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BX 9084 .158 1880 
 
 Innes, A. Taylor 1833-1912 
 
 Letters from the Red Beech 
 
 "AN '••naojAs } 
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 LETTERS FROM 
 
 THE RED BEECH 
 
 Bv A LAYMAN 
 
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LETTERS FROM THE RED 
 BEECH 
 
 SIX LETTERS BY A LAYMAN TO A MINISTER 
 OF THE FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND 
 
 THE CANON, THE PULPIT, AND CRITICISM. 
 
 EDINBURGH: JOHN MACLAREN & SON. 
 
 GLASGOW : DAVID BRYCE & SOX. ABERDEEN : A. & R. MILXE. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTER I. — The recent proposal that the Free Church should become " a living witness for the 
 
 tnith." Questions raised ......... 5 
 
 LETTER II. — Continual private judgment on the Canon a duty. Evidence for some books in it 
 
 far greater than for others. This familiar to ministers, but not to the people. Why not ? . 7 
 
 LETTER III. — Why should ministers not communicate their critical knowledge? Dr Biunie's 
 
 pamphlet. The critical and uncritical school . . . . . .10 
 
 LETTER IV. — Inspiration. Scripture authoritative as to what itself proposes. The four Gospels 
 conclusive on the question, Whether accuracy in historical detail, as well as substantial ti'uth, 
 was ititcnded ? So in quotations. Results of not familiarising the people with what is 
 known ........... 12 
 
 LETTER V. — Answer to objectors. Their claim to teach what they think " wise." We want to 
 get what they know to be " truth. " Is preaching a means of giving truth ? Fear on both 
 sides of Free Church of alarming congregations by preaching familiar facts . . .15 
 
 LETTER VI. — These questions wider than Professor Smith's case. (But they bear on the new 
 proposal that the Commission should judge him, not by the creed, but by a tradition.) 
 Is criticism a fundamental duty and necessity of faith ? If so, it demands appropriate habit 
 of mind. Dangerous reaction on this point. Hopefulness of falling back upon acknowledged 
 duty when future is doubtful . . . . . . . . .19 
 
HtC. SEPib«l \ 
 
 Letters from the Red Beech 
 
 ON THE CANON, THE PULPIT, AND CRITICISM. 
 
 3d September ISSO. 
 
 My DEAR Sir, — I believe that this is the first 
 time on which I have broken silence on this 
 question. Like not a few other laymen I have 
 a filial desire for the welfare of the Free 
 Church, and for the welfare of Scotland 
 through it, but I have thought that both 
 might be best promoted by zealously hold- 
 ing one's tongue on the Robertson Smith 
 matter, and taking no side upon it. Like a 
 good many such men, however, I have at last 
 been driven out of mere silence. Some 
 general and important aspects of the question 
 are coming to the front, which seem to me to 
 demand not so much special knowledge — that 
 I do not possess — as a frank interchange 
 of conscientious views between laymen and 
 ministers. And while I have the honour 
 to know most of the leading ministers of the 
 Free Church, I am desirous to address one 
 who is not only a member of the Commission 
 of Assembly which has to deal with this special 
 matter, but, above all things, a minister and 
 a preacher — a man deservedly trusted and 
 deservedly beloved, as a devout and compe- 
 tent dispenser of the divine Word to at least 
 two generations of his countrymen. 
 
 For reasons which will appear in the sequel, 
 I think the influence of the Scottish pulpit, 
 
 and the use which its occupants may make of 
 the knowledge which they already possess, of 
 the highest importance in this matter. But in 
 the meantime I ask leave to mention to you 
 those new and more constraining aspects of 
 the question which have led to my addressing 
 you. 
 
 At the last meeting of the Free Church 
 Commission of Assembly some of the weightier 
 movers in this question abstained in a very 
 remarkable way from the stress formerly laid 
 on the Westminster Confession of Faith, and 
 instead directed the mind of their hearers to a 
 certain traditional belief of the Church on 
 those subjects. Some of them pointed a con- 
 trast, apparently for the same purpose, be- 
 tween the Bible as being our supreme standard, 
 while the Confession is only subordinate. And 
 all this was reflected in the terms of Dr Wil- 
 son's motion, which, as carried, appointed a 
 committee to consider the bearing of Professor 
 Smith's writings on " the accepted belief and 
 teaching of the Church. " This phraseology 
 appeared to one of the most trusted and 
 experienced friends of the Free Church, 
 Mr Brown Douglas, so unusual and so dan- 
 gerous, that on 17th August last he wrote 
 a letter of caution and warning as to 
 a course which might perhaps have been 
 entered upon unawares. But it immediately 
 
Letters from the Red Beech. 
 
 appeared that it was not unawares that a 
 change had been suggested. A man so repre- 
 sentative and almost official as Mr Norman 
 Walker at once writes in answer, that 
 pressing the letter of our Confession on this 
 point is fraught v\ith danger ; that there are 
 articles in the Church's creed which were 
 never formulated, because they did not need 
 to be, but which it is unlawful to controvert ; 
 that there are fifty points ivithin the Confession 
 of minor importance, which Mr Walker would 
 grudge excessively that any man should be 
 held a heretic for denying, while the views 
 supposed to be held by Professor Smith, 
 which Mr Walker assumes in his letter to be 
 beside the Confession rather than opposed to 
 it, are not only not to be tolerated by the 
 Church, but are so bad that, if the Church did 
 tolerate them, Mr Walker would not think it 
 prudent to remain in its communion. 
 
 The new question is therefore fairly raised, 
 and I for one do not regret it, or view it with 
 the same alarm that Mr Brown Douglas does. 
 He is, no doubt, thinking of the judicial duty 
 of the Commission, or rather of the Assembly, 
 and of the danger of dealing unfairly with Pro- 
 fessor Smith individually. And certainly that 
 will require careful consideration. But the main 
 question for the Church is one which does 
 nut concern Professor Smith alone, and which 
 the decision of his case one way or other will 
 do very little to settle. It is equally mixed 
 up with the questions which came to the front 
 in Dr Marcus Dods' case, and in the discussion 
 on Professor Candlish's lecture, and it is 
 raised, as you know, by the opinions of some 
 of the elder, as well as most of the younger, 
 men of the Free Church, to say nothing of 
 other communions. The generalising of the 
 question does not make it less anxious or im- 
 portant — rather more so. But it has two 
 advantages. It redeems it, in the first place, 
 from the somewhat disingenuous aspect which 
 for the last few years it has assumed — which it 
 has assumed equally on both sides, though, 
 
 perhaps, without much moral fault on either. 
 On the one hand, I have never been able to 
 keep quite grave while Professor Smith and 
 his friends have filled the air with their pro- 
 fessions of attachment to the Westminster 
 Confession, and their demand that orthodoxy be 
 determined in the Free Church by it, and by 
 it alone. Nor have I been surprised in the 
 least when this demand was suddenly with- 
 drawn, as at the last General Assembly, 
 as soon as it seemed advantageous 
 for their side to put an end to 
 the cause without a dogmatic decision. 
 On the other hand, the acknowledgment that 
 the Confession of 1G47 may be imperfect on 
 the head of Scripture, because what ought now 
 to be part of the Church's faith did not previ- 
 ously need to be formulated, has been recently 
 more and more imminent. All through the 
 present case it was becoming clearer that the 
 framers of the Confession never had before 
 them the kind of questions which has now 
 arisen, and that consequently if the words 
 they have used are such as to decide our 
 modern controversy, either in the one sense ^r 
 the other, that decision can only be a sort of 
 fluke — an undesirable result for a court of law ; 
 and for an ecclesiastical Assembly, which is 
 more or less a court of conscience, one deeply 
 discreditable. The strongest and most respect- 
 able feelings which have been shocked by the 
 views narrated or suggested by our Aberdeen 
 Professor are feelings of the present Christian 
 conscience about the Word of God itself, and 
 these can never be expressed in the anachron- 
 isms of a Confession two centuries old without 
 a painful sense of mental circuitou£ness and 
 moral twist. For these reasons I believe I 
 am expressing the views of a good many Free 
 Church laymen when I say that the demand by 
 the most orthodox section of the Free Church 
 that it, as " a living witness for the truth," 
 shall no longer in tliis matter walk in what 
 Mr Walker calls the "fetters" of creed, 
 is a righteous demand, and one which comes " 
 
The Confession ; or, the Higher Standard. 
 
 home to the conscience. It is so altogether 
 apart from the motives which may have origi- 
 nated the claim and the views which may now 
 support it. 
 
 For you, the trusted pastors of the Scottish 
 Church, know that the best of your educated 
 laymen generally take this position. They are 
 not intensely anxious about the question 
 whether a Professor of Hebrew in the nine- 
 teenth century had present to his mind all the 
 lines drawn by men in the seventeenth, still 
 less whether men who formed creeds in the 
 seventeenth had present to them questions 
 which in God's providence were to come into 
 existence long after they were dead and 
 buried. These things do not touch the general 
 conscience ; they have no warrant from the 
 Judge and no commission from the King. At 
 best, they touch only that second-hand and 
 artificial conscience, which men, born into 
 large societies, form for themselves, under the 
 pressure of circumstances which they did not 
 create and do not defend. But the moment 
 you raise the question. What is the supreme 
 and not the subordinate standard — what is 
 the relation of the Christian to the Bible and 
 the Word of God — you raise one from 
 which there is no escape in conscience. That 
 is a matter which we are bound to meet, and 
 on which you will find most intelligent men in 
 
 your congregations anxious to get information, 
 and willing to respond to all appeals. 
 
