'■^'^nJ^-%, J _ *^ **>> ». X sr'^,1 \:: ':^'''^ T. and T. Claries PuUications. PROFESSOR GODET'S WORKS, Just published, in Two Volumes, demy 8vo, price 21s., COMMENTARY ON ST. PAUL'S FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. By F. GODET, D.D., PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY, NEUCHATEL. ' A perfect masterpiece of theological toil and thought. . . . Scholarly, evangelical, exhaustive, and able.' — Evangelical Review. ' To say a word in praise of any of Professor Godet's productions is almost like "gilding refined gold." All who are familiar with his commentaries know how full they are of rich suggestion. , . . This volume fully sustains the high reputation Godet has made for himself as a Biblical scholar, and devout expositor of the will of God, Every page is radiant with light, and gives forth heat as well.' — Methodist New Connexinn Magazine. In TLree Volumes, 8vo, price 31s. 6d., A COMMENTARY ON THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. ' This work forms one of the battle-fields of modern inquiry, and is itself so rich in spiritual truth, that it is impossible to examine it too closely; and we welcome this treatise from the pen of Dr. Godet. We have no more com- petent exegete; and this new volume shows all the learning and vivacity fur which the author is distinsruished.' — Freeman. In Two Volumes, 8vo, price 21s., A COMMENTARY ON THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE. ' Marked by clearness and good sense, it will be found to possess value and interest as one .of the most recent and copious works specially designed to illustrate this Gospel.' — Guardian. In Two Volumes, Svo, price 21s., A COMMENTARY ON ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 'We prefer tliis commentary to any other we have seen on the subject. . . . We have great pleasure in recommending it as not only rendering invaluable aid in the critical study of the text, but affording practical and deeply suggestive assistance in the exposition of the doctrine.' — British and Foreign Evangelical Bevieio. In crown Svo, Second Edition, price 68., DEFENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. TRANSLATED BY THE HON. AND REV. CANON LYTTELTON, M.A., RECTOR OF HAGLEY. ' There is trenchant argument and resistless logic in these lectures ; but withal, there is cultured imagination and felicitous eloquence, which cairy home the appeals to the heart as well as the head.'— /S^corJ and Trowel. DR. WALKER'S THEOLOGY AND THEOLOGIANS OF SCOTLAND. EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS OF THE FIRST EDITION. ' We do not wonder that in their delivery Dr, Walker's lectures excited great interest ; we should have wondered far more if they had not done so.' — Mr. Spuugeon in Sword and Troioel. ' We commend to our readers this ahle and interesting volume.' — Literary World. ' These pages glow with fervent and eloquent rejoinder to the cheap scorn and scm-rilous satire poured out upon evangelical theology as it has been developed north of the Tweed.' — British Quarterly Review. ' This volume must be welcomed as an important and seasonable contribution to the science of historical theology. . . . There is a glow of spiritual earnestness pervading these lectures which, indeed, has always connected itself with the awakening of an interest in the history of the contendings of the Scottish Church, and belies the extravagant assertions of those who ascribe a dry and speculative orthodoxy to Scottish religion, as its distinctive characteristic' — British and Foreign Evangelical Review. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 38 George Street. WITH THE PUBLISr" coil. THE THEOLOGY AND THEOLOGIANS OF SCOTLAND, PRINTED BY MOKRISON AND GIBB, FOR T. & T. CLARK, EDINBUEGH. LONDON, HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO. DUBLIN, GEO. HERBERT. NEW YORK, .... 8CRIBNER AND WELFORD. THE THEOLOGY THEOLOGIANS OF SCOTLAJ^D CHIEFLY OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. Bring one of tfje " Cunningfjam Eccturcs.' JAMES WALKEll, D.D. CAUXWATH. SECOND EDITION, REVISED. EDINBURGH: T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET. 1888. INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO FIRST EDITION. HE Trust-deed of the founder requires that each course of Cunningham Lectures shall be published within a year after their delivery. Xo doubt a law like that could not be meant to be enforced under exceptional circum- stances. The illness of a lecturer would doubtless be accepted by the Trustees as a sufficient reason for an extension of time. Unfortunately in the case of Dr. Walker that excuse has existed. In the spring of last year, almost immediately after the delivery of the Lectures, he was laid aside from work of every kind, and has been obliged to spend the winter abroad. The interest produced by the Lectures, however, at the time of their delivery, was so great, that their speedy publication w^as earnestly pressed by many friends ; and this, combined with other things, led to his being asked to consent to their publication in his absence. To this arrange- ment he was naturally at first quite averse ; but vi Introdudorij Note to First Edition. Leing most anxious to fulfil the conditions of the Trust-deed, and not to delay the publication of his Lectures until perhaps another volume of the series might be due, he agreed to commit his manuscripts to our care, and to leave us to judge whether they were fit, as he had left them, for the press. Tlie issue of the present volume shows the conclu- sion to which we have been led. As might have been expected, we have had many difficulties to encounter; but the Lectures seemed to us to contain so much that was fitted to interest and stimulate, as to make an indefinite delay in their publication extremely undesirable. Although the work now appears under great disadvantages, we are confident that it will be welcomed by all friends of the Scottish Church as an acceptable contribution to an important department of its literature. It is right to explain further, that none of the proof- sheets have been seen by Dr. Walker, and that he is therefore not to be held responsible for any mistakes that may possibly have occurred in connection with the deciphering of his manuscripts. Had he been his own editor, he would of course have given all his authorities, and likewise appended illustrative notes. It was also part of his plan to complete the discussion of his subject by adding four Lectures to the six that were delivered. Introductory Note to First Edition. vii We cannot conclude without acknowledging very cordially the effective help which we have received, in preparing the volume for the press, from the Eev. James Black of Dunnikier and the Rev. E. A. Thomson of Edinburgh. Their intimate knowledge of Scottish Church History, and their readiness to forward the publication in every way in their power, have made their assistance quite invaluable. NORMAN L. WALKER. W. G. BLAIKIE. INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO SECOND EDITION. [HE First Edition of these Lectures has been long since exhausted, and their re -issue has been often pressed. But the health of the author has never allowed of his under- taking a thorough revision of them, and liitlierLo he has resisted all the appeals made to him to permit their republication in their original form. His objec- tions, however, have now so far given way, and hence the present volume. This new Edition has been printed from a private copy of the Lectures which Dr. Walker himself read with pencil in hand some years ago, and to a certain extent corrected and annotated. But substantially tlie work is unchanged. One distinct addition only has been made to it, in the shape of a supplementary chapter dealing with an interesting aspect of the Doctrine of the Visible Church. This appeared some years ago in The Catholic Presbyterian, and is reprinted here with the permission of the Editor, Dr. Blaikie. NORMAN L. WALKER. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. SURVEY OF THE FIELD. Scottish Theology begins with John Knox — Andrew Melville's Contributions were small— Principal Rollock, of the Univer- sity of Edinburgh — Beginning of 17th Century — "Welsh, Sharp, the Simpsons^ Boyd of Trochrigg, a Writer of Eminence at Home and Abroad — Was succeeded in Univer- sity of Glasgow by Cameron — David Calderwood and the Altare Damascenum — Theologians of the Second Reformation — Samuel Rutherford, his Remarkable Character and Writings • — George Gillespie, a Fit Fellow- Worker of Rutherford — Prin- cipal Baillie, Dickson, Durham, Principal Strang — James Wood of St. Andrews, one of the Ablest Men of his Time — Principal Patrick Gillespie, Hugh Binning — Literary Results of the First Century of Presbyterianism — The next Period finds the Church in Sackcloth — Literary Activity of Exiled Ministers — M'Ward — John Livingstone, a Great Preacher and a Great Scholar — Brown of Wamphray, an Able and Voluminous Writer — Home Literature of the Persecution— The Literature of the Period after 1690 — Contest as to Epis- copacy — Jamieson's Works claim a Special Notice — Several Schools of Religious Thought now in the Church — Thomas Boston, one of the Great Figures in our Religious History — The First Five Secederswere Theologians and Men of Learn- ing — Special Notice of M 'Laurin and Adam Gib, . . 1- X Contents. CHAPTER II. PREDESTINATION AND PROVIDENCE. PAO ES Scottish Theology deficient in some Points— It made no Contri- bution to the Trinitarian Controversy — But Scottish Theolo- gians were intimate with the Ante-Nicene Fathers — Frequency of Quotations from Augustine — Their Opinion of the Nicene Creed — Little was contributed towards Historical Apologetics — Faith in the Self-manifesting Power of Divine Truth strong — The External Evidence somewhat undervalued — Peculiar Struggles of Eminent Men with Unbelief — Experimental Apologetics — Halyburton's Treatise — Modern Apologetical Philosophy of Scotch Origin — Philosophy applied to Revival Phenomena — Doctrine of Fundamental Beliefs — Doctrine of Conscience propounded before Butler — Discussions on Predes- tination, etc. — Knox, Boyd, Rollock, Rutherford — Rutherford on Sin — God's Mean to an End — Absence of Reverent Restraint in the Discussion — This arose from Boundless Confidence in God — But there Avas Little Sympathy with Difficulties now so common— No Idea of making God the Author of Sin — Boyd of Trochrigg's Explanation — Rutherford's Way of putting the Matter— Dr. Strang attacked this View — Doctrine of Physicus concursus — Direct Action of the Divine Will in Nature — This not connected with Caprice or Disorder — Doctrine as to the Mode of the Answer to Prayer — The Preciirsus and Concursus applied to all Being — God held to be efficient of all Entitive Acts about Sin — Theory of Sin — Sin not an Entitive Act — What is Noble in this View- Sanctity of Nature — But it makes the Moral give way to the Metaphysical — General Influence and Prevalence of this View — Calvinism and Necessitarianism — Professor Simpson — Adam Gib's Attack on Lord Kames' Necessitarianism — He was , afraid that Law would be elevated above God — The Motive-Spring of these Views, oQ-QQ Contents. xi CHAPTER III. THE ATONEMENT. PAGES Views of Scotch Divines on Necessity of Redemption — Rutherford held no Necessity save in Free Decree of God — Denied Justitia punUiva of God— Threw no Light on the Divine Per- mission of Sin — Desired to Conserve the Freedom of Grace — Patrick Gillespie nearly agreed with Rutherford — Fraser of Brea, the last who held this View — Boston and the "Marrow Men " held the Opposite — Their A^iew of the Moral Law also different — Views on the Nature of Redemption — Opinions on the Covenant of Works — The New Covenant of Grace — Pro- minence of the Person of Christ — Some Differences as to the Doctrine of the Covenants — They held Christ to have offered a Real Satisfaction — His Sufferings held to have been the same in kind — Views on the Extent of Redemption — Discussion of Question, Did Christ die for all ?— Opinion of Fraser of Brea — Commotion occasioned by the Publication of his Book — Eraser's Theory that Christ purchased Temporal Benefits for all — This Subject discussed by Durham and others— Patrick Gillespie's View different — The "Marrow" Controversy on Extent of Redemption — Doctrine of "the Marrow" on this point condemned by General Assembly — The Marrow Men re- pudiated its Interpretation — They held Particular Redemption — The Marrow View of the Appropriation of Christ — Objections to the MarroAV Theology — Reprobation — Sinners of Mankind Christ's Legatees — Judaic Theory of tlie World's Conversion — Yet Boston and the Marrow Men had the JModcrn Mission- ary Spirit, 67-94 CHAPTER IV. THE DOCTRINE OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH. Vast Number of Scotch Treatises on the Church — The Visible Church — the Idea of it is Catholic — This Conception, now so feeble, was then very powerful — The Idea of Catholic Protestant Unity — Different Churches in same Territory xii Contents, PAGES generally inadmissible — Opinions of Rutherford, Durham, etc. — The Donatists did not obtain their Sympathy — Gillespie's Pleading against Separations — The Church was not to be Lax, but Schism was a Great Sin — A Change begun by the Controversy of Resolutioners and Protesters — Differences about the Indulgence — M'Ward denies the State-Church to be of genus Church — Brown of Wamphray's View of Unity — The Old View of Unity losing ground — Revolution Settle- ment — the Non-Separation Cameronians — The Three Field Preachers join the Church — The Revolution Church held the Old View of Schism — Lauder's Views nearer to the Present — The Secession of 1733 — how justified — Adam Gib splits the Secession — his Unique Character — The Present State of Things would have horrified Rutherford or Brown — Member- ship in the Visible Church — The Visible Church not based on Belief but on Profession — The "Judgment of Charity" not admitted — The Power of the Magistrate in enforcing Adher- ence — More Spiritual Views came into vogue — Boston's Views of Baptism, etc. — opposed to Rutherford's — Combina- tion of Two Views, anent Schism and Membership — Christ the Only Source of Blessing in the Church — Lesson for Present Times, 95-126 CHAPTER V. THE HEADSHIP OF CHRIST AND ERASTIANISM. Prefatory Note — Erastianism the Great Blot of Reformed Churches — But the Scotch Church had no Proclivity towards it — The Crown of Christ prominent at all the Best Periods — The Doctrine of the Headship enshrining a Present Christ — Meaning of the Doctrine— The Minister a " Sent Messenger " — Rutherford on the Meaning of Excommunication — The Church the Real Kingdom of Christ — Christ the only King or Head — no Depute Headship admissible — Neither Pontifical nor Magistratical Headship — Erastian Vindication of the Magistrate's Headship as " Gustos" — This View indefensible — Contents. xiii PAGES Nature of the Magistrate's Power — His Action respects the Civil Side of Things — Civil Element in the First Table of the Law — The Magistrate's being a Christian does not alter the case — Catena of Testimonies — Andrew Melville— Testimony of ' ' Plea for the Persecuted Ministers " — Testimony of Brown of Wamphray— Views of the Early Seceders— Rutherford's Change of View — Views that penetrated Church of 16th and 17th Centuries — Limitation of these Views by Tolera- tion — Rights secured to the Church,— 1st Right, Self-govern- ment— 2nd Right, Cherishing and Nourishing — 3rd Right, The Tithes — 4th Right, Exclusion of all other Claimants — Toleration of Heretical Bodies dreaded— The Church Christ's Special, if not only Kingdom as Mediator — Views of Hooker and Cartwright as to Christ's Mediatorial Sovereignty — Apollonius held the only Kingdom Doctrine — It was his Weapon against Erastianism — Disputed whether this Doctrine of the Scotch Church — But they held He was King of Zion very specially — This brought the Lord of Glory very near, . 127-156 CHAPTER VL PRESENT MISREPRESENTATION OF SCOTTISH RELIGION. Alleged Gloominess of Scottish Religion — Mr. Buckle's Extravag- ance and Blunders— His Misrepresentation of Excommunica- tion — And of the Authority claimed by Christ's Ministers — And of the Power claimed by them over the Future World — Samuel Rutherford and Thomas Buckle — Extravagances of the Period matched at the Present Day — Were the Scotch People really cowed and stricken ? — The Gospel gave the Love of Freedom to the People — Personal Character of the Leading Divines — Durham — John Livingstone — Richard Cameron — John Welsh of Ayr — Thomas Boston of Ettrick — Hugh M'Kail — Domestic Tenderness of these Men — Story told by Livingstone of a "Tocher" — Devotion, not Selfishness, the Ruling Force — Scotch Religion alleged to be a Religion of Speculative Dogma — Doctrinalism of Broad Church, Unitarian, xiv Contents. PAGES and other Schools — The Personal Christ not absent from Scottish Religion — Allegation of an English High Church- man — Quotation from a Scottish Layman of 1665 — Christ the Administrator of the Covenant — Quotation from Boston — Alleged Sabbatarianism of Scottish Religion — The Facts do not bear out what is alleged — Doctrine of the Sabbath — Formalism necessarily connected with the Sabbath — Not con- lined to Scotland — Tendency of our Time to rebel against Law— The Power of the Scottish Sabbath— The Sabbath at Ettrick — Effects on the Temporal Progress of Scotland — - Conclusion, 157-187 CHAPTER VIL DO I'RESBYTERIANS HOLD APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION ? A Doctrine of Apostolical Succession held in some Sense by Scotch Presbyterians— Ordination regarded as essential — Significant Proceedings of Cameronians — Gillespie on Presbyterian " Orders " — Rutherford's Distinctions — "What implied in the Idea of Succession — No Sacramentarianism in it — Mr. Glad- stone's Alistake — A Visible Church recognised — Indelibility repudiated — Approbation of the People indispensable — An Intruded ]\Iinister not a Lawful Minister — Independent "Orders" recognised by Presbyterians — Lay Preaching — Failure of tlie English Presbyterian Secession of 1G62 — Reasons for it — Dangers of a High Church Presbyterianism — Allowance of Fellowship Meetings — Importance of main- taining the Preaching of tlie Word — Scotch Rule never to administer the Sacraments without Preaching — Significant Difference on this Point among High Churchmen, . 188-200 SCOTTISH THEOLOGY. CHAPTER I. SUKVEY OF THE FIELD. HE theology of Scotland begins with the Reformation, and the first of our great theological writers is John Knox himself. No doubt the Reformer was more a preacher and a man of action than a student and a thinker ; yet he was the latter as well as the former. His clear, strong mind firmly grasped the Calvinistic system, with which it might be said he had both morally and intellectually natural affinities ; and he was sufficiently acquainted with its scriptural grounds, with its accepted methods of doctrinal statement, even with its meta- physics, to be the expounder and defender of it. Very far from beincj the mere iconoclast, he was also the great teacher of his countrymen. The first Confession of Faith, the First Book of Discipline — in its magni- ficent comprehensiveness, one of the most remarkable compositions of a great time — both of them chiefly the work of Knox — the long and elaborate treatise on 2 Scottish Theology. Predestination, in which the doctrines of grace and of the divine sovereignty are so vigorously, yet upon the whole so wisely, asserted and maintained — give Knox a high place among theologians ; and, at any rate, they have been greatly influential in giving direction to the theological thinking of our country. Among Knox's contemporaries and fellow-workers there were several accomplished divines ; but they were more taken up with preaching the gospel and organizing the Church than writing books, — with making well-instructed Christians of the people, than addressing themselves to the schools. Even of a later generation the theological remains are not very abund- ant. Andrew Melville, second to none in learning, and hardly second to Knox in power and influence, has left us only one theological treatise, a short com- mentary on the Epistle to the Eomans. We have his hand, however, as is well known, in the Second Book of Discipline, — probably, too, in the papers belonging to the contention between the State and Church in 1596, which Calderwood has preserved, and which, brief though they are, bear the unmistakeable indica- tions of a clear and powerful intellect ; and we can only regret that we have so little from his pen. Passing by not a few names of able men, we come to Pollock, the first Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Inducted to his office in 1583, during the twenty years of his professorial labours he developed a great theological activity, and from his training came many of the best ministers of the day. He is our first Survey of the Field. 