©uc Cburcb Ibcvitngc 
 
 Rev, N. L. Walkeb* D*D, 
 
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 tljf Slibrarii of 
 
 Prtnrrtnn Sljrolngtral S^rmtnarg 
 
 BX 9070 .W3 1893 
 Walker, Norman L. 
 Our church heritage 
 
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 />^y4^/^^5 OUR 
 
 CHURCH HERITAGE 
 
 THE SCOTTISH CHURCHES VIEWED /,V THE 
 LIGHT OF THEIR HISTORY 
 
 
 ^^£>P;"i' ^^W 
 
 B^bl•csse^> to tbc 1Wew (Beneration tbat bas IRiscn up Since 
 tbc Bisvuption 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. NORMAN L. WALKER, D.D. 
 
 Author o/ " Robert Biic/ia7ian, D.D., Ati Ecclesiastical Biography, 
 
 "Scottish Church History," 
 
 &-C. &■€. 
 
 NE^A;■ EDITION 
 
 T. NELSON AND SONS 
 
 Londot, Edinburgh, and Xe~u York 
 1893 
 
}3vefai:e. 
 
 I HAVE been asked very often to reprint this little 
 book, but hitherto it did not seem to me that 
 any particular end would be served by its republica- 
 tion. This year — when the Free Churcli has reached 
 its Jubilee — I have been urged anew to issue it, and 
 have at last consented to do so. It may be of use in 
 enabling our young people to understand the present 
 ecclesiastical situation in Scotland. 
 
 The first edition — a very large one — was published 
 anonymously. Now there is no need for keeping back 
 the author's name. A new chapter has been added, 
 bringing, if we may so say, the subject up to date. 
 
 Norman L, Walker. 
 
 Edinburgh, May 1S93. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 r. HOW IT HAPPENS THAT THERE ARE 80 MANY DENOMINA- 
 TIONS IN SCOTLAND, ... ... ... ... p 
 
 II. THE ATTEMPTS MADE TO IMPOSE EPISCOPACY ON THE 
 
 CHURCH,... ... ... ... .. 24 
 
 Til. WHY THE SECESSIONS BEGAN — THE ORIGIN OF THE 
 
 UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ... ... .. 25 
 
 rV. ANOTHER EXODUS— RESULTING IN CONGREGATIONALISM, 35 
 
 V. A NEW EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT FROM A NEW CENTRE, 40 
 
 VI. THE MOVEMENT ARRESTED BY THE CIVIL COURTS, ... 50 
 
 VII. THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE, ... ... 58 
 
 VIII. A LAW LORD ON THE LEGAL DECISIONS OF 1843, .. 75 
 
 IX. THE SEVEN " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE, ... ... 86 
 
 X. THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE THE DISRUPTION, AND 
 
 THE PATRONAGE ACT, ... ... ... J04 
 
 XL WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOV/ TO DO, . . .117 
 
OUR CHURCH HERITAGE. 
 
 CHAPTEK I. 
 
 HOW IT HAPPENS THAT THERE ARE SO MANY DENOMINA- 
 TIONS IN SCOTLAND. 
 
 STRANGER from abroad travelling througli 
 Scotland at present, and trying to make him- 
 self acquainted with the condition of the 
 people, could scarcely fail to take special 
 notice of the number of religious denomuia- 
 tions which are to be found among us. The 
 existence of some of these, however, would be easily 
 accounted for if he had any acquaintance with Scottish 
 history. This country, for example, like so many others, 
 v/as once a Popish country ; and not even here was the 
 Reformation so complete as to obliterate all traces of 
 the Church of Rome. Just, then, as in some young 
 wood you may find a rotting tree-stump which proclaims 
 that at some earlier period a now extinct forest occupied 
 the ground, so here and there — at Braemar, and in the 
 Hebrides and elsewhere — there still linger aboriginal 
 
10 OUR MANY SECTS. 
 
 Roman Catholic congregations, reminding us of the state 
 from which some centuries ago we were so happily 
 delivered. These congregations have formed the nucleus 
 of a Scottish Roman Catholic Church ; which, in conse- 
 quence of the accessions it has received from time to 
 time by the influx of immigrants from Ireland, has 
 grown to dimensions formidable enough to make its 
 influence felt in the government of the country. 
 
 Then, again, the time was when Episcopacy was in 
 the ascendant in Scotland — when the Established Church 
 was itself Episcopal in its form of government, and when 
 there were diocesan bishops at Glasgow and St. Andrews, 
 and curates acting as parish ministers in every part of 
 the land. Matters have changed since then, and the 
 transition which took place at the Revolution was ac- 
 complished with marvellous completeness ; but it would 
 have been a surprising thing if all had lightly become 
 Presbyterians at the bidding of the King. There were 
 some who then adhered to Prelacy conscientiously; and 
 as a concurrence of circumstances — such as the residence 
 of the upper classes in England, and the education of 
 their children in the South — has since led to the with- 
 drawal from the " Kirk " of the great mass of the aris- 
 tocracy, the presence in the midst of us of a Scottish 
 Episcopal Church is no less easily explained. 
 
 And if, in addition to these, there are to be met with 
 in our great cities little companies of men — Methodists 
 or Plymouthists, for example — who keep aloof from the 
 larger religious communities, either because they are 
 incomers from abroad or because they hold views with 
 which there is no general sympathy, the reason of their 
 
OUR MANY SECTS. 11 
 
 separate existence is so plain on the face of it as hardly 
 to require any explanation. 
 
 But the perplexing thing is this, that the whole re- 
 maining population is broken up into sections ; and as 
 the most of these have the same creed, the same form of 
 government, and the same order of worship, one cannot 
 wonder if even a very intelligent stranger feels bewil- 
 dered in the presence of such an extraordinary pheno- 
 menon. How did these different bodies come into 
 existence 1 What were the causes which led to the for- 
 mation of so many separate societies — several of them 
 being so large, so well organized, and so influentiaU 
 Nobody supposes that they came into being by accident ; 
 nobody can believe that anything but very powerful 
 forces could have made them what they are. When a 
 thoughtful man walks along the shore, and sees here that 
 the rocks have been torn asunder, and there a boulder 
 lying among the debris which manifestly belongs to 
 another system, and yonder that the sea margin has 
 been sensibly altered, he at once concludes that volcanoes 
 or earthquakes have been at work. And he argues thus 
 most wisely, because there is no principle in philosophy 
 more self-evident than this, that for all effects there 
 must be adequate causes. On the same principle, an 
 observant stranger travelling through Scotland, and 
 examining its institutions, could not but at once take 
 this for granted, that whatever was the origin of, for 
 example, the Free Church, or the United Presbyterian 
 Church, such bodies, contributing between them, as they 
 do, for religious objects, over £800,000 a year, could 
 have been called into existence and sustained only by 
 
12 OUR MANY SECTS. 
 
 the operation of forces as great as the effects which they 
 liave produced. 
 
 But what were these forces 1 It is customary in many 
 quarters to think of them as consisting merely of " the 
 theories about the Church" which certain individual men 
 at certain periods happened to adopt. That, however, 
 is a complete mistake. The United Presbyterian Church 
 did not begin to be because its founders came to hold 
 that there ought to be no connection between Church 
 and State. Nor did the Congregational body take its 
 rise and gain its first successes because those who were 
 responsible for its establishment had seen their w^ay to 
 adopt the principles of Independency. Nor was the 
 Free Church formed in consequence of its first leaders 
 coming suddenly to see that a lay patron ought to 
 have no recognized standing-place within the Temple 
 of God. When we go back upon the springs of all 
 these denominations we find this, that those who were 
 concerned in their formation were simply devoted Chris- 
 tian men, whose only object in moving a step along the 
 line they followed was the revival of spiritual life and 
 the propagation of the gospel, and who were in the end 
 driven to take up the positions they did solely by the 
 adverse currents which they came in providence to en- 
 counter. It is a melancholy thing to read the Church 
 History of Scotland in the light of this fact — to see 
 how many of the efforts which were made to reanimate 
 the National Establishment proved worse than abortive; 
 how reformer after reformer was driven forth, baffled 
 and disheartened, from within its pale ; and how each in 
 turn — Erskine, Gillespie, Haldane, Chalmers — became 
 
OUR MANY SECTS. 13 
 
 the leader of a new exodus. But, on the other hand, 
 there is something unspeakably satisfactory as well as 
 hopeful in the fact that the various nonconforming* 
 denominations which now exist among us are not the 
 effects or memorials of mere pets or party heats, or even 
 of philosophical theorizings, but, on the contrary, are 
 outstanding and enduring results of great spiritual 
 awakenings. If this were more constantly borne in 
 mind, it might not reconcile us to the continuance of our 
 divisions, but it would enable us to hold up our faces 
 when the existence of them is cast up to us as a reproach. 
 
 * In using the word " Nonconformists " in the succeeding pages, we wish 
 it to be understood that we do not employ it in its ordinary technical sense, 
 but simply as a convenient term for designating those who do not acquiesce 
 in the conditions on which the Church in Scotland has been established by 
 the State. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE ATTEMPTS MADE TO IMPOSE EPISCOPACY ON THE 
 CHURCH. 
 
 |T was during tlie reign of Queen Mary that 
 Jolm Knox lived and the Reformation from 
 Popery was effected. Mary's successor was 
 her only son James, who, on the death of 
 Elizabeth in 1603, was also called to the 
 throne of England. The Reformed Church 
 of Scotland was from the first cast in the mould of 
 Presbyterianism, and the people never lost their faith 
 in that form of government ; but King James soon be- 
 came convinced t-liat the Scottish idea of the Church as 
 a spiritual kingdom, to be governed freely by its own 
 officers under Clirist, was antagonistic to his own pre- 
 tensions to arbitrary power, and long Ijcfore he left his 
 native country he professed Episcopacy, and did his 
 best to impose that system upon Scotland. So early as 
 1596 (not much more than twenty years after the death 
 of Knox) he taught his son Prince Henry that the 
 office of a king is partly civil and partly ecclesiastical ; 
 that a principal part of his function consists in ruling 
 the Church ; that it belongs to him to judge when 
 
SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 15 
 
 preachers wander from their text ; that parity among 
 ministers is irreconcilable with monarchy, and the 
 mother of confusion ; and, in short, that Episcopacy 
 should be set up, and the principal Presbyterian minis- 
 ters banished from the country. It was rather a fortu- 
 nate thing, on the whole, that the King was led to 
 express himself so frankly in this way, because, in 
 consequence, the key-note of " a free Church in a free 
 State" came to be at once struck in the land loudly and 
 distinctly. And all through the succeeding centuries 
 the words of Andrew Melville were never forgotten : " I 
 must tell you there are two kings and two kingdoms 
 in Scotland. There is King James, the head of this 
 Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the King of 
 the Church, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of 
 whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, 
 but a member." 
 
 The views which the King had adopted, however, 
 proved the source of sufferings, which were continued 
 for many long years. In England he was ecclesiastically 
 in his element. There he found any number of persons 
 willing to accept his favourite maxim, " No Bishop, no 
 King !" and with the backing of the South to sustain 
 his efforts, he addressed himself patiently and hopefully 
 to the task of reducing the Church of Scotland to the 
 level of the Church of England. Nor was he unsuc- 
 cessful. There were famous men in those days, who 
 refused to sell their birthright privileges for a mess of 
 pottage. But there were time-servers and latitudi- 
 narians enough to be willing to do the King's bidding ; 
 and when the most troublesome Presbyterians had been 
 
16 SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 
 
 got out of the way by banishment or imprisonment, a 
 General Assembly of the Kirk (that of 1618) was found 
 willing by a majority to vote its approval of the Prelacy 
 which had been introduced some years before, and of 
 the ritualistic ceremonies which formed a part of the 
 same system. 
 
 King James bequeathed his opinions on the subject 
 of arbitrary power and the subjection of the Church as 
 a legacy to his children, and the fatal gift proved in the 
 end the ruin of his dynasty. His son, Charles I,, 
 ascended the throne in 1625; and when, a few years 
 later, he paid his first visit to Scotland, he at once let 
 it be known that if his father had chastised the people 
 with whips, he would chastise them with scorpions. In 
 his day the attempt was made to introduce that famous 
 Service-Book by Archbishop Laud with which is con- 
 nected the story of Jenny Geddes, and the imposition 
 of which, with other things, led to the commencement 
 of the " Fifty Years' Struggle of the Covenanters." That 
 struggle may be said to date from 1638, when the 
 memorable Glasgow Assembly was held, and when the 
 Church rebelled against the bondage in which she was 
 held, and asserted once for all her intrinsic independ- 
 ence. She was not to secure the peaceful possession 
 of her rights, however, without passing through the 
 fires of martyrdom. First, through the later years of 
 the reign of Charles I., whose fanatical devotion to the 
 despotic theories of his father led to his own dethrone- 
 ment and execution in 1649; and next, under the 
 basely ungrateful tyranny of Charles II., who rewarded 
 the Scots for their loyalty to him by the infliction of 
 
 (400) 
 
SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 17 
 
 cruel persecutions, tlie Church was taught by bitter 
 experience what it is to want religious liberty; and 
 there was then burned into her heart that passion for 
 freedom which has broken out into a flame again and 
 again at subsequent periods in her history, and the 
 decay of which has always proved a sure token of her 
 own declension. 
 
 It was in 1662 that the second grand attempt was 
 made to impose Episcopacy upon Scotland. Previously 
 to that four new Scottish bishops (two of them being 
 Sharp and Leighton) had been consecrated at West- 
 minster ; and in order to compel the Presbyterian minis- 
 ters to conform, a law was issued requii^ing all who had 
 been settled since 1649 (when lay patronage was abol- 
 ished under the Commonwealth) to secure a fresh title 
 to their charges by, among other things, getting episco- 
 pal sanction to their holding them. A disruption was 
 the consequence. Four hundred of the best men in 
 Scotland refused to assent to the terms oflered ; and in 
 the depth of winter they were ejected from their homes. 
 When as many ministers and more were driven from 
 their manses in 1843, the thing was bad enough. Pro- 
 vision required to be made suddenly for their mainte- 
 nance, and there were no churches ready in which they 
 could continue to preach. But in 1662 the case was 
 immensely more hard ; for to preach at all was then reck- 
 oned a crime, and not a few were compelled to seal their 
 testimony with their blood. The twenty-six succeeding 
 years came in this way to make the saddest and most 
 romantic period in the history of the Church of Scotland; 
 for it was during this time that there occurred a number 
 
 (460) 2 
 
18 SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 
 
 of those tragedies the memory of which has sunk the 
 deepest into the popuUir mind, — the execution, for ex- 
 ample, of the Earl of Argyle, the drowning of Margaret 
 Wilson at Wigton, and the murder by Claverhouse of 
 John Brown of Priesthill. 
 
 The day of deliverance, however, arrived at last. In 
 1685 Charles II. Avas succeeded by his brother, James 
 VII. of Scotland and II. of England, who w-as an 
 avowed Papist. The growing disgust which the con- 
 duct of the Stewarts had awakened throughout the 
 country now reached its climax. There was good reason 
 to fear that under the new King there might be a return 
 of the times of the Bloody Mary. Under the influence 
 of this common apprehension many came together who 
 before had been at feud with one another ; and William, 
 Prince of Orange, who had married a daughter of James, 
 was invited to come across from Holland and take the 
 lead in the defence of Protestantism. William accepted 
 the invitation, and landed in England on the 4th of 
 November 1688. James, after a short but ineffectual 
 struggle to maintain his position, fled to France, and 
 William and Mary quietly ascended the vacant throne. 
 The immediate result of the new order of things was a 
 cessation of persecution; but it was not till July 1689 
 that the first steps were taken formally to reverse the 
 policy of the preceding years. At that time an Act of 
 the Scottish Parliament was passed abolishing Episco- 
 l)acy. In the spring of 1690 another Act passed re- 
 scinding the Act of Supremacy. That was followed by 
 another, restoring to their churches all the surviving 
 ejected ministers, and ordering the removal of the 
 
SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 19 
 
 Prelatic incumbents who were occupying their parishes. 
 And at length, on the 7th of June, came the Confession 
 of Faith and the settlement of the Presbyterian form of 
 Church government. This completed what is known in 
 history by the name of the Revolution Settlement ; an 
 arrangement which, in some respects, was most seriously 
 defective, but which perhaps was as satisfactory as could 
 in the circumstances have been fairly expected. In 
 particular, there was one thing in it which proved prac- 
 tically disastrous, but which at the time there seemed 
 no way of evading. This was the receiving, without a 
 very rigid test of the " curates," as they were called, 
 into the Presbyterian ministry. There were at this 
 period about nine hundred parishes in Scotland, and 
 these were occupied by men who had conformed to 
 Prelacy. Of the ejected ministers only about ninety 
 survived. Even after room, therefore, had been made 
 for them, there remained many charges which would have 
 been left unoccupied if the former incumbents had not 
 been employed. That they were ready to change their 
 colours to suit the fashion of the hour, did not say very 
 much for their strength of principle; and that before that 
 they had approved themselves to a Government whose 
 hands were red with the blood of martyrs, was not a 
 point in their history from which very favourable con- 
 clusions could be drawn as to their personal piety. But 
 there they were, a body of men who had been trained 
 for the ministry, and who had had more or less expe- 
 rience in it; and it would have been scarcely possible, 
 as things stood, to reconstitute the Presbyterian Estab- 
 lishment without taking them into it if they were will- 
 
20 SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 
 
 ing to submit to its rule. They were incorporated into 
 the Church accordingly; and we shall see how their 
 presence came to complexion its after history. 
 
 Before noticing this, however, a word may be said in 
 justification of the position taken up by the Church of 
 Scotland in so pertinaciously opposing the attempts 
 made to bring it into conformity with the Church of 
 England. There now live among us a good many wise 
 men who think that Andrew Melville and Alexander 
 Henderson were very narrow-minded persons, and that 
 the Covenanters made much ado about nothing, and 
 were martyrs by mistake. Among those who have 
 themselves attained to so high an elevation that they 
 can afford to review the proceedings of the times of 
 which we have been speaking with a condescending pity, 
 is the Rev. Dr. Cunningham of Crieff, who, in his 
 " Church History of Scotland," says: — 
 
 "It may, without much liberality, be allowed that 
 Christianity would have survived in our country though 
 Presbyterianism had been destroyed. Christianity is 
 not bound up with any form of Church polity. The 
 sternest Presbyterian will at length allow that a bishop 
 may be a Christian man. It was not, therefore, for 
 Christianity, but merely for Presbytery, that our fore- 
 fathers fought. The religious struggles of our country 
 were entirely about church government and church dis- 
 cipline, and not about the inner truths of our holy ftiith. 
 It is possible that too great attention to the one may 
 withdraw the mind from the attention which it ought to 
 bestow upon the other. There is some reason to think 
 that this result has been exemplified in Scotland. 
 
SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 21 
 
 Scotchmen certainly talk much more about church mat- 
 ters, than about matters purely spiritual. There is an 
 abundance of ecclesiasticism in our country; there is, 
 perhaps, a deficit of spiritualism." 
 
 By such " good words and fair speeches " have " the 
 hearts of the simple been deceived" in all genera- 
 tions. Language like what we have just quoted was 
 probably precisely that which was used by Archbishop 
 Sharp, and with more sincerity by his associate Leighton. 
 A bishop may be a Christian man, — who can doubt it 1 
 Questions of church, government are in themselves of 
 less importance than "the inner truths of our holy faith," 
 — nobody can deny it. There is a risk of men becoming 
 ecclesiastical without becoming spiritual, — that, too, is 
 conceded at once. But what are the conclusions which 
 Dr. Cunningham wishes us to draw from these innocent- 
 looking premises 1 They are such as these : that our 
 forefathers fought for trifles ; that the conflicts in which 
 they engaged need never have been waged ; that, on the 
 whole, Scotland has sufi"ered rather than gained by them ; 
 and that all candid men would have felt a greater plea- 
 sure to-day in reading our Church history, if it had been 
 written therein that the great men of the past had risen 
 above their sectarian prejudices, and had become Epis- 
 copalians when their lawful sovereigns wanted them. 
 
 We might point to the condition of England at the 
 present hour, as affording a most striking proof of the 
 wisdom of the Scots in resisting the imposition of Pre- 
 lacy upon them. It has been well said that the English 
 Reformers cast the Papal thief out of the window, but 
 left the ladder standing by which he could return. That 
 
22 SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 
 
 the government and ritual of the Church of England aro 
 favourable to the fostering of Romanism, has been abun- 
 :lantly demonstrated ; and even were it true that our 
 forefathers fought for nothing more than " Presbytery," 
 their conduct could be most entirely justified. For to 
 their "narrowness" is due the fact, that while many are 
 beginning to doubt whether Rome may not yet come to 
 regain its ascendency in the South, the principles of the 
 Reformation still keep their hold unshaken on the 
 people of the North. 
 
 But when a Church historian says slightingly that 
 the Covenanters contended " merely for Presbytery," — 
 thereby conveying the impression that the battle of fifty 
 years was only about a point of church government, — 
 he is either trying wilfully to " deceive the hearts of the 
 simple," or he is exhibiting an amount of ignorance 
 which demonstrates his incompetency to perform the 
 task which he has presumed to undertake. For, all 
 through the conflict, this was made clear, that while 
 James and the Charleses were trying to enforce their 
 views upon the Church of Scotland, the^ loere doing 
 their best to establish the principle that the Church, as 
 such, has no inherent independence or freedom, but 
 must be content to shape itself according to the fashion 
 2)resented to it by the civil authorities. There are some 
 people, we know, who have no objection to that prin- 
 ciple ; but, as a rule, it is odious to Scotchmen, both as 
 citizens and as Presbyterians ; and were there nothing 
 else, we feel devoutly grateful to the wise and good men 
 of old, who were willing to die rather than acquiesce in 
 its adoption. 
 
SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 23 
 
 A very much more just and intelligent view of these 
 old times is given by another, who has better appre- 
 hended the meaning of our national history. Says Dr. 
 Rainy in his answer to Dean Stanley : — 
 
 "The earnestness with which Presbyterianism was 
 maintained was due to something else besides the con- 
 fidence men had in theii' theoretical conclusions about 
 church government. Everything that is theoretically 
 good and true has its witness in itself, from which it re- 
 ceives daily confirmation. So it was with Presbyterian- 
 ism. Presbyterianism meant organized life, regulated 
 distribution of forces, graduated recognition of gifts, 
 freedom to discuss, authority to control, agency to ad- 
 minister. Presbyterianism meant a system by which 
 the convictions and conscience of the Church could con- 
 stantly be applied by appropriate organs to her afiairs. 
 Presbyterianism meant a system by which quickening 
 influence anywhere experienced could be turned into 
 efiective force, and transmitted to fortify the whole 
 society. Presbyterianism meant a system in which every 
 one, first of all the common man, had his recognized 
 place, his defined position, his ascertained and guarded 
 privileges, his responsibilities inculcated and enforced, 
 — felt himself a part of the great unity, with a right to 
 ^ care for its welfare and to guard its integrity. From 
 ' the broad base of the believing people the sap rose 
 through Sessions, Presbyteries, Synods, to the Assembly; 
 and thence descending, difiused knowledge, influence, or- 
 ganic unity through the whole system. Yet Presby- 
 terianism is a system for a free people, that love a regu- 
 lated, a self-regulating fi-eedom, — a people independent, 
 
24 SCOTTISH EPISCOPACY. 
 
 jet patient, considerate, trusting much to the processes 
 of discussion and consultation, and more to the promised 
 
 aid of a much forgiving and a watchful Lord Our 
 
 fathers felt instinctively that the changes thrust upon 
 them threatened to suppress great elements of good, — 
 not mere forms alone, but the life which these forms 
 nourished and expressed. When Episcopacy shall have 
 trained the common people to care, as those of Scotland 
 have cared, for the public interests of Christ's Church, 
 and to connect that care with their own religious life as 
 a part and a fruit of it, then it may afi'ord to smile at 
 the zealous self-defence of Scottish Presbyterianism." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 WHY THE SECESSIONS BEGAN THE ORIGIN OF THE UNITED 
 
 PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 
 
 ''HEN Presbyterianism was reestablished in 
 Scotland in 1690, the whole of the people — 
 with the exception of a few Cameronians 
 Xa^^^ (who afterwards constituted the Reformed 
 ^^ Presbyterian Church), those Episcopalians 
 
 who adhered to Prelacy from conviction, and 
 the Paj^ists — were gathered into one communion. But 
 although the old state of things was thus so far restored, 
 there were elements of disharmony in the reorganized 
 body which did not promise for it an unclouded future. 
 Its ministry, for example, was composed of at least three 
 distinct classes : first, there were four of those who had 
 been breaking the bread of life, during the times of the 
 persecution, to the Hill Folk, or extreme Covenanters ; 
 next, there were ninety of the more moderate Presbyte- 
 rian ministers, who had either been driven out of their 
 parishes in 1662, or had been ordained (some of them in 
 England and Holland) between that date and the Re- 
 volution j and, lastly, there were the men who had been 
 serving as curates in the Episcopal Establishment, and 
 who were willing to retain their livings by conforming 
 
26 UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 
 
 to Presbyteriaiiism. This last class was the most num- 
 erous of the three ; and although the other two were 
 strongest in point of capacity and principle, and managed 
 to tell very influentially on the conduct and legislation 
 of the Church at large, yet, as may well be supposed, it 
 was not good for the country, in the long run, that the 
 majority of its ministers came to be composed of men 
 who, many of them, must have been time-servers. In 
 point of fact, they became the founders of the Moderate 
 Party, — that party to whose spirit and policy may be 
 ascribed a good many of the misfortunes of the Church 
 of Scotland. 
 
 In consequence of the Church being so constituted, 
 three things by-and-by happened : first, the spiritual 
 oversight of not a few parishes was intrusted to men 
 who were not evangelical in their preaching; second, 
 doctrinal errors of various kinds sprang up ; and, thii'd, 
 when the liberties of the Church were unwarrantably 
 trenched upon, the resistance offered was fitful and in- 
 effective. 
 
 By the terms at once of the Revolution Settlement, 
 and of the Treaty of Union, the Church of Scotland was 
 secured from the burden of lay patronage. But in 1712, 
 only five years after the Treaty of Union had been con- 
 summated, the British Parliament rudely traversed the 
 engagements which had been entered into. On the 13th 
 of March in that year, one of the Scottish members sud- 
 denly rose in his place in the House of Commons, and 
 asked leave to bring in a Bill for the restoration of 
 patronage. The proposal, for political reasons which it 
 is needless to dwell on here, was received with the 
 
UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 27 
 
 greatest favour. It was pushed through the Lower 
 House with such haste that it was in the Lords before 
 the Church, whose interests it chiefly affected, could offer 
 any formal opposition. And although, when the news 
 of the intended outrage reached Scotland, an influential 
 deputation proceeded to London to remonstrate against 
 the Bill, and was heard respectfully enough at the bar 
 of the House of Lords, yet we all know how little weight 
 those who are most nearly concerned about any matter 
 have with a political j)arty in power, when it suits that 
 party to take a certain course of its own. The Govern- 
 ment of the day imagined that the restoration of pat- 
 ronage would add, in various ways, to its strength. The 
 Parliament was obsequious. And so the pleadings of 
 the Scottish deputies were disregarded, and an Act was 
 triumphantly passed, concerning which one may say 
 that it is difficult to tell whether to speak of it most 
 severely or most contemptuously — as a great wrong, or 
 as a piece of short-sighted and blundering statesman- 
 ship. 
 
 The report of the passing of the Act was received in 
 the North with indignation. Protests against it poured 
 in from all quarters. And the first preachers who 
 accepted presentations, and attempted to secure admis- 
 sion into parishes under the new law, were dealt with 
 as offenders. But it is now clearly seen that the 
 Church ought to have done more than all this. The 
 Act was manifestly illegal. If the Treaty of Union was 
 not a mere piece of waste paper, it was no more in the 
 power of the British Parliament to alter, in the way and 
 at the time it did, the terms of the Church Settlement, 
 
28 UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 
 
 than it was in its power to diminish by a stroke of the 
 i^en the number of Scottish Representative Peers in the 
 House of Lords. The Church therefore would have 
 acted in a perfectly constitutional way if it had taken 
 its stand upon its rights, and refused to acquiesce in the 
 new arrangement in any way. There can be little 
 doubt that that would have been the course adopted by 
 John Knox or Alexander Henderson had they been at 
 the helm. But, unfortunately, Principal Carstares, the 
 leading ecclesiastic of the day, was not of the stamp of 
 the old Reformers ; and besides, the evil leaven, the 
 origin of which has been already described, had begun 
 to tell. And thus it came about that the change, which 
 at the first was vehemently protested against, was in an 
 incredibly short time quietly submitted to. Within less 
 than twenty years after the reimposition of lay patron- 
 age, the new system was in full operation ! The intru- 
 sion of unacceptable ministers into parishes against the 
 will of the people became exceedingly common. And 
 what was worse, the leaders of the Church had become 
 enamoured of the law, and were prepared to administer 
 it with rigour. In other words, the Moderate element, 
 which even at the Revolution was the strongest numeri- 
 cally, grew to be distinctly conscious of its strength, and 
 did not hesitate to show and exert it. 
 
 But the enforcement of a Moderate policy naturally 
 and necessarily produced a reaction ; or, to put the thing 
 in the form which is historically truest, the principle of 
 life in the Church began to rebel against the attempts 
 made to smother it. A rising Evangelical party made 
 itself be heard and felt — a party sound in doctrine 
 
UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 29 
 
 amidst the laxity of the time — preaching a free and full 
 gospel in a period which had become accustomed to 
 something very like a hiding of the Cross — and true to 
 the constitutional principles of the Church of Scotland, 
 while many were supporting a policy which was rapidly 
 alienating the best of the Scottish people from the 
 National Establishment. This party embraced such 
 men as Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine; "Willison of Dun- 
 dee, the author of " The Afflicted Man's Companion;" 
 and Thomas Boston, the author of " The Fourfold State." 
 When they commenced to lift up their voices in Church 
 Courts and elsewhere, the idea of contributing to the 
 formation of a new religious denomination was not in 
 all their thoughts. They were nothing more essentially 
 than devout men, whose hearts the Spirit of God had 
 touched, and who were moved by him to cry against the 
 corruptions which were weakening their Church, and 
 threatening to bring about its downfall. The suppres- 
 sion of error, the diffusion of evangelical truth, the 
 government of ecclesiastical affairs in such a way as 
 best to further the interests of vital religion every- 
 where, these were their only objects ; and if they had 
 been let alone to do what they had a perfect right and 
 title to do in these connections, they w^ould have proved 
 a tower of strength to the as yet unbroken Church of 
 the Nation. 
 
 The Moderates, however, with characteristic blindness, 
 did not understand the time in which they lived, or the 
 spiritual forces with which they were in conflict. All 
 that they saw with any clearness was that they had a 
 sweeping majority of votes on their side. Being thus 
 
30 UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 
 
 satisfied tliat they had the power, they rode rough-shod 
 over all opposition. They would listen to no remon- 
 strances. They would tolerate no protests against even 
 their most tyrannical acts, " ISTot only must you do 
 what we order," said they in efiect to their Evangelical 
 brethren, " however much the doing of it may go against 
 your consciences, but you must not utter a single word 
 in condemnation of, or objection to, our commands." 
 In short, they did their very best to suppress all free 
 speech in the Church — to make reformation impossible 
 — and to impose on those who differed from them a 
 spiritual despotism of the most insupportable description. 
 And out of such a state of things there could be only 
 one issue. The men on whom the weight of the tyranny 
 fell most heavily refused to continue to submit to it. 
 Four ministers — Ebenezer Erskine of Stirling, William 
 Wilson of Perth, Alexander Moncrieff of Abernethy, 
 and James Fisher of Kinclaven — were driven out of the 
 Church; and in 1733 there was formed the Associated 
 Presbytery — the little cloud which has since developed 
 into the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. 
 After the mischief had been done, the ruling party in 
 the Church woke up to realize in some measure the 
 greatness of their mistake, and they would then have 
 done anything within their competency to restore the 
 broken unity. But it is much easier to make breaches 
 than to heal them. Whether they can be fully justified 
 or not, the first seceders kept their ground, and refused 
 all offers of reconciliation; and the Moderates had the 
 mortification of seeing formed outside their own com- 
 munion a protesting camp, into which an increasing 
 
UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 31 
 
 number of the most religious people in Scotland gi-aclu- 
 ally found their way. 
 
 It has been hinted that even among those who sym- 
 pathize with the Erskine party in the stand they made 
 against Church tyranny, there are some who think that 
 they ought not to have turned their backs so stiffly on 
 their old friends when the door was opened for their 
 return. It is a very debatable question, and we do not 
 propose to discuss it here. But this much must be said 
 for the seceders, that if one of the reasons which weighed 
 with them was the conviction that the penitence of their 
 oppressors did not go very deep, then their conduct and 
 the grounds of it received a very significant justification 
 from the events which followed. The Moderates re- 
 covered from the discomposure which had been at first 
 produced by the retirement of so many good and able 
 men from the ranks of the ministry of the Established 
 Church, and which had actually moved them to let the 
 helm fall for a time into the hands of the Evangelicals. 
 They became themselves again. And with this restora- 
 tion came a return of their old policy. "What they con- 
 sidered the law was enforced with a remorseless rigour. 
 Principal Robertson, who was now the leader of the 
 Church, laid do-v^ni the principle that effect must be given 
 to all presentations, whatever was the consequence. 
 And as he had adopted another theory, which he was 
 equally prepared to uphold against all comers — that no 
 member of the Church can avoid executing the orders 
 of its supreme authority, except by withdrawing from 
 it altogether — he dispensed with " the Hiding Com- 
 mittee," which had been employed hitherto in carrying 
 
32 UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 
 
 through unpopular settlements, and insisted on each 
 Presbytery doing the business of its own intrusions for 
 itself. This part of their duty was felt to be very gall- 
 ing about the year 1751-52 by the Presbytery of Dun- 
 fermline. A vacancy had occurred within its bounds at 
 Inverkeithing, and the patron had presented a man who 
 was so unacceptable that the people would not have him 
 upon any terms. Under these circumstances the Presby- 
 tery refused to proceed to the settlement, and the case 
 went up to the Assembly. There, however, the scruples of 
 the Dunfermline brethren met with no sympathy. They 
 were ordered to proceed to the induction at once ; and 
 that all nonsense might be driven out of them, it wa.s 
 specially enacted that there should be present not a 
 quorum of three only (which is the legal number) but of 
 five. This reckless enactment necessarily involved a 
 good man, Mr. Gillespie of Carnock, who, if he had 
 been allowed to stay peaceably at home on the ordina- 
 tion day, might never afterwards have been heard of. 
 It is not recorded of him that he thought lay patronage 
 sinful. It is not hinted that he would have refused to 
 recognize Mr. Andrew Pichardson as minister at Inver- 
 keithing after he had been settled there by men who 
 could conscientiously do so. All that he made a point 
 of was this, that he could not for himself be a party to 
 the intrusion of any minister into any parish. And 
 holding that, he dared to absent himself from the induc- 
 tion. The offence thus committed by him could not be 
 overlooked. He was taken up, and tried, and deposed 
 for contumacy. But here was another stupid mistake 
 of the Moderates. The power of the vote is a tremen- 
 
UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 33 
 
 dous instrument, not to be despised by any; but there is 
 a power also in common sense and conscience, even when 
 these are in a minority. And the fact was illustrated 
 here. Mr. Gillespie was believed by a good many 
 people to have done nothing worthy of death, or of 
 bonds, or even of deposition. The treatment to which 
 he was subjected served to show in a stronger light than 
 ever the intolerable character of the system under which 
 the affairs of the Church were being administered, and 
 the result was the formation of a new sect, which on 
 commencing its career professed to have nothing dis- 
 tinctive about it except this, that it sought relief 
 from patronage. The Relief Church, as the body con- 
 stituted in 1761 came to be called, and the various 
 branches of the secession, pursued separate courses 
 until 1847, when they happily agreed to combine 
 their forces, and the Communion so formed has been 
 known since by the name of the United Presbyterian 
 Church. 
 
 From this sketch, brief as it is, it will be very clearly 
 seen that this section of Nonconformists have no cause 
 to blush for their origin. They are where they are, not 
 as the result of a freak of some scrupulous conscience, 
 but as the fruit of movements with which all liberal and 
 earnest men now sympathize. And although they have 
 now in the main adopted views of the relation between 
 Church and State which have seriously altered their 
 position, the shrewd remark made by Mr, Hill Burton 
 is one which they may still remember with pride. " The 
 great Establishment of England," says he, " kept to its 
 principles, while the Dissenters struck out innovations ! 
 
 (460) 3 
 
34 UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. 
 
 On the other hand, Scottish Dissent always tended to 
 preserve the old principles of the Church, whence the 
 Establishment, by the progress of enlightenment, as 
 some said — by deterioration, according to others — was 
 lapsing." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ANOTHER EXODUS — RESULTING IN CONGREGATIONALISM. 
 
 NDEE. the leadership of Principal Pobertson 
 and others (whose avowed policy it was to 
 give effect to every presentation made by a 
 patron, whatever might be the consequences), 
 the people, as a rule, ceased to offer any 
 violent opposition to the most obnoxious settle- 
 ments. If the inhabitants of a parish were indifferent 
 about religion, they callously acquiesced in the appoint- 
 ment of an unacceptable minister as an irremediable 
 evil ; or, if they counted it indispensable to have Evan- 
 gelical preaching, they quietly retired from the Church, 
 built a plain " meeting-house " for themselves, and ap- 
 plied for " supply " to the Seceders. But God did not, 
 even during this dark period, wholly forsake the Church 
 of Scotland. Here and there, both in the north and in the 
 south, were points of light, which, if they did not dispel 
 the prevailing darkness, helped greatly to relieve the 
 gloom ; and toward the close of the century in partic- 
 ular a very remarkable movement began, which at first 
 seemed to promise the infusion of a new life into the 
 body as a whole. The movement was originated by 
 
36 CONGREGATIONALISM. 
 
 Robert Haldane, the proprietor of the beautiful estate 
 of Airthrey, and a near relative of Lord Duncan, the 
 hero of Camperdown. How such a man came to be 
 the leader in a religious revival will be best told in his 
 own words : — 
 
 " Before the French Revolution," he says, " having 
 nothing to rouse my mind, I lived in the country, almost 
 wholly engaged by country pursuits, little concerned 
 about the general interests or happiness of mankind, but 
 selfishly enjoying the blessings which God, in his provi- 
 dence, had so bountifully poured upon me When 
 
 politics began to be talked of, I was led to consider 
 (everything anew. I eagerly caught at them as a pleas- 
 ant speculation. Asa fleeting phantom they eluded my 
 grasp ; but in missing the shadow, I caught the sub- 
 stance : and, while obliged to abandon those confessedly 
 empty and unsatisfactory pursuits, I obtained in some 
 measure the solid consolations of the gospel ; so that I 
 may say, as Paul concerning the Gentiles of old, ' He 
 was found of me who sought him not.' " 
 
 The first idea of Mr. Haldane, — at the time of his con- 
 version an attached member of the Church of Scotland, — 
 was to consecrate himself and his possessions to the work 
 of Christ abroad. He sold his estate, and, with the pro- 
 ceeds, proposed to establish in the city of Bentu-es a mis- 
 sion, in which he himself, and several others (ministers 
 and laymen) whom he had persuaded to agree to accom- 
 pany him, were to be the active labourers. But the 
 East India Company refused to allow the plan to be 
 carried into effect; and the consecrated band, having the 
 gate of the East shut against them, threw themselves on 
 
CONGREGATIONALISM. 37 
 
 the (in their way) almost as necessitous fields which lay 
 around them in their o^vn country. On the 20th of 
 December 1797, they formed themselves into a " Society 
 for Propagating the Gospel at Home;" and to prevent 
 their act in so doing from being misapprehended, they 
 were careful at the outset to disclaim all intention 
 to intermeddle with the existing ecclesiastical arrange- 
 ments. "It is not our design," they said, "to form 
 or extend the influence of any sect. Our sole inten- 
 tion is to make known the evangelical gospel of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. In employing itinerants, school- 
 masters, and others, we do not consider ourselves as 
 conferring ordination upon them, or appointing them to 
 the pastoral office. We only propose, by sending them 
 out, to supply the means of gi-ace wherever there is a 
 deficiency." 
 
 Here, then, once more within the century, a time of 
 merciful visitation came upon the Church of Scotland. 
 A body of devoted men arose out of her own bosom, 
 and called upon her aloud to awaken out of her sleep ; 
 and there cannot be the shadow of a doubt that if she 
 had responded to the call the result would have been an 
 immense increase to her strength and efficiency. But 
 again she failed to discern the signs of the times. She 
 did not hear the voice of the Lord. She was not wise 
 enough to adopt and direct a current which it was out 
 of her power to arrest ; and the final result was a new 
 exodus, and the formation within her own territory of 
 a new religious denomination. 
 
 " The movement of the early Congregationalists," says 
 Dr. Lindsay Alexander, one of themselves, " was from the 
 
38 CONGREGATIONALISM. 
 
 beginning a purely spiritual movement. Like Method- 
 ism in England, the secession which they headed had 
 its source simply in a craving for more life, more energy, 
 more spiritual freedom and difiusiveness, than they could 
 find in existing systems. Could they have found what 
 they wanted in the religious societies with which they 
 were already connected, it was not in their minds to 
 have ever forsaken them. On the contrary, they rather 
 clung to them with filial afiection ; nor was it until they 
 were treated as unworthy and rebellious children — their 
 requests refused, their longing desires scorned, their 
 evangelistic efibrts repressed and punished, and the whole 
 machinery of ecclesiastical despotism put in operation to 
 suppress and terrify them — that they asserted their 
 rights as men whom the truth had made free, and 
 availed themselves of the liberty conceded them by the 
 laws of the country to unfurl the banners of an indepen- 
 dent communion. Theii' adoption of the Congregational 
 form of Church polity was the result of subsequent in- 
 vestigation and study ; to which they were led partly by 
 the circumstances in which they were placed, and partly 
 by the counsel and instructions of ministers from En- 
 gland holding these views, who came to countenance and 
 assist them in their evangelistic efibrts." 
 
 It is not necessary to go deeper into the history of this 
 sect, or to show how afterwards it came to divide into 
 two parts, the one holding " Baptist," the other " Pjedo- 
 baptist " views. Enough has been said to bring out this 
 fact, that the not inconsiderable section of our fellow- 
 countrymen who are now Congregationalists in their 
 Church principles, might at this day have been still 
 
CONGREGATIONALISM. 39 
 
 Presbyterians and in the National Church, if it had 
 not been for the folly and tp'anny of the Moderate 
 majority, which would not suffer the new life to have 
 free scope for expansion within the limits of the Es- 
 tablishment. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 A NEW EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT FROM A NEW CENTRE. 
 