 But it is one on which there has been far too 
 little communication hitherto between pastors 
 and people. I do not allude to the more diflicult 
 and elaborate questions which have been in- 
 troduced to your notice, as well as ours, 
 chiefly by Professor Smith in the " Encyclo- 
 predia." I allude to the more common and 
 ordinary knowledge on matters of the canon, 
 
 1 which all ministers attain in the course of 
 their education, but which is only in excep- 
 tional cases made equally familiar to their 
 congregations. Is it not possible that much 
 of the uncertainty and anxiety to 
 which we are exposed, and some even 
 
 , cf the difliculty which we feel in dealing 
 with new questions like this Aberdeen one, 
 may be owing to our not having rightly used 
 the knowledge which we already possess — i.e., 
 which ourtrusted and educated guides possess, 
 and which they use for themselves % 
 
 I reserve the unfolding of this suggestion, 
 in one or two illustrations, for future para- 
 graphs. But I desire to express in the mean- 
 time the deep and afi"ectionate respect with 
 which I approach on this subject one who 
 knows and loves Scripture — one, indeed, I 
 had almost said, whom Scripture knows and 
 loves. 
 
 II. 
 
 My deak Sir, — You know, as all ministers 
 know, that the canon of Scripture is not received 
 by us upon the authority of the Church, but by 
 the judgment of the individual from age to age 
 upon the evidence presented to him. This is a 
 matter in which Protestants hold that they deal 
 directly with God and His providence, and not 
 with any Church assuming to stand in His room. 
 And one result of this is familiar to you, or at 
 least was familiar in your college days, but it is 
 not equally familiar to all your hearers. Ques- 
 
 tions of the canon are not ended once for a 
 among us, as they are among Roman Catholics. 
 Among them the thing is settled by authority 
 for the authority of the Church is above Scrip- 
 ture. The Catholic Church settled, once on a 
 time (in the case of some writings on very strong, 
 in the case of others on very slight, evidence), 
 what ancient wi'itings were to be held as 
 genuinely apostolical ; but, that once settled, its 
 judgment is held infallible and cannot be gone 
 over again. To us this assumption of the 
 
Letters from the Red Beech. 
 
 Church is hateful. Scripture is, for us, above 
 the Church. We have first to find 
 for ourselves, as individuals, what is Scripture, 
 and what are the characteristics of its several 
 parts, and then that enables us to make and work 
 a Church. The Church has no authority in any 
 matters of faith — least of all, in the fundamental 
 question — What is that revelation of God which 
 regulates faith and regulates the Church ? 
 
 I have suggested that this duty of constant 
 " criticism" of the canon, or, if you prefer the 
 Latin to the Greek word, of constant "private 
 judgment" upon it, is not such a truism among 
 our Protestant people as it is in the schools. Am 
 I not right with regard to our Scotch congrega- 
 tions ? Take one illustration of it. I believe 
 the majority of the people in your congregation 
 have a fancy that they are called upon to believe 
 in all the books of our present canon with the 
 same firmness of faith. You know otherwise, 
 and so does every young minister who 
 is not disgracefully ignorant of the ele- 
 ments of his profession. You know 
 well that the evidence for all the books varies 
 greatly ; and that while with regard to some of 
 them there never was any doubt in the Church, 
 others were by some parts of it rejected, by others 
 received, and by the majority finally accepted on 
 external evidence of a very slight and slender 
 kind. And that evidence is now for Protestants 
 exactly what it was theo, with such variations as 
 critics have since discovered. It is still the same 
 evidence, external and internal — that evidence 
 and no other — which God proposes separately to 
 the faith of the individual with regard to each of 
 the books — books which He chose to give sepa- 
 rately, and with a separate history, for two or 
 three generations at least. The Catholic has 
 found a better way. For him the decision of the 
 Church equalises his faith in the books which the 
 Church equally receives. The Protestant would 
 often desire a similar adjustment. But he knows 
 he cannot do it without dishonesty. His faith 
 follows God's warrant ; he must take the facts as 
 he finds them. And the facts are notorious — 
 notorious, that is, to you who are ministers, and 
 to all of us laymen who read. 
 
 Walking in Queen Street the other day with a 
 
 doctor of divinity distinguished for his caution, I 
 said to him incidentally — " I suppose I am right 
 in holding that the evidence for the Epistle to the 
 Romans being apostolical is sixteen times as 
 great as the evidence for the 2d Epistle of Peter 
 being so?" "Sixteen times!" he answered, 
 " You might say sixty-six times." I have no 
 doubt he was right, though I suppose Lhat he re- 
 ferred exclusively to the external evidence — to 
 the historical proof that traces such a book 
 to an inspired man, not the mere impression made 
 upon the mind as to the excellence of its doctrine, 
 apart from its origin, I suppose his " sixty-six 
 times" does not at all exaggerate the notorious 
 fact. But to be very safe, let us say that it does. 
 Let us say instead only ten times. I suppose 
 that no man can look into these things, I do 
 not say with ability, but with honesty, 
 without arriving at the result that he 
 must have ten times the faith in the 
 apostolicity of the one epistle that he has in the 
 apostolicity of the other. Had it been left to us 
 we might have desired it otherwise. W^e might 
 have desired that all writings of men of the 
 apostolic time should have descended to us with 
 the same evidence that they came from men in- 
 spired. But God has willed it otherwise. He 
 has given us some of them with no sufficient evi- 
 dence of this, and these we therefore hold 
 apocryphal, though they were accepted by some 
 of the ancient Churches. He has given us others, 
 for which the balance of external evidence is very 
 slight, but yet, as most good judgeshold, sufficient ; 
 and which, therefore, after delay, and with some 
 difference of opinion, have been received into the 
 ordinary canon. And He has given us yet others, 
 like the majority of the gospels and epistles, for 
 whose authorship by inspired men the proof is 
 conclusive and overwhelming. He has chosen 
 to give us Scripture, not as one book, 
 but in sundry times and in divers manners, 
 and with claims on our belief in which each part 
 dilFers from each other, sometimes very greatly, 
 according to circumstances carefully ordered by 
 His providence. That is the Bible as He lias left 
 it to us, and if we desire to have it as He has left 
 it, we must take it so. If we prefer to go to the 
 Church for our Bible, or for our faith, that also is 
 
The Private Christian and the Canon. 
 
 open to us ; but only by refusing the facts and 
 Him who has appointed them. 
 
 But it is time to hear what you have to say. 
 And I fancy it may be not unlike the answer of 
 a clerical friend to me the other day, when I 
 touched on some of these things as familiar to 
 him. He said, not without irritation, " yes ; 
 we know all that. But what is the use of it ?" 
 
 The use of it is this. You know all that, and 
 know it familiarly. But have you made your 
 people familiar with it ? 
 
 I think the question is pertinent to the present 
 time and some of its difficulties. I am sure, at 
 least, it is not impertinent, forit is addressed to one 
 whom I have selected not as deficient in his pas- 
 toral duties, but as eminent in their performance. 
 You, as a Protestant, hold it to be the duty of 
 the private Christian to judge of these matters for 
 himself. But there are only three or four private 
 Christians in your congregation who are qualified 
 for doing so by their own reading — who have had 
 inclination and leisure to get up the same kind of 
 information for themselves which you attained as 
 a divinity student. The others, so far as I can 
 see, must trust to the one man who has been 
 equipped (for their sakes) with this special know- 
 ledge to communicate it to them — not, of course, 
 to communicate it to them in constant detail, 
 but to keep them familiar with the broader and 
 more notorious outlines such as I have re- 
 ferred to. 
 
 "Yes, but," you still insist, or if you do not, 
 others do, "what use would it be to them? I 
 could make use of this or any other knowledge I 
 have in various mischievous ways, and in this 
 among the number. But you have not yet an- 
 swered my question. What use my doing so would 
 be, not to me, but to my hearers ?" 
 
 I might, I think, limit myself to answering 
 that there is always some use in people perform- 
 ing their fundamental duties. You tell us it is 
 the duty of the private Christian to receive 
 Scripture as God has given it to him, and not 
 according to any Church canon. If God has laid 
 this duty of private judgment upon laymen, there 
 is a strong probability that, sooner or later, some 
 advantage will result from their performing and 
 some danger from their neglecting it. And if it 
 
 is a duty which in its own nature can only be 
 performed by the unlearned layman making use 
 of the historical knowledge with which others are 
 I entrusted for his use, then there is the same 
 j probability that injury will result to the indi- 
 [ viduals concerned, and perhaps to the whole 
 organisation, from the parts of it not per- 
 forming their several functions. You tell us 
 that laymen in this matter are a jury, 
 bound each to give their individual verdict. 
 But how can they give a verdict unless the facts 
 are laid before them ? And if it is their duty to 
 give a verdict on the facts, is it not a strong 
 thing to ask what use their knowing the facts 
 will be ? 
 