3 commentator of any note. Besides the lectures pub- lished by the Wodrow Society, he gave to the world works in Latin on several of the Epistles of Paul, which are still worthy of being consulted. He wrote also on the Psalms and the book of Daniel. Pollock was no less a theologian than an expositor, as his treatise on Effectual Calling shows ; and though cer- tainly not of the scholastic type, he has proved himself sufficiently familiar with the intricate questions which the schoolmen almost claim as their peculiar profession. Neither a brilliant nor a powerful man, he was sensible and capable ; fit for almost any kind of work in his de- partment. Calderwood says he was mild and timorous ; and perhaps it was well for him that he died before the days of trial came. There was considerable theological activity in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. John Welsh of Ayr wrote against Eomanism. John Sharp, his fellow-sufferer, published in Latin his Harmony of the Prophets and the Apostles, a very interesting work of its kind, in which verses or passages which seem to disagree are placed side by side, and their seeming dis- agreement explained ; containing also a number of short essays or discussions on difficult moral and theological questions. It has a place of its own in our theological literature. The Simpson brothers were busy with their pens. Patrick gave us our first History of the Church, and William a treatise on the Hebrew accents. Archi- bald was still more prolific. He was evidently a man of talent. His exposition of the seven penitential 4 Scottish Theology. Psalms is quaint, and fresh, and telling, and affords ns a very favourable specimen of the popular exposition of the period. But, not to dwell on less distinguished men, one of much greater mark was Boyd of Trochrigg. This eminent person, after attending Bollock, prosecuted his studies in France, and became a minister in the French Church. All accounts represent him as a most accomplished scholar. A friend said of him, with per- haps some exaggeration, that he was more eloquent in French than in his native tongue ; and Livingstone tells us that he spoke Latin with perfect fluency, but that he had heard him say, if he had his choice, he w^ould rather express himself in Greek than in any other language. The Church of Boyd's adoption, which had given Andrew Melville a chair in one university, and Sharp a chair in another, was not slow to do honour to their brilliant countryman. He was made a professor in the University of Saumur ; and there for some years he taught theology. He was per- suaded, however, in 1614 to come home and accept the Brincipalship df the Glasgow University. Though he was far from extreme in his Presbyterianism, he was found to be less tractable than the king and liis advisers expected, and was obliged to resign his office. But he was long enough in Glasgow to leave the impress of himself on some of the young men destined to distinction in the Church in after years. Boyd's great work is his Commentary on the Epistle to the Uphesians. A work it is of stupendous size and Survey of the Field. 5 stupendous learning. There is more in it than in the four quarto tomes of Turretin. Its ap'paratus criticus is something enormous. The Greek and Latin Fathers ; the writers of the dark aojes ; the Protestant and Eomish theologians of his own time ; Justin and Ire- naeus ; Tertullian and Cyprian ; Clement and Origen ; Augustine and Jerome ; Gregory Nyssen and Gregory Nazianzen ; Anselm, and Bonaventure, and Bernard ; Calvin and Eollock ; Bellarmine and Pighius, — are all at hand to render aid or to receive replies. In one sense, Boyd on the Ephesians is a commentary, that is to say, the author discusses the meaning of every verse and clause, and does so well. But much more properly it might be called a theological thesaurus. You have a separate discussion of almost every im- portant theological topic. The Trinity, the Incarna- tion, Original Sin, Baptism, Arianism, Ubiquitarianism, the Nature and Extent of Piedemption, are all fully handled. There is a treatise on Predestination wdiich alone would make a considerable volume. One can only regret that a selection of these separate essays or discussions was not published, rather than the huge indiscriminate mass, which has led to the calamitous result of a oreat divine beinc^ buried under his own erudition. Boyd's character was as noble as his learning was great. He was, says Livingstone, '' of an austere-like carriage, but of a most tender heart. Notwithstand- ing of his rare abilities, he had no account of himself, but a high account of every other man's parts, when 6 Scottish Theology. he perceived any spark of grace and ingenuity ; "but where these were not, no man was such a severe censurer." He died in his prime, under fifty years of age. Boyd, I may notice, was succeeded in Glasgow after some interval by a man of still greater celebrity, Dr. John Cameron. He, too, had been in France, and a professor in one of its colleges. Owing to some offence he had given the French Government, he was obliged to leave that country ; and James, thinking him likely to prove serviceable, installed him in the vacant principalship. He did not find himself at home there. He was lax in his doctrine and lax in his ecclesiastical principles ; and this did not suit the tastes of many of the students whom Boyd had trained, nor the current of general sentiment, which still ran strongly against Prelacy and the Ceremonies. Cameron was soon glad to return to the Continent. We can hardly reckon him among our Scotch divines ; and perhaps it is no loss. His repute in other countries was very great. On all hands you have the praise of his learning ; and the great men of the French Church, when they speak of him, even when differing from his sentiments, speak of him with respect. Yet his doctrine of the three covenants, and his attempted mediation between Cal- vin and Arminius, have had little success, and do not indicate a mind of high order. The equal of either Boyd or Cameron in learning was David Calderwood, the ardent Presbyterian, the unflinching opponent of Prelacy and its adjuncts. Survey of the Field. 7 Banished for his nonconformity, he found a home in the Low Countries, where he wrote his great work, the Altare Damasccnum. It is the most serious attack on Diocesan, or rather Anglican, Episcopacy which I suppose has ever been made in this country. Patiently and perseveringly Calderwood goes over the whole system, tearing it to pieces, as it were, bit by bit. The Bible, the Fathers, the Canonists, are equally at his command. It does our Church no credit that the Altare has never been translated. It seems to have been more in request out of Scotland than in it. The large and beautiful edition I possess of the Altare was printed in Amsterdam as late as 1700. Among the Dutch divines he was ever *' eminentissimus Calder- wood." Calderwood lived to see the principles for which he liad suffered, and which he had so powerfully vindicated, in complete ascendency. He was present at the Glasgow Assembly in 1638, and saw Prelacy and the Ceremonies swept away. The clouds were gathering again before he died. He breathed his last at Jedburgh, a fugitive from his parish of Pencaitland ; and they laid him in the churchyard of Crailing, where the first, and very likely the happiest, years of his ministry were spent. And so we come down to the theologians of the so-called second Eeformation. To this period belong Samuel Eutherford, George Gillespie, Baillie, David Dickson, Blair, Durham, Gray, Binning, Hutchison, Ferguson, James Wood, William Guthrie, Patrick Gillespie, and many others. 8 Scottish TJiCology. Samuel Eutlierford I have put first on tins list, and perhaps he is the greatest. To most of us it is likely he is best known by his letters, — letters which, I may say, stand all alone in religious literature, — to some as bright with unearthly glory, to others as offending against all sacred proprieties. Yet all will admit there is something about them sui generis. Condemn their taste if you will, you cannot but own that they contain flashes of real, if unreojulatecl, oenius. So far as I know, they are the only letters two centuries old which are still a practical reality in the religious life of Scotland, England, and America. And criticism cannot get rid of the fact that they continue to retain their hold of human hearts, — that they have won a place for themselves beside such books as Augustine's Confessions or Thomas a Kempis. Something great there must be about their author. First of all a Eegent in the University of Edinburgh, he was settled at Anwoth, a beautiful parish, far away on the shores of the Solway. He did not let his studies fall into abeyance in this severance from the centres of intel- lectual life. In 1637 there came from his seclusion his Excrcitationes Apologeticcc 'pro divina gratia, in which are discussed all the main points in the Arminian controversy, — the Immutability of the Divine Decrees, — the Scientia Media, a new Jesuit theory, — the Efficacy of Grace, — God's Determination of the Will, and the like. Eutherford's fame w^as at once established. He was made Professor of Divinity at St. Andrews, where for the next twenty years he Survey of the Fidel. 9 exercised an immense influence on the future ministry of our Church. He becomes now the leading theo- logical writer of his day in Scotland, ever ready to press into the very thick of controversy. His pen is immensely active. Of the same class as his Exercita- tiones is his De Proviclentiet, a larger and much more scholastic book. It deals with every question from which we now-a-days shrink back. Good Mr. Wodrow looked into it, and he seems- to have been terror- stricken. Over more than six hundred closely printed pages, bristling with references to Thomas, and Scotus, and Bradwardine, to the great Jesuit and Arminian writers, he debates as though in his very element : " What is the nature of God's permissive will ? " " Whether under God's permission sin comes neces- sarily about, by a necessity of consequence, though not by a causal bond ? " " Whether there is such a thing as Christian fate ? " " Wliether in the sins of men and devils God is the eigens jprincijjedis in such a way that He is free from all stain ? " — winding up with an excursus which contains questions that seem to carry you into very cloudland : " Is God the origin and cause of possibles and impossibles ? Is this possible something real ? " " Is there anything impossible save as it has its original impossibility from God ? " Eutherford was somewhat of a hero-worshipper, and his heroes were the schoolman Bradwardine (Magnus Bradwardine he always called him) and the Puritan Dr. Twiss. His choice of masters was not a happy one ; and he seems to have contracted from them a 10 Scottish Theology. certain scholastic artificiality. At the same time, it is impossible not to admire the marvellous keenness of his mind, and the alertness with which he flashes through that maze of logical distinctions, now crossing swords with Bellarmine, now striking hard at Suarez, now, as he thinks, laying Arminius low. I have sometimes fancied that his Latin goes on with a more vigorous and jubilant tread when the difficulties and intricacies are the greatest. Much more interesting than either the Exercitationes or the De Providentia, while passing to a large extent over the same ground, is the Examen Arminianismi, It contains his lectures at St. Andrews on that subject, and is, in fact, an excellent theological manual. But while the great debate between Calvinists and Arniin- ians formed the chief subject of Eutherford's doctrinal works, he did not confine himself to that. His visit to England, and no doubt also his large reading, brought him into contact with the mystical Antinomianism which in various forms had made its appearance since the Eeformation, and which had in a very plausible guise arisen recently across the border. The result was The Spiritual Antichrist, a strange, unarranged production, containing a survey of Antinomianism. This latter work gives us his views, and we may suppose the views of his time, on some of the points that came into keen discussion a century later. Then Eutherford was not less voluminous in his contributions to our ecclesiastical theology. The Survey of the Field. 1 1 Peacectble Plea for Presbytery; The Due Eight of Presbyteries ; The Divine Right of Church Government, — all from his fertile pen, contain the amplest exposi- tion and vindication of our old ecclesiastical principles. I do not say they are equal to some others, either in power or clearness ; but they sweep over a wider field than any. Most essential points which Gillespie has barely touched, Eutherford carefully considers ; as, for instance, the nature of the visible Church as such, and its constituent elements. Even in the Erastian con- troversy he is a necessary supplement to his great contemporary. It is something to me altogether amazing, the mass of thinking about Church questions you have in those writings. Confused they often are, over - subtle, but everywhere there are sparkles of suggestive thought, which indeed the writer, as though heedless about them, does not care to use. Nor did the St. Andrews professor confine himself to meta- physical, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical theology : at almost equal length he discussed the doctrine of the State. The principle of toleration was beginning to be broached in England, and in a modified shape to find acceptance there. Samuel Eutherford was alarmed, or rather, I should say, he was horrified, for he neither feared the face of man or argument. He rushed to the rescue of the good old view, as he thought it, in a work which bears the title, A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience. It is not so easy to find a theoretic ground for toleration ; and Eutherford has many plausible things to say against it. .With the 12 Scottish Tlicology. most perfect confidence, lie argues that it is alike against Scripture and common sense that you should have two religious side by side. It is outrageous ecclesiastic- ally, it is sinful civilly. He does not, however, take wdrat 1 might call the essentially persecuting ground. He does not hold that the magistrate is to punish religion as religion. Nay, he strongly maintains that the civil magistrate never aims at the conscience. The magistrate, he urges, does not send any one, w^h ether a heretic or a murderer, to the scaffold, wdth the idea of producing conversion or other spiritual result, but to strengthen the foundations of civil order. But if he gives so much power to the king, he is no lover of despotism withal : the king himself must be under law. To vindicate this great doctrine is the object of another book, the celebrated Lex Bex ; of which it has been said by one competent to judge, that it first clearly developed the constitutionalism which all men now accept. In addition to all the works I have mentioned, we have still a considerable list of a less controversial character, — The Covenant of Life ; The Trial and Triiim'ph of Faith; Lnflucnccs of the Life of Grace, partly scholastic, partly practical, with many of the author's finest thinojs in it ; the \o\vj, and sometimes very eloquent Christ Dying, and Drawing Sinners, unequal and discursive, but abounding in those gleams and coruscations their author never w^ants, and charac- terized by what I might call that daring, reckless affluence of language and metaphor which is another Survey of the Field. 1 3 of Eutlierford's peculiarities. Eutherford also took an active part — I fear I must say, too keen and bitter a part — in the Protester and Eesolutioner controversy, and had a hand in its literature. He disfigures his last book, in answer to a divine of another Church and country, by a partisan preface sadly wanting in the love of which he had been wont to speak so wondrously. It is not easy to find any one in Church history with whom to compare this remarkable man (thougli I have sometimes thought of Bernard of Clairvaux), a man of power, I may say of genius, fresh, bold, pene- trating, to whom no subject came amiss, teeming with intellectual energy, distinguished for his learning, but never cumbered by it, the greatest scholastic of our Presbyterian Church, and yet we are told, the plain and faithful preacher, the fieriest of Church leaders and the most devout of saints, equally at home among the tomes of Aquinas, and writing letters to a poor congregation. Altogether a sort of intellectual, theo- logical, religious prodigy ! Great defects he had assuredly. His intensity, both intellectual and spiritual, led him to extremes. He seems to have written currente ccdamo ; and in style and arrange- ment he greatly fails. But for all, he is one of our highest names. And it was not only his countrymen that thought thus of him ; he was twice over invited to occupy a chair in the Low Countries, whose univer- sities were still in their glory. The name you most naturally conjoin with Euther- 14 Scottish Theology. ford's is that of his younger contemporary, George Gillespie. He was hut a stripling when he entered the field of authorship, in his work on the English Popish Ceremonies. You do not wonder at the im- pression it made. With an entire self-composure, the youthful theologian debates the points at issue with the great writers opposed to him. The wdiole literature of the subject seems to be at his call. I do not sup- pose that from the pen of so young a man there has ever appeared in our country a work of more con- summate learning. The English Ceremonies was followed by other works. In London, Gillespie came into collision with the English Erastians. This led to his Nihil Rcspondes and his Male Auclis, to be reckoned among his best productions. They are brief ; and when he did not feel himself bound to spin out his arguments, Gillespie was always lively. In those tractates he takes up the grounds in the Erastian controversy on which all Scottish divines continued long to follow him. The London contests induced him to undertake a work on a much larger scale, and which he ushered into the world with one of those unfortunate titles which were then the fashion. Aaron s Bod Blossoming is his chef d'osuvre, and no doubt the chef d'osuvre of Scotch ecclesiastical theology. I need hardly mention, or at least say anything about, Gillespie's other books : his Exposition and Defence of our Presbyterian Church government, remarkable for its thoroughness and its moderation ; his Miscellanies, in which you have many Survey of the Field. 