 OWARD the middle of the first quarter of the 
 present century another man came distinctly 
 into the public view, who was manifestly sent 
 to revive the Evangelical interest within the 
 Church of Scotland. This was Dr. Andrew 
 Thomson, who was settled in St. George's, 
 Edinburgh, in 1810. What manner of man he was is 
 told by one who shortly after took his own place as a 
 reformer by his side, and who lifted aloft the banner of 
 spiritual freedom when it was suddenly stricken from 
 his friend's hand. " When one thinks," said Dr. Chal- 
 mers, " of the vital energy by which every deed and 
 every utterance were pervaded; of that prodigious 
 strength which but gambolled with the difiiculties that 
 would have depressed and overcome other men ; of that 
 prowess in conflict and that promptitude in counsel with 
 his fellows ; of that elastic buoyancy which ever rose 
 with the occasion, and bore him onward and upward to 
 the successful termination of his career ; of the weight 
 and multiplicity of his engagements, and yet, as if 
 nothing could over-work that colossal mind and robust 
 
THE LATER EVANGELICALS. 41 
 
 frame-work, the perfect lightness and facility wherewith 
 all was executed ; when we think, in the midst of these 
 powers and these performances, how intensely he la- 
 boured — I had almost said how intensely he lived — we 
 cannot but acknowledge that death, in seizing upon him, 
 hath made full proof of a mastery that sets all the might 
 and all the powers of humanity at defiance." 
 
 The raising up of such a leader, at the time he ap- 
 peared, within the Scottish Establishment, was a provi- 
 dential dispensation as marked in its way as was the call 
 to Martin Luther at the dawn of the Reformation. Not 
 only did he raise the Evangelicals, as a Church party, into 
 a compact and powerful organization — but by the man- 
 liness of his Christian character, and the extraordinary 
 eloquence of his preaching and speaking, he commanded 
 respect for earnest piety in places where it had formerly 
 been derided as weak, and sensibly afiected the tone of 
 general society in the city where he resided. As in- 
 stances of his power over the public mind we may note 
 such facts as these : that his sermons on the immorality 
 of the stage "for a time almost ruined the Edinburgh 
 theatre ; " that his discourses on infidelity " alike pros- 
 trated the pride of the sceptic and gave confidence to 
 the timid believer ; " and that it was mainly through 
 his influence over the Parliament House that so many 
 of our most distinguished lawyers were found on the 
 popular side in the contendings which issued in the 
 Disruption. 
 
 Nor was Dr. Thomson left to labour without worthy 
 coadjutors. While he was lifting up the standard so 
 fearlessly and efiectively in the east, another star, also 
 
42 THE LATER EVANGELICALS. 
 
 of the first magnitude, was blazing forth as conspicu- 
 ously in the great commercial metropolis of the west. 
 Dr. Chalmers was admitted minister of the Tron Church, 
 Glasgow, in 1815. In less than two years afterwards 
 (January 1817) there appeared those " Astronomical Dis- 
 courses " which ran an almost equal race for popularity 
 with the "Tales of my Landlord." And the whole 
 country soon rang with the name of one who was prov- 
 ing himself to be possessed not merely of a tongue of fire, 
 but of practical qualities such as the times most urgently 
 needed, by the exercise of which it was confidently hoped 
 that the scattered energies of the Church would be col- 
 lected together and organized into an effective force for 
 the evangelization of the people. 
 
 When Dr. Andrew Thomson and Dr. Chalmers were 
 thus labouring to establish the reign of God in Scotland, 
 the wish to stir up an ecclesiastical controversy was as 
 far as possible from their minds. Their single aim was 
 the propagation of the gospel, and the reforms they 
 sought for the Church were in general advocated, not on 
 theoretic, but on practical grounds. The spirit of the 
 movement which they represented is illustrated, for ex- 
 ample, by the circumstance that now the Assembly did 
 not put away from it as visionary the proposal to send 
 the glad tidings of salvation to the heathen. In 1825 
 a committee was appointed to consider the feasibility 
 of a mission to India; and in 1829 Dr. Duff" actually 
 set out for the East. The proposal to undertake this 
 new enterprise came from Dr. Inglis, an Evangelical 
 Moderate, as he has been called ; and happily so, for thus 
 the concurrence of the dominant party was secured in 
 
THE LATER EVANGELICALS. 43 
 
 favour of what — if the movers in it had been from the 
 opposite side — might have been looked coldly at as an 
 Evangelical project. But the truth was that the Church 
 as a whole was beginning to feel the influence of the 
 rising tide, and this engagement in missionary work was 
 a palpable proof of the fact. The Evangelical leaders of 
 the day, however, were not men who could allow them- 
 selves to compound for what was unsatisfactory at home 
 by taking a deeper interest in the spread of the truth 
 abroad. They saw around them, at their own doors, 
 things which they were not able to view without trouble 
 and anxiety : many of the pulpits filled by men who did 
 not themselves preach the gospel ; large districts of the 
 country in which the cause of spiritual religion was at 
 the lowest possible ebb ; and a general listlessness and 
 indifference about the Church and its doings which were 
 at once ominous and disheartening. As they brooded 
 over all this they came, possibly by different routes, 
 to one and the same conclusion — namely, that if the 
 Church of Scotland was ever again to become a great 
 spiritual force in the land, a potential voice must he given 
 to the people in the choice of their own ministers. The 
 broad practical mind of Chalmers would have reached 
 that position, and held it tenaciously, even although no 
 such principle had ever found a place in the original 
 constitution of the Church. But, of course, he felt 
 surer of his ground, and was better prepared to contend 
 for it, when he discovered that in pleading the cause of 
 the people he was introducing no innovation, but was, 
 on the contrary, actually bringing again into view an 
 original but forgotten right. To Dr. Andrew Thomson, 
 
41 THE LATER EVANGELICALS. 
 
 on the other hand, the constitutional side of the ques- 
 tion would have special attractions at once ; and hence, 
 while the name of Chalmers became by-and-by associated 
 esjDecially with Non-Intrusion, Thomson went in 
 blankly, and so early as 1825, for the Abolition of 
 Patronage. 
 
 I'he main motive-spring in both these men was, there 
 can be no doubt, substantially the same. They were 
 concerned about the revival of religion. They were 
 eager for the success of an Evangelical movement which, 
 they hoped, would gain Scotland for Christ. And in 
 pleading for the abolition of patronage, or for non-intru- 
 sion, they thought far less about the abstract question of 
 what is the true theory of the Church than about the 
 bearing of the reforms they advocated on the practi- 
 cal issues which they had at heart. It is this, indeed, 
 which explains what some have thought the inconsist- 
 ency of certain Evangelicals with regard to patronage. 
 It is well known that the continued existence of some 
 form of patronage would not alone have caused the Dis- 
 ruption. Many argued about it in this way : In an 
 Established Church there are undoubtedly two things 
 connected with every parish — a cure of souls, and what 
 is called a living ; and if due care is taken that in no 
 case shall a minister be settled in a place but with the 
 hearty concurrence of the people, no great harm can 
 come of conceding to those who, theoretically speaking, 
 provide the " living " the privilege of bringing under 
 the notice of the people one or more individuals whom 
 they would like to see settled in the charge. Practically 
 there are enormous difficulties in the way of loyal Pres- 
 
THE LATER EVANGELICALS, 45 
 
 bytevians assenting to any such arrangement, however 
 guarded, because experience shows that when you give 
 a lay patron an inch, he will, when he can, take an 
 ell. At the same time, it is to be distinctly remembered 
 that what many of the best men of the Church in those 
 days chiefly thought about, was not so much relief from 
 every kind of patronage, as the securing, under any 
 system which happened to exist, the rights of the Chris- 
 tian people. And for these rights they came to contend, 
 not merely because they saw that it would be expedient 
 to have them recognized, but because it grew to be in- 
 creasingly clear to them that they were rights which 
 the Church had no title in itself to surrender, which, in 
 point of fact, the Church of Scotland never had sur- 
 rendered, and the suspension of which was never in- 
 tended under any concordat or covenant which that 
 Church had at any time made with the State. 
 
 At different periods in the history of the Church the 
 laws relating to the settlement of ministers have varied ; 
 and sometimes, it cannot be denied, elements have been 
 allowed which we would now regard as inadmissible. 
 Bat underneath all these variations there ran one deep, 
 strong, overpowering conviction on the part of all Evan- 
 gelical Scotchmen, in all generations, that " it appertain- 
 eth " to each congregation to choose its own minister ; 
 and when Chalmers lifted up the banner of " Non-Intru- 
 sion," his aim, as a practical Christian statesman, was to 
 meddle as little as possible with the existing arrange- 
 ments of the Establishment, but to secure in any case 
 to the people of Scotland their inalienable privilege of 
 popular election. 
 
46 THE LATER EVANGELICALS. 
 
 The subject was first formally brought before the 
 Assembly in 1832, the year after Dr. Andrew Thom- 
 son's death, in connection with a number of overtures, 
 the general tenor whereof was as follows : " That where- 
 as the practice of Church Courts for many years has 
 reduced the call to a mere formality, and whereas 
 this practice has a direct tendency to alienate the 
 affections of the people of Scotland from the Estab- 
 lished Church, it is overtured that such measures as 
 may be deemed necessary be adopted in order to re- 
 store the call to its constitutional and salutary effi- 
 ciency." When these had been read, a motion was 
 made that they should be referred to a committee for 
 consideration ; but the Moderate party was in a clear 
 majority in the House, and the motion was peremptorily 
 negatived. 
 
 Next year the matter was revived — a still larger 
 number of overtures from the inferior courts showing 
 hov/ much the Church was stirred about the question ; 
 and Dr. Chalmers moved that efficiency should be given 
 to the call ; the dissent of a majority of the male heads 
 of families (being communicants) to be regarded as proof 
 that " the call^^ in the Church sense, was awanting. But 
 again the efibrts of the Evangelicals were unsuccessful. 
 The proposal of Dr. Chalmers was lost by a majority 
 against it of twelve. 
 
 As the votes showed, year after year, that the tide was 
 turning, the subject was not allowed to sleep. The 
 memorable Assembly of 1834 arrived, and the motion 
 made by Dr. Chalmers was renewed by Lord Moncreiff. 
 And this time it wns not made in vain. By a vote of 
 
THE LATER EVANGELICALS. 47 
 
 184 to 138 what is called the Veto Law was passed, and 
 the long reign of Moderatism came to an end. 
 
 Happily we do not now need to vindicate the essen- 
 tial wisdom of the measure which was thus carried in 
 the Assembly. The lay patron has since then been 
 unanimously flung overboard, and nobody now-a-days 
 stands up for the old Moderate principle, that " effect 
 should be given to every presentation, no matter at 
 what cost." It has equally ceased to be the fashion to 
 argue for a " veto with reasons," Lord Aberdeen's Act, 
 which gave us a sample of that, not having raised it much 
 in the public estimation. But as the grand cry of the 
 enemies of non-intrusion forty years ago was that the 
 Veto Act was illegal, that the General Assembly had 
 done what it had no right to do, and that this attack 
 by the Church on the State furnished a justifiable 
 ground for the reprisals which followed, it may be well, 
 before closing this chapter, to ofier two remarks. 
 
 In the first place, let the reader take notice what the 
 Yeto Act really amounted to. It did not propose to 
 meddle with patronage. Although the Church had 
 never formally submitted to the outrage inflicted in 
 Queen Anne's time, it had practically condoned it by 
 allowing patrons to present to livings ; and the Evan- 
 gelicals in 1834 acquiesced in the use and wont. But 
 the Act of Queen Anne never even professed to abolish 
 the call. It was still the law and the custom of the 
 Church to go through the form at least of asking that 
 concurrence of the people to which the call gave formal 
 expression. And all that the General Assembly did 
 was to vitalize what had become a dead letter. It 
 
48 THK LATER EVANGELICALS. 
 
 might have done this, we are all now disposed to think, 
 in a more perfect way. It might, for example, have 
 ordered the rejection of any presentee who could not 
 show a largely-signed call in his favour ; and it might 
 have requii'ed a majority, not merely of all the male 
 heads of families, but of all the communicants, male and 
 female. But Lord MoncreifF and his party were studi- 
 ously moderate in their demands. And all they asked 
 was this, that no man should be intruded into a parish 
 when a majority of the male heads of families came for- 
 ward and deliberately and solemnly objected to him. 
 
 Now, secondly, for the true Church of Scotland — the 
 Church of the Reformers and Covenanters — to have ad- 
 mitted that in giving an honest meaning to " the call " 
 it had done something ultra vires, or beyond its right, — 
 for the Church of Scotland to have done that, would 
 have been to acknowledge its own constitution to be a 
 mockery, or to confess that in entering into an alliance 
 with the State it had bartered away one of its most 
 important privileges. As a matter of history, the Church 
 had never assented to the putting of lay patrons in the 
 place of the people ; but if it had — if the Moderate in- 
 terpretation of the law had been the right one, and we 
 had been actually obliged to allow that by the Church's 
 own consent the General Assembly was debarred from 
 taking any effectual steps to see that the call was what 
 it professed to be — then the state of things would have, 
 in plain terms, been in the last degree discreditable. If 
 a Church like ours believes, as it always has believed, 
 that it " appertains " to the people to choose their own 
 ministers, it must assert the same under all circum- 
 
THE LATER EVANGELICALS. 49 
 
 stances. And it ought never to act as if wliat belongs 
 to the people as their heritage could be legitimately 
 given away for some other benefit supposed to be better, 
 or could be properly accepted as a gift conferred upon 
 them by any civil or ecclesiastical authority. 
 
 (4ri0) 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE MOVEMENT ARRESTED BY THE CIVIL COURTS. 
 
 V.J' 
 
 HE Evangelical movement which originated with 
 the labours of Andrew Thomson and Chalmers 
 had at first better success than the similar 
 movements which preceded it. Erskine, Gil- 
 lespie, Haldane, all found opposed to them 
 an overpowering majority, to bear up against 
 which seemed hopeless, and they sought expansion for 
 the new life they represented by soon going outside the 
 Establishment altogether. The ISTon-Intrusionists, as 
 they came to be called, were more fortunate. They 
 actually succeeded in converting the Church to their 
 views, and after the year 1834 they could always com- 
 mand in the Assembly such majorities as were necessary 
 to secure the carrying out of any of their projects. In 
 a word, what takes place in the State when the political 
 party in power is beaten at the polls, and the Ministry 
 in consequence resigns, had occurred in the Church. The 
 Moderate i-6gime was over, and the Evangelicals reigned 
 in their room. 
 
 And the change very speedily approved itself to all 
 earnest people as a hapj)y one for the country. Here is 
 
COLLISION WITH THE CIVIL COURTS. 51 
 
 a sample of what was done in the earliest years after its 
 accomplishment. Between 1834 and 1838 there were 
 built in necessitous districts 187 new places of worship, 
 at a cost of over <£200,000. Within the same time the 
 contributions to Foreign Missions were trebled. In 
 1836 a Colonial Scheme was established. In 1838, Mr. 
 M'Oheyne and his friends were despatched as a Deputa- 
 tion to the East to inquire into the condition of the lost 
 sheep of the house of Israel, and as the result, a Jewish 
 Mission was commenced at Pesth a year later. A new 
 interest also began to be taken, with excellent effects, in 
 the management of the National Schools and Colleges, 
 and in education generally. And the Veto Act being 
 found, as a rule, to work most admirably, a marked im-r 
 provement soon appeared in the general effectiveness of 
 the ministry throughout the whole Church. The spec- 
 tacle thus presented was so pleasing, and the struggle 
 which followed was so sad, that it is not to be wondered 
 at that men should still be discussing the question of 
 who was really responsible for the arrest of the refor- 
 mation. Let us do the minority in the Assembly the 
 justice to say that, as a party ^ they did not press to an 
 immediate issue the difficulty about jurisdiction. They 
 had their own opinions about the legality of the Veto 
 Act, and they might have done at once and dii'ectly 
 what was done in effect afterwards with their sympathy, 
 — appealed against the decision of the Assembly of 1834 
 to the Civil Courts. But they did not do that. On the 
 contrary, they so far acquiesced in that decision as to act 
 under it. The conflict, then, was not provoked by the 
 Moderiites at that stage. Nor were there any signs of 
 
52 COLLISION WITH THE CIVIL COURTS. 
 
 spontaneous interference on the part of the State. On 
 the presentee to Auchterarcler must lie the responsibility 
 of having thrown the first stone which broke the peace. 
 But it would be folly to pretend that his alone was the 
 whole guilt of the Disruption. Without the backing of 
 the Moderate party he never could have fought the battle 
 he did. If their low views of the Church had not cor- 
 rupted to such an extent the mind of Scotland, such utter- 
 ances as by-and-by came from the Bench would never 
 have found expression there. And it is matter of 
 simple history that Lord Aberdeen and Sir James 
 Graham, who could have prevented the catastrophe of 
 1843 if they had chosen to lift up their little fingers, 
 often bitterly complained in after years that they had 
 been grossly misled by the advice which they received 
 from north of the Border. Though it cannot be 
 afiirmed, therefore, that as a party they set agoing the 
 agitation which broke up the Church, it is certain that 
 they formed the life of that agitation when it had once 
 begun; and on them, without any question at all, the re- 
 sponsibility lies of having forced a new section of the 
 Scottish people into the ranks of Nonconformity. In 
 point of fact, then, substantially the same thing has 
 happened in our day which took place in last century. 
 Moderatism is in its own nature hostile to Evangelical 
 life ; and it will not tolerate its existence alongside of it 
 if it can possibly help it. In earlier times the suppres- 
 sion of Evangelical risings was easy. The Moderates sat 
 at the helm, and when any of the crew became trouble- 
 some they could throw them summarily overboard. 
 But when they lost the command of the ship, the case 
 
COLLISION WITH THE CIVIL COURTS. 53 
 
 was altered. Then they requii-ed to make alliances. 
 They called in to their assistance the secular arm, and 
 in combination with it they became strong enough to 
 insist, as of old, that at whatever risk their views of 
 ecclesiastical polity should be adopted. And it was un- 
 doubtedly another day of triumph for them when, on 
 the 18th of May 1843, a new act of expulsion took place, 
 and one more was added to the religious denominations 
 of Scotland. 
 
 The help of Caesar was got in the following way : — 
 On October 14, 1834, Mr. Robert Young, a probationer, 
 was presented by Lord Kinnoul to the parish of Auch- 
 terarder. When the call was moderated in, it was 
 signed by the factor (who was non-resident), and by two 
 heads of families. On tlie other hand, Mr. Young's 
 settlement was opposed by 287 heads of families, all of 
 them being communicants. Under these circumstances 
 the Presbytery refused to sustain the call, and their 
 conduct was approved on appeal by the Synod and the 
 General Assembly. The patron and presentee, however, 
 were not satisfied with the decision of the Church, and 
 they turned to the civil authorities. At first their 
 demand was in some respects a reasonable one. They 
 asked to have it declared that the possession of the pre- 
 sentation secured to Mr. Young the " living" if not the 
 cure of souls. But upon the Presbytery saying that 
 they had no objection in law to offer to that, the pur- 
 suers enlarged their demands, and required that the Court 
 should affirm that the Yeto Act was illegal, and that 
 Mr. Young was entitled to be settled in Auchterarder 
 (if nothing could be said against his life or doctrine), 
 
54 COLLISION WITH THE CIVIL COURTS. 
 
 whether the people were opposed to him or not. On 
 the 8th of March 1838 the Court of Session, by a 
 majority of eight to five, pronounced a sentence conced- 
 ing in principle all that was thus asked, and proclaiming 
 in effect that the Church was merely a creature of tlie 
 State, and had no such thing within itself as an in- 
 dependent jurisdiction. This judgment was affirmed 
 by the House of Lords on the 3rd of May 1839. 
 Something was wanting, however, in both verdicts. 
 The state of the law was plainly enough announced, but 
 nothing was said as to how a Presbytery was to be pun- 
 ished if it refused to proceed to the ordination of a man 
 against whose settlement in a parish all the inhabitants 
 protested. A new case, therefore, was commenced. 
 Mr. Young and Lord Kinnoul demanded that the Pres- 
 bytery of Auchterarder should be held liable in pecuniary 
 damages if they refused to intrude the presentee into the 
 parish ; and this modest request was as cordially complied 
 with as the other. Such a wonderful change has come 
 over the spiiits of men since then, that the new gener- 
 ation will hardly credit the fact that such monstrous 
 decisions were given within the memory of many who 
 are still living. For who, now-a-days, thinks it would be a 
 right thing to force a minister upon a reclaiming people ? 
 Who now wonders at good men declaring that they 
 could not in conscience take anything to do with such 
 intrusions ? And who now would care to be known as 
 the champion of a system under which Presbyteries 
 were held bound either to be parties to the commission 
 of outrages, or to submit to the exaction of ruinous 
 pecuniary damages 1 
 
COLLISION WITH THE CIVIL COURTS. 55 
 
 The excitement was immense wdiicli was produced all 
 over the country by the Auchterarder decisions; and no 
 wonder, for they rendered this abundantly plain to all 
 who were very much concerned about spiritual religion, 
 that, if a true reading had been given of the relations sub- 
 sisting between Church and State in Scotland, it would 
 be nothing less than treason to Christ and to the gospel 
 to maintain the union a day longer than was necessary. 
 Nothing, however, was done rashly. The Church, 
 through its Supreme Court, made a final appeal to the 
 Legislature. Such and such, it said, are the legal deci- 
 sions which have been given in our case. If they are 
 enforced, it is impossible that we can submit to them. 
 But we are profoundly convinced of the importance of 
 maintaining the Establishment, and we ask you to listen 
 to the statement which we have drawn up with regard 
 to the constitutional position of the Church, and to con- 
 sider, in the light of what it contains, whether you can- 
 not do something effectual for our relief. The Govern- 
 ment of the day received the appeal, and of course led 
 Parliament in the course which it took with respect to 
 it. What that course was is well known. " The Claim 
 of Right " was rejected. The judgments complained of 
 were countersigned by the representatives of the na- 
 tion, as setting forth the conditions on which alone the 
 connection between Church and State could be main- 
 tained, and those who now constitute the Free Church 
 were then forced to seek outside the Establishment 
 what was conclusively denied to them within" it. 
 