 But, apart from general presumptions, there 
 are surely some obvious advantages in the 
 present day in the people being furnished with 
 the same information about Scripture which their 
 ministers possess. And that is all I plead for. If 
 I have in any way ill-stated the facts as you 
 know them — and this of the varying evidence for 
 the separate books which have been gathered by 
 the Church from the separate churches is only 
 one illustration— then take the facts in the better 
 form in which you and all ministers of our Pres- 
 byterian Church possess them. Try it in the case 
 of your own congregation. Are you sure that 
 there are no good Christian people in it on 
 whom the sudden statement of such 
 facts would have a disquieting effect ? But if they 
 had been familiar with them, as you have been 
 for twenty years, there would have been no such 
 danger. Their faith would be exposed to no shock, 
 being conversant with the facts which God had 
 prepared for it. Again, are there no people in 
 your congregation on whom the new positions with 
 regard to books of the Old Testament, which 
 are being made known to us through Professor 
 Smith, have a disquieting, and, indeed, a danger- 
 ous effect ? You are fortunate if you have none 
 such. But how much of that danger to them is 
 caused by their dim feeling — a feeling which they 
 share with you — that it is their duty to act as 
 critics upon all facts and arguments that come up 
 to them in this region, combined with the certain 
 knowledge that hitherto they have been 
 never invited to do so, and that many 
 
lO 
 
 Letters fro7n the Red Beech. 
 
 would count it a dangerous innovation ? 
 Had they been in the habit of weighing books, 
 and parts of books, according to their separate 
 evidence and history (which, as you know, vary 
 much even as presented now from time to time, 
 in so much that you do not believe in the 
 genuineness of texts and narratives which are re- 
 tained in our ordinary translation, and in which 
 your predecessors did believe) had these hearers 
 been taken along with you in all this, they would 
 not have been more disposed to believe in new 
 and rash theories, but they would have been more 
 prepared to judge of them fairly along with you, 
 and to suffer no danger in the process. And 
 lastly, you do not believe less in the unity of 
 Scripture — the oneness of its spirit and message, 
 the " consent of all the parts and the scope of_the 
 
 whole" — because the parts have very unequal 
 claims upon our faith, and some of them have 
 suffered far moi-e than others in their 
 transmission to us. On the contrary, 
 
 you recognise all the more a unity of revela- 
 tion because of the multiplicity of Scripture 
 and those sundry ways and divers manners of 
 which criticism takes cognisance. And would it 
 not be well if this were also the experience of all, 
 and especially of some of the older and some of 
 the younger members of our congregations, who 
 at present are apt to feel as if allegations (not 
 even astocanonicity, but as to the authorship and 
 dates) of particular parts — parts which you know 
 to be often of less importance — tore up the very 
 texture of their faith ? 
 
 HI. 
 
 My dear Sir, — In my last letter I gave, as an 
 illustration of the Protestant duty of criticism or 
 private judgment, the obligation to xceUjli the 
 varying evidence for the several books of the 
 canon — evidence which, as all reading men know, 
 varies excessively in strength. It may be said— 
 and will naturally be said by those who object to 
 the expediency of raising so fundamental a ques- 
 tion — that that is not the point at present before 
 the Free Church, which is surely troubled enough 
 without, &c. I answer — That is precisely Mhy 
 I raise it. I am not — or, at least, I do not intend 
 here to make myself — one of the judges of Pro- 
 fessor Smith. You are, and you will not find 
 me disposed to intrude upon your province. I 
 go behind that question, and I have already in- 
 dicated my two special reasons for doing so. 
 They are not the general grounds on which 
 some of the best laymen in the Free 
 Church — including, if I mistake not, such men as 
 those who sign themselves "Unsettled" and 
 " Mizraim " respectively — raise more general 
 questions than those before the Church courts. 
 My first reason is that leading men in those 
 Church courts have indicated the intention to 
 
 abandon the question whether Professor Smith's 
 views are in conformity with the standards of 
 their Church ; and to raise instead the question 
 whether they are in conformity with the standard 
 of the universal Church — the Bible ; not as it is 
 defined in any Confession (now admitted on both 
 sides to be defective), but as it has been given by 
 God to man. And whether they intended it so or 
 not, I believe most educated laymen are of opinion 
 that they are thus raising the real question — the 
 only question worth discussing by men who expect 
 after a few years to have the grass growing green 
 over them, and who may therefore as well occupy 
 those years with fact and not with fiction. And 
 this first reason leads on to my second. 
 For the origin of the Bible and man's 
 introduction to its parts as God gave 
 them has long been part of the ordinary 
 furniture and training of the Christian ministry ; 
 and that not so much as material for amusing 
 or even edifying the Christian congi-egation, as 
 for discharging from age to age the fundamental 
 Protestant duty of receiving truth direct from 
 the divine spring and not from artificial pools. 
 And this forced me back upon a conviction which 
 
Critical and Uncritical Theologians. 
 
 II 
 
 has been growing for some years. It is that the 
 educated ministry has it already in its power to 
 put us in the best position for coming to a right 
 solution of these questions. Whether the right 
 solution shall be one on Professor Smith's side or 
 not, I, as you know, have not been able to make 
 up my mind. But I believe we, the mass of 
 the Christian people, shall be most likely, under 
 God's providence, to come at the right solution 
 of these new and uncertain questions by being 
 put on a level with you as to the certain results 
 of the old. I believe you can do your best for us 
 by simply communicating to us {I.e., " making 
 common " to us with you) what you already 
 thoroughly know, but what you do not permit 
 your congregations to know equally well, 
 
 I may, before laying down my pen, illustrate 
 this under another head. But meantime let me 
 make reference to a matter which has come up in 
 connection with Professor Binnie's admirable 
 pamphlet on the proposed reconstruction of the 
 Old Testament history. I call it an admirable 
 pamphlet from my own point of view — that of an 
 educated layman with no time to get up special 
 knowledge on the subject. It has a beginning, a 
 middle, and an end ; it deals with a subject new 
 to the popular mind in Scotland in a lucid and 
 almost luminous way ; it distinguishes between 
 things great and small, desiring to give conscience 
 its due on one side, and candour its due on the 
 other ; and it treats in this fashion a great and 
 grave question which has not yet actually con- 
 fronted us, but which certainly lies behind the 
 literary question raised by Professor Smith, and 
 is accordingly waiting for us round the corner of 
 the street. Whether Professor Binnie has dealt 
 with it conclusively I do not at all know ; 
 but I respect the intellectual as well as the 
 moral qualities of his work, and not least one 
 intellectual quality which has almost a moral 
 value — I mean the sense of humour which suffuses 
 his writing, amost human element, "rich in saving 
 common-sense," and for which many an eager 
 controversialist might barter half his ability. 
 I may add that in the correspondence between 
 Professor Smith and him. Professor Binnie 
 seems to me generally to have the best of 
 it. Professor Smith says, " You have attacked a 
 
 scheme which I believe to be false, but which my 
 recent publications and the proceedings upon 
 them — which together form the occasion, though 
 not the cause of your writing — will inevitably 
 make people associate with my name." Professor 
 Binnie's answer is, "It is true, and I wish you 
 had considered it before issuing your recent pub- 
 lications, and had taken a little more pains to 
 dissociate yourself from a scheme with which 
 people so inevitably connect you." But on one 
 point — one, too, on which Professor Smith has 
 made no reply* — his brother theologian does 
 not seem to me to be so successful, 
 and it bears directly on the subject of 
 my letter to you. In one of his publications — I 
 think his letter to the Presbytery — Professor 
 Smith had used the words, "we of the critical 
 school," and Professor Binnie tells him that his 
 expressly identifying himself with the critical 
 school may give rise to grave misunderstandings. 
 Now, considering that Professor Binnie in his 
 pamphlet generally, though not universally, means 
 by the " critical school " the school that denies 
 the supernatural, I think it must have occurred 
 to him that this could not have been the sense in 
 which Professor Smith took his Presbytery into 
 confidence on the matter, and that grave mis- 
 understandings founded on that supposition were 
 not seriously to be apprehended. But it is this 
 1 use of the phrase all through Dr Binnie's pamph- 
 I let which staggered me while I read that excellent 
 I publication, and which makes me put to him the 
 question, " Do you not belong to the critical school 
 in the Free Church ? Do you not at least belong 
 to some critical school ?" The whole value of Dr 
 Binnie's pamphlet to me is that it claims to be, 
 and ex facie to a certain extent is, a critical per- 
 formance ; certainly its whole value as against 
 the German critics, whom it attacks (and 
 this is seven-eighths of the whole of it), 
 is, that it broadly affirms and suggestively indi- 
 cates that they, with all their assumptions, are 
 most uncritical in their methods of procedure. I 
 need not say that were this not its meaning, it 
 would not be worth the paper on which it is 
 
 * Professor Smith took it up a week or two after 
 the date of this letter : more, however, in the interest of 
 his own case than of the general question of language 
 suggested in the text. 
 
12 
 
 Letters from the Red Beech. 
 
 written. But if so, I must really, on behalf of 
 the oi-dinary reading laity, protest against the at- 
 tempt, on the part of a man of Dr Binnie's re- 
 spectable position, to confine the word "critical " 
 to the unbelieving school. It is fitted to have 
 precisely the result which he deprecates, because 
 if people are to choose between critical and un- 
 critical theologians in the, present da)', then, ac- 
 cording to the popular use of language in the year 
 18S0, there is no doubt to which side they ought 
 to turn. But this is more than a question of 
 words, and in saying so I come back from Pro- 
 fessor Binnie to you. Criticism is, as you and all 
 Protestants teach us, no mere luxury 
 of the present day. It is the funda- 
 mental necessity of honest Protestantism ; 
 and it does not belong primarily to the profes- 
 soriate or the clergy, but to the Christian laity, 
 though the professoriate and the clergy exist 
 partly in order that the Christian laity may by 
 
 their help discharge age after age this funda- 
 mental duty. Criticism, as we have been re- 
 minded on high Free Church authority, is not a 
 thing confined to sacred matters. It is " the 
 science of the means by which a book has its cha- 
 racter and place in history determined." ^Ve of 
 the laity know that it is our highest duty to de- 
 termine this for ourselves in regard to the Bible, 
 and to act and believe accordingly in time and 
 beyond. We look to our professors and clergy 
 to help us in our duty ; and I see no ultimate 
 or insuperable difficulty, provided they do so. 
 But if we are to have a theological school at all, 
 it must be a critical school. Dr Binnie, I need 
 not say, thoroughly understands this, and so do 
 you. But I have a strong impression that your 
 convictions need at the present moment to be 
 proclaimed rather than smothered, if you are not 
 to lose hold of the consciences of a good many 
 men in Scotland, 
 
 IV. 
 
