful work upon the bodies of men, going on at Cambuslang". A fierce and intemperate pamphlet war ensued – though the writers always professed a Christian concern for the truth and the well-being of men's souls. The controversy still rages today, and remarkably similar general positions are still taken, depending on religious convictions, or indeed the lack of them. The Cambuslang Work was a remarkable historical event and one which is peculiarly well, and in great detail, documented.
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