 But w^hat, in plain terms, was then settled 1 Osten- 
 sibly this chiefly, that a presentee had an incontestable 
 
56 COLLISION WITH THE CIVIL COURTS. 
 
 claim in law to ordination, if a Presbytery found him 
 personally qualified ; in other words, that in the settle- 
 ment of ministers the will of the patron was entitled 
 to dominate, not the will of the people. Or, to put it in 
 yet another form, it was declared that the Church as an 
 Establishment had no right to put in operation the 
 principle of non-intrusion. Even if that had been all, 
 the case would have been serious enough; for the Evan- 
 gelicals had become thoroughly convinced that the 
 intrusion of ministers into charges was contrary to 
 Scripture, contrary to the constitution of the Church, 
 contrary to reason, and hostile to the maintenance of 
 spiritual religion, and they could never in honour 
 have consented to remain in a position which prevented 
 them from carrying out their convictions in that connec- 
 tion. But in the course of the conflict another and a 
 yet higher question was raised. It was this. Did the 
 Church, when it formed an alliance with the State, 
 negotiate as an independent power; and did it carry with 
 it, when the union was completed, all its inherent rights 1 
 or did the State act in the matter as a jJatron who takes a 
 dependent institution under his protection, and who there- 
 by becomes entitled to shape and mould it at his will ? 
 The Courts of Law and the Legislature took virtually the 
 latter view. The Church's claim of spiritual independ- 
 ence was scoffed at as absurd ; and when the attitude 
 taken up by Parliament with reference to this matter 
 was declared to be final, the blow given was felt 
 with peculiar keenness on this ground, that whereas 
 the denial of non-intrusion afi'ected directly only the 
 rights of the [)eople, the denial of a free autonomy to 
 
COLLISION WITH THE CIVIL COURTS. 57 
 
 the Cliurcli struck immediately at the supremacy of 
 Christ. 
 
 We shall look more particularly at this subject in 
 next chapter, but in the meantime we may, in passing, 
 note this important fact, that although two attempts 
 have been made — the one in 1843 by Lord Aberdeen, 
 the other in 1874 by Lord Advocate Gordon — to put the 
 Establishment right with the people, nothing whatever 
 has been done even to blunt the edge of those decisions 
 by which the Church was declared by the Law Courts 
 to possess no inherent freedom. In the " Protest " 
 which was left by the Evangelical majority upon the 
 table of the Established Church General Assembly at the 
 Disruption, not a word appears referring to lay patron- 
 age ; and even the intrusion of ministers upon reclaiming 
 congregations is mentioned only incidentally and by way 
 of illustration. The grand burden of complaint in that 
 document is, " That the Courts of the Church as now 
 established, and members thereof, are liable to be coerced 
 in the exercise of their spiritual functions." That com- 
 plaint has remained unheeded to this hour. The grounds 
 of it continue precisely what they were thirty years ago ; 
 and if Chalmers, and Candlish, and Cunningham, and 
 those who followed them, were right in leaving the 
 Establishment rather than imperil the principle of sj^iri- 
 tual independence by remaining in it, the obligation is 
 still binding upon the Free Church to sustain, the same 
 as evei', the attitude of protest. 
 
CHAPTER VTl. 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCP]. 
 
 |0 Scottish Presbyterian can consistently object 
 to any Christian Church putting in a claim 
 to " independence." Worldly politicians 
 may sneer at the doctrine of an im2)erium 
 in i'nijjerio, — a kingdom within a kingdom, 
 — as a devout imagination or as an invention 
 of ambitious churchmen. But we who accept the 
 Confession of Faith as containing our creed would 
 simply make fools of ourselves if we were to join with 
 them, for here is the doctrine in question laid down 
 in the most unmistakable way in our common stan- 
 dard : — 
 
 " The Lord Jesus, as King and Head of his Church, 
 hath therein appointed a government in the hand of 
 church-officers, distinct from the civil magistrate." 
 
 Whatever more these words may signify, they at the 
 least mean this, that the Church is a society which is not 
 created by the State, or necessarily dependent upon it ; 
 that its immediate Head is Christ ; that it has a govern- 
 ment of its own, and officers of its own ; and that the 
 civil magistrate, as such, has no standing within it so aa 
 to have the right to rule in it or to administer its laws. 
 
THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 59 
 
 In other words, the Confession clearly assumes that the 
 Church possesses within its own sphere a jurisdiction as 
 real as that which is exercised within their spheres by 
 the Civil Courts of the country. 
 
 And happily we do not in Scotland require to contend 
 for this principle so far. You w^ill meet with not a few in 
 England whose ideas of the Church are so low that they 
 don't care to say a word for it as a separate existence. 
 In their eyes it is and ought to be nothing better than a 
 Parliamentary institute, which the House of Commons 
 can lick into any shape it pleases. But, to the honour 
 of Scotchmen be it said, such unworthy conceptions of 
 a divine institution have always been unknown on 
 this side the Border. Even in the darkest days of 
 Moderatism it was held, and held strongly, that the 
 Church is as substantial and independent an entity as 
 the State itself. 
 
 All our differences have arisen from our not being 
 able to agree as to ivhat belongs to the province of the 
 Church, and as to the principle loe are to adopt for 
 redding the inarches hetiveen Church and State. 
 
 The Established Church said before the Disruption, 
 and says still, that it belongs to the Civil Courts to define 
 what are Temporalia and what are Spiritualia, and it 
 has in the most solemn ways put the seal of its approval 
 upon what these courts did during the Ten Years' Con- 
 flict ; while we, on the other side, affirm that the Coui*t 
 of Session did in those days most unwarrantably intrude 
 into the Temple, and that for us to assent to its deciding 
 authoritatively and in the last resort what it is competent 
 for a Christian Church to do, would be to be guilty at once 
 
60 THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 of great folly and of inexcusable disloyalty to Christ. 
 Tlie distinction, tlien, between the Free Church and 
 the Established Church in this connection is radical. 
 Nothing could cut deeper. We do net differ about the 
 general position that the Church has a province of its 
 own, and can fully fulfil its functions only if it is allowed 
 to occupy that province. The Erastianism of Scotland is 
 too refined to insist upon the State giving no freedom to 
 the Church at all. We diverge here, when our friends 
 tell us that if ever there shall arise a dispute as to 
 whether a certain thing is spiritual or temj^oral, we must 
 be held bound to submit to any judgment which may be 
 given uj)on the point by the Lord Ordinary. 
 
 On this head we are very much indebted to a certain 
 anonymous pamphleteer"* for his plain speaking. We 
 would not, indeed, think it worth while to refer to his 
 performances here, if it were not that we have some 
 reason to believe that he is accepted by the authorities 
 in the Establishment as their champion. At any rate, 
 his pamphlets have been gratuitously circulated by 
 thousands. They were given away at the doors of the 
 Free Church General Assembly, and have since been 
 posted to every Free Church manse. It would be too 
 much to think that the author is doing all this out of 
 his own pocket ; and the conclusion seems a reasonable 
 one, that what he says has met with the approval of his 
 Church, and that through him the Church is speaking. 
 On this account Ave have to thank him for his out- 
 spokenness ; for in quoting him we can feel quite sure 
 
 * The pamphleteer is now known to have been Dr. M 'George, who states 
 the Church view in Professor Story's history, "The Church of Scotland, 
 Past and Present." 
 
THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 61 
 
 tliat we are not putting sentiments into the mouths of 
 those who differ with us about this matter which they 
 themselves would repudiate. 
 
 Before giving the doctrine of this writer, however, 
 let us give a sample of his modesty. It is thus he 
 thinks fit to speak of The Protest of 1843, and of the 
 first Legal Adviser of the Free Church of Scotland : — 
 
 [The Protest], he says, " is worth reading as a curiosity 
 of polemical controversy, not otherwise. It is an un- 
 scrupulous partisan paper, written by Mr. Alexander 
 Dunlop, advocate ; who, it is charitable to assume, framed 
 it in haste, under the unreasoning fervour of party feeling 
 and party zeal." 
 
 That is one picture. Over against it let us place 
 another, sketched by one whose right to speak no man 
 will question. 
 
 " Dunlop," says Lord Cockburn, " is the purest of 
 enthusiasts. The generous devotion with which he has 
 given himself to this cause has retarded, and will pro- 
 bably arrest, the success of his very considerable profes- 
 sional talent and learning. But a crust of bread and a 
 cup of cold water would satisfy all the worldly desires 
 of this most disinterested person. His luxury would be 
 in his obtaining justice for his favourite and oppressed 
 Church, which he espouses from no love of power or any 
 other ecclesiastical object, but solely from piety and love 
 of the people. There cannot be a more benevolent or 
 honourable gentleman. Immovable in his principles, and 
 by no means impervious to occasional contempt or indig- 
 nation, neither those feelings, however just, nor any other 
 provocation, ever surprises him out of his gentleness ; 
 
62 THE BATTLE FOR IXDEPENDEXCE. 
 
 nor is it possible for the influences of religious contro- 
 versy to Ijias his candour. I have all along heard him 
 discuss all these very inflammable matters in private, 
 and while all parties and nearly all men have been 
 raging and traducing, I have not only never heard a 
 harsh word from him, but I have never been able to 
 detect the lurking in his heart of an unkindly thought, 
 even toward his least tolerable opponents. Any of these 
 opponents who are candid might safely trust the explan- 
 ation of their statements or views in their absence to the 
 impartiality of Dunlop. I know no other person who so 
 thoroughly unites the society and agitation of Church- 
 men Avith the liberality of a layman and a gentleman." 
 The writer above alluded to puts the case as between 
 the two Churches with charming cleainiess. He brings 
 out distinctly what we have already said, that the dif- 
 ference does not consist in any denial on the part of the 
 Establishment that the Church has a province of its own. 
 "In the very last case," he says, "the Lord Justice 
 Clerk, delivering the judgment of the Court, took occa- 
 sion to state emphatically, '. that the Church Courts, 
 within their ecclesiastical j)Tovince, were just as supreme 
 as the Court of Session.' " What then was all the to 
 do about '? It was simi)ly this, that the Non-Intrusion- 
 ists refused to leave in the hands of the same Court of 
 Session the settlement of the question of where the 
 ecclesiastical province begins and ends. To the mind of 
 the mere lawyer (which the pamphleteer seems to be) 
 this position looks horrid. The Court of Session is his 
 fetish. The Lord Ordinary is a sort of god to him 
 He cannot imagine such a thin^ us any higher voice 
 
THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 63 
 
 speaking ; and he is inexpressibly shocked at the Church 
 of Scotland not at once bowing its head with submission 
 when Lord President Hope gave forth this dictum, that 
 such and such things were within the province of the 
 State, and that the Church had no business to meddle 
 with them at all. 
 
 " It was not a question of spiritual independence," 
 says he, " or spiritual jurisdiction in any sense. It loas 
 simply a question of laiv, cnid a Court of Law was the only 
 trihu7ial competent to decide it " ,' 
 
 " Any party aggrieved and injured by the illegal 
 action of the Church would be justly entitled to ask the 
 protection of the Court ; and the Court, judging between 
 the parties, would be entitled, as it would be bound, to 
 give the relief required in the circumstances." 
 
 "It was a question which could only be decided by a 
 Court of Law." 
 
 These quotations show the drift of the whole argument, 
 which we have again to say just amounts to this, that 
 the Church is free within certain limits, but that these 
 limits must be defined by the Court of Session. We 
 used to suppose that the present members of the Estab- 
 lishment were ashamed of the conduct of the Moderates 
 before 1843, and that if the past could be recalled, they 
 Avould discountenance the high-handed proceedings of the 
 Judges. But from the writings of this advocate of the 
 party we gather that this is a mistake. They are still 
 prepared to vindicate all that took place in those days. 
 We may presume that if the thing had to be done again 
 the old outrages would be i-epeated. And we are obliged 
 to this writer for thus leaving us in no doubt about 
 
64 THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 the fact that if the attitude of the Establishment to the 
 people has changed, its spirit and principles are as Eras- 
 tian as ever. 
 
 For we attach no value whatever to general conces- 
 sions about an " ecclesiastical province," while the Civil 
 Court retains the right to decide how that province is 
 bounded. Under such an arrangement, the " independ- 
 ence " of the Church is a mere name. The Court is 
 really its master, and can invade its territory when it 
 chooses. It is quite true that such an invasion may 
 take place into the territories of any Church. No 
 Church can save itself from persecution. But the ques- 
 tion of principle is this, Is any Church entitled to form 
 an alliance with a State, and accept its pay, while the 
 State is making it a condition of such an alliance, that 
 when a difference of opinion arises as to whether certain 
 things are spiriticalia,the final determination of that ques- 
 tion shall lie with the Civil Courts 1 Our contention is, 
 that the Church which makes such a bargain is sur- 
 rendering its freedom, and is guilty of treason to its 
 Divine Head ; and we are grieved to see from the reason- 
 ings of the anonymous pamphleteer that the present 
 Established Church of Scotland has not only made such 
 a bargain, but glories in it. 
 
 Of course we are quite familiar with the grounds on 
 which the position it has taken up is justified. 
 
 It is said, in the first place, that the Court of Session 
 is not a party in the Church and State alliance at all, 
 but a high judicial authority, holding the balance be- 
 tween both ; and that what took place before 1843 was 
 not the invasion of the ecclesiastical province by the 
 
THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 65 
 
 other contracting power, but simply a proper redding of 
 the marches by arbitrators, to whose judgment even the 
 State itself is willing to submit. 
 
 And, in the second place, it is argued that it is less 
 safe to leave varying majorities in Church Courts to de- 
 fine the spiritual province than it is to commit the mat- 
 ter to men who have had the training of lawyers, and 
 who, being uplifted above the strife of tongues, are able 
 to view all subjects with unruffled candour. 
 
 In answer to the first of these statements we have 
 only to say, that the children of this world would never 
 for one moment dream of assenting to any like arrange- 
 ment for themselves. If France and England were to 
 have a dispute about a frontier line, they might con- 
 ceivably agree to have the point settled by an interna- 
 tional court ; but this is absolutely certain, that the 
 English would never consent to have that court com- 
 posed entirely of Frenchmen, nor would the French con- 
 sent to have it composed entirely of Englishmen. What- 
 ever may be thought about the functions of the Court of 
 Session, this must be affirmed, that all the members of it 
 are " Secular " men, not, any of them, " Church " men ; 
 that for their appointment the State is responsible, not 
 in any respect the Church ; that their qualifications for 
 their offices are civil, not spiritual ; and that, in one 
 word, while the constitution of the body is such as that 
 the State may with safety leave its interests in its 
 hands (and all the more because it is its creature, which 
 it can abolish to-morrow), it would be utter folly in any 
 Church which valued its freedom, and counted its "in- 
 dependence " part of its heritage, to intrust to any secu- 
 
 (460) 5 
 
66 THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 lar court, whatever it might be in theory, the right to 
 control its actions and to determine in all circumstances 
 what it was entitled to do. 
 
 But, although we are unable to assent to the plausible 
 theory that the Civil Court holds the scales, would it not, 
 on the whole, be wiser and more prudent to leave it to 
 decide disputed questions than to have the Church itself 
 perpetually wrangling over them 1 Our answer is, that if 
 the Presbyterian theory of the Church be the correct one, 
 — if, that is, Christ has appointed in it a government in 
 the hand of church-officers, — we have no right to shirk 
 the responsibility which has thus been laid upon us. 
 Church Courts may err, and have often grossly erred, 
 but that fact can never justify them in abnegating their 
 functions. They must rule ; they must use the power 
 of the keys ; they must perform all the functions with 
 which they have been invested by their Head. And 
 they have no more title to divest themselves of their 
 obligations, because in their judgment these can be better 
 discharged by others, than has the Governor-General of 
 India, for a similar reason, to transfer the reins which 
 the Queen has put into his hands into those of some 
 neighbouring Asiatic potentate. Apart from that, how- 
 ever, sad experience has taught us that no more " de- 
 vout imagination " has ever existed than that Civil 
 Courts occupy a sort of supermundane sphere; that they 
 are sublimely free from the blinding influences of human 
 passion and prejudice; and that, being thus the embodi- 
 ments on earth of candour and reason, they may always 
 be safely intrusted with one of the most precious things 
 in existence — the liberties of the Christian Church. 
 
THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 67 
 
 We may frankly admit that the ten years' controversy 
 which preceded the Disruption really deserved its name. 
 It was unquestionably a conflict; and on the side of the 
 Church the excitement was as great as it usually is 
 among the combatants in ordinary battles. But if any 
 one fancies that the Judges kept serenely calm all 
 through the crisis, the foncy simply shows that he 
 knows nothing at all about the history. It was a fight 
 on their side as fierce as it was on ours ; and a very 
 effective fight too, for their powers were not limited to 
 the mere giving forth of oracular utterances. They had 
 a weapon of offence as formidable as was ever wielded — 
 the Interdict ; and they used it freely. And if they 
 did not proceed to devastate the Church, as of old, by 
 fine and imprisonment, it was not because they had not 
 the will to do so, and the legal right (as interpreted by 
 themselves), but because, in plain terms, they were 
 afraid of the old Scottish spirit which they had evoked 
 — the love of independence, which is the sturdiest, as it 
 is one of the noblest, elements in our national character. 
 
 In saying all that, we are not drawing upon our 
 imagination for facts. We have had the curtain drawn 
 aside for us recently by one who himself was in the 
 midst of the fray, and knew at first hand how the Bench 
 felt as well as the Church, — we mean Lord Cockburn; and 
 from him we learn that the fanaticism of the time affected 
 the ermine no less than the Geneva gown ; and that 
 the "judicial arbiters" by-and-by fought as passionately 
 to keep down the Church as Chalmers and Buchanan 
 fought for its freedom. 
 
 Experience teaches fools. Our Civil Courts are en- 
 
68 THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 titled to our profounclest respect. They are not infallible 
 any more than General Assemblies ; but their decisions 
 within their own sphere have, in general, been found to 
 be equitable and just. But it has not turned out to be 
 the fact that an Advocate who becomes a Law Lord 
 necessarily ceases, ipso facto, to be human. Those Judges 
 who were Moderates before their elevation to the Bench 
 continued to be Moderates after ; and the opinions 
 given by some among them are now acknowledged by 
 all men to be absurd. Our reminiscences in this con- 
 nection are too recent and fresh to incline us to walk 
 with our eyes open into the pit again. Even were it 
 lawful, we do not believe it would be expedient to com- 
 mit the keeping of our liberties into the hands of the Court 
 of Session ; and our strongest objection to the present 
 Established Church is, that it has made to that Court a 
 voluntary surrender of its freedom. It has a long rope, 
 perhaps, and a loose rope. But still a rope is about its 
 neck, — placed there, too, by its own consent, — and no- 
 body can tell how soon the jerk may come which will 
 rudely remind it of its bondage. 
 
 I have a garden next to a neighbour's, which I may 
 call my own, and believe to be my own ; but if my 
 neighbour claims the right to say where the boundary 
 line runs, and if I allow that he has that right, then it 
 is very clear that my property in the garden is not a 
 particularly secure one. The neighbour and I may be on 
 excellent terms just now, and he may be profuse in his 
 admissions that I have a garden, and that I am entitled 
 to cultivate it as I choose. But stranger things have 
 happened than a neighbourly quarrel ; and though I 
 
THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 69 
 
 may have no legal right to complain, I may feel it to 
 be uncommonly inequitable and inconvenient when my 
 neighbour acts on his title, and makes his OAvn free use 
 of more than the half of my vegetables. 
 
 This is a lively picture of the position which the 
 Establishment occupies at this moment, and which it 
 has occupied ever since the decisions were given in the 
 great Church cases of the Disi-uption period. These de- 
 cisions are still unrej^ealed. The Patronage Act does 
 not even profess to touch them. The Lord Advocate, 
 in declining to accept an amendment pointing in the 
 direction of giving relief to those who believed in the 
 essential and inalienable right of the Church to spiritual 
 freedom, intimated, in effect, that he considered the 
 Church of 1843 — the Church which we abandoned be- 
 cause it was in bondage — to be possessed of all the in- 
 dependence which he was prepared to concede to it. 
 And in the light of this fact we may judge how much 
 intelligence there is in those who imagine that the re- 
 union of the Church has now been made f)ossible. 
 