 Mv DEAR SiK,— One reason for my appealing 
 to you, and through you to the ministers of the 
 Church rather than to some of the laity, is as 
 follows : — I doubt whether Scotland will ever get 
 well out of these Scripture difficulties into which 
 she has been drifting, so long as the discussion 
 turns merely on the amount of liberty which we 
 may claim. I see a great many men, laymen and 
 clergymen, who are wholly taken up with this 
 question of liberty. Sometimes it is the extent 
 of liberty which the Confession allows, or some 
 particular chapter of it ; sometimes it is the 
 liberty of the Christian man, outside the Confes- 
 sion and anterior to its authority — both, and 
 especially the latter, very legitimate questions. 
 But, though " freedom is a noble thing," and has 
 been a name to charm with in Scotland, as else- 
 where, I have some doubts whether it has ever 
 wrought any great deliverance in the distinctly 
 religious sphere. My recollections of history 
 rather point to the necessity in this region of 
 something positive — some conviction of conscience, 
 some dictate of duty, some command of God — in 
 
 order to found any healthful step of advance for 
 ourselves or our children. 
 
 I remember thinking of this, first with regard 
 to the delicate question which was raised some 
 time ago, as to the accuracy of all parts of Scrip- 
 ture in matters of historical or narrative detail. 
 Much was said on both sides, not too wisely, per- 
 haps, as to the necessity of this, or, at the least, 
 as to the presumption tliat the question 
 must be answered in the affirmative. But 
 all the time it seemed to be forgotten by 
 many that it had not been left an open question 
 at all — that the most important determination of 
 it had been given in the most important instance, 
 and that this determination is constantly pressed 
 upon the minds of our teachers. I remember that 
 during the latter part of that controversy you and 
 your well-worn little Testament were never absent 
 from my mind. That New Testament looks as if 
 it had been constructed by God for express pur- 
 pose of putting an end to this controversy by His 
 own authority. For the most important part of 
 it consists of four narratives, two of them held to 
 
Obvious Facts as to the Gospels. 
 
 13 
 
 be by apostles, and, therefore, presumably in- 
 spired as much as their ordinary preaching was, 
 and two of them by disciples of theirs, who may 
 well have been inspired also. They were allgiven at 
 different times, and to different Churches, and not 
 gathered together into one for, at least, a genera- 
 tion or two after the first was in the possession 
 of its original recipients. Four narratives of one 
 life ; could anything be more exactly suited to 
 determine the question whether any of them i^ro- 
 t'essed more than the ordinary accuracy of histori- 
 cal narrative ? And they have conclusively de- 
 termined it. You are one of the men who know 
 their Greek Testament aflfectionately and fami- 
 liarly, and you never preach from the narrative 
 in one of the gospels without consulting the 
 other three. Why ? For this reason among 
 others, because you know that following one of 
 them will, in almost every cas6, give an inaccu- 
 rate account of the fact — of the acts that took 
 place, and of the words that were said. It will 
 not be a substantially false account. But, in 
 most cases it will be an inaccurate one, the four 
 accounts varying as four accounts by those who 
 were eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word 
 ought to vary. And so, no doubt, they did vary 
 before the accounts first preached were committed 
 to writing. How true this is any unlearned 
 reader ascertains for himself by consulting one of 
 the Harmonies where the gospels are printed in 
 parallel columns ; but it meets you in the ordinary 
 course of your daily and public work. We might 
 have desired and expected ^^otherwise— that an 
 apostolic writer, in recording the most important 
 acts and sayings of our Lord, should have given 
 them with perfect accuracy as they occurred. It 
 would have been absolutely easy for divine power 
 to have ensured this, had divine wisdom intended 
 it. When, therefore, we see it otherwise, page 
 after page, dialogue after dialogue, incident after 
 incident — when we see it otherwise in the most 
 memorable transactions, up to the very words of 
 institution of a sacrament, which certainly hap- 
 pened only once, and not on four different occa- 
 sions — we know what to think. We know that 
 to say that inaccuracy is consistent with an 
 apostolic gospel greatly understates the fact. The 
 fact is, that God has provided that each gospel 
 
 should be constructed on the plan of inaccuracy 
 in details — should be systematically inaccurate in 
 historical detail, while true in the substance of 
 the narrative. That is not the fact merely. It 
 is the authoritative fact — the fact which has been 
 prepared and placed so obtrusively by God's pro- 
 vidence, that no honest man can miss seeing it 
 when his attention is called to it, and that no 
 teacher of His Word can avoid seeing it per- 
 petually. 
 
 Now, this fact as to the four most important 
 books of the canon (which, I need not say, other 
 books of the canon carry out), is familiar to you. 
 But I must ask as before, Have you made it 
 equally familiar to your i^ople ? 
 
 This second illustration of the importance of 
 using our old knowledge before going to meet new 
 questions is almost my last. But you 
 see why it seemed desirable to add it to the first, 
 which dealt with the faith due to the varying 
 evidence for the various books. That first duty 
 of various faith is, according to Protestant prin- 
 ciples, a very fundamental one, and it is one 
 which lies on the individual. But it is one which 
 the individual cannot well discharge without the 
 help of his minister. Yet I find the duty of help- 
 ing the laity in this particular duty — at least 
 of doing it from the pulpit — is one which 
 some of the best of our ministers are 
 disposed to repudiate. Their reasons as stated 
 to me have not been particularly clear ; but 
 I am satisfied of one thing, they do not spring 
 from any reluctance to undertake labour for the 
 sake of the Christian people, but much rather 
 from a dread of disturbing their minds by present- 
 ing such ideas to their congregations. Well, I 
 think some ministers are beginning to find that 
 keeping their congregations ignorant of facts ad- 
 mittedly true is not the way to prevent disturb- 
 ance — is not the way to do so, even when the 
 facts are facts about the Bible and not facts in it. 
 Many of our laymen are now determined to know 
 about their Bible, and they would get thi-ough 
 their crisis a good deal more easily if they had 
 known for the last fifteen years the facts which 
 their minister has known all along. But I think 
 the second illustration suggests that this policy 
 of keeping the people in the dark for their own 
 
H 
 
 Letters from the Red Beech. 
 
 good is a dangerous one, even for the pulpit and 
 its necessary work. It is a policy which you will 
 lind it almost impossible to confine to things 
 which are outside the Bible, or outside its con- 
 tents, and therefore outside your oi'dinai'y exposi- 
 tion. Some of my friends have satisfied them- 
 selves that it is not within their duty, as ministers 
 of the Word, to warn their unlearned hearers that 
 God has left it doubtful whether some particular 
 book, now in the canon, is really apostolic. That 
 is not, they say, their pulpit work. I diff'erfrom 
 them on that point. But whether they are right 
 on that point or not, it is not their real reason. 
 Their real reason is that it would disturb the 
 minds of their hearers who at present acquiesce 
 in an easy, but false idea on the subject. But 
 whether it is the business of a Christian teacher 
 to instruct his people about the canon of Scrip- 
 ture or not, it is certainly his business to expound 
 the four Gospels. And in expounding the Gos- 
 pels he must either disturb the minds of the same 
 class of people to the same extent, or he must use 
 some ingenuity to prevent the construction of each 
 Gospel, in the matter of accuracy, from having 
 its natural effect on their minds. 
 
 It may be said, again, that the subject stated 
 in this letter has nothing to do with Professor 
 Robertson Smith's question ; it does not relate to 
 the Old Testament at all. And I answer again, 
 that is partly why I start it. Fingering the 
 blossom is not always the way to have good 
 fruit ; digging about the root, and dunging it, 
 may come nearer the result, though it looks 
 roundabout. It is no waste of time on the part 
 of a ship before a voyage to adjust her compasses, 
 and if you agree with me (as to which I am doubt- 
 ful) about the duty of ministers on these points, I do 
 not think you would differ as to the important 
 effect which their performance of that duty for 
 the last twenty years would have on Scotland in 
 this year 1880. 
 