1 5 fine discussions, and now and again an elevated and thoughtful eloquence, but in which are also some of his least satisfactory efforts. Gillespie, like Eutherford, was all his days in the midst of strife ; but his works are not disfigured by the odium theologicum. His style is notable for the times, at least among Scotch writers. It is generally clear and nervous. There is no art, but there is often a terseness and vivacity very different from many of his contemporaries, though when he insists on giving twelve or twenty reasons against Mr. Prynne, he can hardly help becoming dull. " Great Mr. Gillespie " he was called for many a day, and not undeservedly. He died at the age of thirty-five. If he had been spared, he would have risen, no doubt, to still higher distinction in other fields of religious thought than the one he had almost exclusively cultivated. Even as it is, some have regarded him as the prince of our theologians. Baillie took some part in the theological contro- versies of the day, and his various works give proofs of his learning and his voluminous reading, if they are not so lively and interesting as his letters and memoirs. Dickson is always spoken of with high respect by his contemporaries. First of all minister at Irvine, where his labours were very largely blessed, he became afterwards successively Professor of Theology in Glas- f{ow and Edinburcjh. Various works came from his pen, the most notable of which theologically is his 16 Scottish Theology. Therccprntica, a treatise partly doctrinal and partly practical. But the true glory of Dickson was his devotion to biblical studies. He set his heart on a Scotch commentary on the Scriptures. His plan was to assign particular books to men competent for the work ; and to him w^e owe it that we have Ferguson on the Epistles, Hutchison on the Minor Prophets, on Job, and the Gospel of John, Durham on the Song and the book of Eevelation. Dickson put his own hand to the work. He published English notes on the Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews. His exposition of the Psalms is not un- known to Christian readers still ; and besides, w^e have from him annotations in Latin on the whole of the Epistles, which were first of all read to his students, and which, though brief, are sensible, and show a real exegetical tact. Nor are Dickson and his fellow-inter- preters to be despised. They want the scholarship of tb.e present day, though they were scholars. But if they wanted our scholarship, they were more than our equals in theology. Some think that a disadvantage ; I must disagree with them. If there be a theology in the Bible, — and the fact that theologies have always risen out of it, when men have been its earnest students, is sufficient proof of that, — it must be against all the laws of scientific progress, not to say common sense, that you should go to its interpretation without the aid of the best thought that has been already bestowed on it. You will find sometimes light from these old commentators, let us say of the theological Survey of tlu Field. 1 7 school, where " unprejudiced " scliolarship sees and says nothing. The true idea is surely that we use all the aids, — exegetical, theological, spiritual, and the aids of the past as well as the present. Among those who entered into Dickson's scheme I have mentioned Durham, well worthy of a further notice. No Scotchman of that age was more pro- foundly venerated. Keen partisans united in doing homage to the purity and elevation of his character. And he was a theologian as well as a good man. His commentaries are of the type of the period, always sen- sible, and always honestly endeavouring to reach the real meaning. In his large book on Eevelation, after the manner of Boyd in his commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, we have also several essays, some of them on the most important and difficult points in theology. With undoubted vigour and freshness, he discusses such questions as the Trinity and the proper object of worship, the nature and the extent of the merit of Christ's death, the intercession of Christ, the difference between common and savinsj crrace. Durham is the author of a book which once was very famous. For a hundred years and more you find it constantly referred to. Unhappily, as in so many other instances, it has a forbidding, or at all events not an attractive name. Yet I am not sure that any- where a better idea is to be obtained of our old ecclesi- asticism, and of its freedom to a large extent from the severity and rancorousness which have been so often attributed to it, than from the book On Scandal B 18 Scottish Theology. by this judicious man, who, with his thorough, search- ing, cumbrous intellect, reminds you not seldom of John Owen. No mean theologian was Dr. Strang, Principal of Glasgow College, author of the Dc voluntate et actioniUis Dei circa peccatum. It is a work of the same class as Eutherford's Dc Frovidentia, to which indeed it is in part a reply. Strang was not so high a Predestinarian as Piutherford, and ventured to assail some of the positions of the latter, as we shall have occasion to notice again. He suffered for his boldness. The case at last came before the Assembly, and in the end he had to withdraw from his office in the Glasgow College. Dr. Strang is the author also of an able and most learned defence of the Scriptures against the Church of Piome. There is none of these second Eeformation divines of whom, if God had spared him, and the times had been happier, more might have been hoped than James Wood, one of Paitherford's colleagues at St. Andrews. With the invasion of Cromwell's army there was an invasion also of Independency. With the Puritan Pailer a minister of the name of Lockyer came north, to win Scotland from her errors in Church government. The divine was not so success- ful as the soldier. However, he did his best. He strongly attacked Presbyterianism in a book bearing as usual a quaint title, and in its day Mr. Lockyer's Little Stone out of the Moimtain made some impression. Wood was selected to rej)y to it, and his reply is Survey of the Field. 19 of sterling worth. It is admirably clear. The writer reminds me more of the great man with whose name this lectureship is connected, than almost any of our old authors, in his power of putting the status q^umstionis. Evidently well read in the great theo- logians of the past ; knowing his subject thoroughly, and never for a moment letting the point in hand out of his sight or out of his grip, with a certain ring of power in his expressions, it seems to me that James Wood ranks among our ablest men. So far as I know, his only other publication is part of a pamphlet belonging to the sad controversy between the Protesters and the Eesolutioners. It discusses with the same clearness and thoroughness the ques- tion of Church authority, and is, in fact, perhaps the very best and most satisfactory discussion of that question we possess. Wood died a comparatively young man, not long after his illustrious colleague, with whom through these years of that most cala- mitous of all our controversies he had been in con- stant conflict. If either of those good and able men had dreamed what fruit was to be reaped from their animosities and divisions, would they not perhaps on both sides have been less extreme in the assertion of their respective views ? Patrick Gillespie, the Commonwealth Principal of Glasgow College, and the energetic leader of the Pro- testers, claims a more conspicuous place than is wont to be given him in Scottish theology. He is the author of a posthumous work on the Covenants. It 20 Scottish Theology. came from tlie press with a preface from John Owen, in which the great Puritan bears the following re- markable testimony : " I do freely declare my judg- ment, that for order, method, perspicuity in treating, and solidity of argument, the ensuing discourse exceedeth whatsoever single treatise I have seen written with the same design." Teaching the same doctrine as Eutherford and Dickson, Gillespie unfolds it with a richness and fulness peculiar to himself. There is little doubt his books were a quarry from which succeeding writers on the Covenants drew materials, even though in some points they diverged from Gillespie's views. Hugh Binning died a young man just entering on his short career, but he had already won a dis- tinguished place for himself in the theological litera- ture of his country. Some of his lectures on the Common Principles of our religion are in a high strain of thoughtful eloquence. They are not indeed theological discussions, and are perhaps a little dicta- torial ; but there can be no doubt that their author, as all accounts of him bear testimony, had great speculative powers, and might have risen to the very highest eminence as a theologian. He has literary gifts of a remarkable order for his times ; the first- fruits of a harvest which, kept back by the sad events of the times, were not reaped for more than a century. These are some of the more eminent theological names belonging to the Confessional period. I might Survey of the Field. 21 liave added others, whose works are either of less importance or of a more practical kind. ISTow what does all this amount to ? The first century of Presbyterianism in Scotland has been one of almost incessant struggle. During that period you can hardly say that it has had five-and-twenty years of quiet and peaceful ascendency. And yet the Scottish Church has produced several divines recognised as of the first class among continental Protestants : it can point to a respectable exegetical school from which came commentaries upon all the books of the JSTew Testament, and a considerable number of the books of the Old. Indeed that is not a full statement of the facts : for you have at least four commentaries on the Epistles to the Eomans and the Ephesians, and two in the case of some other portions of the Scrip- ture ; and when, after a long down-trampling, in 1638 Scottish Presbyterianism reclaimed and regained its rights, it was able to send representatives to the Westminster Assembly, who could hold their own in every respect, and perhaps more than their own, in one of the most venerable and learned Church Con- ventions of Christian history. The second century of Scottish Presbyterianism opens with a thorough change. The Church of 1638, rent and enfeebled by internal divisions, becomes the easy prey of its enemies ; and before it has so much as time to attempt the reorganization of its forces, it is lying in the dust, with the fetters 22 Scottish Theology. firm on its limbs. During the thirty years of suffering that follow, the Presbyterian ministers were to all intents and purposes outlaws, and they had no opportunity for the cultivation of theological literature. But even this period withal is not barren. Following the example of his grandfather, Charles the Second without delay got quit of the men whose talents and influence he feared by, first of all, proposing an oath which he knew they could not take, and then, on the refusal to take it, banish- ing them from Scotland. The exiles found a home and a welcome in Holland. The little circle of refugees included such men as Brown, Livingstone, M'Ward. How do they occupy themselves in their banishment ? Well, they do not forget their friends in Scotland. They are kept well informed of all that is taking place in their native land, and they are ever ready with their counsels and encouragements. M'Ward, in particular, keeps up a busy fire of letters and pamphlets. The Banders D islanded, or The Poor Mans Cup of Cold Water, or The Testimony against Paying the Cess, vigorously reasoned, and still more vigorously expressed, form a sort of fiery cross among the more resolute of the Scottish sufferers. In fact, the good man blew the flame till it scorched himself, and he vainly tried to allay it. To M'Ward also is attributed a more considerable book. The True Nonconformist, which, in answer to a Prelatic disputant, goes over the whole controversy between Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Survey of the Field, 2 3 John Livingstone, as every one knows, was the most popular preacher of his tirae. Once and again there had been with his preaching a resistless power. On one occasion it was said 500, on another 1000, souls had been converted by the word he spoke, — were, at any rate, profoundly moved. Very many will un- doubtedly think of such a man as another M' Briar of the romance. I have found him in the writings of last century quoted to illustrate covenanting fanaticism. For forty years the favourite preacher of Scottish Cove- nanters in their most intense, their most Calvinistic religious sera, will he not be entirely out of his element shut up at Eotterdam ? Can he have any literary tastes to fall back upon ? The truth is, Livingstone was a scholar such as we shall not readily fall in with in these days in the Church. He knew Hebrew and Chaldee, and something of Syriac. He had tried his hand, he says, at Arabic. He was sufficiently acquainted with French and Italian to be able to make use of French and Italian books. He could read the Bible, too, in Spanish. And now in his exile he desired to do something " whereby the knowledge of the only true God might be more plentifully had out of the original;" so he set himself first of all to revisino' the best Latin text of the Old Testament Scriptures, comparing it with the original Hebrew, intending to print the Hebrew and Latin side by side in separate columns. This work was actually done, and was ready for the press, when the friend died who had consented to bear the responsibility of giving it to 24 Scottish Theology. the world. What became of the fruit of Livingstone's scholarship I do not know ; but the fact of it may help to dispel some misconceptions, and give truer notions of Presbyterian learning in the seventeenth century. The works of Brown of Wamphray form almost a library in themselves. The Apologetical Relation, a historical defence of the Scottish Church, and exposi- tion and vindication of its principles, is well known, and has been recently reprinted. Among his works in English, besides several smaller ones, you have his Commentary 07i the Epistle to the Romans and his Life of Justification. The latter seems to me to occupy a place by itself in our theological literature. It is by far our most thorough exposition and discussion of the doctrine it handles ; and it is all the more to be prized because of the particular bearing it has on the new views which Baxter and others had begun to propa- gate, and which in some shape are ever returning upon ourselves. I need not say it is not distinguished for brevity ; but I have read it with more interest than I have been able to feel in some of the sjreat Ensrlish Puritans. The exiled minister of Wamphray was as copious in Latin as in English. He discusses in one Latin work with a foreign rationalist the principles of Scripture interpretation ; and in another, he makes an additional contribution to our ecclesiastical theo- logy in a reply to the Erastian principles asserted by Velthusius. Brown treads here chiefly in the footsteps of Gillespie and Ptutherford ; but his book has an Survey of the Field. 2 5 independent value, and takes its place beside Aaron's Rod and The Divine Right of Church Government. But the magnum opus of this divine is his De Causa Dei contra antisahbatarios. It is larger than all the published works of Dr. Cunningham put together. Beginning from a far distance, like a captain attacking a strong fortress manned by the most powerful guns, he toils slowly and steadily forwards, in a sort of zigzag way, withal overlooking no advantage, seizing and fortifying every point, that he may deliver his assault with success. The strength and resources of a modern author would be spent long ere this good man gets within range of his subject. Law m genere, morality from the will of God, God's natural rights, — such are some of the preliminaries. Even after he has entered fully into his subject, you have essays on cognate questions, which you will not find, so far as I know, so fully treated elsewhere : as, for instance, on Cameron's peculiar views ; whether in some sense, and in what sense, the law of works belongs to the Mosaic dispensation. And as to his main theme, I need only say that, with a fulness of argument and an amount of learning which belong to no other writer on the subject, he gives himself to the establishment of what I may call our Scottish doctrine of the Sabbath. In a word, De Causa belongs, among books, to the order of the mighties : it is great in length, great in learning, great in patient sifting of the subject, and in meeting of assertions and marshalUng of arguments. '26 Scottish Theology. I briefly notice, further, that we have also a home as well as a foreign literature of the persecution, such as Na;phtali, and emphatically I refer to the introduc- tory essay by Sir James Stewart, which has a remark- able vigour and grasp ; Forrester's Bedius Instriteiulitm ; The Plea for the Persecuted Ministers, hy Two of their number, — all of them works of uncommon vigour, and not meriting the comparative oblivion into which they have fallen. I can hardly imagine anything more distressing than that, after two hundred years have passed away, Scotclunen cannot all admire the noble heroism of our martyr days. Say that these ploughmen, and cottars, and serving - girls were under strauge delusions : they were at least honest, virtuous, God- fearing ; they thought they had God's voice in His word, pointing out to them the path of dut}^ ; and surely it was something to elevate and ennoble national life, that those humble people were ready to endure any amount of suffering, to meet death whether on scaffold or moorland, rather than stain their consciences even with the faint equivocation which might sometimes be offered as a loophole of escape. I for one shall say that I would feel the loss of the Wigton Martyrdom to be something like the loss of one of our greatest national memories— like the blotting of Bannockburn from our annals. I am not ashamed of the Cloud of Witnesses, or their testimonies. At the same time, in saying this I am not to be held as assenting to all you find in Lanark Survey of the Field. 2 7 and Sanquhar declarations. The mass of the people, even the leading Cameronian ministers, did not accord with all that was done in this way by those who so long held out against Stuart tyranny. If you would know what manner of men were these Scottish ministers, even the more extreme of them, men who stedfastly resisted all complicity with the indulgences, read The Plea for Persecuted Ministers, published in 1677, a work occupying no secondary place in our theology. I shall very rapidly glance over the period succeed- ing 1690. Taking all things into account, it is wonderful how the Eevolution Church was able to arrange itself so rapidly and so successfully as it did. It is every way remarkable that it found so many competent men to fill its pulpits, and even the chairs in tlie Divinity Halls. For instance, it finds in one who has lived quietly all through the days of suffering, a professor for Edinburgh, whom the ablest ministers who studied under him never speak of save as " the great " Mr. George Campbell. Perhaps it was only natural in the circumstances, that one of the first things the Presbyterian theologians should address themselves to, with Presbyterianism again in power, was the defence of their Church government against Episcopalian attacks. Their prin- cipal works in this department are Forrester's Answers to Honeyman, Scott, and Munro ; Ptule's Good Old 28 Scottish Theology. Way; 'Ld.\\(\QY'^ Ancient Bishops; The UpiscojKtl Con- troversy — The Querela Nazianzeni — The Cyprianus of Jamieson ; all of tliem learned and able books, all of them debating the point both on grounds of Scripture and ecclesiastical antiquity. Those of Jamieson claim a special notice. Their author was blind ; so far as appears, he was born blind. Yet he w^as a thorough scholar, and in particular was %vell acquainted both with the Latin and Greek Fathers. His works are of somewhat unequal merit, but as a whole they are among the best of their class, and contain an effective defence of Presbyterian Church government. Nor did Jamieson confine himself to the Episcopal controversy. We have a curious work from him which he entitles Spicilegia, and which is in reality notes on the connection between sacred and profane works, including under the latter the history of Egypt, Assyria, Scythia, Syria. It is full of discussions based on Herodotus, Justin, Diodorus, Strabo, and many other ancient writers, poetical as well as historical. I am not able to give any judgment as to its real merits, but it is evidently a work of learned research. It has been oftentimes remarked that there are deep connections between Eomanism and Eationalism : these connections have been eloquently pointed out by some of our living theologians. The blind Glasgow lecturer has a Latin work on the subject, which he calls Boina Bacoviana, and in which, though in perhaps too external a manner, he shows that many doctrinal accordances exist between Socinianism and the latest creed of the Survey of the Field. 