 It has been recently said, and that in quarters where 
 we should not have expected it, that what the faithful 
 Church of Scotland has always been asking in the name 
 of spiritual independence is nothing more nor less than 
 what is claimed for itself by the Papacy. The Pope in- 
 sists that he is supreme in all causes, civil and spiritual, 
 and that all the kings and authorities of the earth shall 
 submit themselves to him. The Church, before the 
 Disruption, made the modest demand that it should be 
 allowed to regulate the formation of the pastoral tie, that 
 it should not be interfered with in arranging who should 
 
70 THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 sit in its own courts, and that it should be free to 
 exercise discipline on its own members. At the same 
 time, it was careful to declare that it recognized the 
 supremacy of the civil authorities within their own 
 sphere ; and that it would interpose no obstacle in the 
 way of the State withdrawing at any time its temporal 
 favours, if the conduct of the Church in any case did 
 not meet with its approval. That was the position 
 taken up by the Evangelicals before 1843, and which 
 the Free Church is to-day prepared to uphold ; and Dr. 
 Cook calls that Ultramontanism ! He cannot really be- 
 lieve that the two views are the same ; and we must 
 suppose that he confounded them for forensic purposes. 
 The only conceivable ground on which any man could 
 find even an excuse for coupling the two together is 
 this, that some have committed the absurd mistake of 
 imagining that the Church Courts, in claiming the right 
 of an independent power to have some say in the defini- 
 tion of their own functions, have at the same time put 
 in a claim to determine for the State what its province is. 
 The Church of Scotland never put forward any such pre- 
 tensions. It always said to the State, You must judge 
 for yourself, in submission to God, what your sphere is ; 
 and, in particular, you are perfectly entitled to proceed 
 to disestablishment at once, if you are not satisfied with 
 the ecclesiastical body which you have taken into your 
 alliance. In a word, what our Church holds on the 
 subject is this, that as each individual citizen has rights 
 and obligations of which he dares not divest himself at 
 the bidding of any earthly power, so we, as a society, 
 founded as we believe by Christ, and to be governed in 
 
THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 71 
 
 immediate subjection to him, cannot, without treason to 
 our Head, allow the State to do for us what we have 
 been commissioned to do for ourselves, and thus to de- 
 prive us of what is indispensable to our usefulness — 
 the right of free self-government. 
 
 But it is now said frequently — and, alas ! not with 
 a sigh, but almost complacently — that the State cannot 
 concede liberty to any Church. Non - Established 
 Churches, we are told, are just as much exposed to 
 raids upon their independence as those which are Estab- 
 lished ; and since we are all in the same plight, it is 
 very silly in people not to reconcile themselves to the 
 inevitable, and, if chains must be worn, not to wear 
 them gilded ! The grounds on which this is said are, 
 that now the Civil Courts of this country have finally 
 come to the conclusion that a Church is no more in the 
 eye of the law than a trading corporation ; and that, when 
 a dispute arises, the only question to be discussed is : 
 Which party has kept to the terms of the contract ? 
 
 Now there is nothing which has done more to recon- 
 cile earnest Nonconformists to their remaining in a 
 state of separation from the State than just the adoption 
 by the Courts of this doctrine. It is simply not true, as 
 a matter of fact, that a Church is in the position of a 
 company of ordinary traders ; and it is the shallowest 
 thing in the world to proceed to deal with it as if it 
 were true. Judgments cannot possibly be relied on 
 which are based on a notoriously false assumption. If 
 I join a gas company, I do so voluntarily. If a contract 
 is proposed to be drawn up, I can, if I have influence 
 enough, get it framed in this way or that way as I choose. 
 
72 THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE, 
 
 A Church, on the contrary, is a society which professes 
 to be divine in its origin. In the making of its consti- 
 tution I had no responsibility. And in joining it I 
 became not a free partner in a business concern, but the 
 subject of a King. It signifies nothing that some people 
 believe all this to be nonsense. It is enough that, deeper 
 than all other convictions, lies this conviction in the 
 hearts of the best people in this country; and for a Judge, 
 in attempting to settle the relations subsisting between 
 the civil and the spiritual, to ignore it, and to talk as if 
 a religious society holds together by just such rules as 
 unite men in smelting iron or sailing ships, is to commit 
 the same sort of mistake that a king would be guilty of 
 if he tried to govern a province of his empire with a 
 sovereign disregard of the hereditary faith and character 
 of its inhabitants. 
 
 But what makes this paltry "contract " idea addition- 
 ally irrational is this, that it is propounded in a country 
 where an opposite principle is part of the law of the 
 land. It might be excusable in a Judge to see nothing 
 in a Church but a common company, if he lived where 
 Christianity was unknown. But here the Confession of 
 Faith is one of the recognized documents by which Par- 
 liament directs the Law Courts to rule their proceed- 
 ings; and the doctrine we are now speaking of is as 
 little countenanced by statute as by reason. Nor will 
 it do to say that the statement that " the Lord Jesus, 
 as King and Head of his Church, hath therein appointed 
 a government in the hand of church-officers," was meant 
 to apply only to an Establishment. It is a general 
 statement, exhibiting the doctrine of Christ's Church, and 
 
THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. 73 
 
 was obviously intended to guide men in dealing with 
 the Church, whatever might happen to be its external 
 circumstances. 
 
 However, lament it as we may, it is impossible to 
 hide from ourselves that low views of the position of the 
 Church as a divine institution in the Avorld have come 
 to prevail in high places in this country ; and this, as has 
 already been said, is reconciling even those who have 
 the strongest views of the utility of an Establishment 
 to our remaining in a position of nonconformity. A 
 reestablishment of the Church at present could be no 
 homage to Jesus Christ. The continued maintenance 
 of the present Establishment does not now imply any 
 such homage. In the eyes of the State, the Church is 
 no longer a kingdom within a kingdom, but a mere 
 collection of individuals, fortuitously and voluntarily 
 brought together ; and any endowments granted to it are 
 given on the same principle that allowances out of the 
 public funds are made for the sustenance of the police. 
 
 But because these low views prevail,* it does not fol- 
 low that we are to acquiesce in them, but the contrary. 
 If the Court of Session chooses to deal with the Free 
 Church as if it were no more than a secular corporation, 
 
 * The demoralizing influence of the subtle Erastianism which is prevalent 
 at present is often revealed unconsciously in the conversation of Established 
 Church people. They will tell you, sometimes with a little flourish, that 
 their Presbyteries are " Courts," whereas ours are mere imitations of the 
 same. You ask, What constitutes them "Courts"? They answer, Our 
 Establishment. Then you admit, we say, that they have been created by 
 the State, and derive their jurisdiction from it? No, they reply. But, we 
 insist, you cannot both have your cake and eat it. If all you mean is that 
 the civil authorities choose to recognize your Presbyteries as Courts, good 
 and well, we have nothing to say against it. But you are grossly untrue to 
 your Presbyterian principles if you think that recognition either confers 
 jurisdiction or confirms it. 
 
74 THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE 
 
 SO much the worse for the Court of Session. It does so 
 on its own responsibility, and whatever evil con- 
 sequences follow, it will be the bearer of them. Our 
 guilt in the matter will only begin when, instead of pro- 
 testing against the false assumption, we condone it, — 
 and especially when we do so to gain some temporal 
 advantage. It is not the free man who is oppressed that 
 is to be despised, but the man who sells his heritage of 
 liberty for a mess of potage. 
 
CHAPTER YIII. 
 
 LAW LORD ON THE LEGAL DECISIONS OF 1843. 
 
 IHERE are two positions which the Established 
 Church requires to make good. The one is, 
 that the principle is a just one on which its 
 relation to the State is based — namely, that 
 when there is a conflict of jurisdiction it ap- 
 pertains to the Civil Courts to determine for 
 both which party is in the right. The other is, that 
 these Courts were right in what they actually did in the 
 Pre-disruption Period, and that the Evangelicals were 
 wrong in saying that the province of the Church was then 
 invaded. The anonymous champion of the Establish- 
 ment already spoken of is quite clear upon both points. 
 To him it seems axiomatic that the Court of Session 
 should rule. And he is so satisfied that all the individual 
 decisions were sound, that he summarily pronounces all 
 who difier from him to be either ignorant of the facts or 
 " unscrupulous " perverters of them. 
 
 What value the Established Church people put upon 
 the ipse dixit of this nameless writer may be inferred 
 from the fact, already mentioned, that they have circu- 
 lated his pamphlets by thousands ; and we may therefore 
 
76 LORD COCKBURN ON THE CONFLICT. 
 
 feel warranted in assuming tliat they are still prepared 
 to vindicate the decisions out and out, as not involving 
 any intrusions into the spiritual province. The conclu- 
 sion to which we are thus forced is a lamentable one, 
 because it shows how utterly delusive is tlie belief, enter- 
 tained by some, that our neighbours have repented of 
 their Erastianism. That the Civil Courts did in those 
 days, sometimes at least, go out of their sphere, and were 
 guilty of trenching upon the independence of the Church, 
 is now admitted throughout the Christian world ; and 
 one is alarmed to think of the evidence which has been 
 furnished in this connection that, after thirty years' re- 
 flection, even the more intelligent men of the Establish- 
 ment seem just where they were. 
 
 It may be said, however, that we are simply meeting 
 one ipse dixit by another. We Free Church people may 
 hold that the Civil Courts did intrude into the ecclesias- 
 tical province ; but the people of the Established Church 
 have just as good a right to say the contrary. Certainly ; 
 and if their arguments are better than ours we are bound 
 to admit as much. But if the matter is to be deter- 
 mined in any sense or respect by authority, it may be 
 permitted to us to express satisfaction that our view of 
 the decisions is sustained by a man who himself adorned 
 the Scottish Bench, and whose acquaintance with the 
 whole subject of which he treats was peculiarly intimate 
 and thorough. 
 
 The appearance, at the present juncture, of the "Jour- 
 nal " of Lord Cockburn is most opportune. It contains, 
 among many other things of interest, the private opinions 
 of one of the Judges of the Court of Session with respect 
 
LORD COCKBURN ON THE CONFLICT. 77 
 
 to the contest about spiritual independence which took 
 place before 1843. And we propose simply to let him 
 tell what were the impressions which were produced 
 upon his mind by some of the proceedings as they 
 occurred. 
 
 THE AUCHTERARDER CASE. 
 
 '^ 19th March 1838. — This is perhaps the most important civil 
 cause that the Court of Session has ever had to determine. It im- 
 plies that the people have very little, if any, indirect check against 
 the abuse of patronage ; and that the Church cannot give them any, 
 but that Presbyteries are bound to induct unless the presentee be 
 objected to on cause shoivn : that the mere unacceptableness of the 
 man to the parishioners is not even relevant as an objection ; that, 
 in fact, the call is a mockery : that though it be the province of the 
 Church to determine whether the presentee be qualified, it is not 
 entitled to hold acceptableness as a qualification : and that it is 
 competent for the Civil Court— erm ^vhen the temjwraUtics are not 
 directly concerned— to control the Church in the matter of induc- 
 tion. The majority made it apparent that their legal opinions were 
 affected by their views of the expediency of the Veto Act. They 
 wish to preserve patronage. I wish they may not have ruined it." 
 
 The italics are Lord Cockburn's, and when they 
 appear in the quotations below they are always to be 
 regarded as his. Let the reader note what is said in 
 the closing sentences of the paragraph. The decisions 
 of a lawfully constituted court are always to be treated 
 respectfully ; but such hints as are here given from be- 
 hind the scenes are well fitted to keep us from the super- 
 stition of falling down before them as if they were cer- 
 tainly the utterances of pure reason. A vote of eight 
 men to five — which was the division on the Bench in 
 the first Auchterarder case — was sufiicient to settle the 
 law for the time being ; but it by no means permanently 
 settled the question of whether the law then laid down 
 
78 LORD COCKBURN ON THE CONFLICT. 
 
 was according to justice. And any doubts that may 
 exist on this head are not unlikely to be confirmed by 
 what is here revealed — that some of the judgments given 
 were manifestly inspired hy Moderate prejudices. 
 
 " 6th Mail 1839.— T\ie House of Lords has affirmed the judgment 
 of the Court of Session in the case of Auchterarder. There never 
 was a greater cause adjudged in the House of Lords on reasons 
 more utterly unworthy of both. A case about a horse, or a £20 
 bill of exchange, would have got more thought. Brougham de- 
 clared that his only difficulty lay in finding out what the difficulty 
 was ; which perhaps was a correct account of his own state and of 
 that of his learned compeers. The ignorance and contemptuous 
 shghtness of the judgment did great mischief. It irritated and 
 justified the people of Scotland in believing that their Church was 
 sacrificed to English prejudices." 
 
 Lord Brougham's conduct throughout the conflict was 
 most objectionable. He was consulted by Lord Mon- 
 creiiF in 1833, before the Yeto Act was proposed, as to 
 whether the means which the Church thought of taking 
 to prevent intrusion into parishes could be objected to 
 as incompetent by the Civil Courts, and he gave it as his 
 opinion that no danger was to be apprehended in that 
 direction ; and in the faith of this opinion the Yeto Act 
 was launched. It is quite likely that if the Church 
 had not been so encouraged it would have taken another 
 way of giving efi'ect to the Call. But it was soon seen 
 that no plan that could have been adopted would have 
 prevented the conflict about spiritual independence. 
 And when Brougham declared in Parliament that the 
 opposition of the people, however expressed, could, under 
 the law of patronage, no more avail to arrest the settle- 
 ment of a presentee than " the kick of the champion's 
 horse on coronation-day could arrest the settlement of 
 
LORD COCKBURN ON THE COXFLICT. 79 
 
 the king," it was made so abundantly plain that the real 
 aim of the Moderate party was to prevent the people 
 from having their rights, that to have abrogated the Veto 
 Act, even with the view of introducing something similar, 
 would have served no practical purpose whatsoever. 
 The Church itself had no doubt about its competency to 
 pass the Act ; and all that we can say now is, that if in 
 its concordat with the State it did so surrender its inde- 
 pendence as to have deprived itself of the right to pass 
 any such Act, it gave up powers which it had no warrant 
 to surrender. 
 
 THE LETHENDT CASE. 
 
 *^ 29th May 1839. — On the application of a presentee, who stated 
 that he had been illegally rejected on the Veto Act from the j)arish 
 of Lethendy, an Interdict had been granted prohibiting the Presby- 
 tery from inducting another person, to whom a new presentation 
 had been issued by the patron. The Church held this civil inter- 
 ference with what they maintained to be their spiritual duty illegal, 
 and broke the Interdict. On this there was a complaint, and the 
 Court on the 22nd found the complaint proved, and ordered the 
 eight reverend delinquents to appear at the bar in three weeks. 
 Glenlee was absent. Jeffrey and Moncreiff held the interference 
 of the Court incompetent ; but the other ten Judges were of an op- 
 posite opinion. Fullerton and I were in the minority in Auchter- • 
 arder ; but being now compelled to profess a belief that we were 
 wrong, and holding that there was sufficient civil matter involved 
 to warrant the Court in having protected the interests of the re- 
 jected presentee by the i^recautionary measure of preventing the 
 induction of his rival, we went Avith the majority here." 
 
 A note at this point gives Cockburn's opinion in 
 January 1843. He says then, "I have since been 
 obliged judicially to doubt the soundness of this opin- 
 ion." He then proceeds in continuation of the above: — 
 
 "This judgment is the second deep cut into the nervous system 
 of the Church ; for if we can order a Presbytery not to induct, I 
 
80 LORD COCKBURN ON THE CONFLICT. 
 
 don't see that we have not the power to bid it induct. And after 
 this, where is the peculiar power of the Church, especially if this 
 authority of ours be connected with Brougham's opinion in the 
 Lords, the doctrine of which (shallow and presumptuous though 
 his speech be) was, when I stated it in my Lethendy opinion, 
 adopted by all the Judges who had formed the majority in Auchter- 
 arder? This doctrine is, that, except in deciding on the presentee's 
 orthodoxy, morals, and learning, and in performing the strictly 
 spiritual act of ordaining, the Church has no pmver whatever ; and, 
 in particular, that intrusion and unfitness for the particular parish 
 were things with which the Church had nothing to do. The result 
 IS, that the effort to mitigate patronage has ended in making it more 
 stern than ever." 
 
 Observe the nature of the doctrine which the major- 
 ity of tlie Court had adopted, and by the application of 
 which they rode rough shod over the opposition of the 
 Evangelicals. From it we learn the view they took of 
 " the ecclesiastical province " of the Church of Scotland. 
 
 THE DAVIOT CASE. 
 
 '* 18th December 1839. — It is thickening. The presentee to Daviot 
 applied for an Interdict against the registered heads of families, 
 prohibiting them from objecting to him loithout cause at the meeting 
 for moderating in his call under the Veto Act ; and yesterday the 
 Second Division of the Court granted the Interdict. The Judges 
 present were the Justice-Clerk (Boyle), Medwyn, and Meadow- 
 bank — Glenlee, one of the Auchterarder minority, being absent. 
 It was all ex parte, and so, I presume, will all that the Civil Court 
 may do now be ; at least the Church will probably never make ap- 
 pearance again." 
 
 THE CULSALMOND CASE. 
 
 *^ 4th April 184^. — The majority of the Presbytery of Garioch 
 being Intrusionists, and holding the Veto Act to be illegal, indiicted 
 a presentee into the parish of Culsalmond, in spite of dissents with- 
 out reasons by a majority of communicants, of an offer of dissents 
 with reasons, and in the face of an appeal to the Synod. On this 
 the minority and others applied to the Commission of the General 
 Assembly, which, in November 1841, dealing with the inducted man 
 
LORD COCKBURN ON THE COXFLICT. 81 
 
 as for the present minister of the parish, though not excluding the 
 effect of the future objections that had been intimated to his having 
 been inducted, enjoined him to abstain from doing duty ' until a 
 final deliverance shall have been pronounced in regard to the pro- 
 ceedings complained of,' and ordained the minority of the Pres- 
 bytery to perform the spiritual business of the parish in the mean- 
 time. Such an order might have been given, and, indeed, it often 
 has been, although the Veto Act had never been heard of. Nothing 
 is more common than for the Assembly to take upon itself the tem- 
 porary charge of a parish. 
 
 "This order [of the Commission] was brought before the Court 
 by a Bill of Suspension and Interdict. Lord Ivory, as Lord Ordi- 
 nary, refused the Bill ; and Lord Fullerton, Lord Gillies, and Lord 
 Mackenzie differed from these two Judges, and passed the Bill of 
 Suspension, in order that the case might be more fxiUy tried ; but 
 in the meantime they imposed the Interdict. By this Interdict 
 they prohibited not only the execution, but the very intimation, of 
 the order of the Commission ; enjoined the minority not to molest 
 the minister, and forbade them to do any ministerial duty within 
 that parish 
 
 "The three Judges admitted that there was no patrimonial in- 
 terest at stake, in the usual and proper sense of the word. But the 
 minister being ordered not to do duty, they held that he was ' dis- 
 graced and degraded,' and that this raised a civil interest which 
 he had a right to require the Court to pursue ; and they were fur- 
 ther clear that they were entitled and bound to grant him and the 
 patron protection by subverting what the Ecclesiastical Court had 
 done. Ivory and Fullerton, on the contrary, held that, as the 
 Commission had acted ecclesiastically, in a purely ecclesiastical 
 matter, the Civil Court, even though the Church had mistaken or 
 had wdlfully violated the law, had no jurisdiction to correct the 
 proceedings by obstructing the ecclesiastical acts, any more than it 
 has to correct acts done illegally, but still within their peculiar 
 sphere, by the Criminal or the Fiscal Courts, In support of this 
 principle, Ivory gave out an excellent Note, and FuUerton delivered 
 by far the best opinion that has yet been given on any of these 
 Church questions. 
 
 " Now, it is vain to attemj)t to disguise that the principle of this 
 judgment does expressly and directly subject the Church, in every 
 sentence it can pronounce, to the review of the Civil Court. The 
 
82 LORD COCKBURN ON THE CONFLICT. 
 
 principle is, that wherever the Court of Session shall think that the 
 Church, though acting within its peculiar ecclesiastical jurisdic- 
 tion, has gone \vrong and acted illegally, theia the Court can give 
 redress, though there be no other civil interest at issue than what is 
 necessarily involved in every order by which the Church restrains 
 its own members, and though the redress be given in the form of 
 directly suspending or permanently prohibiting the execution of 
 the ecclesiastical order. " 
 
 Our readers will remeniber that the decision here de- 
 scribed stands at this moment on our statute books, de- 
 finincy the relations of the Civil Courts to the Establish- 
 ment. The Evangelicals protested against it, and, rather 
 than homologate anything so monstrous, they gave up all 
 their interest in the national endowments. But those 
 who remained behind accepted the law as laid down, 
 defended it when it was attacked, and are now living 
 under it. And upon the state of matters as now 
 reached let the reader listen to Lord Cockburn. 
 
 *' This newly discovered legal Church may be the best of all pos- 
 sible Churches, but it is not the Church which any one Scotchman 
 suspected he had adoi^ted : for though most of the Moderates, witli 
 the thoughtlessness natural under the immediate flash of party 
 triumph, pretended to exult in these judgments, there is not one of 
 them into whose imagination the possibility of such things ever en- 
 tered before ; and if the Court of Session had interfered in the same 
 way with the proceedings of Moderate General Assemblies, there 
 would not have been one Moderate member who would not have 
 been in arms under llobertson and Hill in defence of the Church. 
 The uses, indeed, to which this ecclesiastical supi-emacy of the Civil 
 Court may hereafter be turned, make some of the most sensible among 
 them by no means comfortable imder their present victories." 
 