 But there are many cases which clearly fall 
 within your duty of pointing out the facts to the 
 people, with regard to which it is hard to say 
 whether they are about Scripture or in Scripture, 
 Take one of these, which I select because, besides 
 having a most important bearing on this question 
 of accuracy, it has the reference to the Old Testa- 
 
 I ment which you desiderate in the other. I allude 
 to the quotations from the Old Testament which 
 are found in the New, You know well that these, 
 
 i taking them in the mass, are made with what 
 may almost be described as ostentatious inaccu- 
 racy. It is not that there is an inexact quotation 
 here and there, or even frequently ; it is that they 
 are so continual as to make it certain that Divine 
 Providence has some lesson to teach us thereby, 
 which we must deliberately shut our eyes against 
 in order to miss it. Very frequently the quota- 
 tion, and that by our Lord and His apostles, 
 follows not the original Hebrew at all, but the 
 Septuagint translation, with its divergencies 
 from the original. Very frequently the quotation 
 diverges from both. I am not alludiug to the 
 cases where the speaker makes a different use of 
 
 I the passage from what it had in the Old 
 Testament ; and sometimes a very diff'ereut use 
 from what we should have expected. That is a 
 separate matter, and has its own importance. I 
 allude to cases of distinct quotation, where the 
 quotation, by a writer who is undoubtedly to some 
 eS"ects inspired, is again and again and again 
 inaccurate. Now, let who will believe that this, 
 lying everywhere on the surface of Scripture, has 
 no intended meaning for the Christian people ; I 
 do not. It has a meaning, which, if the facts 
 which it is their birthright to know had been laid 
 
 I before them in ordinary course, they would have 
 had no difficulty in receiving directly from their 
 Divine Teacher. For here, too, I must express the 
 conviction that we shall not get well out of this 
 difficulty till lay Scotland realises, as it did of old, 
 a distinct call to make itself acquainted with the 
 mind of God, as distinguished from the mind of 
 the Church on this matter. 
 
 You have already observed that I differ empha- 
 tically from those who, in relation to Professor 
 Smith's matter, pooh-pooh such questions as mere 
 matters of scholarship with which the people have 
 no concern. The people have the only interest in 
 this matter which is of any consequence. The in- 
 terest in them of scholars, and even that of theo- 
 logians, legitimate as both of these are, are not to 
 be compared with that of the ordinary Christian 
 people. T}i(]f are the jury by whose verdict 
 everything must be decided, because to them it 
 
Duty to familiarise the People. 
 
 15 
 
 has been referred by the judge. The jury, no 
 doubt, may have matters of scholarship brought 
 before it, and on these it ought to be asked to 
 listen only to witnesses, who can speak to the 
 facts— ;.e., to scholars. We may even be the 
 better not only of scholarly witnesses, but of 
 skilled witnesses, i.e., of men who have been 
 trained to marshal and weigh the facts of scholar- 
 ship which are put before us. All these are helps 
 which those who believe in the ministry as a 
 Church ordinance hold that laymen are entitled 
 to have ; indeed, were it not for such work as this, 
 it would be difficult to justify the modern institu- 
 tion of the ministry as a separate profession. 
 Consequently, while I agree strongly with those 
 who claim a right as laymen to look into such 
 matters, I cannot but express regret that they have 
 in many cases been so little systematically laid be- 
 fore the laity by the ministry. It would have been 
 
 the safest and best way of doing it. And it will be 
 so now. The laymen are the jury, and must 
 decide on their own responsibility to Him who has 
 sworn them. But I for one should have been ex- 
 ceeding glad to have your summing up. Yet even 
 this is not absolutely necessary. What is necessary 
 —the minimum of duty for the future— humbly seems 
 to me to be that in the ordinary course of your work 
 you make your people acquainted with the facts, 
 whether the facts accessible to them directly (like 
 the mere variations in quotation), or the facts 
 accessible to them only through you (like the 
 variations caused by following the Septuagint). 
 Facts and data you must give; but it 
 is not, I concede, absolutely necessary for you to 
 draw conclusions for your hearers. It is their 
 duty and responsibility to do that for themselves, 
 and when you have furnished them with the facts, 
 with all the facts, you have delivered your soul. 
 
 V. 
 
 My dear Sir,— I probably owe it to you to 
 state that you have not approved, much less sug- 
 gested, this public method of addressing you. I 
 take it on my own responsibility, and you are 
 entitled to choose your time and way of sending 
 an answer to my remarks, if you should think it 
 right to do so. Meantime it has this advantage, 
 that I am enabled to verify my previous know- 
 ledge, which was not quite meagre to begin with, 
 of the views and feelings of members of the Free 
 Church, by the varying impression which the re- 
 marks already thrown out have made upon vari- 
 ous readers, and especially upon clerical readers. 
 Had the result been mere hostility I should have 
 been disappointed ; but had it been mere acquies- 
 cence I should have been still more so, for in that 
 event their publication would certainly have been 
 uncalled for. 
 
 Observe the point— the only point— I have to 
 make. It is not any fact as to a particular book 
 of the canon, or as to quotations from the 
 Septuagint, or as to the intentional inaccuracy of 
 the Gospels, nor is it any one fact in Biblical in- 
 
 troduction, or any doubt as to any such supposed 
 fact. I have given illustrations of these things 
 as being notorious and familiar to you, and to all 
 ordinarily educated ministers, though not to the 
 people ; and if I have in any way misstated 
 them, as is abundantly likely, I have requested 
 you at once to make the necessary correction. 
 But in each case the correction will leave the fact 
 as corrected a broad and obvious one, notorious 
 to all scholars. And the only point I have to 
 raise is. What use, should be made of such facts 
 when you have admitted and, if need be, adjusted 
 them ? Now, I must do my critics in speech and 
 writing the justice to say that up to this 
 time ('24th September) none of them 
 has endeavoured to misrepresent this point, 
 by diverting the question to any of the illustra- 
 tions. On the contrary, assuming that there are 
 some— if not perhaps a good many— cases where 
 theologians have knowledge of this sort which is 
 denied to all, they have generally met me fairly 
 on the question whether the Scotch ministry 
 should familiarise the people, perhaps through the 
 
i6 
 
 Letters from the Red Beech. 
 
 pulpit, with the knowledge which it possesses. 
 And the least return I can make is a resi^ectful 
 notice of some of the arguments which have been 
 stated, partly in public, but at least as influentially 
 in private. 
 
 " A Free Church Minister" writes to assure 
 this doubting layman that the ministers are 
 ««x/o(« that the people "should know as much 
 as they themselves know about the formation 
 of the Scripture canon," and that the 
 only question is how this can be 
 best secured. The professors, he then suggests, 
 are practised in the statement of this subject, im- 
 plying that the ministers are in the meantime 
 not accustomed to discuss it. But that is pre- 
 cisely the fact of which I complain. Then he 
 suggests that certain little books upon it, espe- 
 cially Mr Westcott's, "might be put into the 
 hands of the people "—an admirable suggestion 
 were the Christian ministry abolished, but one 
 which does not solve the question what the 
 ministry should do in the meantime. Even with 
 regard to the pulpit, he gives me a further assur- 
 ance, " The ministers are neither afraid nor 
 unwilling to state what they know about the 
 canon in the pulpit," and he adds, "or any- 
 where" — a generalisation which does not 
 strengthen the more particular assurance. And 
 the more particular assurance needs strengthen- 
 ing ; for, in the case of several admirable men, by 
 whom it has been made to me in private, when I 
 have suggested that the work might be begun 
 next Lord's-day, the suggestion was met, if not 
 by fear, by a very decided "unwillingness." 
 Their state of mind I take to be more represented 
 by the second minister who writes on my letters. 
 He, too, professes not to be afraid of saying what 
 he knows " on the subject of the composition of 
 the Bible ;" and he even goes a certain guarded 
 length as to the use of the pulpit. On the com- 
 position of the Bible, he says, " We have all oj)- 
 portunities of saying what we think wise when we 
 lecture on a particular book, or when we teach 
 our young people." Precisely ; we have all oppor- 
 tunities, but do we all use them to the effect of 
 revealing the more common and notorious facts 
 about it — facts which we cannot even keep from 
 the people without a certain efifort ? Were I a Ro- 
 
 man Catholic, I should expect the priest to 
 tell me what he " thought wise," and nothing 
 more ; for on their theory that and nothing more 
 is his duty. But, being a Protestant, I have a 
 direct interest in God's Word, and I claim a right 
 to be acquainted with the facts by which God has 
 introduced and evidenced His Word to the world 
 in general, and to me in particular. And when 
 the minister of that Word (for the education of 
 whom in the knowledge of those very facts I 
 have probably paid, to use no higher considera- 
 tion), tells me that he thinks it not "wise" to 
 communicate them to me, I refuse to be diverted 
 to that question of his wisdom — I absolutely 
 question his rhjht to withhold them. The matter 
 is a great deal too fundamental for the other 
 treatment. When God's providence has selected 
 a particular method, the opinion that that method 
 was injudicious may be very conscientious— I 
 know in many cases it is — but it is irrelevant. And 
 when He has laid upon our faith a duty of dealing 
 according to evidence, the question whether we 
 shall look at the evidence or not is scarcely one 
 of discretion or expediency. 
 
 Whether this duty of the ministry, supposing 
 it to be one, is to be discharged through the 
 pulpit, is a subordinate question. But the criti- 
 cisms with which my letters to you have been 
 honoured have made me feel more strongly than 
 before that those ministers who really desire to 
 discharge it will find the pulpit the natural and 
 also the best place. One excellent and able 
 minister of the gospel, who writes anonymously, 
 and another who gives his name, have both ob- 
 jected to this plan. But much the larger part of 
 their argument, in bulk at least, is directed to a 
 proposal not only different from mine, but broadly 
 contrasted with it. The former suggests that I 
 wish to turn the pulpit every now and then into 
 "a chair," or at least to make it keep a 
 bright look - out on the world of letters, 
 that it may convey to the pew new critical 
 discoveries, and keep us "abreast of the age " by 
 " critical excursuses." But my friend must have 
 taken the precaution of burning my letters before 
 answering them, because, in precise and intended 
 contrast to this, I had exhausted myself in warn- 
 ing him that this was not what I was to deal with. 
 
Objections and Objectors. 
 