2 9 false Church — that Tridentine Eomanism is indeed Socinian at heart. Passing over various names, I merely mention Halyburton, to whom I shall have to allude again ; M'Claren and Flint — the defenders of orthodoxy against Simpson, — whose works were once highly thought of; Sim^^son himself, an able man, of large reading, propably the ablest man of that semi- rationalistic type now beginning to appear in the Church, and whose defence of himself, in his first trial, is not unimportant in our theological history, as giving the Church freedom from one or two merely scholastic points, which few people now have any notion of, and which the Confession had really left untouched. There were evidently now several schools of religious thought in the Church, — the men who, like M'Claren, clung in every point to the traditional, the new evan- gelical, the evangelical-moderate, the semi-rationalistic, all, no doubt, shading off from and into one another. In all these parties there were men of first-rate talent, especially in the second. The persecutions had quick- ened and roused instead of depressing. Intellect was sharpened ; convictions were, among the best part of the people, deepened ; and there are evidences that religious life had come to have even more geniality and heartiness. And from the young men who came about this time to the Divinity Halls from the flower of Scottish homes, the Church got an infusion of new evangelical blood into its veins. The result was, that 30 Scottish Theology. many able men were found all over Scotland in the first half of last century, chiefly in the country parishes, and chiefly of the school and class I have particularly referred to. Among these I notice, first and foremost, Thomas Boston, whom I cannot but regard as one of the great figures in our theological history. Brave, honest, capable, forming his own opinions about everything, never letting a question lie by him unsettled; combining with the aspirations or ambitions of a strong and active intellect, a sense of responsibility which pressed him to work with his might; in spite of the most unfavourable circumstances, he won his way to theological eminence, and left his mark both on the theology and the religion of his country. There, in his lonely abode at Simprin, his mind teeming with arduous questions, he has no university or other library at his command, and his own is sufficiently scanty. "He hadZanchy," he says, " some one or two books more." It stung him to the quick when one of his neighbours one day peeped into the little book-press, and made some jeering allusion to its contents. And how he longed for books ! He has a parcel of them coming ; it is as the prospect of a fortune to him, he cannot take his mind from it, and God chastens him by the grievous tidings that the parcel is lost ! He bows submissively, yet hopes against hope, and the treasure after all reaches its destination. It was when thus, as we say, poorly equipped, he wrote the remarkable work called the Miscellanies, and wrought himself to some conclusions Survey of tlie Field. 31 that mark an sera, I believe, in our religious history. Sensitively conscientious in his pastoral duties, taking as much interest in his little flock as though they had been the whole world to him ; preaching sermons to shepherds of Ettrick, full of thought and of theology ; he kept hard at study, not intermitting even that summer when the new manse was building, and he had to betake himself to the stable and the barn. He was not, however, dreaming of authorship or of fame ; it was the sheer grand intellectual force of the man and his lofty conscientiousness which would not let him rest. He was greatly surprised when a friend suggested publishing, and offered security against any loss. So, gradually, the Church obtained the fruits of the Simprin and Ettrick studies — the Four- fold State; the Covenant of Grace; the Miscellanies; the Body of Divinity ; the Crook in the Lot, the Sermons which have exercised an influence second to none upon our religious thinking and our religious life. At Simprin he had mastered the French language, that he might have an entrance into French theological literature ; but he seems to have been yet unacquainted with Hebrew. At the time he came to Ettrick, he tells us, he borrowed a " piece of the Hebrew Bible containing the books of Samuel and Kings," and with that set himself to the study of the " Holy Tongue." After a while he bought for himself the whole Hebrew Scriptures. " This," he says, " was the happy year wherein I was first master of a Hebrew Bible." And 32 Scottish Theology. now lie " plied the Hebrew original close and with great delight." I need not tell at length how he ran the course of Hebrew scholarship till he became an enthusiast on the subject of Hebrew accentuation, and wanted to publish on it. The learned men in his own country gave him slight encouragement, but he had now devoted admirers who would not let a work of the Ettrick scholar fall out of sight. The manu- script was submitted to competent judges out of Scotland. An Englishman, Sir E. Ellis, sent it to Holland ; and you can think how the heart of the simple minister was gladdened, or rather, what battling experiences he had, when he read that the two learned Hebraists Schultens and Grenobius had examined what had been put into their hands, and gave as their judgment : " The author has given sur- prising instances of the usefulness of the accents to settle the meaning of the text ; and in the supposition that the rest of the book is equal to this sketch, it will, on the whole, be the best book that has been written on the subject." He was the best Hebrew scholar in Scotland, as he was the freshest and most powerful of Scottish living theologians. And I have been told by the most competent scholar of our country that he regards Boston's work as one of sterling value, and not yet out of date. I have somewhere read an interestiug account of Bishop Bull, as yet the poor curate or vicar, labouring unknown and unthought of in the mine of patristic literature, penning those works which have made him Survey of the Field. 3 3 illustrious. There, in the Ettrick forest, without fame or other expected reward to stimulate him, you have our Scottish counterpart, — shall I say not less striking, not less picturesque ? And Boston was not alone : he had several contemporaries not unfit to be placed beside him, — mostly country ministers. He had several in his own neighbourhood : Charles Gordon of Ashkirk, who became Professor of Hebrew at Aber- deen ; Wilson of Maxtou, a man, Boston assures us, of vast learning and great intellect ; Lauder, the author of the Ancient BisJioj^s ; Eiccalton of Hobkirk, the author of the Sohcr Enciuiry, in answer to Principal Haddow, of a remarkable but peculiar Treatise on the Christian Life, of a Commentary on the Galatians, and of various other w^ritings rather speculative than theo- logical. Boston mentions a number of his friends of like stamp with these. All the first five Seceders w^ere theologians and men of learning, — Fisher, Wilson, Moncrieff, Kalph and Ebeuezer Erskine, — of which they have all left indubitable proofs. There is ground for believing that all over Scotland, in the first half of last century, such men were not thinly sown. More of our Scottish ministers at that time could have written a theo- logical tractate in Latin on any of the Loci Communes than of ministers in the Church of Ensjland. There are two theologians I would like to mention ere I close my Lecture — M'Laurin, and Adam Gib the Antiburgher. When I turn from the evangelical theologians who precede him to the pages of the c 34 Scottish Theology. former, I am conscious of a vast change. He is beyond all doubt an earnest believer in the doctrines of grace, and substantially one with Eutherford and Brown ; yet he is evidently looking at all things from a changed point of view. I do not think his able discourses on Sin not chargeable on God could have been written by one of the old schoolmen. There is an underlying element of apologetic in what he writes. Still more striking to me is the literary culture wdiicli he disi^lays. The elaboration of the sermon on the Glory of the Cross is something quite foreign to the theologians of wdiom I have spoken, with the single exception, so far, of Binning. In Adam Gib it is altogether difierent. He is an ecclesiastic of the second Eeformation type. All its leading principles he had firmly grasped, or rather they had taken possession of him. A hard, dry man, fond of logic and formulas, he had an extraordinary intensity of character. He writes his covenant with God in the blood of his own veins. Though the world mocks, he dares to act strictly and sternly on the old Church doctrines. It would not be difficult to trace our own Church connection with the Antiburoher leader. o Yet even he, as we shall see, made some movement theologically from the past. Boston, M'Laurin, Gib, — they are all notable men. In Boston you have the cosmopolitan idea of Chris- tianity — "his deed of gift and grant to manhincl- sinners " — brought into a prominence which is not found in the older theologians, who were hampered by Survey of the Field. 3 5 some peculiar ideas tliey found it hard to put away about the method of God's forgiveness. In M'Laurin we see Christianity forming an alliance with modern culture and modern speculation, yet in such a way as to promise hopeful results. In Adam Gib, and those who think with him, is to be found, for a season, a place of refuge in Scotland for the Church views of the past, which brought into relation wdth altered circumstances — especially with new theories of civil government — led to or helped on ecclesiastical move- ments on very different lines from any dreamed of by their preservers. CHAPTER 11. PREDESTINATION AND PROVIDENCE. ■HEEE are some departments in which Scottish theology is unquestionably deficient. Eirst, it has made no contributions to the Trinitarian controversy, like those which have been made in England. There are good reasons for this deficiency. The works of Bull in defence of Trinitarian doctrine appeared partly during the martyr period of Scottish history, and partly during the time succeed- ing the Eevolution. But in the midst of one of the fieriest persecutions Church history records, — shut out from all the seats of learning ; not caring, even when living in quiet, to seek the honours of martyrdom ; finding it hard to earn a livelihood ; wrapt up in other and more pressing interests than those of distant con- troversies, — it could not be expected that Presbyterian ministers should be digging into patristic tomes, even had they possessed them, or writing books without a public to welcome and read them if they were written. Then it is not to be forgotten that the matter was greatly more pressing on the one side of the border than the other. As to the English Church, it might be said the battle was at the gates. When the 86 Fredestination and Providence. 37 Scottish Church had Trinitarian heresy to deal with in a comparatively mild form, its theologians found the work done; and they depended, in the well-known case of Professor Simpson, on the great English con- troversialists. It would be an utter mistake, however, to suppose that the Scottish divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had not the necessary equipment for the battle which the Anglicans fought so nobly and successfully. They were most thoroughly familiar with the Nicene theology, and adhered to it closely; and the great Christian writers of the first centuries, especi- ally the Latin ones, were their careful study. Boyd, and Eutherford, and Gillespie, and Brown, would have found themselves engaged in a perfectly congenial occupation, debating the doctrine of the Trinity, whether in its metaphysical or its historical aspects. It is, indeed, one of the notable differences between our older and our later theology, — the greater dependence of the former on the ancient Church. A theological work used to be regarded as incomplete without the witness-bearing of Augustine, and Hilary, and Chryso- stom, and Basil In some cases, the pages of these old Presbyterians groan under the weight of patristic quotations and references. English Churchmen have been generally supposed to find themselves specially at home in the Cyprianic age. Presbyterians did not regard the Church of that age as a pure one ; they thought many changes had taken place since apostolic days, and in their view these changes were corruptions, 38 Scottish Theology. not improvements ; but they, too, cultivated a close acquaintance with the writings of Cyprian and his time, and found in them, as they believed, arguments absolutely conclusive against modern Prelacy. From Calderwood downwards, for more than a hundred years, the Bishop of Carthage, with all his follies and aberrations, figures largely in their works both against Independents and Episcopalians. Augustine was natur- ally held in special veneration. In nearly every sort of question his opinions are brought forward. I have taken three w^orks of the first half of the seventeenth century, and counted the quotations from Augustine and Calvin respectively ; and I find that from the former the number is upwards of 350, and from the latter between 70 and 80. Our writers on ecclesi- astical theology leant greatly on Augustine's works against the Donatists, or at least drew support for the Church principles they enunciated from them. They did not ascribe any proper authority to the Fathers. They clearly and unhesitatingly pointed out their many blemishes, and how little claim they had to the place Eomish and semi-Eomish writers would ascribe to them ; but they had a real affection for the theologians of the early centuries, and were always disposed to render a respectful homage to their teachings. It is in the following terms that a Scottish divine of the most decided type speaks of the Council of Nice. I quote the words, as they may help to dispel some illusions which prevail in regard to Presbyterian narrowness and bigotry : " Whatever else amiss it may Predestination and Providence. 39 have decreed, who that candidly considers how great and, if I niight so speak, how spontaneous proved the consent of so many pastors and other persons of eminence summoned from so many parts of the world in the passing of the IS'icene symbol, — what bright luminaries of the Church these doctors were, and how many of them, in the defence of the common Christian cause, underwent the greatest sufferings, the greatest perils, — with what constancy they ever declared that the doctrine embraced by that symbol had descended in continuous and never interrupted course from the apostles themselves, — what was the exceeding gravity of the question agitated, the slightest error in which would assail the very vitals of Christianity, — what anxious care was taken that nothing should be put in it but what was contained in sacred Scripture, — what depth and firmness of root this creed has had in the minds of good men in every age and land, — and last, not least, with what steady faithfulness and fervour Christ's noblest athletes, who in the long array of ages have stood up against sin, nay, against the man of sin, resisting even to blood and death, have clung to it and doue it homage ; — who, I say, that lays these things to heart in all sincerity, need shrink from affirming that there well might be, in the case of such an assembly, a Divine Providence keeping it free from a lapse which must have been of so serious a character, and from the great crime of a most vile idolatry ? " I suppose you might search thousands of volumes of high Anglican divinity, and search in vain, — I do not say for such a 40 Scottish Tlicology. generous appreciation, — but for anything like a fair estimate of the Westminster Assembly or the Synod of Dort. Another department of theological literature in which we are behind our neighbours is that of Historical Apologetics. We want the kind of books of greater or less value which appeared in England in answer to the earlier assailants of the Bible. In volumes of sermons which have gone into oblivion, and in pam- phlets perhaps yet to be found in the great libraries, you will find, no doubt, a considerable amount of apolo- getics of a sort — proofs of the resurrection, discussions of the reasonableness of a divine revelation, answers to particular deistical objections ; but we have nothing like those English works on the evidences which, if they are now in some measure superseded, were so effective in their day. Various explanations may be given of this short- coming. Probably one is the comparatively unim- portant place our evangelical theologians used to attach to the historical argument. The Bible is its own evidence. The Spirit who miraculously gave it of old to prophets and apostles, now unveils it super- naturally to God's elect, and brings home the convic- tion of its divinity ; and it is only this faith that really makes it God's book to you. From this point of view you find the old divines even disposed, one might say, to look askance upon what we call the external evidences. Simpson was less out of the way on this point than on some others, but he gave great offence Predestination and Providence. 41 by his views. Says one of his ablest antagonists : " While men are dealt with by mere reason in divine matters, the others will not want plausible reasons, too, wherewith to defend themselves ; for reason, however true and clear, hath never that force to convince an adversary as arguments drawn from the Scriptures themselves. In proving the Scriptures to be the word of God by such proofs as found and beget a divine faith, the ultimate proof is drawn from the Scriptures themselves." Eeference is then made to the Confession of Faith, where the only proofs of the divinity of the Scriptures are drawn from the Scrip- tures themselves. You have the same view strongly put by Eutherford, and still more strongly by Haly- burton, in a remarkable discussion with which, I daresay, many of you are familiar. If the latter theologian does not refuse the external evidence, the whole tendency of his powerful and eloquent argu- mentation is to depreciate it. The apostles, he urges, never made use of " moral and rational considerations," but required their hearers to receive and believe God's word. As to the miracles, he says, "We are no other way sure of them than by the testimony of the word ; " and he seems to hold that the miracle-argument is a kind of vicious circle. As you see the sun, and do not reason yourself into a belief of his existence, so with a gracious intuition you must behold the divinity of the holy book. In its blessed pages there must rise up before you the vision, as it were, of the Heavenly Majesty, the Lord seated as on a throne 42 Scottish Theology. high and lifted up ; and its utterances must thus become to you voices issuing directly from the most excellent majesty. If it was said that at least you must go to the Scriptures with the belief of God as the ground, so to speak, of their possible authority — that, as we sometimes put it, you must have natural religion as the basis of revealed religion — this was denied. The Bible is the most glorious of God's works, and the highest proof of Deity. " He hath magnified His word above all His name." Besides, a mere rational faith in God does not afford a basis for the further faith of a supernatural revelation. " To be settled in the faith of a divinity," it was said, " it is not enough to assent to this truth merely upon grounds of reason, but you should assent to it upon grounds of faith : there are more clear marks and characters of a divinity stamped upon the Holy Scriptures than upon all the works of nature." I have a great sympathy with these views. I have never been able to see that in the theistic arc^ument I am excluded from reference to Bible miracles, whether of knowledge, or power, or morality. And I suppose none of us imao^ines that mere lo^ic will aive a slight of Christ, or take a man into the kingdom, any more than the demonstration of the sun's existence will enable a man to see. A supernatural intuition, what some of the Marrow divines called " a seeing persua- sion," is connected with all vital faith. But, at the same time, I do not think the old divines gave that place to the external, or, as they said, the rational Predestination and Providence. 