 To this subject of the suicidal disloyalty of the Mod- 
 erates Lord Cockburn returns more than once. Thus, 
 after giving it as his opinion (has the opinion no refer- 
 ence to the present time ?) that, " though they are now 
 
LORD COCKBURN ON THE CONFLICT. 83 
 
 driven to profess a degree of liberality whicli would have 
 horrified their brethren in the olden time, this is merely 
 superficial, and the spirit of that time is still in their 
 hearts," he says : — 
 
 "Their great error lies in the encouragement which they give to 
 the control claimed by the civil tribunal, and to the rebellion at- 
 tempted to be practised against the Church by its own sons. They 
 will feel the recoil if they ever recover power ; and they are inwardly 
 afraid of this themselves. They know that if the Court of Session 
 had fired Interdicts into the Church in Robertson's time, as it has 
 done lately, the Principal would have headed the whole battalion of 
 Moderates in charges on the Com-t ; and that not even the form of 
 a conference would have been waited for, before any bold minister 
 had been deposed who had indicated a tithe of the rebellious spirit 
 which his successors have excited." 
 
 SIR JAMES Graham's letter. 
 
 '^ 12th January 184S. — The answer from Government to the 
 
 Church has at last been published The remarkable thing is, that 
 
 on the only, or at least on the chief, points on which sensible men 
 think the Church right, this Government pleading assumes the law 
 to be exactly the reverse of what the Court of Session has found it 
 
 to be No sensible person defends the Church for adhering to the 
 
 Veto Act, since it has been found illegal ; nor for deposing the 
 Strathbogie ministers, on the ground that they obeyed what the 
 Judges told them was law ; nor for any disobedience of the law : but 
 what they defend the Church upon is its claim of independence 
 quoad the spirituality in purely spiritual acts, particularly in the 
 exclusive right of giving or withholding licenses, of admitting, or- 
 daining, and deposing. Government's refusal to interfere is founded 
 very much on the statement that in all these matters the Church 
 is absolutely independent. It is so said in express words ; but, 
 alas ! there is not one of these acts with which the Court of Session 
 has not interfered, and interfered not merely by withholding civil 
 effects, but by controlling the ecclesiastical tribunals in the ecclesi- 
 astical loroceeding itself. I suspect that the Church would close 
 with the Government on the Secretary of State's terms ; but he is 
 not aware that, as the law has been delivered, the Court can always 
 
84 LORD COCKBURN ON THE CONFLICT. 
 
 reverse the ecclesiastical proceeding, or can by damages compel the 
 Church to reverse it, provided the Court thinks that the Church, 
 though acting within its proper sphere, has gone wrong in law, " 
 
 We cannot here extend these quotations further ; but 
 let us just see for a moment what those we have given 
 amount to. They contain the deliberate opinions of a 
 distinguished lawyer, who was required to deal profes- 
 sionally with the subject in dispute, and that not as an 
 advocate having a side to defend, but as a judge whose 
 duty it was to do justly by all parties. The Free Church 
 has not absolute cause to be satisfied with the view he 
 took of things. He held, for example, that the Court 
 of Session was the proper authority to decide finally for 
 the Church what it was competent to do ; and on this 
 ground he insisted that the General Assembly should 
 have repealed the Veto Act when it was pronounced 
 illegal. But there was one thing in which he did agree 
 with the Evangelicals most thoroughly — namely, that 
 the law laid down by the Court of Session was had laio^ 
 
 and THAT UNDER IT THE ChURCH WAS LEFT WITHOUT 
 ANY SPIRITUAL INDEPENDENCE WHATEVER. 
 
 It is objected that this is the opinion of one who may 
 be said to have become a party in the case. Lord Cock- 
 burn was one of the five Judges who formed the Auch- 
 terarder minority, and he undoubtedly did what he 
 could to keep the Court he adorned from going out of its 
 province. But to say that he proved his unfitness for 
 forming a just estimate of his times by openly acting out 
 his convictions, is to bring against him the ridiculous 
 charge which infidels ai-e in the habit of advancing 
 against Christian vdtnesses. What those men said, they 
 
LORD COCKBURN OX THE CONFLICT. 85 
 
 argue, wlio became partisans for Christ by dying for 
 him is nothing. Tell iis what the contemporary heathen 
 said in favour of Christianity who never became Chris- 
 tians at all ! That Lord Cockburn should have given 
 judicial sentences in conformity with his opinions was 
 certainly to have been expected. What we have alone 
 to consider is the question of whether the oj^inions of 
 such a man are worth attending to. 
 
 " On the principles of the great judicial decisions of 
 1843," says another lawyer, — Mr. Taylor Innes, who is 
 perhaps better acquainted than any man of his pro- 
 fession now living with the subject of which he speaks, 
 — '* it is certain that if Parliament were next year to 
 ordain the Church of Scotland to set up the worship of 
 the Vii-gin Mary, or to ignore in the Confession the 
 divinity or atonement of Christ, all its ministers and 
 elders would be bound to do so." 
 
 This seems an extraordinarily strong thing to say, 
 but reading the history of the period as it is described 
 by Lord Cockburn, we can come to no other conclusion 
 than that Mr. Taylor Innes is right. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE SEVEN " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 
 
 I HEIST such men as Lord Cockburn were wont to 
 affirm that the Veto Act was " illegal," what 
 the J meant was, that in the opinion of a major- 
 ity of the Judges in the Court of Session the 
 passing of that Act was ultra vires of the Church ; 
 or, in other words, that the Church had no right 
 or competency to pass it. And those, therefore, who 
 believe that it belongs to the Civil Court, by a majority 
 or otherwise, absolutely to define the Church's province, 
 must, of course, be satisfied to i-est on that opinion as 
 conclusively settling the question. But here lies the 
 kernel of the whole dispute. Very many of the best 
 and wisest men in Scotland held that the Church of 
 Scotland, in entering into an alliance with the State, 
 never meant to divest itself of its inherent rights as a 
 Church ; that, even had it been willing, it had no title 
 to do so ; and that, as a matter of fact, it never did any- 
 thing of the kind. Seeing the thing in this light, they 
 came to just such a conclusion as an individual Christian 
 would come to if a Civil Court were to interfere with his 
 liberty of conscience ; that is to say, they did, as for 
 
THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHliOGIE. 87 
 
 example the early disciples did when they were com- 
 manded by the legal authorities of their day not to 
 teach or preach any more in the name of Jesus, or as 
 Daniel did in Babylon when Darius the king issued 
 his famous interdict against prayer, — in. plain terms, 
 they disregarded a law which they conscientiously be- 
 lieved to be opposed to a higher law, and took the con- 
 sequences. 
 
 If it be said that, as members of an Established 
 Church receiving pay from the State, they had no 
 warrant to talk in so high a strain about liberty, then 
 you suggest an idea sufficiently startling — namely, that, 
 in accepting such pay, the Church sold herself to the State, 
 and became bound to take submissively whatever her 
 master considered it right to bestow on her. Of course, 
 that is out of the question and not to be allowed for a 
 moment. But, you will argue, if she were a free agent, 
 voluntarily serving the State for wages, she ought at 
 once to have retired from the house when a serious mis- 
 understanding took place as to the nature of her duties. 
 Well, the fashionable theory now is, that she retired 
 quite soon enough. She did retire in the end. That 
 was the price she paid for keeping on good terms with 
 her conscience. But she thought it right and wise and 
 Christian-like to exhaust all the means in her power to 
 get things rectified before taking the extreme step of 
 breaking up an Establishment which she believed to be 
 a blessing to the country. It is conceivable that she 
 could have managed things more cleverly. Even Lord 
 Cockburn suggests that, by a little " cunning," she 
 might have got all she wanted. Daniel need not have 
 
88 THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 
 
 opened his windows so widely; the disciples need not 
 have flung their spiritual independence principle so 
 blankly in the teeth of the Sanhedrim ; the Evangelicals, 
 too, might have bent to the blast, and by a process of 
 thimble-rigging might have nominally repealed the Veto 
 Act to make it undergo a resurrection a day or two 
 later under a differ eiit name. But honesty, after all, is 
 the best policy. The battle of spiritual freedom had 
 again to be fought out in our day, and there is some- 
 thing comfortable in the reflection that that battle was 
 fought out so fairly — in an open field without ambush- 
 ments or dodging. 
 
 The question of whether any Christian Church can 
 possibly have a warrant from its Divine Head to commit 
 to lay patrons the unchecked power of appointing minis- 
 ters to vacant congregations is one which every intelligent 
 Christian man is com2:)etent to form an opinion upon. 
 No knowledge of Acts of Parliament or of Scotch or 
 English law is needed in that connection. With regard, 
 however, to the much narrower question of whether, by 
 the Act of Queen Anne, the Established Church of 
 Scotland became legally bound to ordain all presentees 
 without reference to the feelings of the people, it must 
 at once be admitted that the opinion of a trained lawyer 
 on that point is presumptively of more value than that 
 of a trained theologian. And the Moderates have, un- 
 doubtedly, something to boast of in the fact that, when 
 the question was debated in our highest Court, eight 
 Judges went with them, and only five against them. 
 But when, after a generation or two, people come to 
 look at the sentences of Civil Courts as they do at votes 
 
THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 89 
 
 in Parliament, not in their immediate practical bearing 
 upon the proceedings of their time, but in the higher 
 aspect of their intrinsic worth and reasonableness, it 
 sometimes happens that a very different verdict is given 
 upon them from what would at one time have been 
 delivered. Between thirty and foi-ty years ago eight 
 men (some of them letting it be plainly seen that they 
 were influenced in their views of the statutes by their 
 ecclesiastical prepossessions) declared that it was good 
 law to give all the power to the patron and none to 
 the people. At the same time, five men, equally dis- 
 tinguished as Judges, declared that in their opinion 
 it was very had law. And now you cannot hinder 
 people in 1875 sitting in judgment on both parties, and 
 coming to their own conclusions as to which had the 
 best of the argument. In doing this, we are not taking 
 it upon us to reverse their sentence. On the contrary, 
 we admit that, for weal or woe, their sentence stands, 
 except so much of it as has been affected by the Patron- 
 age Act of 1874. The sting of the Auchterarder deci- 
 sions lies in this, that they asserted the right of the 
 Civil Courts to prescribe to the Church what it is com- 
 petent for it to do. That stands ; and it is our gravest 
 charge against the present Establishment, that it is 
 accepting the pay of the State on the distinct under- 
 standing that it is to be allowed to stand. But while 
 we have ceased to fight against a sentence in which we 
 have now no personal interest, we claim the right to 
 say what we continue to think about the ground on 
 which it proceeded, and we are glad to have lived to see 
 the day when all Scotland has been brought to acknow- 
 
90 THE " MARTYltS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 
 
 ledge that those who noAV form the Free Chinch took 
 the correct view of the legal or constitutional situation. 
 
 The oldest Judge on the Bench in 1838 was Lord 
 Glenlee. He was a Conservative in his political prin- 
 ciples, and on that and other grounds he might have 
 been expected to have been opposed to the popular 
 interpretation of the law ; but to him the case was so 
 plain that he spoke of the contentions of the Moderate 
 side with impatience. The Church, he conceived, was 
 manifestly both entitled and bound to ascertain the fit- 
 ness of every presentee for the particular charge to 
 which he had been nominated. Acceptableness to the 
 congregation was, by the law and practice of the Church, 
 a necessary part of that fitness, and Mr. Young (the 
 Auchterarder presentee) had it not. The Act of 1834 
 was simply the test by which his want of fitness was 
 ascertained. " Upon the whole matter," said his lord- 
 shij), " it may be that this is an improper Act ; but, for 
 the life of me, I cannot find myself at liberty to say 
 that the Act is ultra vires. ''^ 
 
 It is refreshing to read the speeches which have been 
 delivered in Parliament, and General Assembly, and 
 elsewhere, in recent times, by the political successors of 
 those who opposed all the attempts of the Church to 
 make his acceptableness to the people an indispensable 
 qualification in every presentee. Patronage, in whose 
 interest the Moderates fought, has been thrown over- 
 board ; and the people, whom they tried to keep down, are 
 now everything. In so far as non-intrusion is concerned, 
 the Auchterai'der decision has been overturned by accla- 
 mation, and Lord Cockburn and his colleagues are 
 
THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 91 
 
 admitted to have been right in the view they took of 
 the meaning of the statutes. For the House of Com- 
 mons was persuaded to pass the Bill, not by abstract 
 arguments about the wisdom of giving congregations the 
 power to choose their own ministers, but by an elabo- 
 rate exposition by the Lord Advocate of the constitu- 
 tional history of the Church. 
 
 After all, however, it may still be pleaded that the Veto 
 Act was, rightly or wrongly, declared by the Court of 
 Session to be illegal. The law thus laid down may have 
 been bad ; but still it was law, and ought to liave been 
 respected. It is impossible then, you will say, to vindi- 
 cate the Church in not at once bending before the storm, 
 and agreeing to repeal it. Yery well, then, suppose we 
 admit all that. Good reasons have been given why 
 such a course was not followed ; but, for the sake of 
 argument, we shall allow that these reasons were not 
 sufficient, and that, as a matter of fact, the Church was 
 wrong. But will this admission justify the Civil Courts 
 in the conclusion to which they came, and which is still 
 freely advanced as explanatory of the many otherwise 
 indefensible interferences which took place afterwards 
 with the most purely spiritual things — in the conclu- 
 sion, namely, that because the ecclesiastical authorities 
 had exceeded their powers, the civil authorities were 
 entitled (as it were, by way of reprisal) to invade their 
 territories ? "I have been accustomed to think," says 
 Lord Cockburn, "that the Church, acting within its 
 clear jurisdiction, was no more liable to be controlled 
 by the Court of Session because it erred in law than the 
 Courts of J usticiary or Exchequer are. The patrimonial 
 
92 THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 
 
 consequences of an illegal act by the Church is another 
 matter ; but can the act be entirely superseded or the 
 anticipated act be prohibited ? " The argument com- 
 mends itself to common sense. If a Church commits 
 a civil wrong, let the State by all means look after its 
 own interest, and punish in ways competent to it. But 
 to intrude into the Church by way of injQiicting punish- 
 ment, is not to right the wrong but to imitate it ; and 
 for any Church to submit to such intrusion, and by 
 submission to allow it to be lawful and to court its 
 repetition, is manifestly to do dishonour to its great 
 Head and Lawgiver, and to throw away as valueless its 
 heritage of independence. 
 
 These remarks will make plain the peculiar signifi- 
 cance of the story which we are now briefly to tell. 
 
 In 1837 the parish of Marnoch, in the Presbytery of 
 Strathbogie, fell vacant, and the trustees of the Earl of 
 Fife, the patron, presented Mr. John Edwards to the 
 charge. Mr. Edwards was well known to the people. 
 He had been assistant to the former incumbent for 
 three years, and had made himself so unacceptable, that 
 he had been removed at the urgent request of those to 
 whom he had been ministering. When the Presbytery 
 met in the place, therefore, it was found that only one 
 parishioner (Peter Taylor, the keeper of a public-house) 
 was prepared to sign the call, and that of, the 300 male 
 heads of families, communicants, 261 were ready to 
 tender their solemn dissent against the settlement. It 
 so happened that a majority of the members of Presby- 
 tery were Moderates, and if they had had their way, 
 the presentee would have been settled out of hand, in 
 
THE " aiARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 93 
 
 the teeth of all the opposition ; but the case was carried 
 by appeal to the Assembly, and by order of that Court 
 Mr. Edwards was rejected. The Court of Session was 
 then appealed to ; and in June 1839 a decree was issued 
 declaring that the Presbytery was bound to proceed, 
 notwithstanding the judgment of the Assembly. As 
 the tendencies of the Strathbogie ministers were well 
 known, and it was fully anticipated that the judgment 
 of the Civil Court would be unfavourable to the Church, 
 the Commission in March had taken the precaution to 
 prohibit the Presbytery from going on with the case, no 
 matter what might be the result of the civil appeal, 
 until the whole matter had been again considered in the 
 superior courts. But the spirit of the seven " martyrs " 
 was now thoroughly aroused ; and as if all acts were holy 
 in so sacred a contest, they resorted to a piece of clever 
 strategy which had very nearly succeeded. The decree 
 of the Commission was, no doubt, notour to them all as 
 individuals. But they could have no official notice of 
 it till next ordinary meeting of Presbytery ; and, pro- 
 ceeding on this happy thought, they addressed a letter 
 to the Moderator, asking him to call a j/ro re nata 
 meeting of the Presbytery, to consider the claim of Mr. 
 Edwards to be taken on trial. Their scheme was 
 transparent. They hoped to carry through the settle- 
 ment in Marnoch with a rush, before their spiritual 
 superiors could interfere. But the plot was defeated by 
 the accident of the Moderator's chair being filled at the 
 moment by an Evangelical, who named in his note call- 
 ing the meeting, not merely the claim of Mr. Edwards, 
 but the sentence of the Commission, and who proposed, 
 
94 THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 
 
 as the day for tlie meeting, one so near the Commission 
 in November, as to render it impossible for them to do 
 any mischief without interference. Being thus out- 
 manoeuvred, they vented their rage on the minority by 
 refusing to allow the ^;ro re naia meeting, which they had 
 been the means of summoning, to proceed to any business 
 whatever; and the Moderator was able to bring the 
 matter before the Commission in November, only under 
 the sanction of a protest taken in the hands of a notary. 
 Such conduct seems to have even shocked the Moderates, 
 for the Commission was unanimous in the conclusion 
 which it came to with reference to it. The petition and 
 complaint to which the Presbytery had refused to listen 
 at the 2?ro re nata meeting was ordered to be served 
 upon it when it next met for ordinary business. At 
 the same time copies of the deliverances of the Assembly 
 and Commission were directed to be laid upon its 
 table, that it might not plead ignorance of what the 
 mind of the Church was. And, finally, the Presbytery 
 itself was summoned to appear at a special meeting of 
 the Commission, which was called for the 11th of De- 
 cember. There was thus given a clear space for reflec- 
 tion and repentance ; but the men had chosen their 
 part, and were prepared to play it. On the 4th of 
 December, the ordinary meeting of the Strathbogie 
 Presbytery was held, and the case of Mr. Edwards was, 
 in defiance of the Commission, proceeded with. Even 
 to go so far was rebellion against the authority of the 
 Church ; but the manner in which the case was con- 
 ducted was so violent and offensive, that the aimnus of the 
 offenders was made apparent to all. The parishioners 
 
THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 95 
 
 of Mai^nocli appeared by an agent to protest against the 
 intrusion of the presentee ; but they were not allowed 
 to be heard, nor was even the fact of their presence 
 suffered to be mentioned in the minutes. 
 
 The Commission assembled on the 11th of December, 
 and the " martyrs " appeared by counsel at its bar. They 
 came there, however, with no intention of turning 
 back. Sundry technical objections were offered by 
 them to the court proceeding with its business ; but 
 their advocate was instructed to intimate in effect that 
 they had no thought of doing anything else than what 
 they had done — that is, taking their orders about the 
 settlement at Marnoch, not from the General Assembly, 
 but from the Court of Session. Under these circum- 
 stances, the Commission could do nothing else than 
 assert its authority by passing upon the ministers who 
 were thus braving it an Act of Suspension. Some have 
 professed to be shocked at this proceeding as intolerant, 
 and have even compared Mr. Cruickshank and his 
 friends to Gillespie of Carnock, who was driven out of 
 the Establishment by his Presbytery insisting on his 
 performing a ministerial act agaiast his conscience ; but 
 it requires a very bright imagination to see any parallel 
 between these cases. The Strathbos^ie men were 
 required to do nothing. All the responsibility in con- 
 nection with the ordination at Marnoch the Assembly 
 was quite willing to undertake. And they had very 
 curious consciences indeed if it was under their 
 constraint that they were in such desperate haste to 
 honour the Civil Courts at the expense of the Church, 
 and to thrust an unacceptable minister upon a reclaim- 
 
96 THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 
 
 ing congregation, at the call of one single individual. 
 All this was seen so clearly, tliat the vote in favour of 
 suspension was 121 to 14. 
 
 Next day the seven " martyrs " (as they have been 
 facetiously called) served upon the Moderator a notarial 
 protest, holding the 121 who had given their voice against 
 them liable in " all cost, skaith, damage, and expense," 
 that might in consequence be incurred ; and four days 
 later it became plain that this was not to be an idle 
 threat. They then held what they called a meeting of 
 Presbytery (it will be remembered that they had been sus- 
 pended by their lawful superiors, and were at the moment 
 incompetent to discharge any ecclesiastical function), and 
 came to the resolution of making an appeal to the Court 
 of Session. They asked that Court " to suspend the 
 resolutions, sentence, and proceedings of the Commis- 
 sion," and to " prohibit and discharge " the minority of 
 the Presbytery from carrying the instructions of the 
 Commission into effect. Further, they asked that the 
 minority should be interdicted from exercising the 
 powers conferred upon them by the Commission to act 
 as the Presbytery of Strathbogie, and from performing 
 any ministerial duty in the parishes of the suspended 
 ministers. And, finally, they prayed that the minority, 
 and the ministers appointed by the Commission as their 
 assessors, should be prevented from intruding into these 
 parishes, even to intimate the sentence of the Commis- 
 sion. The very largeness of this petition is significant. 
 It shows us what manner of men were the seven 
 " martyrs " of Strathbogie. They were champions of 
 whom the Moderates had cause to be proud — men who, 
 
THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 97 
 
 having a good principle, were prepared to go through 
 with it — who, starting from the point that the Church 
 is subject to the State, could feel perfectly at rest only 
 when the liberties of the Church had been trampled in 
 the very dust. 
 