 17 
 
 but merely "the more common and ordinary 
 knowledge on matters of the canon, which all 
 ministers attain in the course of their education," 
 and even which every young minister knows 
 "who is not disgracefully ignorant of the 
 elements of his profession." Not only so, but 
 even with regard to this knowledge, common to 
 all ministers, my suggestion was that it might be 
 communicated to the laity, " not, of course, in 
 constant detail," but in the " broader and more 
 notorious outlines." iNIy command of language is 
 limited, but I thought I had guarded on this 
 point against misinterpretation by any amount of 
 stupidity. I had evidently not calculated on the 
 still greater power of affection for the Christian 
 people to divert honest and able men from ques- 
 tions with which they are invited to deal, but 
 which, for the sake of their people, they con- 
 scientiously dislike. 
 
 It is always an advantage when you can accept 
 the very illustration which disputants have 
 selected as the strongest to use against you. 
 
 Both Mr M and his brother minister are 
 
 down upon me about '2d Peter. The latter says, 
 " You want us to give critical discoveries — 
 announcing, for example, one fine morning that 
 this book is 66 times less authoritative than the 
 Epistle to the Romans, "and the former represents 
 me as wishing to " introduce into our public 
 teaching such questions and considerations as 
 whether the evidence for the canonicity of the one 
 epistle is ' sixteen or sixty ' times stronger than 
 the evidence for the other." Now, I need not 
 say to you that this is precisely the converse of 
 what I did say and desire. I introduced the six- 
 teen and sixty-six expressly in order to waive 
 both aside, and I waived aside all such questions 
 as not what I proposed, because that would be to 
 "entertain the Christian people" with the 
 individual minister's idea of the exact 
 relative amount of evidence on a point not capable 
 of exact treatment. What I did say or imply was 
 just the other thing. It was this. There is a 
 " common or ordinary knowledge" on this matter 
 of the historical evidence for 2d Peter, which you 
 to whom I wi'ite, and the other minister who 
 
 writes for you, and Mr M who excels us 
 
 all in eschewing anonymity, have all attained, not 
 
 as a critical discovery, but in the course of your 
 theological education, as does every young minister 
 who is not ignorant of the elements of his profes- 
 sion. The proportion between the evidence 
 for the apostolicity of this epistle, and that for 
 the apostolicity of some others may be as 1 to 06, or 
 56, or 46 ; you may differ on these, but there is some 
 minimum on which you agree (I suggested even 
 10). And the one question which I raised was as 
 to whether it was well to conceal this and similar 
 common knowledge from the Christian people 
 instead of communicating it to them, perhaps on 
 some occasion in the ordinary course of Christian 
 teaching. It is not so ambitious a proposal as 
 that which has been exchanged for it. But it is 
 a sufficiently grave question, and I am far from 
 being offended with the anxiety for the public 
 weal which has unconsciously led to the substitu- 
 tion of one more easily answered. 
 
 And now that we have got back to the real 
 question, I am unable to see that the answers 
 made to it have any cogency other than that of 
 feeling. The proposal is that each minister 
 siaould communicate to his congregation what, in 
 his view, is well-ascertained and settled as to the 
 formation of the canon — at least in broader out- 
 line. This, Mr M says, would be "to 
 
 preach the gospel of modern criticism," instead of 
 the gospel. But does he hold that the modern 
 criticism is equivalent to well-ascertained and 
 settled truth ? And, if not, what discordance is 
 there between what, in his opinion, is well-ascer- 
 tained truth and the preaching of the gospel ? 
 Does he find any in his own mind ? 
 And if there is none there, why should there 
 be any in the minds of the Christian people ? 
 There is no reason that I can see, unless the well- 
 ascertained truth has been so hidden from them 
 as to become strange in their eyes. 
 
 But at this point appears a view of preaching 
 which I consider of great importance, and it has 
 
 been stated not so much by Mr M as by 
 
 my other friend. I had desired that the Lord's- 
 day teaching should occasionally include such 
 matters as the more notorious facts on the forma- 
 tion of the canon. He meets this by saying that 
 the Lord's-day services are "for the purposes of 
 worship and edification," and for applying 
 
i8 
 
 Letters from the Red Beech. 
 
 Christianity " in a practical way," and that it is 
 " best to preserve our public assemblies on 
 Sabbath for those spiritual exercises 
 which have been instituted for the fur- 
 therance of the religious life." Well, this 
 contrast between preaching the truth and 
 preaching for edification, and the magnifying of 
 the latter over the former, is very familiar to us ; 
 but we have usually heard it from the other side 
 of the Border, and have answered that in Scot- 
 land at least all truth preached in its proper 
 jjroportion tends to edification. Are we to make 
 an exception to this in the case of truth as to the 
 evidence of the Scripture canon ? Why should 
 not this, stated in its due jiroportion and on 
 proper occasion (and no one pretends that I have 
 suggested anything else), tend to edification ? 
 Does truth fight with truth ? Is the reception of 
 Scripture not a part of truth ? Or is the receiv- 
 ing of it on its true grounds hostile to receiving 
 the gospel which it contains ? 
 
 I should find it difficult to treat the 
 argument seriously were it not that I have 
 found it adopted by ministers of opposite 
 views, and especially by those on the other side 
 from my present critics. It is they who have 
 hitherto usually said, "0, what does it matter 
 about Deuteronomy ? Leave that to the critics. 
 Preach the gospel, preach Christ, who is the sub- 
 stance of the gospel, and leave all these questions of 
 the canon alone." It is they who have usually 
 urged this in Presbyteries and Assemblies ; and, 
 as a layman, I thought they went too far even 
 when their argument referred to difficult and con- 
 troverted points. And so I went to some of them 
 — men themselves known as earnest and admirable 
 preachers — and stated the argument of these let- 
 ters. " You don't think we laymen are fitted to 
 act as a jury on these new points, and perhaps 
 you are right, though I don't see to whom 
 else you can ultimately go. But why 
 do you not begin at the beginning? 
 There are well - ascertained facts as to 
 canon which all ministers know. Why not leave 
 the doubtful points alone, and state these which 
 are not doubtful in the course of your ordinary 
 teaching ? " And the answer was, in effect, 
 "God forbid ! Whatever we do, let us not dis- 
 
 turb the minds of our congregations." And, now, 
 having put the same thing in public, I have the 
 same answer from the other side, " Let us not 
 disturb the minds of our congregations by com- 
 municating to them even the best-ascertained re- 
 sults of criticism, seeing that there are other 
 results which are not well-ascertained, and may 
 be dangerous and unsettling." 
 
 Now, perhaps, this concurrence of usually op- 
 posed authorities ought to impress one as con- 
 clusive. I regret to say that on my mind it has had 
 very much the opposite effect. It seems to me 
 simply the most ominous symptom in the whole 
 of our body politic ; and, to tell the truth, it is this 
 which has driven from neutrality into speech one 
 who knows how much less qualified than many 
 around him he is in mental equipment and in 
 moral strength to deal with such subjects. But 
 so long as we are perfectly open and candid in our 
 dealings as between ministers and laymen, we 
 have good reason, and we have right, to look, under 
 God's hand, for a happy issue out of all our troubles. 
 The moment we slide into any other course, 
 or, at least, the moment we begin to defend it, we 
 are in a very ugly path. It is a path which others 
 have tried before us. Germany has very brilliant 
 qualities, but one of its characteristics I have 
 always considered as unfortunate. The pulpit gives 
 itself, there, exclusively to" edification"and "prac- 
 tical Christianity," avoiding even the "well-ascer- 
 tained " results of Biblical science. Has this 
 worked well ? Have believing theologians there 
 the hold they ought to have on the people ? Are 
 we prepared to inaugurate the same course in 
 Scotland? Have we considered the frightful 
 results that may begin to gather and grow upon 
 us from this time forward ? And, apart from 
 expediency and results, have we the right to 
 do it? 
 
 On the other hand, can there be any more 
 fitting preparation for difficult and dark questions 
 than being faithful to the light we already have ? 
 We, the laity, find the clergy differ among them- 
 selves on advanced questions of criticism, which, 
 you all assure us, concern us. Would we not be 
 better able to judge of them if you made us ac- 
 quainted with those more elementary results of 
 criticism on which you are all agreed ? Is it not 
 
Practical Applications. 
 
 19 
 
 possible that great good might resalt from this 
 obvious process ? It was on this point that I had 
 intended a concluding letter to you which the 
 
 present argumentative communication has de- 
 laved. 
 
 VI. 
 
 My dear Sir, — It is time to say something in 
 conclusion on the practical and present bearings 
 of the questions here raised. 
 
 1. You reminded me in the course of these 
 letters of my admission that they do not bear, and 
 are not intended to bear, upon the decision of the 
 case of Professor Robertson Smith. And you 
 added, good-humourediy but firmly, that in that 
 case they do not touch upon tlie great question 
 before Scotland at tlie present time, I think 
 your conclusion may be liasty in more respects j 
 than one. 
 