43 evidences which they claim, and which they have in the word. I have sometimes thought that it was one of the chief w^ants of the religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that along with its magnificent conception of the doctrines of salvation, and its vivid spiritual faith in them, it had not what men are striving after in these days — a strong historical con- viction resting on strictly historical grounds. So, when the direct vision grew^, as it were, dim and dimmer, there came that sudden tremendous collapse into unbelief. To supply that defect, as I have said, we are struggling now. Already the battle has been sometimes terrible,- and it may be yet more terrible ; but let us not fear. Who shall estimate the stupendous power of a faith like that of apostolic days — a faith in which we have the spiritual and the historic combined ? We can only faintly dream of the energy with which the Church, now no longer a small community, but a powerful kingdom, would have told upon mankind, if there had been then that kind of realization which is given by historical convictions of Christian facts, and a spiritual and saving conviction of Christian doctrine — both gifts of the Holy Spirit. Suppose you had had, for example, the doctrinal Christ of the seventeenth century in the second, and the historical Christ of the second century in the seventeenth ! But this by the v/ay. These being the views of our divines, you see how naturally they kept out of a line of authorship which it might not be difficult to show was as naturally followed elsewhere. 44 Scottish TJicology. Perhaps there is a further explanation of the theo- logical deficiency I refer to, in the peculiar experience of many of our distinguished men. Many of them had sore strno-crles with unbelief. Tliis was the case CO with Eobert Bruce, one of the most commanding figures in our religious history, about whose words there was a certain hingly power, we are told, as though they came direct out from the sanctuary. " It is a great thing," he was wont to say, " to believe in God." I have no doubt what that meant. Eutherford, in speak- ing of the atheistic doubts with which good men are sometimes assailed, adds in sympathetic parenthesis, " Expertus Loquor" The youthful Eenwick describes his immeasurable agony in that soul-tempest which threatened to engulf all his dearest convictions and hopes. Being in the fields, and looking to the moun- tains, he said, " If these were all devouring furnaces of burning limestone, I would be content to go through them, if so be that thereby I could be assured that there is a God." Hogg of Carnock, in his autobio- graphy, narrates how, being led off his feet by Cartesian speculations, he was drawn as by a spell to make him- self familiar with all that could be said against religion, and fell headlong for a time into a sort of scepticism. You have the same thing in Halyburton, whose case is more generally known. " The alternative," says a great writer, speaking of the present time, " the only alter- native now in front of the cultivated branches of the human family, is this, Christianity or Atheism. All lines of thought are visibly tending to this point ; all Fredestination and Providence. 45 men who are well-informed, and whose habits of thoudit are unshackled, have long ago come to see this, or they are coming to see it, or are convulsively struggling to hold themselves off from it." This was very much the alternative of Scotch experience generations ago ; the result partly of national peculiarity, and partly of the soul intensity which belongs to Puritanism, and which craves strong convictions, and will not be content without them. Well, in none of these cases does deliverance seem to have come from " external evi- dence," at least to any great extent, but mainly through direct manifestation of Christian truths to the soul. The Bible was its own revealer. And yet, though deficient in historical apologetics, we have an Apologetics of our own. To pass over some works of lesser note, we have Haly burton's vigorous and thoughtful reply to the English deists. I think Professor Shedd has hardly done justice to it. He seems, in fact, to have merely glanced at the re- marks on Lord Herbert. But Halyburton's argument is certainly not less valid than, and indeed very much resembles, that of Conybeare, to whom Shedd renders such ample commendation. Halyburton puts the matter thus : Admit that there is a natural revelation of God, and a considerable measure of light to be at- tained from nature ; yet, after all, the knowledge you thus get of the Divine Being is imperfect and vague, far too va£jue ever to come close to men's hearts : it affords you no system of worship, without which religion will be of little avail to the mass of mankind ; 46 Scottish Tlieology. it leaves you in the dark as to the meaning of sin ; it gives no assurance that sin will of course be forgiven ; it leaves an awful uncertainty about the future ; it has not, apart from Christianity, even under the highest culture, attained to anything like a satisfactory moral- ity ; it has entirely failed to supply a motive power ; in a word, your natural religion leaves you dark, dreary, feeble against temptation, unsatisfied, sufficient to draw from you the cry, " Who will show us any good ? " but, if there be a God, affording no response. Bible Chris- tianity is your only resting-place. Then, too, we have the thoughtful treatise of M'Laurin upon prophecy. Without entering upon these minutise of interpretation, which are so apt to afford hiding-places for a skilful unbelief, he takes the great general fact that the Old Testament all through is travailing in birth of a great coming Deliverer of the Jewish race — the Priest, the King, the Teacher of the nations ; and he asks whether, apart altogether from the credibility of the New Testa- ment records, the fulfilment is not patent to the eyes of all men in the Christendom in which we live. At a later period, too, we have Dr. Campbell of Aberdeen, whose reply to Hume, I imagine, is not unworthy of comparison, in its own way, with any modern work of the same class. May I not claim, too, for the Scottish Church, the great Apologetical Philosophy of modern times ? for I suppose I do not err in thus characterizing the philo- sophy of the so-called Scottish school. Sir W. Hamilton thinks that Professor Gershom Carmichael of Glasgow Predestination and Providence. 47 may, perhaps, be regarded as the founder of that philo- sophy, or at least its herald. He was the son of one of the outed ministers of the Persecution. Dr. Eeid himself was a Scotch Presbyterian minister, and came of a line of Presbyterian ministers. Nor do I believe this to be a mere accidental connection between our Church and our philosophy. In a curious controversy connected with the Kilsyth and Cambu slang revivals, some of whose peculiar manifestations Mr. Pobe tried to explain or vindicate by a philosophic theory, Ealph Erskine and Fisher had already maintained and ex- plained, just as Pteid does, the trustworthiness of the senses, and opposed the idea of image -pterception. The doctrine of primitive and fundamental beliefs was also traditional among our divines. Halyburton, for instance, speaking with reference to Locke, whom he seems disposed to interpret in the more spiritual way, had stated it, I think quite clearly, in the beginning of the century. Scotch theologians even held the law written in the heart to be a natural revelation, from which there developed themselves, with the develop- ment of the human soul, the great principles of morality and religion. The law of nature and nations is no less the subject of frequent discussion. One cannot but sometimes doubt whether the account which the histories of philosophy give you of the real author- ship of certain views is to be depended on. These authors have seldom had much acquaintance, I believe, with theologians. If they had, probably not a few of their statements and conclusions would have been 48 Scottish Theology. modified. Nowhere is Bishop Butler lield in higher honour, I believe, than in Scotland ; and his ethical philosophy we all receive. But when you read of that tribunal within all men, of which our writers so often speak, and think of their subtle discussions concerning the authority of that awful power, and how the theo- logical moralists, as they are called, are wont to hold that even an erring conscience ligat non ohligat, you question with yourself whether the author of the Analogy is the great discoverer in this matter that men say he is. Sir J. Mackintosh notices in his dissertation that Cudworth, as well as many who succeeded him, confounded the apprehension of the difference between right and wrong, with the practical authority which these important conceptions exercised over our volun- tary actions. The theologians of the seventeenth century knew, I think, the distinction well : " Lex naturalis," says Brown, " est signum voluntatis Dei ; lumen naturale est nostra illius signi intellectio." But if in some things we are deficient, as I attempted to show in my last Lecture, — and it would be folly to set oui'selves in comparison with other Churches greatly larger, and with opportunities which Scotland has never possessed, — we have a not inconsiderable liter- ature both in doctrinal and ecclesiastical theology. And what I propose to do is to give a sort of ex- position of Scottish doctrine on some of the great points included in both these departments of theology, in so far as they have been the subject of discussion Predestination and Providence. 49 in the past history of our Church. In my concluding Lecture I shall consider some of the objections made to Scottish religion and religious life. First of all, let us take the great subjects which the old theologians used to discuss under the heads of Be Prcdestinatione and De Providentia, and which since the days of Augustine have had such a charm for the Churches of the West. To these subjects the Scottish divines devoted them- selves most strenuously. Knox's principal theological work is on Predestination. The lonoest and most o elaborate of Boyd's discussions is on the same subject. In his own way, Eollock has cultivated the same field ; so, as we have seen, have Eutherford and many others. The type of our Calvinism varies during these first two centuries of our Church historv, risincj to a high Supralapsarianism in the great period of the second Eeformation, and gradually descending therefrom, till in some points the strongest Calvinists of the latter period might seem considerably to diverge, at least in their way of putting many questions, from their pre- decessors. There is a chanore, thouoh not in the doctrine, yet in the philosophy of the doctrine. " It is asked," says Eutherford, " whether sin is pro- perly a means of the divine glory ; and if so, whether in itself gv per accidens ? 1 reply that it is a means, and a means in itself, and not per aceidens, as Arminius will have it. Tor sin, just in that respect that it is so utterly bad in genere mali, is the better and fitter means in genere honi, so far as it is useful and serviceable." 50 Scottish Theology. " The permission of the first sin," he teaches, " is the common effect of election and of reprobation. God intends in the order of nature, before He creates us, the glory of His justice through the efficacious per- mission of sin, and the glory of His mercy in the gift of repentance. "Whoever wishes the end, wishes, too, the means both near and remote, though it is not necessary that he desires the end and the means with the same love and the same complacency ; sufficient it is in this matter that God, with an effective practical complacency in it, wills the declaration of His vindict- ive justice. There is no need for Him willing with the same effective complacency all the means to that end ; enough that He wills sin with a complacency permissive, which best consists with the moral dislike of the offence. So, when you desire health as the end with an effective complacency, you do not require to desire in the same way the section of your vein ; it is enough that you wish the latter, not for its own sake, but for something else, and that you allow the surgeon to cut it." " Sin — that is God's mean to an end that He could not otherwise accomplish." God, as he puts it in substance, desires to have the glory of His justice and His mercy manifested. But that is impossible without the proper objects — without sinners to save, and sinners to punish. Accordingly He must have sin, in order that mercy and justice may have their appro- priate objects, and be magnified in their action towards it. The creation and the fall do not, as in the Sublapsarian idea, belong to one line or order of things having ends Predestination and Providence. 51 of its own, and salvation to another order of thing^s, in which you have supernatural grace interposing and working out its decrees of righteousness and grace upon the sinful mass ; but the order of creation, which has properly nothing distinct or independent in its idea, is only a means to a higher end, and sin is but the fitting and necessary step in its outworking. There is a great deal in the way of looking at things in some of the old Scottish writers, which is evidently based upon these views, even when you may not have them stated in so many words. The " covenant of works " is a poor and transitory thing : all about it indicates that it is set up only to be taken down ; it is no more than the scaffolding for the erection of a nobler structure. Even at a later period, when the sterner features of our theology were somewhat mitigated, you have one of the ablest writers of his time, famous as a defender of the Marrow doctrine, maintaining in a remarkable dissertation on the Christian life, that the main object of creating and putting Adam for a little while into Paradise, was to afford a type or picture of the greater who was to come ; while as to his fall, " his loss in it was so far from being matter of regret either to himself or his posterity, that it was incomparably better for both, than if, by his standing, he and all his posterity had been confined to that low state. For far higher ends was man designed." ]^ow, even siij)pose there were truth in these views, as there is a side of truth in them, one would have desired something more of reverent restraint in the way in which they are given 52 Scottish Tlicology. forth. Brown of Wamphray explains the point of view from which he and his school regarded these high questions : " In respect of God's sovereignty, and truly and in itself considered, God may do to His creatures whatsoever He wills, without any even the least kind of injury ; for injury supposes some right or debt in the case of the person to whom the injury is done. But in the creature, viewed in his relation to God as his Creator and absolute Lord, no right, no due exists ; therefore no injury here is possible. Wherefore, though He should inflict suffering on the creature, all unde- serving. He would do him no injury ; for wdiere there is no pis, no injuria can have any place. Cannot God, if He will, annihilate His creatures ? And if He can annihilate, can He not put them to death ? And if He can put tliem to death, cannot He do this in a longer or a shorter time ? And if He can do this, cannot He do it with some degree of pain ; and if with some degree, why not with a greater ? " These men were not cold and heartless speculators. They were teeming, many of them, with Christian sympathies and kindnesses. But they had learned to lose themselves so utterly before the glorious majesty of the Eternal, that they shrank from everything that had even the appearance of a right . or a claim upon Him from the creature as destructive of His absolute independence — in fact, taking away His crown. You have, besides, in this extreme phase of our theology, a protest against Arminianism, which — I do not say in respect of individuals, but as a system — does tend to Predestination and Providence. 53 bring down the Almighty from His throne of sovereignty, and make Him simply the best and most excellent of beings. The Church of the Eeformation, too, was not yet across its Jordan, and enemies were mustering everywhere, and bright hopes had been sadly clouded ; and, shall I say ? she felt her need of an all-resistless arm, of an all-subduing sovereignty. Yet it strikes one often painfully, the feebleness wdth which the seventeenth century felt many of these dread mysteries which now so often cast their gloom on good men's souls. How easy an affair it seemed then to let sin and suffer- ing come in and act their part in God's universe ! As I have said, however, there came gradually a change. Good men saw that they could hold all the doctrines of grace without placing them on such theoretic founda- tions. They spoke much more of the nature of God, and of His actions as determined thereby, in perfect consistency with His holy freedom. After all, we are not to suppose that the holders of these views had any idea of making God the author of sin. They carefully explain that, while sin came about infallibly under God's permissive decree. He was not directly or immediately efficient in its pro- duction. But this permission was, as they expressed it, not an otiose permission ; it was a permission indirectly, yet infallibly fruitful. The Arminian per- mission, which merely, as it were, left the field open, is the theme of much contemptuous abuse. Boyd of Trochrigg illustrates the matter thus : " I plant a tree in a sunny spot, and such a tree as might in the 54 Scottish Tlieology. course of time strike deep its roots, and bear fruit for many a year, if 1 choose to shelter it with hedges from the violence of winds, or to restrain the assault of the tempests. Well, though I am well aware of this, yet it seems good to me not to encircle it with the shelter- ing hedge, or to keep off the fierce storm -blast ; and the result is, that the tree is straightway uprooted. I am not the cause of the overthrow, merely because I could have prevented it, but the winds themselves are. I am not to be regarded as the cause of the catastrophe, though I foresaw it, and willed it to the extent of permitting it to come about, by not preventing when prevention was in my power ; and both because I was not bound to do it, as under no obligation, and because for good reasons I had made u]3 my mind to allow this particular upshot of affairs. In like manner did God with Adam, letting temptation try him, and making it abundantly manifest what the creature is capable of when without the assistance and regimen of the Creator. Yet is God in no sense to be called the cause of Adam's la^^se, since, instead of bringing him into it. He plied his fears, He warned and threatened him ; and since He neither inclined him to evil, nor put into him any sinful longing, nay, not so much as took from him any gift conferred in his creation ; but only, as it seemed good to Him, denied or did not bestow the confirming grace which Adam had no right to claim." Something more positive it might seem than this is implied in the way in which Eutherford and his school were wont to put it. Adam, it was tanght, had high Fredestination and Providence. 