 Strange to say, the Court of Session hesitated to go 
 the full length of what it was asked. It granted an 
 Interdict as craved, but it was only to the extent of 
 prohibiting the minority or others from intimating the 
 Commission's sentence in the national churches, church- 
 yards, or schools. To the terms of this Interdict 
 nobody seriously objected. The Civil Court had un- 
 doubted authority over these places, and its commands 
 in reference to them were scrupulously obeyed ; but the 
 Church proceeded with its own work for all that. It 
 was the dead of winter ; but the ministers appointed to 
 execute the sentence betook themselves to the market- 
 places of the villages, and to the open fields, and being 
 there invariably surrounded by crowds of people, they 
 not only did the Commission's bidding, but preached 
 with power and efiect the glorious gospel of the blessed 
 God. 
 
 These results were not quite what the " martyrs " had 
 expected. What they wanted was to shut out the 
 Church from their parishes altogether ; and they re- 
 turned to the Court of Session with a pressing request 
 that the whole of their original prayer might be 
 answered. Nor did they now ask in vain. Lord 
 Murray, the Ordinary, refused to go further ; but on 
 appealing to the Inner Court, a sentence was given in 
 their favour by a majority. Lord Fullerton warned the 
 
 (460) 7 
 
98 THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 
 
 Coui't that it was exceeding its powers. " What were 
 their lordships called upon to do," he said, " but to 
 determine, if not in express terms yet by necessary im- 
 plication, that these reverend gentlemen [the suspended 
 ministers] were entitled to exercise the functions of the 
 holy ministry, and were entitled to administer baptism 
 and dispense the holy communion, and that in defiance 
 of their ecclesiastical superiors, from whom alone their 
 spiritual privileges were derived. Unless the whole 
 distinctions between civil and ecclesiastical law were at 
 once overthrown, their lordships could not pass a 
 Note of Suspension of this kind." The warning was not 
 heeded. An Interdict was issued, prohibiting any but 
 certain specified individuals from preaching in a certain 
 district of the country ; and thus not merely the 
 sentence of the Commission, but the commission of 
 Jesus Christ to his Church, was suspended by the order 
 of a Civil Court. But here the Court overshot its mark. 
 The best ministers in Scotland point blank refused to 
 obey a command which directly traversed the law of 
 their Lord ; and they went out of their way to show 
 how little they regarded it. By rights they ought to 
 have been fined or imprisoned for this ; but a shrewd 
 suspicion had gone abroad that the Court of Session had 
 got into a scrape by issuing such an Interdict at all, and 
 though there were many offenders, no one was punished 
 for his disobedience. '' The celebrated Interdict against 
 preaching," said Chalmers, " has at length opened 
 people's eyes." 
 
 In the midst of all this the Church did not abandon 
 the hope that the seven suspended ministers might be 
 
THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 99 
 
 brought to a better state of mind ; and three of the 
 most honoured ministers of the Church— Dr. John Bruce, 
 Dr. Robert Gordon, and Dr. M'KeUar — proceeded, at 
 the request of the Commission, to Aberdeen, to hold a 
 friendly conference with the erring brethren. On their 
 arrival, however, they found not those they wished to 
 see, but a lawyer, who handed them a document declining 
 the interview. 
 
 The position of the seven ministers was now that of 
 declared rebels ; and, of course, if there had been nothing 
 more that the Church could do in the way of \'indicating 
 its authority with reference to them, it might have been 
 content with simply outlawing them. But it could not 
 stop short at the point it had reached ; and the General 
 Assembly of 1840 had enjoined the Commission in August 
 to take the necessary steps for serving them with a libel, 
 if they still continued up to that date to be contumaci- 
 ous. The Commission came, and the men were as be- 
 fore. On the motion of the Procurator, therefore, the 
 case against them proceeded ; and in the November fol- 
 lowing the relevancy of the libel was sustained. 
 
 In the meantime, Mr. Edwards gi-ew impatient on 
 account of his having been so long kept out of his 
 benefice ; and by the advice, it is believed^ of the sus- 
 pended ministers, who only wanted an excuse for com- 
 pleting the work they had begun, he went to the Court 
 of Session, and asked it to command the Presbytery of 
 Strathbogie forthwith to admit him as the minister of 
 Marnoch, " or otherwise to pay to him, Mr. John Ed- 
 wards, the sum of £8,000, in name of damages." The 
 seven " martyrs " hastened to assure the Court that re- 
 
100 THE "martyrs" of strathbogie. 
 
 bellion against the law of the land was not in all their 
 thoughts, and that they were perfectly willing to yield 
 obedience, in the matter submitted, to " the decrees of 
 this Court." A decree was given accordingly ; and on 
 the 21st of January 1841 the pretended Presbytery of 
 Strathbogie met at Marnoch, to proceed to the ordina- 
 tion of the presentee. The parishioners assembled in 
 the church before the services commenced, and having 
 challenged the right of the suspended ministers to 
 undertake what they had in hand, and entered their 
 solemn protest against the outrage, they all left the 
 building. But curiosity had brought a sufficiency of 
 strangers from abroad to witness the extraordinary 
 ceremony, and Mr. Edwards was in their presence set 
 apart, in form at least, to the office of the ministry. 
 
 This incident did not, of course, make the duty of the 
 Church seem less plain than it had done before. Tlie 
 probation of the libel was completed at the Commission 
 in March, and in the May following, after a long and 
 important debate, the rebellious ministers were deposed 
 by the General Assembly. Dr. Chalmers moved the 
 sentence ; and referring in his speech to the plea which 
 had been set up, that the accused Avere martyrs to their 
 conscientiousness, he said : " Sir, I know not what the 
 inward principle of the ministers of Strathbogie may 
 have been, nor will I attempt any conjecture on this 
 subject ; but I do know that, when forbidden by their 
 ecclesiastical superiors to proceed any further with Mr. 
 Edwards, they took him on trial ; and when suspended 
 from the functions of the sacred ministry by a Com- 
 mission of the General Assembly, they continued to 
 
THE "martyrs" of STRATHBOGIE. 101 
 
 preach and to dispense the sacraments : that they called 
 in the aid of the civil power to back them in the exclu- 
 sion from their respective parishes of clergymen ap- 
 pointed by the only competent court to fulfil the office 
 which they were no longer competent to discharge : and, 
 lastly, as if to crown and consummate this whole dis- 
 obedience, as if to place the top-stone on the Babel of 
 their proud and rebellious defiance, that to the scandal and 
 astonishment of all Scotland, and with a daring which, 
 I believe, themselves would have shrunk from at the 
 outset of their headlong career, they put forth their un- 
 licensed hands on the dread work of ordination ; and, as 
 if in solemn mockery of the Church's most venerable 
 forms, asked of the unhappy man who knelt before 
 them if he promised to submit himself willingly and 
 humbly in the spirit of meekness to the admonitions of 
 the brethren of the Presbytery, and to be subject to 
 them and all other Presbyteries and judicatories of this 
 
 Church Sir, I repeat I am not able to go in to the 
 
 depth of men's consciences ; but this I am able to per- 
 ceive, that if in heresy this plea [that a man was con- 
 scientious in what he did and said] were sustained, the 
 Church would be left without a creed ; and that if in 
 contumacy this plea were sustained, the Church would 
 be left without a government." 
 
 Even at the last the grand resource of the " martyrs " 
 did not fail them. Two days aftei' their deposition, the 
 Moderator interrupted the business of the Assembly to 
 say that he had received a note, intimating that a 
 messenger-at-arms was at the door with an Interdict. 
 The news produced a profound sensation, and a good 
 
102 THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIB. 
 
 deal of indignation was let off in consequence. But the 
 interest of the story ends here until it revives again 
 after the Disruption. By the 22nd of May 1843, the 
 band which, according to Lord Cockburn, " contained 
 the whole chivalry of the Church," had followed the 
 blue banner of the Covenant down to Tanfield, and the 
 remanent General Assembly was engaged in the delight- 
 ful work of passing Acts Rescissory. At such a time 
 those who had suffered so much for the cause that was 
 now triumphant could not be overlooked, and Dr. 
 Mearns moved that the sentences which had been 
 passed upon them should be — not reversed — but de- 
 clared to have been null and void ah initio ; and that 
 the ministers must be held and recognized as having al- 
 ways been, and as being now, in full possession of all 
 their ministerial and presbyterial rights and privileges. 
 This motion was opposed by some of those unfortunate 
 individuals who had actually voted for the deposition 
 of the " martyrs," but who had not had faith enough to 
 become Free Churchmen ; but their protest was vain. 
 Dr. Mearns carried his point by a majority of 145 to 
 33 ; and thus the Church, as such, identified itself with 
 the rebellion of Strathbogie, and stands committed at 
 this hour to the principle that when the Court of 
 Session disapproves of any act of the Church, it pos- 
 sesses the right and power to produce a paralysis through- 
 out the whole system. 
 
 The recognition of the Strathbogie ministers by the 
 Established Church is one of the facts which no loyal 
 Free Churchman can get over. It was open to the 
 Assembly to have said : We think these men have been 
 
THE " MARTYRS " OF STRATHBOGIE. 103 
 
 unjustly treated, and we hereby rescind the sentences 
 under which they have been lying, and give our sanction 
 retrospectively to the ministerial acts which they have 
 been performing in a state of suspension. That would 
 have answered the honour of the Church and its au- 
 thority. But when it ignored the proceedings of the 
 Spiritual Courts altogether, and acted as if the Court of 
 Session were alone competent to say who are ministers 
 and who are not, an attitude was assumed which im- 
 plied a direct denial of the doctrine of the Confession, 
 that Christ, " as King and Head of his Church, hath 
 therein appointed a government in the hand of church- 
 officers, distinct from the civil magistrate." Erastianism 
 was thus admitted, not unwittingly through an un- 
 guarded postern, but openly and unblushingly through 
 the gate. Nay, more, it was deliberately crowned. 
 The Church, as by law established, took its stand by 
 the side of men whose contempt for ecclesiastical au- 
 thority was wanton and reckless — it hastened to an- 
 nounce to all the world that it honoured them for their 
 rebellion ; and, until that blot has been removed, it is 
 impossible that any one who believes in spiritual in- 
 dependence can hold any other opinion than that it — 
 the Established Church — is living in practical denial of 
 the Crown Rights of the Redeemer. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE f:STABLISHED CHURCH SINCE THE DISRUPTION, 
 AND THE PATRONAGE ACT. 
 
 iN the Established Church, after the Disrup- 
 tion, we see the Moderate party once more on 
 tlie crown of the wave. There were still 
 Evangelicals to be found in it here and there ; 
 but as an organic force they were now out- 
 side, and the general drift of the remanent 
 body was revealed without any mistake in the deliver- 
 ances of its first Assembly. 
 
 We have noticed what was done with the deposed 
 Strathbogie ministers. "Without even the form having 
 been gone through of rescinding the sentences passed 
 upon them by the Church, they were declared to have 
 been always ministers, these sentences notwithstanding, 
 — the judgment of the Civil Courts being accepted as 
 sufficient to make of none eflect the most solemn de- 
 liverances of the Supreme Courts of the Establishment. 
 The Veto Act was dealt with as summarily. Dr. 
 Cook, tlie Moderate leader, was grimly jocular about it. 
 He declined to enter upon "the merits of their departed 
 friend the Veto Law;" but moved that " it be an instruc- 
 
THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 105 
 
 tion by the General Assembly to all Presbyteries, that 
 they proceed henceforth in the settlement of parishes 
 according to the practice which prevailed previously to 
 the passing of that Act." The proposal grated a good 
 deal upon the feelings of some of the members. Even 
 the Procurator, the legal adviser of the Church, refused 
 to be a party to it, and moved that an overture be trans- 
 mitted to Presbyteries for the repeal of the Yeto Act in 
 the old constitutional way. Mr. Story of Roseneath 
 supported this motion. " The Act," he said, " was an 
 ecclesiastical Act, and must be cancelled ecclesiastically." 
 In this view Dr. Norman M'Leod concurred. " He 
 wished," he said, " to repeal the Yeto constitutionally." 
 And to the same side Principal Lee inclined. '' He 
 hesitated with regard to the degree of weight which 
 might be given to a House so inadequately representing 
 the Church." But all remonstrance proved vain. The 
 Moderates were eager to show to all the world how 
 willing they were to take the law, even upon all eccle- 
 siastical matters, from the Court of Session, and of what 
 little account the authority of the Church was in theii' 
 eyes, and the Yeto Act was declared to need no killing, 
 but to be already dead and gone. On this head the mind 
 of the Assembly was so unmistakably indicated that 
 Dr. Cook's motion was allowed to pass without a vote. 
 
 But almost more significant than the proceedings in 
 either of these cases was another decision of the As- 
 sembly afiecting the ecclesiastical standing of a consider- 
 able number of the ministers and congregations of the 
 Church. Originally there were only parochial charges 
 in Scotland, and the incumbents of these were all 
 
106 THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 
 
 Presbyterian ministers in the full sense of the term ; — 
 that is, they were all ordained not merely to preach but 
 to rule. But as the population of the country increased, 
 other places of worship came to be erected, and into 
 these were gathered, in many instances, large congrega- 
 tions. Under the Moderate regime such charges were 
 kept in a state of hopeless pupilage. They were not 
 allowed to have Kirk-Sessions of their own. Their 
 ministers were not acknowledged as members of the 
 Presbyteries within which they resided. And in con- 
 sequence of theii- being thus denied the full advantage 
 of the Presbyterian system, they were like a man called 
 to engage in a fight with one of his hands in a sling. 
 When the reforming sj^irit appeared in the Church, 
 therefore, this was one of the first anomalies to the recti- 
 fication of which it addressed itself. In 1833 the 
 ministers of the Parliamentary Churches were admitted 
 to the exercise of the full rights of their spiritual office \ 
 in 1834, the ministers of Chapels of Ease were in like 
 manner enfranchised; and in 1839, the General As- 
 sembly, in admitting a seceding body into the Church 
 — the Old Light Burghers — recognLjed its congregations 
 as in full Presbyterian standing. When the Moderates 
 returned to power, however, they hastened to change all 
 that. Lord Belhaven moved that the Acts referred to 
 should be rescinded ; but Mr. Robertson of Ellon, and 
 Dr. Cook, would not even condescend to go so far. They 
 held that the Acts had been " incompetently passed," 
 for so the Court of Session had declared in the Stewarton 
 case ; and once more the obsequious Chiirch applied the 
 sponge to its own deliverances. The law then laid 
 
THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 107 
 
 down still rules. So completely has the Pi-esbyterian 
 Church, which is now established in Scotland, surren- 
 dered to the State its power of self-government, that, if 
 Dr. Candlish and the congregation of Free St. George's, 
 Edinburgh, had been willinoj to connect themselves with 
 it, they could only have done so at the cost of having 
 their Kirk-Session suppressed, and theii- minister ex- 
 cluded from Presbytery, Synod, and General Assembly ! 
 It is true, that a congi-egation so wealthy might soon 
 have reojained its status. But how *? In a manner 
 which only makes the disloyalty of the system appear 
 the more glaring. They could have secured a 'property 
 qualification. By raising a certain sum of money, they 
 could have gone to the Court of Teinds and 'purchased 
 the right to have their ecclesiastical standing recognized. 
 You will say that an Act of Parliament might put that 
 all right perhaps. But, besides that you make a de- 
 plorable admission when you say that such a thing is 
 needed, it is to be remembered that the need for such 
 an Act of Parliament has not even yet been felt. The 
 Church which is now in possession of the national en- 
 dowments is a Presbyterian Church which believes in 
 representative government, and government by Kirk- 
 Sessions and Presbyteries ; and yet, without the con- 
 sent of the Civil Power, it cannot carry out in any 
 locality its own system. Let a congregation be ever so 
 numerous and well supplied with spiiitual gifts, the 
 Established General Assembly cannot say to it, " Choose 
 you out men whom we may ordain to have the rule 
 over you;" and let its minister be ever so distin- 
 guished, it cannot say to him, " Go and give the Presby- 
 
108 THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 
 
 tery of the bovmds the benefit of your counsel." That 
 is the state of matters as it exists at this moment. We 
 have heard of no movement in the direction of seeking 
 deliverance from this yoke of bondage. And we are, 
 therefore, warranted to conclude that the principle laid 
 down in 1843 is still accepted, — that it is for the State 
 and not for the Church to determine what congregations 
 shall have Kirk-Sessions, and who shall sit in Presby- 
 teries and General Assemblies. 
 
 One other memorable thing which the Post-disrup- 
 tion Assembly did was to give its consent to Lord 
 Aberdeen's Act, by which the principle was established 
 of a Veto with reasons. It is needless to say anything 
 about this famous principle now. All that the Non- 
 Intrusionists affirmed in regard to its objectionableness 
 has come true, and the Act itself has been abolished by 
 universal consent. The Established Church, however, 
 started with it in high hope, and for a good many years 
 we heard of nothing but of mutual congratulations among 
 the members on the subject of the great improvement 
 which had taken place in the internal condition and 
 management of the Church in consequence. 
 
 How the change has come about which is compelling 
 the Nonconformist Churches to reconsider their relation 
 to the Establishment is well known. The spread of 
 liberal ideas in the country, resulting in the popularizing 
 of the public services, in the extension of the suffrage, 
 and, above all, in the disestablishment of the Irish 
 Church, naturally enough produced a feeling of appre- 
 hension in the minds of those who were responsible 
 for the maintenance of a National Church in a nation 
 
THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 109 
 
 where a large proportion of the people are outside of it. 
 They could not tell how soon the silent tide of change, 
 which was creeping over the land, might reach the 
 foundations of that institution in whose support they 
 were interested ; and, with a forethought for which they 
 are to be commended, they began to consider what they 
 could do to prepare it for the worst. And the pressure 
 of the times now did for them what the still small voice 
 of reason had, often before, tried in vain to accomplish. 
 They became persuaded that lay patronage is opposed to 
 the genius of the Scottish people, and that, consequently, 
 its presence in a Scottish Church is a source of weakness ; 
 and so they resolved to raise the old cry of " The 
 Abolition of Patronage." 
 
 "VVe commit no breach of charity when we say that 
 this movement was totally different in kind from those 
 others which we have had occasion to notice in the pre- 
 ceding pages. It was not a spiritual movement, and did 
 not pretend to be one. Its leaders had no heart dislike 
 to patronage for themselves, nor did they plead for its 
 abolition on grounds of Scripture, or in the interest of 
 the rights of the Christian people. Dr. Pirie, the Con- 
 vener of the Assembly's Committee on the subject, 
 made no secret of the reasons why he desired a change. 
 It was because, in his opinion, the ecclesiastical condi- 
 tions of a country must follow its political conditions or 
 Church and State will tear each other in pieces. In 
 other words, we live, he holds, in a democratic age, and 
 we must be democratic in our Church principles. The 
 movement, therefore, was confessedly a political one. 
 
 At first it did not meet with a great deal of encourage- 
 
110 THK ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 
 
 ment. When a deputation waited on the Prime Minister 
 of the country some years ago and asked, in effect, that the 
 constitution of the Established Church might be changed 
 in the interest of its present members, Mr. Gladstone 
 asked if those who had been driven out of the Church by 
 the very parties then conferring with him, had ever been 
 spoken to about the matter. It was a very pertinent 
 question, for the endowments were intended not for a sect, 
 but for the nation, and it seemed reasonable that those 
 who were virtually acknowledging themselves to have 
 been wrong, should be asked to take into account the case 
 of their brethren who had been injured by them. But 
 the question was disagreeable, and no other deputation 
 ever came back to have it repeated. A great political 
 revolution, however, gave them a chance that was little 
 expected. At the general election of 1873 the Tories 
 gained such a majority in Parliament that they became 
 capable of carrying any measure which they liked to set 
 their hearts upon ; and the friends of the Establishment 
 took eager advantage of the opportunity. A Bill for the 
 Abolition of Patronage was suddenly introduced into the 
 House of Lords, and carried there at the gallop. In the 
 House of Commons the opposition was more serious, a 
 considerable minority voting that no radical ecclesiastical 
 change of any sort ought to have been proposed in Scot- 
 land without a full inquiry being first instituted into 
 the circumstances of the country ; but the Church had 
 the Government at its back, the Government had a well- 
 disciplined majority ready to do its bidding, and so a 
 measure passed triumphantly which shows Moderatisni 
 attempting to build on the basis of a Democracy, 
 
THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. Ill 
 
 We are sure ^v^e can say sincerely that we hope the 
 change made in the method by which Established Church 
 congregations are henceforth to secure ministers, will 
 result in a very large amount of spiritual good. No 
 Scottish Presbyterian can possibly doubt that there is 
 more probability of evangelical religion flourishing under 
 the present system than under that which has passed 
 away. And since one step has been taken in the right 
 direction, we shall look hopefully for more to follow. 
 But those who imagine that what has happened has 
 drawn true and intelligent Free Churchmen more closely 
 to the Establishment are, Ave fear, labouring under a 
 delusion. For, in the first place, recent debates in Par- 
 liament have strengthened our suspicions of all legisla- 
 tion with reference to the internal arrangements of 
 Christ's house. And, in the second place, the avowed 
 purpose of the Bill, and the spirit in which it was sup- 
 ported, were far more fitted to widen the breach than to 
 diminish it. 
 