 In the first place, you assume that the decision 
 of the case of Professor Smitli, one way or other, 
 will decide the great theological question of our 
 time. Is it certain that it will decide it even in 
 the Free Church ? I find a great deal of doubt on 
 this in the best-informed quarters within that 
 body ; and outside it, among men who take a 
 speculative and occasionally malicious interest in 
 the matter, I have seen bets exchanged on the 
 question whether the deposition of tlie Professor 
 would hinder or advance the influence of his 
 opinions within your communion. I have made 
 no bet on the subject, but I will hazard an 
 opinion. Unless the supposed condemnation is 
 conducted in such a way as to carry moral weight 
 {in addition to being the decision of a majority), 
 it will tend very strongly to advance the opinions 
 which are condemned — to advance them even in 
 the Free Church. That is no very hazardous 
 prophecy where a Church is about equally 
 divided on the question of toleration, and where 
 the whole of the colleges and the mass of the 
 young men are alleged, truly or falsely, to be 
 tinctured with the same views. Your co- 
 presbyter has no doubt publicly protested that 
 this allegation is a great mistake, and that Professor 
 Smith's views are isolated and exceptional, and 
 
 have no connection with the general opinions of 
 learned men in his body. If that were true, the 
 right decision of his case would certainly not be 
 the great question for Scotland. But I take it that 
 to say thatProfessor Smith's views have no connec- 
 tion with a general drift of opinion, is at least an 
 exaggeration. They are one result — perhaps an 
 illegitimate result — of a method of inquiry which 
 is exceedingly common among learned men in all 
 Churches, and which is supposed by many to be 
 necessary. The establishing of general principles 
 on this method may settle the case of Professor 
 Smith, but it will settle a good many other 
 things, too ; while the settlement of the case of 
 Professor Smith, ignoring such general prin- 
 ciples, would be a rootless and fruitless thing. In 
 as far, therefore, as the suggestions I have ven- 
 tured bear on the ascertainment or acknowledg- 
 ment of general principles, they may have to do 
 (and before closing this letter, I shall argue that 
 they have seriously to do) with the great question 
 of our time, although they certainly do not bear 
 directly upon the decision of this particular 
 case. 
 
 Besides, what we have been discussing has 
 surely some bearing, if not upon the final decision 
 of Professor Smith's case, at least upon its pre- 
 sent phase. The immediate question in it is what 
 the special meeting of Commission is to say or do. 
 It cannot, I suppose, take the matter up judicially, 
 or carry on a process, though it may invite the 
 attention of Church bodies who can do both. But 
 many are desirous that it should anticipate their 
 verdict — should assume, before trial and without 
 trial, that mischievous or heretical tendency of 
 the articles which a trial might ascertain, and for 
 the good of the people of Scotland utter an un- 
 judicial but yet condemnatory voice. That is, to 
 say the least, a perilous role to assume. It would 
 
20 
 
 Letters from the Red Beech. 
 
 be so even were there a fixed standard according 
 to which the unjudicial body proposed to utter its 
 hasty condemnation. But how much more 
 dangerous does it become when I recall the pro- 
 posal which gave occasion to these letters — the 
 proposal to abandon for this once the standard of 
 the Confession, and to substitute for it some 
 other and traditional standard, never hitherto 
 formulated ? The two pre-requisites for justice 
 have hitherto been supposed to be a court and a 
 code — a judicial body of some sort to try the case, 
 and a standard of some sort by which it may be 
 tried. To abandon dtkar of these has usually 
 been held a risky thing. But to abandon both — 
 and to abandon both at the same time ! Even a 
 Presbytery or an Assembly, which are strictly judi- 
 cial bodies, would be held to do a strong thing if, 
 in a particular case, they stepped aside from the 
 written creed, and tried a man instead by the 
 " accepted faith" of the Church. And what 
 these regular courts would not venture to do is 
 suggested to be done by that fortuitous concourse 
 of atoms — a meeting of Commission ! Or, put it 
 the other way. The Commission of Assem- 
 bly, casual and fortuitous as its concourse often 
 is, has done good work in the past. But it would 
 be a strong thing for it suddenly to assume a judi- 
 cial or condemnatory function with regard to a 
 minister or professor of the Church — a very strong 
 thing, even if the regular judicial courts of the 
 Church were not known to be greatly divided in 
 opinion on the subject. It would be an exceed- 
 ingly strong thing for the Commission, even did 
 it propose, in doing so, to adhere to the common 
 creed. But what shall be said of the pi-oposal 
 that the Commission, when it takes to deal with a 
 case— if case it can be called, which is without libel, 
 without indictment, without service, without ac- 
 cuser, and without accused — without any of the 
 forms which real courts find indispensable — 
 what shall be said of the proposal that it shall 
 for this once only, and in order to attain its end, 
 abandon, on the 27th of October, the creed by 
 which, up to the 26th October, Professor Smith 
 and all others have been tried, and pronounce a 
 condemnation according to a tradition in the 
 minds of the majority ? 
 But the main (question is, ^^'hat kind of tradi- 
 
 tion is it which we are invited thus to substitute ? 
 The words of the remit to the committee are to 
 cousiderthe bearing of Professor Smith's new writ- 
 ings on "the accepted belief and teaching" 
 of the Church. What is meant by the accepted 
 belief and teaching ? I cannot gather from the 
 letter of Mr Norman Walker, who has made 
 himself the spokesman of a desii'e for a change, 
 what is intended — except that he considers it of 
 great importance that it should not continue to 
 be mere acceptance as expressed in the Confession. 
 But is there one accepted faith and teaching of 
 the Free Church on the subject of the canon and 
 inspiration of Scripture distinct from what is 
 expressed in the Confession ? It is at this point 
 that the facts elicited by the letters which I now 
 close come to be of immediate importance. It 
 appears that there is well-ascertained truth as to 
 the formation of the canon, as to the vax-ying 
 evidence for the different books and their parts, 
 and as to the duty of the individual conscience in 
 view of the varying evidence so presented to it, 
 which is made quite familiar to the ministerial 
 mind in the ordinary course of its education, and 
 is, indeed, beginning to be popularised in little 
 books like those of Canon Westcott. It is part of 
 the ordinary possession of the educated minister. 
 But a large number of the ministers of the Free 
 Church, while not denying this, express strong 
 dislike to communicate it to their people. And 
 the ground of that dislike is the important thing. 
 It is that it would shock or harass the faith 
 of their people, or of some of them. It does not 
 harass, much less shock, their own faith ; their 
 own faith proceeds upon it. But the accepted 
 faith of their people, or of great part of them, 
 would be shocked by the truth upon this point, 
 and therefore they count it part of pastoral 
 wisdom to withhold from them the truth. Now, 
 putting aside for the moment the question of the 
 morality of this on Protestant principles, look at 
 the bearing of it on the new proposal as to the Com- 
 mission. That body is to look at views on certain 
 questions relating to Scripture and the canon of 
 Scripture in their bearing, not on the Confession, 
 but on the "accepted belief" of the Church. 
 But the accepted belief of the ministry of the 
 Church on this matter is confessedly difi'erent 
 
Presumptions in the Aberdeen Case. 
 
 21 
 
 from that of the laity— at least of the laity 
 who depend upon them for instruction ; so 
 different that to attempt suddenly to make the 
 latter accept the universal belief of the former 
 would produce a shock to faith. And it is in this 
 state of niattei-s that we are invited to act, and to 
 act not deliberately but hastily and unjudicially, 
 upon the "accepted belief," and, more extraordi- 
 nary still, the " accepted teaching "of the Church 
 as contrasted with its Confession ! 
 
 I feel the danger and injustice of this more be- 
 cause I have considerable sympathy with the con- 
 servative side on Professor Smith's matter, andam 
 prepared to accept a good many of the considera- 
 tions which they urge. For example, I have 
 never been able to make up my mind whether his 
 position is or is not consistent with the Confession 
 of faith. I admit the power of the statements 
 which have been made on this subject by his 
 friends — e.r/,,by the Glasgow professors ; but still 
 they leave doubts on the mind, and the very 
 equal division of the Church on this question, far 
 from being discreditable, seems to me to reflect the 
 real difficulty of the case. I agree therefore with 
 Mr Walker and his friends that it is a doubtful 
 point whether the present creed of the Church 
 can be made an efficient instrument for repressing 
 the views which have again been presented. But 
 I agree with them on another point. While I 
 have doubts whether Professor Smith's views are 
 or are not consistent with the Confession, I have 
 no doubt that there is a popularly-" accepted be- 
 lief" in the Free Church on the subjects of the 
 canon and of inspiration with which they are 
 inconsistent. Farther, I admit that this popu- 
 larly-accepted belief is on the whole coincident 
 with the popularly-" accepted teaching" on the 
 subject. The whole drift of these letters has 
 been to show that the accepted teaching (of the 
 laity, not of the ministers) systematically omits a 
 certain amount of the acknowledged truth upon 
 the matter, and the answer made to this has not 
 been a denial, but an argument — I think a well- 
 founded argument — that if the accepted teaching 
 did otherwise it would disturb the accepted be- 
 lief. The moral question thus raised must work 
 itself out, but in the meantime I cannot but 
 admit that in my view Professor Smith's opinions 
 
 are opposed to the popularly-accepted teaching as 
 well as to the popularly-accepted belief. If, there- 
 fore, an effectual transition could now be made from 
 the one standard to the other, from the Confession 
 or creed to either the popular " belief" or the popu- 
 lar " teaching'' — as both expressions are conjoined 
 in the question proposed to the Commission — 
 then the practical difficulty might be solved. 
 The condemnation which can only be slowly, if 
 at all, attained by the regular judicial organs of 
 the Church dealing according to its Standard, 
 might be suddenly uttered by amore popular gather- 
 ing, which should found (and which could found, 
 I think not falsely, but truly) upon the popular 
 teaching and the popular belief. I agree, there- 
 fore, that it is possible — and I am not insen- 
 sible to some of the considerations in 
 its favour. Some men don't like super- 
 seding an ancient Confession in favour 
 of the presently-accepted faith. I think to do 
 so is not only legitimate but a clear duty — 
 provided the change is not made extempore or 
 ad hominem, but deliberately, and after having 
 formulated what the now accepted faith of the 
 Church is and ought to be. Some men, again, 
 don't believe, or affect not to believe, that Pro- 
 fessor Smith's views would seriously disturb the 
 popularly-accepted belief of the Free Church— the 
 belief of the majority of the laity who believe at 
 all. 1 think them eminently fitted (and that not 
 merely by their mode of presentation) to give that 
 composite belief a dangerous and unsettling shock 
 —unsettling to the belief held, and dangerous to 
 the men who hold it. I see, therefore, the whole 
 temptation to found, suddenly and arbitrarily, 
 on that accepted faith, instead of abiding by the 
 written creed— a temptation which will be felt 
 most in some respects by those of you ministers 
 who have most of the pastor's heart, and who 
 care least about "splitting sacred words" in 
 comparison of saving souls. And yet I be- 
 lieve you are precisely the people who 
 will feel most the moral impossibility of 
 the course proposed. And you will feel 
 it not merely on account of the personal 
 injustice to the minister dealt with — a point on 
 which the esprit de corps reinforces and ought to 
 reinforce the sense of right and the instinct of 
 