55 endowments. In respect of knowledge, and holiness, and wisdom, lie was adequate, with the divine assistance, to the task imposed on him. Did he refuse that assist- ance ? Did he thrust it away from him ? ISTo, God took it from him, and he fell as a stone falls from the hand that lets it go from the house-top or from the sheer precipice. Perhaps the doctrine looked severe ; and though the ar^rument was at hand that God's influence was not due to our first parent, it was but a sort of mitigating or apologetic explanation that was offered. God's act was to all intents a punishment, a punish- ment for the virtual casting away of help divine. Adam made no objections about losing the all-precious aid — made no effort to retain it ; nay, in the very act of the divine withdrawing, he was consentient thereto ; and the prescience of this made him virtually in God's eyes guilty before the act, and so more than justified the divine procedure. This view was strongly attacked by Dr. Strang, Principal of Glasgow College, who was at least as pronounced a Sublapsarian as Ptutherford was the opposite ; and the Church was agitated about the metaphysics of the abstrusest of questions. — It perhaps indicates the prevalence of very high doctrine, that Strang had to give up his chair. There were various points named in the discussion, all more or less connected with what was called physicus concur sus ; one of the most generally accepted doctrines of other days, and one which has a great place in Scottish theology for more than two hundred years. The essence of God, it was taught, was every- 56 Scottish Theology. where, and everywhere directly and immediately ener- getic. In ref^ard to the material world, all motion and action in it spring immediately from God, and are sustained by His immediate influence. Tire is a real entity distinct from God, but it has only its active power through an immediate divine j9?'t'c?«?'5?^s and concursus. So, in the miracle of the Hebrew children, you have not an arrest, as it were, upon the indwelling powers of the natural agent, but the non-action of the power ordinarily connected with it by the withholding of the energy ordinarily given. In no vague or distant sense the Almighty shines in the sun, breathes in the life, brings gales of spring, refreshes in the summer dew or the summer shower, utters His voice in the rolling thunders. The idea of a miglity mechanism kept agoing by inherent laws and forces under a primal impulse, and having only a sort of general preservation, was utterly rejected. " No part of matter has any intrinsic power for producing any effect inde- pendently of God's working in and by it." Second causes are not properly causes, even subordinate, having in some sense a communicated and indwelling causal energy ; they are, at most, the Great Worker's tools, which He uses directly, according to a well-established order of His own. In every case God is not merely the cause supreme, but the cause immediate — more immediate, it was said, than the natural agents along with which He works. As we hold in spiritual things, the word is ineffectual without the application of it by the Holy Ghost ; so fire burns, and the sun gives light, Predestination and Providence. 67 and the shower refreshes in every particular case by a particular application of the same Spirit, as the Spirit, so to speak, not of grace, but of creation ; or, as actu- ating grace is needed as well as habitual, so actuating divine power is needed in the case of the material agent to make it physically effective. And just as, at my willing, my hand or my foot moves, my eye opens and shuts, my tongue articulates, so, by direct action of the divine will, every separate element is put in action — nature frowns or smiles, gives tokens of ap- proving love, or warnings of divine displeasure. Nor did this mean wilfulness, or caprice, or disorder. How could this be, when the Best and the Wisest was the agent, when He was in every instance only carrying out with an unfailing irresistibility His eternal pur- poses ? One of our w^orthies tells us how once in his straits he sought of God, as a sign of his prayer's acceptance, that — if the thing might be — a wind-gust should pass over and bend down the bushes among which he wrestled. Well, that was not a usual thing, and no theologian of the Scottish type ever held that he should ground his faith or his action save on the word of the Most High. But he had no idea of breaking the eternal order, and no idea of success in his petition, on the ground that God was capricious and mutable. He simply believed that all w^as in the hands of the Great Sovereign, and that without Him " not a sparrow falleth to the ground." We learn from some of the best and ablest of these days, what, as we now speak, was their view of prayer : 58 Scottish Theology. " Preces nostrse," says Eutherford, " media sunt adim- plendaB Dei voluntatis." " Our fervent supplications," says a later writer, " as these are a due homage to the universal Lord, so they are among the means He has appointed and brings about, through which His ends are gained." But these i^recursus and concursits did not only extend to the material world ; they applied to all things and all events. All being was good, for all being came from the good Being. And so far as the mere being in any sinful act was concerned, there was no reason why it should be disconnected from Him who is its source. In truth, it could not be dis- connected from Him, as by Him created, and by Him continuously created, and by Him having all its action and existence. Take the first sin, for instance, in its essence or being, apart from moral law forbidding : there is nothing but what is good in the act of the will willing, and the act of the hand going forth to pluck an apple from a tree. Well, the willing and the acting, as mere entities, are directly the product of the Creator, ever Creator of all being. But thus it happens, that as God efficiently and infallibly and inscrutably brings about an event entitively good, and not to Him forbidden, for He is ex leg., an event is presently and freely brought about which is sin on man's part, because of the law under which he lies, and which under highest penalties enjoins him not to take or touch. It is as though there were two worlds, and to both of them man beloncjs, and in both he acts in every act : in the one, as a mere entity Predestination and Providence. 59 under divine causality ; in the other, as a moral being under law : and the same act is in one world good, and in another evil. " God," it was said, " is the first cause of the sinful act in linea physica, but is not in any way the cause of the evil." It is urgently ex- plained that in this physical predetermination, though it is de facto sin, there is, properly speaking, no will- necessitation : mysteriously and transcendentally the will of man concurs, and you liave a conspiratio rather than a neccssitatio. " By the predestination of God, will is not prevented or lost. And though we freely confess that we are not in the least able to explain how it is the divine predetermination and the deter- mination of tlie created will conspire towards one and the same act, yet, at the same time, we must not admit that the created will is the mistress and queen of divine concourses and all free acts." But not to dwell further on a subject so abstruse, let me only notice that the whole argument involves a peculiar theory of sin. If God is efficient in all entitive acts about sin, as about all besides, but is not efficient in the production of sin, then it follows that sin must be thought of as not an entitive act. This was the theory of sin universally held. It sprung out of Augustine's fertile brain, in his intense reaction from Manichsean dualism. It was still more fully developed by the schoolmen, and at least in the Cal- vinistic churches of the Eeformation seems to have been universally received. This doctrine of sin as a nonentity, a nothing, was regarded as fundamental. 60 Scottish Theology. If it was something real, an entity, then it came into existence either without God or by God, — in the former case overthrowing God's omnipotence, in the latter case His holiness. " Admit that sin is an entity," said Eutherford, in his daring way, " and you destroy the idea of Deity." But if sin is mere privation, the nothing of the moral world, then the Most High is still alone Creator and Lord of all, and the fall a sort of 2')e^niitted mornl self-annihilation on the part of man. ]S"ow in some respects there is in this view of being something that is very noble : — all being simply in itself is good, has something in it of Him from whom it comes, some ray of His glory, some gleam of His excellence. The notion seems to have got abroad that Calvinism has a sort of spite at nature. I have seen a statement to that effect by one of our modern philosophers. You see how baseless it is. Why, nature's sanctity lies at the very foundation of all the old Augustinian speculation. But yet you cannot avoid the feeling that, after all, you have here only a line-spun theory. It is something out of the line and scope of the Bible. The moral view of sin gives way to the metaphysical. If, as has been said, the meaning is, that sin is not a separate substance, the same thing applies to good inhering in something else as well as sin. Besides, if it be a nonentity, it is a nonentity of active antagonism to the true Being. That wliich the holy book describes as the fountain of all human woe and degradation, the object of God's infinite displeasure and detestation, the enemy against Predestination and Providence. 61 which He summons us to unceasing struggle, in the power of which there is awakened in the human spirit such an intense and virulent hatred of Jehovah's character and laws, — which has all the action in it of the real and positive, — it does not seem natural to theorize away into mere negativeness or nothingness. In any way of it, there can be no doubt of the grasp which this view of sin had once of the Scottish theological mind. Boyd, and Strang, and Eutherford, all adopt it, the last asserting it again and again with endless illustration and almost passionate vehemence. At a later period it is still the same, Webster and M'Laren stand up for it in an age of change and off-turning from the old paths. Strongly the early Secession theologians clung to it : you find it in such a comparatively popular book as the Exijlanaiion of the AssemUijs Catechism, by Fisher. The one of all our Scottish divines the least scholastic, who never came across a scholastic distinction but he seemed to feel that he was in the presence of an enemy, Dr. Chalmers, has accepted the nonentitive conception of sin, and, I might say, in its least satisfactory shape ; perhaps drawn to it by his admiration of Edwards, and its congruity with his necessitarian views. It has been debated in our day, whether there is perfect consistency between our old Calvinism and the modern necessitarianism, which Calvinism has shown a tendency to appropriate as its philosophy. I shall not go into that difficult subject. I may merely say, that I think that, so to speak, on one side of it, the 62 Scottish Tlicology. Divine causal energy comes more sharply out in the earlier than in the later doctrine, and that yet on another side there seems to be more ascribed to the unfallen human will — some kind of self-determination. But the old, while still firmly held, and the new in some of its earlier forms, actually came once or twice into collision, near enough to get a look of each other, but there was certainly no falling into each other's arms. Professor Simpson seems to have been a philo- sophic necessitarian. He denied the time-honoured doctrine of the divine concursus. Acknowledging God's absolute dominion over all the free actions of men, he somewhat contemptuously expresses his wish that none may make jest of the notion that God's pro- vidence can be effective of the entity, and only per- missive of the evil, since there cannot ever be the former without the latter. His own view he states as follows : " God may determine infallibly all the actions of reasonable creatures that are not above their natural power, by placing them in such circumstances by which they have a certain series or chain of motives laid before them, by which they may infallibly yet freely produce such a series of actions as He has decreed." This, he thinks, will be sufficiently availing in the case of all sinful action, and in the case of men in their ordinary civil relations. With respect to graver actions, however, it is different. There you need an omni- potent first grace, and continual influence thereafter. It seems a mild enough type of necessitarian doctrine ; but it w\as made part of the libel against him. It was Predestination and Providence. 63 asserted that this doctrine made God's dominion over men's actions indirect, and so not full and absolute, — His providence objective and external, instead of im- mediate and internal ; while as for the infallibility of result, that did not alter the abstract nature of the divine action, — it was but another form of the Scientia Media, — it destroyed one great branch of the Spirit's economy, that of His common influences upon men ; — to say that men never do actions morally good, but when motives suitable to them are applied, was to bring in a starlike necessity, — deny a particular influ- ence, as Professor Simpson does ; and it is plain that we depend upon God in reference to our actings, no otherwise than as to our being, when once these are given, — but it is ridiculous to aver that aught which has a physical entity should not be dependent for its existence on the immediate operation of God. The feeling evidently was, that this new theory of motive causes removed God away into the distance, and tended to destroy that near dependence and com- munion which good men felt to be their life. A supreme necessity they all believed in — the eternal decree dominated all ; but that necessity was con- nected with the presence and immediate action of a living person, of a holy will ; and they felt as though this were a necessity of a nobler sort, difl'erent in kind from that chain or series of second causes. At a later period we find the old and the new brought into contact in one of the Seceding Churches, — the one which had been most conservative of the 64 Scottish Theology. religious feelings and opinions of the past. An Anti- burgher preacher adopted the views developed in the essay of Lord Karnes. He was censured. Deep in Kutherford and Brown, the Seceder theologian Adam Gib took in hand to justify the proceedings of his Church in an attack upon Lord Karnes's work, which perhaps the philosophers laughed at, but which is not without its interest theologically. Gib undoubtedly mistakes some points of the necessitarian argument, and his argument against Lord Kames would not apply against other upholders of the system ; but his objections, as offered by a competent Calvinistic divine of the old school, are noteworthy. The same objec- tions which were made in Simpson's case are sub- stantially repeated. " Into the constitution of things are put certain imaginary powers and qualities," in- cluding " the continued interposal of God's efficacious wdll ; " that is to say, " that all human actions proceed in a fixed and necessary train ; " " that, comparing together the moral and the material world, everything is as much the result of established laws in the one as in the other ; " these " destroy accountableness to God." Lord Kames, in one of the editions of his essay, had spoken about a delusive source of liberty, — evidently, said Gib, a happy lapse ; there you have the real char- acter of the scheme admitted. And Gib will not give up his point. He will not listen to what is said about the dispositions of man being the real object of praise and blame, apart from any consideration from whence they come. In reality, however, it comes out that he is Predestination and Providence. 65 substantially a necessitarian of the Edwards school in regard to the nature of freedom and the action of motives. The real offence is, that you have a neces- sity of nature rather than a necessity of God. " The Essayist teaches," he says, " that universal necessity is the true system of nature, the real plan of the uni- verse ; and this he teaches concerning a necessity which he supposes to be in the nature and constitu- tion of things. But we may justly affirm the very reverse : that according to the constitution of things abstracting from the continual prevalence and inter- position of the divine will and power, universal liberty and contingency is the true system of nature, the real plan of the universe." That is to say, God, not law, is the principle of order in the universe. God's living power is the real thing that binds, and moves, and changes. You cannot think or will, motives cannot do their part, without His immanent energy. The feeling vs^as evidently, You are going to put us out of imme- diate relation to the Highest ; you are going to turn many of the Bible's most blessed words into metaphors. In nature and providence, as we think, we are in the presence of the Divine Shechinah ; in this new system of things the glory is, as it w^ere, to be taken away, or have the veil of distance put on it. We will not have this fatalism of second causes. We must have Him who can rule the nature He has made to all His ends, and yet leave us free. Now, was there nothing in this representation of the matter ? Has there been no tendency in the direction which these good men 66 Scottish Tlicology. feared ? Did they without cause object to the sub- stitution of such phrases as motives and moral powers and the like, for common grace and common influ- ences ? Do men pray with the same faith, under the modern idea of the world's order, as they did two hundred years ago? Some form oi i\\Q concur sus w^q must hold. The " Creatio continuata " even Edwards clung to. Be it that sometimes they went too far in their theories, let us not forget that it sprang from their profound homage to the Supreme Power, their desire to keep all His glories unstained, and that all through their speculation the cry of their inmost soul was after the living God of holiness and might and love — God in Jesus. CHAPTER III. THE ATONEMENT. OMIT many questions often discussed by the Scotch theologians. There is not room for all in this course of Lectures. And without further introduction, I go on to-day to give some account of the views and discussions of Scotch theologians in regard to the necessity, the nature, and the extent of redemption. I. First of all, in regard to the necessity of atone- ment — of satisfaction to the divine justice. It has been strikingly shown, in the case of the Church of Eome, how, as religious life began to wane, abated views upon this question began to be enter- tained. With the growth of mere externalism, the theology of Anselm and Bernard passed away, till you have the Pelagianism of the Jesuits and the Council of Trent, and the deeper views of the atonement to all intents put under brand. Strange enough, it seems that among some ultra- Calvinists, from a difterent point of view altogether, came what appears unsatisfactory teaching on that great doctrine. 07 68 Scottish Theology. Among our own divines, Eutlierford adopted the view that the atonement has no necessity save in tlie free decree of God. Sin he held, indeed, to merit punishment. It might have been justly punished even more severely than God has ordained, and is ever the object of His infinite displacency. But punish- ment might either have been less, or might not have been at all, if God in His sovereignty had chosen ; it comes from no holy necessity of the divine nature. " God," he says, " would not be God if sin did not dis- please Him, for holiness is essential to God ; but the punishment of sin is not formally included in the essence of sin, but is something posterior in nature to sin, already constituted in its entire essence ; and therefore God punishes sin by no necessity of nature, nay, if He chose, He might leave it altogether unpunished" (AjJoL 296). This doctrine absolutely possessed him. There is not a single one of his doctrinal works in which he does not assert and defend it. If justitia punitiva be essential in the divine nature, then he argues : Just as the fire burns when it is brought into contact with its proper object, so must such a justice go forth in its destroying energy upon every transgression, even as it appears. " Yea," he says, " if by necessity of justice God cannot but punish sin, this justice shall cause Him to follow the law of works without any gospel moderation ; which is, that the same person that sins, and no other, should die for his sins. If there be such a connection ohjcctivc ex natura rei between sin and Tlu Atonement. 