 It is one of the inevitable results of our havins: lived 
 for thirty years separate from the State, that we have 
 come to have even more sharply-defined ideas than we once 
 had as to what kind of union between Church and State 
 can be regarded as lawful. It has always been the 
 belief of the Church of Scotland that the State is one 
 power and the Church another, and that if these two 
 agree to enter into an alliance it must be on the prin- 
 ciple of each recognizing the other's independence. That 
 this has not always been kept in view in the past is 
 notorious. Even Evangelical men, with sound theoretical 
 views of the Church, have sometimes felt themselves so em- 
 
112 THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 
 
 barrassed by circumstances as to feel compelled to seem 
 to concede a right to Parliament to transgress the strict 
 line of demarcation between the provinces. But now we 
 are in the open. There is nothing whatever to force us 
 to admit anything but what appears absolutely right ; 
 and in this position we object, at the very outset, to the 
 principle of the Lords and Commons doing any such 
 thing as that of regulating the appointment of ministers to 
 vacant congregations. In our judgment, a matter of 
 that kind is internal, — something with which the 
 Church alone has to do ; and the people ought to be 
 allowed to exercise their privileges in virtue of their in- 
 herent right to do so, not on account of certain privileges 
 conferred upon them by any secular legislature. Some 
 may think this hypercritical, but they will not continue 
 to do so if they seriously consider the following account 
 given of the meaning of the Patronage Bill by the Duke 
 of Richmond, who introduced it. The Duke said : " He 
 had been astonished to find it objected to the Bill, that 
 in changing the method of election of ministers the Bill 
 did away with Patronage altogether. It merely changed 
 the right of election of ministers from the j)ersons who 
 have the power to do so now and placed it in the Imnds of 
 other parties. Patronage still exists, hut the parties who 
 have the right of selection were a different constituency." 
 Now this may be thought a distinction without a dif- 
 ference ; but it is not so. The Duke perfectly under- 
 stood what he meant to be at. He wished the House 
 to understand that it was not proposed to throw away 
 a privilege — to divest the Government of a right so com- 
 pletely that tliey could never again recall it. That civi] 
 
THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 113 
 
 power wliicli the lay patrons liad possessed to appoint 
 men to charges was now to be transferred to a popular 
 constituency, but the essential nature of the power was 
 not to be changed — that was to continue the same as 
 ever. And the inference was plainly suggested, that if at 
 any future time their lordships thought better of it they 
 could take back their gift and bestow it ujDon others 
 who would serve their purpose still more effectually. 
 It is a simple matter of fact, therefore, that what has 
 been secured to the Establishment is not a Parliament- 
 ary recognition of the Church principle that it appertains 
 to congi'egations to choose their own ministers, but 
 merely an Act of Parliament declaring, for the time 
 being, in whom patronage is "vested," and making 
 regulations about the settlement of ministers which 
 would appear much more in their place if they were 
 found in the proceedings of the General Assembly. We 
 cannot, therefore, for a moment, allow that the Estab- 
 lished Church has now got — even in this connection — 
 what is possessed by her Nonconformist sisters. The 
 rope has been lengthened, but it has not been cut. And 
 now that the principle has been once more conceded that 
 Parliament has a right to lay down laws for the internal 
 management of the Church, it is at least within the 
 bounds of possibility that it may by-and-by try its hand 
 at regulating for Scotland as well as for England the form 
 and order of its worship. In such circumstances the Free 
 Church will wisely stand aloof The times are not such 
 as to render it particularly prudent to put the control of 
 the religious forces of the country into the hands of 
 secular politicians. 
 
 (4G0) g 
 
114 THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 
 
 But we have good cause on otlier grounds to dislike 
 this Bill. With its avowed design — the strengthening 
 of the existing Establishment — we could have been 
 expected to sympathize, only if we had made up our 
 minds (which we have not) that on that result depend 
 the deepening and extension of the religious life of Scot- 
 land. As it happens, our hopes for the future are not 
 particularly bound up with the existing Establishment. 
 We see very clearly how, if it does not undergo a far 
 more radical reformation than it is now thinking of, it 
 will prove an increasingly serious hindrance in the way 
 of the triumph of Evangelical principles ; and we cannot 
 persuade ourselves that anything very lamentable would 
 happen if it were to cease to-morrow. 
 
 And, feeling in this way, we have no inducement to 
 overlook what is objectionable in the Bill otherwise. It 
 is a Bill whose moral aspects, if we may so speak, are 
 not attractive. It represents a Church seeking non- 
 intrusion from no higher motive than that of putting 
 itself politically on a level with the times ; and it repre- 
 sents a State, which turned a deaf ear to a faithful and 
 reforming Church, conceding, as it believes, what that 
 Church asked in vain, to those who formerly opposed it 
 to the death. Nor have things been made better by the 
 total absence of magnanimity which has appeared in the 
 conduct of its supporters. 
 
 "Those who afterwards be^came the Free Church," 
 said Mr. Gladstone in his place in the House of Com- 
 mons, " were the heirs of those theological and religious 
 traditions which were connected with the Scottish Ke- 
 formation." 
 
THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 115 
 
 The Duke of Argyll quoted that remark and assented 
 to it. He also had no doubt that the Free Church pos- 
 sessed the " succession " of the ancient and national 
 Church of Scotland. But he went further. " I did 
 more," said he, [than recognize in the Evangelicals the 
 heirs of the Reformers ;] ^^ I recognized them as in the right. 
 I had no doubt that their views were, practically, per- 
 fectly compatible with the National Establishment. I 
 did what I could to convince the Government, and the 
 Legislature of 1842, that it would be wise and just to 
 concede such terms as they would accept." 
 
 From these two kindred testimonies two very different 
 conclusions were drawn. The Duke said, " This is un- 
 doubtedly the heir — come, let us kill him^ Mr. Glad- 
 stone reasoned more justly and more generously. " I 
 contend," said he, " that the Dissenting bodies in Scot- 
 land are entirely to be considered in this matter. I do 
 not blame the learned lord for framing the Bill from a 
 Church point of view, but rather for taking it from that 
 point of view entirely. He says he has framed it to 
 strengthen the Church ; but how does he strengthen the 
 Church ? By weakening the other bodies. You leave 
 the Free Church as a body, and the United Presbyterian 
 
 Church as a body, to shift for themselves You would 
 
 endeavour, not to bring back bodies into reunion, but the 
 adherents here and there as you can catch them, in a 
 manner totally devoid of consistency, wisdom, and pru- 
 dence The learned lord's speech to-night has been like 
 
 a repetition of the pamphlets I read in 1842 from the 
 mouths of those who formed the Free Church. They 
 were contemptuously spurned, they were cast aside, and 
 
116 THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH SINCE 1843. 
 
 you introduce this Bill, which is a cry of Peccavi on the 
 part of the Church of Scotland. If it is a confession of 
 wrong, there is along with penitence something else 
 necessary, and that is Restitution." 
 
 The two bodies referred to have had too much self-re- 
 spect to take up Mr. Gladstone's position, and demand 
 restitution. But they had some cause to expect that their 
 historic claims would meet at least with consideration. 
 But no. A modest proposal, that before any legislation 
 was proceeded with, an inquiry should be made into the 
 whole ecclesiastical condition of Scotland — an inquiry 
 which was shown to be necessary by, for example, dis- 
 putes as to the religious profession of the inhabitants — 
 was summarily dismissed ; the idea was resolutely dis- 
 countenanced that those who had been driven out of the 
 Establishment had any title to say a word on the sub- 
 ject of the readjustment of its relations to the State ; 
 the plot was unblushingly developed of (as Dr. Kennedy 
 has well expressed it) raising " an imitation of the Free 
 Church banner" within the lines of Establishment, to 
 decoy deserters from our ranks ; and such eagerness was 
 shown to make the most of the unexpected return of the 
 Conservatives to power as to leave upon the minds of all 
 of us the ineffaceable impression that we have not only 
 seen a gross piece of class legislation, but have been 
 made the victims — so far as the thing can make victims 
 of us at all — of a not very creditable coup cVetat. We 
 dislike the Bill in itself, therefore; but we still more 
 dislike, if possible, the spirit in which it has been carried 
 through Parliament. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 
 
 %^'. 
 
 ^ 
 
 E have no doubt at all that many gave their 
 support to the Patronage Bill under the 
 honest belief that through it lies the best and 
 shortest road to the unification of the Church 
 in Scotland. Those who came to that con- 
 clusion did so on the assumption that our 
 differences are to be ended by the reconstruction of the 
 Establishment, and by the gradual reiibsorption into it 
 of the various outlying bodies of Seceders. Others 
 hold that unity in that direction is no longer to be 
 looked for, and that before the Church of Scotland can 
 be reorganized there must come a dissolution of the 
 Establishment. Much may be said on both sides, and 
 much has been said. The new attitude assumed by 
 the Established Church was a challenge to the Non- 
 conformists who surround it, and a Disestablishment 
 agitation was inevitable. We are yet to see what is to 
 be its issue. 
 
 In the meantime there is a question of present 
 interest requiring attention — namely, this, What ought 
 the Free Church now to do ? 
 
118 WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 
 
 That question we can afford to deal with in a calm 
 and dispassionate way. Our Church has now main- 
 tained its position in a disestablished state for fifty 
 years ; and, as it looks back, it may well thank God, and 
 take courage. In 1843, some four hundred and seventy 
 ministers left the Establishment : the number of our 
 charges now is over a thousand. We have covered the 
 whole land with churches and manses, proving that 
 ministers can be sustained in the poorest districts. 
 Our three Colleges train more students yearly than are 
 to be found in all the halls of our universities. Our 
 income is by far the largest received by any Church in 
 Scotland. And, not to mention other things, the mis- 
 sions which we maintain in heathen countries are greatly 
 more extensive than those carried on by the Church 
 from which we separated. No one will say that the 
 Free Church movement has been a failure, or imagine 
 that we cannot afford to wait, for another generation 
 if necessary, to see a satisfactory settlement of the 
 ecclesiastical situation in Scotland. 
 
 But we may contribute even now something toward 
 the reaching of that settlement by indicating what we 
 believe to be at present the attitude of the Free Church 
 on the whole toward some of the burning questions 
 which have been raised in this connection. 
 
 And, first of all, with regard to the State, we are, I 
 am sure, unanimous in thinking that it is under law 
 to Christ, and that that fact ought to be kept as much 
 as possible before it. On this point the famous Articles 
 of Agreement, accepted by the Union Committees in 
 1867, are perfectly explicit. "Civil government," it 
 
WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 119 
 
 is said in them, " is an ordinance of God, for his own 
 glory and the public good ; to the Lord Jesus Christ is 
 given all power in heaven and on earth ; and all men 
 in their several places and relations, and therefore civil 
 magistrates in theirs, are under obligation to submit 
 themselves to Christ, and to regulate their conduct by 
 his Word.'' What particular things, however, a State 
 should be urged at any one time to do, is another 
 question, and few will argue that under all circum- 
 stances it is its duty to establish a Church. In Spain, 
 for instance, there is at present a little Protestant 
 community, which we believe to be the only body in 
 the country proclaiming the truth ; but it would be 
 monstrous to say that the Spanish Government was 
 oflfering homage to Christ if, for some political reason, 
 it singled out these Protestants for public favour ; and 
 although the cases are not absolutely parallel, it seems 
 to us equally preposterous to speak of our own Par- 
 liament, which is composed not only of Protestants but 
 of Papists, JeAvs, Unitarians, unbelievers, and pagans, 
 as offering homage to Christ in maintaining our present 
 Establishment. 
 
 To talk in such a strain we will not call cant^ be- 
 cause many are quite honest and sincere in using the 
 language ; but w^e will say this, that those who repre- 
 sent things in the way we have described are practising 
 a deception on themselves. 
 
 With a Parliament like ours, composed of such 
 materials, the utmost that we can reasonably and in- 
 telligently urge them to seek after is justice. The law 
 written on their hearts is sufficient to sustain that 
 
120 WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 
 
 claim ; and while we urge them to look up to Christ, 
 we must not seek to make them hypocrites by getting 
 them to profess a respect which they do not feel. What 
 is just ? is the question which we ought to press on the 
 attention of our rulers, and in its light we should view 
 whatever agitation may be at present proceeding in 
 reference to Disestablishment. 
 
 As to our own future relations to the State, we con- 
 fess to not being able to understand the eagerness with 
 which good men among us continue to look to the 
 possibility of our being, as a Church, re-established. 
 These men are alarmed and indignant when they hear 
 from Free Churchmen the cry for Disestablishment. 
 If such a thing were to occur, they think it would 
 destroy their own chance of a reunion with the State ; 
 and to keep that hope alive, they are content meanwhile 
 to sustain an Establishment of which they disapprove. 
 One wonders if they can have read our Church history. 
 Experience teaches fools. What has happened in the 
 past might well convey a lesson of caution. We do 
 not say that a free-established Church is not possible ; 
 but it is not within the longest sight, and the case of 
 Geneva and other places teaches that just as little is to 
 be exjDected from a godless democracy as from such a 
 monarchy as that of Charles II. In the meantime, the 
 Church is certainly safest in keeping free of political 
 entanglements. 
 
 About the Established Church, it is all important to 
 remember that, speaking historically, it simply repre- 
 sents the Moderate party — that party whicli drove the 
 Erskincs, the Haldancs, and Chalmers into Noncon- 
 
WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 121 
 
 formity, and which, at the bidding of the Court of 
 Session, set aside the Veto Act, shut the chapel minis- 
 ters out of Presbyteries, and recognized as in full 
 standing the ministers of Strathbogie who had been 
 deposed by the General Assembly. They hold the 
 Establishment and the endowments by right of law. 
 The legal judicatories decided in their favour. But 
 we have never acknowledged that they have a title in 
 equity to their present position, and, as Lord Macaulay 
 once said in the House of Commons, "if Knox and 
 Henderson and Boston were alive, they would find a 
 home in the Church of Chalmers and Brewster, not in 
 that of Bryce and Muir." We entirely sympathize, 
 therefore, with those who argue that, in justice, the 
 present incumbents of our parochial charges ought to 
 be removed, and their places filled by ministers of the 
 Free Church. That is our technical contention. We 
 cannot carry our ideas into effect, nor, if we could, 
 would we care to do so. But there cannot be a 
 moment's doubt about the fact, that such is our proper 
 testimony ; and we would have more respect for the 
 '' constitutional " position if those who maintain it 
 would agitate for the disestablishment of the Church, 
 now inequitably in possession, with the view of their 
 being put in its room. 
 
 But, we are assured, the passing of the Patronage 
 Act has changed all that. Well, I should like to say 
 a few plain things on that subject, even although I 
 may be guilty of some repetition. And, in the first 
 place, I would remind the reader that the proposal to 
 pass that Act was no indication of a change of mind 
 
122 WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 
 
 on the part of the Moderate party. When the Veto 
 Act was adopted in 1834, the significance of the event 
 was well understood. It marked the turning of a tide 
 — the rise into power of the Evangelicals — who devoutly 
 believed that in a ministerial settlement the element 
 of acceptability was indispensable to spiritual success. 
 The agitation in 1874 had no such origin. It sprang 
 wholly and professedly from political calculation. Men 
 saw the advance of the democracy, and bowed before 
 it. The Evangelicals remained as before. The Mod- 
 erates led, in the interest of expediency. 
 
 Let us see, however, what the Act really was. 
 People are accustomed to speak of it as one for "the 
 abolition of Patronage." That is not its own designa- 
 tion. Its title was, " Act to alter and amend the laws 
 relatiyig to the appointment of ministers to Parishes in 
 Scotland.^'' In its preamble it says, "Whereas it is 
 expedient to repeal and provide otherwise for the 
 appointment of ministers of the Church of Scotland as 
 by law established." "In terms of the Act," it re- 
 gulates the mode of electing ministers, giving to the 
 people the power of choosing men only for six months. 
 And, further, it confers the right to vote at an election 
 not only on communicants but on adherents. 
 
 Under such a measure, Patronage is not abolished. 
 It is only transferred from one party to another. The 
 State does not stand aside and recognize the principle 
 that " it appertains " to the people to choose their own 
 ministers. It deals with the franchise as if it were 
 a civil qualification, which is only to be exercised in a 
 particular way and for a set time, and which may at any 
 
WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 123 
 
 moment be withdrawn. Even in this connection, then, 
 the Erastian trail is visible ; and in conceding so much 
 to the Establishment, Parliament has bj no means 
 given what the Evangelicals always desired, that the 
 Church should be left free to regulate in its own way 
 so spiritual a matter as that of the formation of the 
 pastoral tie. The Established Church is not in the 
 enjoyment of what ought to belong to it, as a Church, 
 by right — the free privilege of popular election. 
 
 But even although things had been more satisfactory 
 in that connection, there would still remain the unre- 
 pealed sentences of the courts of law — sentences which 
 proclaim that the Established Church is willing to place 
 its liberties in the safe keeping of these courts, and is 
 prepared to submit to them to any extent. There are 
 few chapters in the Church history of Scotland more 
 humiliating than that which tells of what took place in 
 the Established Assembly of 1843, after the Evangeli- 
 cals had left it. Dr. Cook actually joked about the Veto 
 in dismissing it ; and the Acts Rescissory, by which a 
 sponge was lightly drawn over the most solemn con- 
 clusions of Assemblies — professedly at the bidding of 
 the Court of Session — will ever remain as an inexpiable 
 scandal at the door of those who passed them. For those 
 Acts the Church is responsible. They define its position. 
 They show that it regards the Queen as supreme in all 
 causes, civil and ecclesiastical. And, as long as this 
 state of things continues, we must in the most earnest 
 way maintain our protest. 
 
 We shall be reminded, however, of the efforts made 
 by Mr. Finlay to tide over this difficulty. Tt is indeed 
 
124 WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 
 
 gratifying to find that after so many years, the testi- 
 mony of the Free Church has been so effective. One 
 " imitation of our banner " (as Dr. Kennedy puts it) 
 was attempted in the Patronage Act ; and we see 
 another in the endeavour which has been made to 
 secure the recognition of spiritual independence. But 
 Mr. Finlay's Bill has not been carried j and even if it 
 were, it may well be questioned whether it will meet 
 the situation. What we are now chiefly concerned 
 about is to get the State to recognize all Churches to 
 be more than Voluntary Associations, and that end will 
 not be gained by singling out the Church of Scotland. 
 
 It is vain, then, we fear, to talk of reconstruction 
 on the basis of a new Establishment. The necessary 
 conditions are absent. If, on the contrary, the union 
 between Church and State were in the meantime dis- 
 solved, and the Churches left to come to an unhamjDered 
 understanding, there is nothing to hinder their seeing 
 eye to eye. As to the outcry made against their dis- 
 establishment by those who are at present in the 
 enjoyment of its advantages, on the ground that it 
 would be sacrilege to meddle with them, it will be 
 understood how little that feeling can be sympathized 
 with by those who adopted in 18-42 a Claim of Rigid to 
 the privileges now possessed by others, and who think 
 of the existing Church as established in law but not in 
 equity. It has its present position because in 1843 
 the Court of Session gave that position to it — claiming 
 the power to do so. We are not able to see the 
 sacrilege which will be committed if the same authority 
 takes the privilege away and bestows it elsewhere. 
 
WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 125 
 
 With regard to the endowments, it is not easy to see 
 what it would be wise to do with them. There is 
 something in the desire to preserve them for religious 
 purposes, and if it is claimed that the real estate — the 
 churches and manses and glebes — must be used in that 
 way, we see no objection in principle to the endow- 
 ments being employed in a similar manner. Perhaps 
 the best suggestion which has been offered is to assign 
 the teinds to the parishes which contribute them, and 
 allow them, under certain restrictions, to be employed 
 as the inhabitants think best. 
 
 There is one other subject to which attention must 
 be given before we close : what is to be the relation of 
 the Free Church to the other Presbyterian bodies in the 
 country"? With the fragments which remain of the 
 Covenanters and Original Seceders, there should surely 
 be little diJQSculty in finding by-and-by a solid basis of 
 union. But serious obstacles have been raised to any 
 amalgamation with the New Light Presbyterians, who 
 have, most of them, got the length of believing that 
 the State should never establish the Church. It is 
 admitted on all hands that separation from them is an 
 evil. We occupy the same ground, and so come in 
 each other's way. And we miss the strength which 
 we would get if our forces were combined. That they 
 are doctrinally as sound as we are, and preach the 
 same gospel, and have the same system of government, 
 is not denied. The only thing that really bars the way 
 to union is this unfortunate Voluntaryism, which is not 
 made a term of communion, and which does not lead 
 them to have low views of the civil magistrate, but 
 
126 WHAT THE FREE CHURCH OUGHT NOW TO DO. 
 
 which hinders them from admitting that under certain 
 ideal circumstances the State may endow the Church. 
 We are among the number of those who reckon it a 
 great mistake to make so much of this peculiarity. The 
 contingency which would bring us into collision is so 
 remote, that to sacrifice all the present advantages of 
 amalgamation for its sake seems to us suicidal, and we 
 hope the Church will soon be brought to see this. 
 Meanwhile, we shall end by quoting some w^ords spoken 
 by Dr. Candlish, immediately after the Disruption, when 
 the Moderator's Chair of the Assembly was surrounded 
 by Nonconformists, 
 
 " My friends," said he, " will bear me witness that I 
 am the very last person who would stand on the rigid 
 assertion of the mere theory of Establishment for the 
 purpose of keeping up division or schism in the Church. 
 So far from that, it appears to me that the distinct 
 refusal of the states and kingdoms of this world to 
 recognize the only principle on which we can consent 
 to have the Church established, leaves to us a very 
 great degree of practical liberty and a large measure of 
 practical discretion as to the terms on which we should 
 stand with other Churches. Is the division and schism 
 of the Christian Church to be kept up by a question as 
 to the duty of another party over whom we have no 
 control ? " 
 
 THE END. 
 
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