22 
 
 Letters from the Red Beech. 
 
 equity. For there is another consideration. If 
 there is any truth in the ground which we have 
 traversed together, it is you who are chiefly re- 
 sponsible for any divergence between the accepted 
 faith of the laity on these subjects and your 
 own. The reticence which has been used may 
 have been right or wrong, justifiable or other- 
 wise, but it equally produces its results. The 
 partial teaching is inevitably " accepted " by its 
 hearers as the whole, and an accepted faith is thus 
 formed which in a very short time comes to be 
 pleaded to various effects, some worse than others. 
 It is bad enough when it is pleaded that the ac- 
 cepted faith, being a one-sided faith, is necessarily 
 fragile, and that therefore the minister must not 
 endanger it by preaching the whole. But how 
 much worse if it is proposed to elevate this ac- 
 cepted faith, because of its one-sidedness and fra- 
 gility, into the place hitherto held either by the 
 doctrinal standard of the Church or by the whole 
 truth as known to the ministry and educated 
 laity ! 
 
 II. I pass now from the Aberdeen case. It is 
 only one of many which are sure to arise in the 
 present day, and the inability to judge of it, which 
 I and other laymen feel, has raised with me the 
 general question — What is the attitude of mind 
 and conscience in which laymen ought to approach 
 them all? In short, I have backed into the 
 harbour that, with your aid, I may " adjust my 
 compasses." It is, perhaps, not an easy task. 
 But am I wrong in assuming one point — that 
 when your needle points to the true 
 north, mine cannot do wrong to point in 
 the same direction ? Of course, you see what I 
 mean. Hitherto the ministers of every Protestant 
 Church have taken for granted that criticism of 
 the books claiming to be inspired is the means, 
 the only means, the divinely-appointed means, of 
 making up for ourselves the canon, or sum of 
 those books, and that this duty lies upon each 
 generation of the Church, and has not, as Roman 
 Catholics believe, been performed once for all and 
 authoritatively by some previous Pope, patriarch, 
 or father. And in your colleges you are put 
 through all this when students, as an ordinary 
 and necessary part of work and duty. But 
 if this is duty and work laid upon you ministers 
 
 age after age — not taken up at your own hand, 
 but laid upon the conscience by God — then it 
 involves a certain appropriate attitude of mind. 
 It involves a critical attitude of mind, a habitu- 
 ally critical attitude of mind, even towards Scrip- 
 ture, as part of the habit of mind which you are 
 bound to cultivate. It is only part of that due 
 habit of mind. It is not the whole. On the con- 
 trary, what has been said implies that the habi- 
 tually critical attitude of mind towards Scripture 
 and the parts of Scripture is and must be consist- 
 ent with the other qualities of mind towards it 
 which God also demands — such qualities as re- 
 verence, and'a divine faith in its message and in its 
 author. Now, that is how God has willed you to 
 adjust your compass, and though it may not be 
 easy to keep the needle pointing aright, you 
 know it can only be done by having respect to 
 both duties — criticism and faith. Well, one 
 point which seems to be agreed upon by Pro- 
 testants is that this is in no respect a duty of the 
 so-called clergy alone. It belongs to the individual 
 and to the layman ; and between him and God's 
 Word no minister and no Church has authority to 
 interfere, though he has a right to such assistance 
 as they can give. But he is the judge, upon 
 his own responsibility. Now, is this true, 
 or is it not ? If it is not, it ought 
 not to be put as a fundamental of 
 Protestantism. But if it is true, then I am sure 
 there are many people in Scotland, some even in 
 your own congregation, whoueed to be familiarised 
 with it. And why should they be familiarised 
 with it ? Because this duty is one which requires 
 in laymen, as truly as in ministers, a certain 
 attitude of mind. And the right attitude of 
 mind, on central and religious subjects, is not a 
 thing easily attained — is not a thing to be at all 
 attained by those who do not feel their need of it, 
 or who have been taught that they have no 
 need of it. Did you, as a student, feel no 
 need of divine guidance and even of human help, 
 when the combined duties of criticism and faith 
 first opened upon you ? And why should I need 
 moral preparation less than you ? 
 
 I am satisfied that the lack of this preparation 
 is the lesson forced upon many of us by recent 
 events. We have been precipitated, without 
 
Is Criticism a DtUy or a Sin ? 
 
 23 
 
 preparation, into matters on which we are told 
 that we are bound to judge, but for which 
 we find ourselves unqualified. And now 
 it seems to be suggested that we should 
 abandon that duty altogether. The question in 
 the Free Church appears to be approaching a 
 curious point. Moi-e than two years ago, when it 
 was at an early stage. Principal Rainy faced the 
 general subject in four published lectures on the 
 Bible and criticism. They had all his character- 
 istic power of original truism. But in this book 
 the truism was held to be more obvious than the 
 originality. Men said of it, as Dr Duncan said of 
 Dr Gordon's sermons, that the most 
 striking sentence was the sentence after 
 the last. So far as the sentences went, 
 they were held to be wise beyond measure, 
 but to be very safe, if not even tame. And yet, 
 all through, it assumed and proclaimed criticism 
 to be a necessity of faith, as well as a duty ob- 
 vious to the natural conscience, and gave earnest 
 counsels as to the mental and moral habitudes it 
 required. Well, but that was two years ago. 
 What was a mere truism then is ignored or 
 doubted now. Professor Binnie writes a pamphlet 
 in 1880, and throughout it he speaks of criticism 
 not as a necessity of faith and conscience, but as 
 an unmixed evil, and of the critical school — 
 not any particular section of that school — as 
 simply unbelieving. Now, which is right ? It 
 may be answered that Professor Binnie's use of 
 the word is merely an ambiguity. But it is a 
 very retrograde and ominous kind of ambiguity. 
 I remember well the blush which adorned your 
 countenance when, not so very long since, a pro- 
 minent member of the Free Church publicly de- 
 nounced the teaching of criticism, and in parti- 
 cular the teaching of the evidence for the several 
 books of the canon, in the modern divinity halls 
 of Scotland. There was no such thing in his 
 youth, he said, and he saw no business 
 that we had with anything but the results 
 in the Confession of Faith. The young men 
 around you were loud in their contempt for an 
 utterance which would make the Church and its col- 
 leges the laughing-stock of every Protestant com- 
 munion. You said nothing, but you told me 
 afterwards that you thought such teaching neces- 
 
 sary as part of Scripture apologetics. Most true ; 
 but is Scripture apologetic necessary in the pre- 
 sent day for ministers only and not for laymen ? 
 And when a process is ascertained to be necessary 
 apologetically — i.e., for the defence of Scripture — 
 does it make it less important that it is also 
 necessary fundamentally — i.e., for the ascertain- 
 ment of Scripture ? And if laymen are interested 
 even in the defence of Scripture, are they not at 
 least equally interested in its evidence and ascer- 
 tainment ? And if this is a duty to which 
 ministers and laymen are (as you tell us) 
 both called, should not both either be 
 alike obedient to the heavenly vision, or 
 alike refuse it altogether ? If criticism is a good 
 thing, should not laymen and ministers, as well as 
 professors, take part in it ? If it is a bad thing, 
 should it not be stopped in the colleges, as well as 
 outside ? 
 
 Lastly, as to the hopefulness of turning in 
 God's name to the ordinary work of criticism. 
 You and others think that the present state of 
 matters has sad and serious aspects. Of course 
 it has. It is a serious thing to be born into this 
 world at all, and it is a serious thing when in 
 it to have to do with God's revelation and 
 call. And the state of matters in our country is 
 especially serious, because we are passing from 
 the immoral but most comfortable habit of resting 
 upon human authority in matters of faith. The 
 change can never be made without risk of harm 
 and loss. Yet the other direction is the only one 
 in which we can see light. Nil desperandum 
 Christo ditce et auspice Christo. I do not indeed 
 wish to cast everything loose, even under pretext 
 of following such high guidance. But when so 
 many laymen are in doubt and difficulty, it has 
 occurred to me to inquire whether it may not be 
 well in the first place to build on what our mini- 
 sters familiarly know to be truth and right. 
 There is not much hope for us if we neglect what 
 we confess to be fundamental duty, and avoid the 
 attitude of mind Avhich it would impose upon us. 
 If we turn to that duty in dependence upon our 
 Leader, we may still have many an anxiety due to 
 our own folly and sin, but our faces will then be 
 set to the dawning of the day.— I am, &c., 
 
 A Layman. 
 
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