69 punishment, it must be between sin and punishment in the very same person that sinned. For this is justice — noxa sequitiir ca'piit!' That is, you must have a divine freedom in the whole matter, or you overthrow Eedemption. The good man sometimes drives the matter to conclusions still more startling. " Whatever sin," he says, " God forbids. He forbids the existence of it by His approving will, not by necessity of nature : for if God essentially and by nature willed that sin should never be. He would efficaciously hinder it : but what God wills by His commanding will, we see He does not efficaciously hinder the existence thereof. But how do you prove that God is more obliged by necessity of nature to defend the glory of His justice, than He is by the same necessity to defend His legislative glory ? " Here, indeed, is the mystery. How does sin come on the stage against that great " Thou shalt not " ? And certainly Eutherford and his school fail to bring us daylight upon it, when they seem to suggest that behind that great forbidding there is nothing real, and that, for anything we know, all other manifestations and revelations of the Highest may be unreal too ; and so that all we have is phenomenal shadow, not the living God Himself. It is neither true to the Bible nor to the wants of the human soul, — this exaltation of Deity into a kind of practical non-existence. " Let us make man in our image " is a glorious word to have inscribed on the portals of Eevelation, and we must not yield it away to a transcendental theology, any 70 Scottish Theology. more than to a man-degrading unbelief. How, then, did Eutherford put the matter ? For he was a most devout believer in the Cross ; and if ever any man did, he gloried in the Cross. It is altogether different, he says, God's doing a thing with the object of reveal- ing and manifesting His justice, and His doing a thing ex justitia. In the one case He acts freely, in the other He cannot but act. So there is all the difference possible between mercy as a "native inclination" of the Highest, and mercy as something He would show forth to His creature : in the latter case, you have room for wdll and pleasure ; in the former, God cannot help Himself. Not, then, from any necessity of His nature, but simply and only to manifest the glory of His justice in His eternal free purpose, God resolves, since the thing is right in itself, that, in bestowing salvation, He will bestow it in the justice-magnifying way of an atoning death. I do not say that there is nothinsj in the danorers which haunted Eutherford. Arminianism had made redemption the sinner's right, something he had a positive claim to. God's love had no help for itself. God's compassion must needs bring forth salvation. So people no doubt still exaggerate. By their way of speaking of the divine benevolence, they deny all that sovereignty of grace which we can neither explain nor control, and which does not answer to us for its ways. But it is a perfect illusion, that for God to act according to the holiness and justice of His nature by any sort of necessity, implies the upgiving of His freedom. The Atonement. 71 In a modified form, Patrick Gillespie, in his Arh of the Covenant, seems disposed to agree with Eutherford ; and there is little doubt that his view had once con- siderable prevalence in Scotland. It gradually, how- ever, passed away. Almost the last faint gleam of it we have in the universalism of good Fraser of Brea. In the Simpson case, the defender of orthodoxy declared dissent from the great theologian whom he so deeply reverences, and maintains that punitive justice is essential in the divine nature. " It was not possible for God," says this estimable man, " without any consideration or satisfaction to forgive sin and release the sinner, because the justice, holiness, and righteousness of His nature would not allow it." A hundred years after Eutherford's death, the highest Calvioist in Scotland goes to, I may say, the very opposite extreme from him, affirming that the Infinite One would renounce the sovereignty of His being and the righteousness of His nature, if He should suffer sin to go unpunished ; and as the sinner is immortal, and has no power of self -recovery, his punishment must be eternal. " But, sir, might not the Lord have pardoned Adam's sin without satisfaction ? " asks Nomista in the Marrow. " No," replies Evangelista, " for justice is essential in God. It is unjust to pardon sin without satisfaction." This, there can be no doubt, expresses the doctrine of Boston, and, I should say, of all the Marrow men. And not merely in the point before us, but in other questions kindred with it, the positions of the 72 Scottish Theology. Eutlierford-Brown school were given up. Thus they held that in the moral law you had three different classes of precepts. The first three certainly belonged to the class of the essential and eternal. God could not but enjoin the worship, the exclusive worship, the adoring worship of Himself. These three precepts, as it were, lay back of will. The fourth commandment was positive, that is, it came by way of external revelation, and was not written on the heart ; or in so far as it might be called natural, it was only remotely so. The remaining six commandments they placed in an inter- mediate category. They were, so to speak, natural- positive. They were natural, as belonging to that natural revelation written in the human heart ; they were positive, as coming rather from God's will than from God's nature, and were in themselves alterable, as seen in the command of God to Abraham to put Isaac to death, and in the command to Israel to spoil the Egyptians. It is quite clear there was some mistake or misconception. It was, in fact, the remains of the overdrawn distinction of the schoolmen between the volmitas signi and the voluntas henc2)laciti. But the scholastics of the De Provicleniia and the De Causa Dei seem, you can hardly tell how, to pass out of sight. The moral law becomes, in the language of later theologians, the effluence of God's moral glory. " The ten commandments," says the great Marrow leader, " being the substance of the law of nature, a representation of God's image, and a beam or His holiness, bestowed for ever unalterably to be a rule of The Atonement. 73 life to mankind in all possible conditions and circum- stances, nothing but the utter destruction of human nature and its ceasing to be could divest them of that office, since God is unchanging in His image and holiness. No change of covenant or dispensation could ever prejudice this their royal dignity." II. In regard to the nature of the atonement of Christ, you may say there was no difference. On the part of all, it was held to be a true and proper satis- faction offered to the justice of God. We are, I dare- say, all familiar with the way in which this matter was wont to be put. The old theology of Scotland might be emphatically described as a covenant theology. Man was created in God's image, and under law to his Maker. Any breach of law exposed him under this natural constitution to merited punishment, though, as we have seen, Eutherford thought the actual infliction of that, or the amount of it, was entirely arbitrary; and even divines of another school declined to say " what behoved to have been the Creator's disposal of the creature on the supposed event of sin's entering without a covenant being made ; " while, at the same time, they had no doubt about what sin justly merited. On the other hand, man on l)is part had no claims upon God : no claims by his obedience to honour or immortality, though it was admitted there was in his nature a kind of image of the covenant which was formally entered into, as is plain from the instinctive struggling of all men after a work-salvation. 74 Scottish Theology. But the covenant of works, based, so to speak, on the natural relationship in which the Creator and His intelligent creature stood to each other, and including, as it were, all that is implied in that relationship, put things in a distinct and definite shape, in order to human probation and the outworking of the divine purposes. Adam is raised from being the merely natural head of mankind, in which character his in- fluence on his race would not have been different in kind from the influence of any ordinary parent, to be the federal head of humanity, so that all men are viewed as being in him morally and legally ; and in this character God enters into a sacred — it was said a gracious — pact with him, that if he perfectly keep His holy law in that specific positive precept in which, however simple in itself, the human will is put in simple direct relation to the divine will, and perhaps in the form most suitable in all the circumstances, he and those he represented shall have in God and in His favour an eternity of holy blessedness ; but that, on the other hand, if he fail in rendering that perfect service which is required of him, he and his race shall be made liable to eternal death. Comin^^ from God, man of course was bound to accept God's will. God's proposal is law ; God's way is man's. To a new and higher stage, humanity, it was said, is thus lifted up. Grand destinies open up before it. The very highest and strongest motives of holy action are supplied. Man has now in a sense claims upon his Maker, and is brous^ht into closer and more intel- Tlie Atonement. 75 ligible relation to Him. So it was certainly put. Yet it is plain the probationary element comes into great prominence, and that it is very boldly marked in Scotch Theology. It was held that man, under the first covenant, was not in a state of justification, but only in a state of negative justification, or, as it were, non- condemnation. There is sometimes, too, a way of speaking about the covenant of works, where probation is, so to speak, exaggerated, which gives one an un- comfortable feeling, as if the whole thing were per vaded by a hireling element. I have to say, however, that the Scottish divines are very careful to bring clearly out that it was no hireling obedience which the first covenant claimed. It was no service of selfish terrors or selfish longings which would meet its requirements. God Himself must be above all heavens, and severance from God more terrible than all hells. But I must not tarry. This covenant of works was broken, and mankind lay under its curse, and, though still pressed by its claims, were unable to fulfil them. And now comes into view another covenant. About mankind thus fallen there are transcendent counsellings — how else can you speak ? The Three Persons of the Godhead decree salvation, and the second (all- willing) undertakes the work. A covenant of grace is entered into between the Father as representing essential Deity, and the Son, invested already with the mediatorial office, in which it is concluded the latter shall in an actual incarnate state take " the law-place," 76 Scottish Theology. as it was said, of the chosen ones, and by His all- meritorious sufferings and death render " all that law and justice could exact of broken man ; " and that this should, be accepted as the redemption price on the ground of which all for whom He thus vicariously acted should have full law-quittance as to their guilt, acceptance, sonship, holiness, and everlasting life, as well as whatever was required to make the purchased inheritance the real possession of the ransomed. This is the substance of the matter. But far more than this have our old authors to unfold of the glories of the grace covenant. Under its promises you have not a mere restoration to the Adamic state. The believer is exalted to that higher state which our first parents, and we in them, would have attained if Edenic pro- bation had ended happily — to that real and glorious justification, with its nearer relation to God and its unfailing security in the righteousness of Christ. A new and peculiar right of sonship is taken out by the Lord Jesus, in which His people share. Sometimes it almost seems as if things very extreme were spoken about that new and nobler life, a life almost distinct in kind, which the new man has in his Lord. Perhaps no part of the old covenant theology is more remarkable, more precious, than the way in which you have set forth the promises made to Christ Himself as Mediator, and, in connection with these, the blessed doctrine of the administration of grace- blessings, in His hand. We hear it said ofttimes that our theology puts Christ in the background. It is not Tlie Atonement. 77 Jesus, but doctrine, with Scottish Presbyterians. I shall have to refer to this again. But if they who speak thus ignorantly would glance into Gillespie or Boston, no prejudice could keep them from seeing almost on every page how entire is their mistake. Why, Christ is everywhere with these old teachers. The Person of Christ circles like a life-pulse through every doctrine and aspect of doctrine. I may add, though I have not time to enter into the subject, that in the Scottish doctrine of the Covenants you note some differences. Dickson and Eutherford spoke of both the covenant of redemption, and of the covenant of grace or reconciliation : by the former, they meant the covenant between the Father and the Son ; by the latter, a distinct and subordinate covenant, based on the former, between God and His people, under which, in fact, tlie blessings of redemption are administered : the former, so far as man was concerned, absolute ; the latter having as its condition faith. Boston and Gib refused the distinction between the covenant of re- demption and the covenant of grace, asserting that there is no such distinction in the Bible, — the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace in their view being only two names of the same thing, " which in resp)ect of Christ may be called a covenant of redemption, for He alone engaged to pay the price ; while in respect of man, it is a covenant of grace, as all to us comes freely." The later divines saw some tendency in the earlier doctrine to E'eonomianism, or, as the covenant of reconciliation was external in the 78 Scottish Theology. visible Church, even a sort of bar to immediate dealing with the Saviour, and entrance by an appropriating faith into living union with Him. It is perhaps a difference in the same line when the earlier theologians say : " The covenant was made with Christ, not as a public person representing many, but as an eminent chosen person, chosen out from among His brethren ; " and the later teachers: "Jesus Christ, the party con- tracting on man's side in the covenant of grace, is to be considered as the last or second Adam, head and representative of a seed." The question is sufficiently intricate, and I do not believe there is any real difference between the two ; only in the one case the vicarious was brought more distinctly out, in the other the representative ; and the one making the relation between Christ and His people more arbitrary or artificial, — the other making it more natural and real, though mystical. But to return from this long digression, it was, as I have said, a real satisfaction to the justice of God, Christ offered as the substitute and representative of His people. He obeyed in their room and stead. He bore the curse in their room and stead. By His obedience unto death. He acquired for them, under His covenant with tlie Father, law-rights to eternal life ; so that, while in respect of themselves this life was all of grace, in respect of Christ it was due under the law-covenant to which He had bowed Himself. " As in Adam we sinned," it was said, " so in Christ we satisfied." Eutherford makes the believer say : " I The Atonement, 79 was condemned, I was judged, I was crucified for sin, when my surety Christ was condemned, judged, and crucified for my sins. I have paid all, because my Surety has paid all." I may add that the old Scotch divines cling to the view that Christ not merely suffered, but bore the same sufferings in hind which were due to His people. While, in their view, it was the divine dignity of Christ's person that gave such infinite worth to His atoning work, they did not regard the nature or the measure of the sufferings as unimportant. Once and again they protest against the bold statement, that a drop of Christ's blood is enough to wash mountains of sins away. " There is a necessity to hold," says Brown, " that Christ suffered the same in substance that the elect were liable to suffer ; the same curse and death, the same punishment in its essential ingredi- ents." The matter is explained at large, and not irreverently. I confess for myself, that I think there is a tendency in our day to slide away from these views, which is not true to the Christian experience of the past, and which may endanger the idea of proper expiation more seriously than we think. III. But further, and more particularly, in regard to the EXTENT of Eedemption, or the extent of the merits of Eedemption. It is implied in what has been already said, that Christ, in some altogether peculiar sense, was the Saviour of His people. But was there no other 80 Scottish Theology. (improper) sense in which He might have been said to die also for others ? Well, the subject is largely discussed. It is discussed by Eutherford, and Brown, and Durham, and Dickson, and Gillespie ; and I think there can be no doubt that they hold, that in whatsoever sense Christ died for any of our race, in that same sense He died for all for whom He died. They held, indeed, the intrinsic sufficiency of Christ's death to save the world or worlds ; but that was altogether irrespective of Christ's purpose, or Christ's accomplishment. The phrase that Christ died suffi- ciently for all was not approved, because the " For " seemed to imply some reality of actual substitution. Yet the Scottish theological mind was evidently greatly exercised upon the subject in many aspects, and once and again we have discussions in connection with it, which are little known, and not without their interest. The name of Eraser of Brea is one well known, and very precious to many : a man he was of profound piety, full of love and devotion to his Master, for whom in the days of suffering he had borne an unflinching testimony. ISTone is mentioned with greater respect by his contemporaries among the good men of his time. I might have added him to the writers whom I mentioned in my last lecture as having had experience of sore spiritual struggles. He tells us how he was assailed with historic doubts, — such as might have been learned in the school of Strauss or Baur. But these very unfoldings of his inner life which he has given The Atonement. 81 us, evidently indicate that if be was a man both of gifts and grace, he was also a man of a peculiar type. You do not wonder at singular doctrines coming from his pen. An earnest gospel preacher, he yet seemed to himself to want a sufficient ground for the gospel offer; and while a prisoner on the Bass, he wrote a work upon the subject. As I have already mentioned, he was, at least in some points, a follower of Euther- ford, and not infrequently he quotes Dr. Twiss ; yet, strange to say, he wrought out a theory of Universal Eedemption from the extremest positions of his ultra- Calvinistic masters. He asserts that " Christ obeyed, and died in the room of all, as the head and representative of fallen man : " that " men are all fundamentally justified in Him and by Him : " " that Christ died for all." But then are all men saved ? No. God did not mean to save any but His chosen. What, then, was the object of that one indivisible sacrifice for all, which God's Son offered on the cross ? Well, first of all, to lay a real foundation for the gospel offer. For every man was satisfaction rendered, and every man might appro- priate it as something objectively real. Is this all ? Is it simply the old story of a conditional salvation ? Not at all. Eraser scorns the idea of conditional redemptions and salvations. Men take, he argues, low and insufficient views of the Saviour's work, when they think it had respect to human happiness alone. The manifestation of God's justice and grace is its last and highest end. And this, according to him, is the F 82 Scottish Theology. glory of His scheme. It lays a basis for a gospel in which reprobates, just as well as the elect, can be asked to believe, while they are not, as the elect, brought under the divine appointment unto life ; and hence, too, it follows that, in their free rejection of what is simple verity, they become liable not to law, but to gospel wrath and vengeance ; and the same blood which magnifies God's grace exceedingly, magnifies essentially His justice. It comes to this, in short, — Eraser plainly states it, — that Christ dies for repro- bates, that they may fall under a more tremendous doom, as, on the other hand, He dies for the elect, that theirs may be an all-transcendent blessedness. In many other aspects the good man presents his theory. As you may buy a casket for its jewels, so Christ bought all the world, and all men in it, for His chosen's sake, not to save all, but to use them, and, as it suits Him, to cast away ; though still, as there is a purchase, there is no unreality in offering them pardon and acceptance in virtue of it. So he puts it. There is no hiding or mitigating ; all is plainly and boldly spoken out. This work was not published in the author's life- time. About the middle of last century it was given to the world, and created no little commotion in two communities, the Cameronian and the Antiburgher. Two of the five ministers of the Cameronian presb}^- tery seem to have embraced its views substantially, and broke off from good Mr. M'Millan. An excellent minister of the Secession also became tainted, and The Atonement. 83 was deposed. It was not difficult to answer them at almost every point. That whole notion of gospel vengeance was altogether out of keeping with the spirit of the Bible. How monstrous the idea of the Father satisfied, and the Saviour made the wrath-inflicter 1 What did you gain by this ? That vague doctrine of redemption did not help you to the real one. Meant as a ladder to it, it really broke down under the first footstep placed on it. The work soon passed out of memory. The most important result of its production was the theolocjical discussions which it brought from the pen of Adam Gib, the ablest and most important, I imagine, of their day. At the same time, I think Eraser left more traces of himself on our theology than we commonly suppose. There is one point in Eraser's book to which I have not alluded, and which is of larger interest than some of his other doctrinal speculations. It was a part of his scheme that Christ had purchased " common bene- fits," the ordinary temporal blessings of life, and that it is through His grace that the world is sustained as it is, and that all its bounties are enjoyed by mankind. At different times and in different forms this ques- tion has been debated in the Scottish Churches. Durham has an essay, in which he considers whether any mercy bestowed upon the reprobate, and enjoyed by them, may be said to be the proper fruit of, or purchase of, Christ's death. And he answers decisively in the negative. The native fruits of 84 Scottish Theology. Christ's death, he says, are not divided, but they all go together. So that for whom He satisfied and for whom He purchased anything in a.ny respect, He did so in respect of everything. There may be certain consequences of Clirist's death of an advantageous kind which reach wicked men. But that is a mere accident. Nay, to the wicked there may be given common gifts, by which the Church is edified and the glory of the Lord advanced ; but these belong to the covenant redemption, as promised blessings to God's people. It is argued further, that it is very doubtful whether, looked at in every point of view, it can well be said that it is a blessing to men w^ho yet reject the Son of God, that they have the morally purifying influences of Christianity, and are more or less affected by them in their character, or by any such blessing as can be said to fall from the tree of life. So, too, thought Gillespie, and so thought Paitherford. In the Simpson trial the subject came up in another shape. Simpson maintained that there was in nature a dim revelation of grace. That the wrath of God did not straightway overtake sinners ; that the sun shone, and the showers fell, and the harvests still came round to supply the wants of men, — was this not, in its measure, a revelation of grace ? Did it not speak faintly of the cross ? If so, it can only be the cross- grace. But the idea was decisively rejected by the evangelical divines of the day, who, indeed, made Simpson's doctrine one of the points of the libel. Halyburton handles the question in his own way in The Atonement. 85 a famous excursus of his Natural Religion, — on God's government of the heathen world. " Is that govern- ment," he asks, " in any sense one of grace ? " He answers in the negative. Eemarkable indeed it is, that the guilty should be spared from generation to generation. But who knows all the reasons God may have for that ? As Adam stood the representative of the race of mankind, is it not fitting that all whom he represented should come into existence, and bear their part in the great responsibility ? Why should only a part of mankind live, and sin, and suffer, and others involved in the great transaction as well as they never come into existence ? Besides, some of the chosen ones may still belong to those to whom He exercises this forbearance, or, as it were, this holy connivance in their sins. Not any law of grace, but the law of creation, the law of works, unretracted, unmitigated, reigns everywhere outside the gospel realms ; and even by that law, although its penalties are meanwhile sus- pended, a certain outward order can be still preserved, and a certain system of external rewards and punish- ments comes in. The only theologian of any note in whose writings there appears something different from this is Patrick Gillespie, — at least, he is the only one in whom I have noticed anything different. " It is Christ," he says, " that establishes the earth, that so the creatures which are for man's use are not destroyed ; for justice did require as speedy vengeance upon men as upon the angels." 86 Scottish Theology. A fair representation of tlie Scottish doctrine may be given in tlie words of the old Seceder, who has elaborately written on this point : " There can be no proper enjoyment of any benefits from Clirist, as benefits of His mediatory kingdom, but in a way of communion and fellowship with Him by faith. Thus, no common material benefits, as enjoyed by wicked men or unbelievers, can be looked upon as benefits of His mediatory kingdom, or as the fruits of His pur- chase. These material benefits, in the most general consideration thereof, do proceed from God as the great Creator and Preserver of the world, in which respect they are common to men and beasts. But more particularly, they always come to men in some covenant channel. They come to wicked men, or unbelievers, through the broken covenant, in the channel of its curse ; and so, whatever material good- ness be in these things to them, as suited to their fleshly nature, like the goodness thereof unto beasts, yet there is no spiritual goodness attending the same, — no divine love, but wa^ath. Whereas, on the other hand, these benefits come to believers through the covenant of grace in the channel of its blessing ; and so they enjoy these benefits in a way of communion with Christ, as benefits of His mediatory kingdom." Again, in the Marrow controversy, the Church was agitated about tlie extent of redemption. Boston, when he was minister of Simprin, in visiting among his flock, fell in with a volume in the house of one of his members, the title of which interested him. He The Atonement 87 took it home with him. Eager at the time for books, he was soon busy with its perusal, and that perusal was, you might say, both an epoch in his life and in the religious history of Scotland. That book was the Marroiv of Modern Divinity ; and the Marroiv of Modern Divinity was in course of time issued afresh from the Scottish press. Soon the country was a-blaze with theological discussion. The Marroio was condemned by the General Assembly as teaching several erroneous doctrines, and among others, that of universal redemption as to purchase. The same charge was made, and continued to be made, against the supporters of the Marrow. The ground of the accusation was their holding that it is part of the direct act of faith to believe that Christ died for me, and that what He did and suffered He did and suffered for me. This, it was asserted by Principal Haddow and other writers, evidently capable men, could mean nothing else than that Christ had died for every man, and that it was, in fact, a part of savin Gj faith to believe in that. The Marrow men denied the charge indignantly. In truth, they were extreme particular redemptionists. As Boston points out, they more thoroughly identified Christ and His elect than the theologians who pre- ceded them. The second Adam included His whole spiritual seed in Him ; and only they whom He repre- sented, and who should spring spiritually, as it were, out of Him, could have any part in His salvation. As well midit the idea be entertained of some other 88 Scottish Theology. than a mere man being engrafted into tlie human stock, and falling heir to its sin and woe, as that of any out of the Christ-man race being engrafted into the new and higher stock. What they taught was not, " Christ died for thee as for every man ; believe that, and be saved ; it is true, whether thou believest or not ; " for this was sheer universalism. They were only falling back, they said, on the old Scottish doctrine of Davidson and Eollock. " We do affirm," says the latter divine, " and defend the certainty of special grace. In the gospel, grace is procured and offered not only in general to all, but in special to every one ; wherefore the certainty of special grace is required in every one. The Spirit of Christ, when any general promise or sentence touching Christ and His mercy is alleged, doth no less particularly apply the same to every man, by speaking inwards to the heart of every one, than of old Christ did by His holy voice apply these particular promises to certain persons, as to the woman in Simon's house, to Zaccheus, to the thief upon the cross." It was, in short, the appropriating persuasion, still more strongly put by many Eeforma- tion theologians, the Marrow men wanted to bring back. Perhaps the Eeformers had spoken too strongly in those days of a fresh strong life, when Christ's entry into the soul was often as though amid songs and shoutings ; at least their definitions of faith seem almost to imply, that you can never have it without being sure that you have it and its glorious object. The Atonement. 89 At a later period the point was put more cautiously, though not in substance differently; and that, no doubt, indicated a movement in another line. That move- ment was, there is some ^rround for thinkino- carried too far in another direction. A somewhat distant kind of dealing with salvation had crept in. First of all, you were to get well humbled by the law ; and then, bruised and stricken, you were to look towards the Saviour as a great One in whom there was hope for you; put your confidence in Him as all-sufficient, and devote yourself to His holy will. This was mean- while sufficient to give you a measure of peace. In course of time there would come the evidences of the reality of your union to Christ, and you would be able, with a faith of a stronger and more vigorous kind, fully to appropriate Him, fully to call Him yours. There are hints that the soul manipulation in such works as Dickson's Thcrapeutica was not alto- gether successful. The mere law work, without, as Eutherford said, a dash of the gospel, sometimes created acerbity, resistance, positive im belief. Pro- bably there was among the Marrow men a reaction towards an earlier view, and not the less so that their own experiences were more or less of the intui- tional type. What they aimed at is clear in their reply to the questions put by the General Assembly. First of all, a glorious object is presented to your view, offered to your acceptance, brought more and more home to you in His worth and suitableness, and grace and beauty ; nearer He comes, and nearer ; your 90 Scottish Theology. sonl closes with Him ; and as, in the band of the Holy Ghost, the heavenly call presses in on you with supernatural power, — in a faith divine, of living soul conviction, you take the offered One, take Him as yours ; yours His blood, yonrs His righteousness, yours all the fulness of His salvation, all He has done and suffered for poor sinners ; so that with Paul you say, " I live, yet not I ; and the life which I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God, which loved me and gave Himself for me." I do not see how one with anything of living faith, heart to heart with the divine reality, can be said, as in the Catechism, to embrace Christ, without having more or less strongly an experience like this. In proportion as you are really resting on the Blessed One, not clinging to a notion, or building on some vague, dim hope, but dealing with a real Saviour, and putting confidence in a real Saviour, offered of God, — in the same proportion you will have the confidence that He gave Himself for you, and. suffered for your sin. And the Marrow doctrine had nothing to do with either universal or partial redemption. The " whatever He did for the redemption of mankind He did for me," is, as it were, the joyful cry with which the experiences of a soul welcoming this redemption with vivid, or, as they said, with supernatural faith, accompanied realizations of the Lord of glory. The truth is, these good men had strong belief in the spiritual object and the spiritual power, in Christ's essential adaptation and the working of the Holy The Atonement. 91 Ghost : tliey had faith enough in the reality, in the divine grandeur of these, " Come unto Me, all ye that labour," " Ho ! every one that thirsteth," to expect that the everlasting gates would still be widening before them for glorious enterings of the King. And if it may be they sometimes went too far, though I do not know that they did, they were nearer the right way than many of their opponents, who, it is to be feared, liad no very earnest wish for a strong and lifeful Christianity, whatever was its orthodoxy as to redemp- tion or assurance. But while the Marrow theology was almost extreme in its doctrine of particular redemption, there were aspects of it in which you do not wonder that it gave offence. I think it would have given offence in some points to the best men of a passing generation, and they would have dreaded some of its positions ; for while it is substantially the old Calvinistic theology, it is certainly more. I shall notice one or two points that have struck me : — 1. I have been often struck with the frequency with which the subject of reprobation is introduced into our older theological works, and the almost unkind way in which reprobates are spoken of. Now the Marrow divines, as well as the divines of the second Beformation, believed in the doctrine of reprobation. But they treat it, as it were, with a holy awe, and do not care to thrust it forward. In Eutherford's work on the Covenant, the word reprobation or reprobate occurs between eighty and ninety times ; in Boston 92 Scottish Theology. ou the Covenant it only occurs thrice. There can be little doubt of what that indicates. 2. Then, in the Marrow theology, you might say there is more of a desire to put the gospel near to human souls. This is seen in their deed of grant and gift, and, as I think, often very questionable appliance of texts to the support of that doctrine. It is also seen in a difference between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century divines, which has perhaps been hardly ever referred to. In the earlier treatises on the Covenant you have generally some discussion of Christ's testament. Indeed, some of the richest and tenderest things are spoken about it. Much, in particular, is said of the legacies and the legatees. Who are the legatees ? In the older works, without apparently any other idea being supposed capable of entertainment, they are the elect — believers. No, says Boston. To the elect only the testament becomes effectual ; but they are not the only persons to whom the legacies are left. The legatees are sinners of man- kind indefinitely, and every mankind sinner is entitled to put in his claim. No doctrinal divergence, how- ever, is implied ; yet Boston explains carefully, at the same time, that in his view Christ's testament belongs to His administration of the covenant. But still, as a fact, the difference is worthy of remark, 3. Another thing, more noticeable still, I briefly refer to. The seventeenth century divines were greatly hampered by what I might call their Judaic theory of the world's conversion. Our modern idea of the visible The Atonement. 93 Church as a kingdom of faith pushing out in bold aggression on every side, gathering in converts by units or hundreds, as the case may be, to become at once soldiers of Christ, aiming at nothing less than the spiritual subjugation of the world to the faith and obedience of the gospel, was very faintly realized in that earlier period of our history. What our fathers rather thought of was a sort of expansion of nationalism after the Jewish fashion, in which, when God has elect ones among a people to be gathered in, He takes the nation into external covenant with Himself, and within the order and under the ordinances of a visible Church as His " office-house of grace," — not excluding the aid extrinsic of the sword of the magistrate. He carries out the purposes of grace ; calls, shields, sanctifies His chosen ; and when He has no more of these, then lets the framework fall in pieces. " If the doctrine of the covenant of its own nature," says Eutherford, " may be so preached to all nations, without exception, in every difference of time, then must all the nations of the earth, in all difference of time, be in a capacity to be a covenanted people of God ; the Church of Christ ; the vineyard of the Lord ; His inheritance ; the spouse of Christ ; His lovely, His called and chosen flock. For, to have the doctrine of the covenant preached to a nation, and Christ offered to them, is to be the planted vineyard of the Lord." " The field is the field of the visible kingdom of Christ, because the world of all natural men is not the Lord's field, where He soweth His wheat, but the visible Church is 94 Scottish Theology. only such a field. Tor seeing the gospel, the immortal seed of the regenerate, is not sown through the whole world of mortal men, but only in the visible Church, the field must be Christ's field, or His world of Church professors." Boston tells us that he was at one period of his life sorely perplexed about this view. It was the common saying, that members of the visible Church had the right to have the gospel preached to them, just as though no others had. He did not understand it. But light came, and he saw the gospel offer was for all, — that not to visible Church sinners, but to mankind sinners, the calls and ministries of heavenly love were to be sent. Boston and the Marrow men, first of all among our divines, entered fully into the missionary spirit of the Bible ; were able to see that Calvinistic doctrine was not inconsistent with world- conquering aspirations and efforts. CHAPTER lY. THE DOCTEIXE OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH. jHERE is perhaps no country in the world in which all kinds of Church questions have been so largely discussed as our own. We have an immense authorship of one sort and another in regard to the nature, constitution, government, order, rights of the Church. Discussion on this subject, you may say, has never been in abeyance since the days of John Knox. I propose to devote two of these Lectures to givino- an account of the views our theologians have developed on some of the points to which they have mainly devoted their attention. I. The visible Church, in the idea of the Scottish theologians, is catholic. You have not an indefinite number of Parochial, or Congregational, or ^N'ational Churches, constituting as it were so many ecclesiast- ical individualities, but one great spiritual republic, of which these various organizations form a part. The visible Church is not a genus, so to speak, with so many species under it. It is thus you may think of the State; but the visible Church is a totum integrale 95 96 Scottish Theology. it is an empire. The Churches of the various nation- alities constitute the provinces of this empire ; and though they are so far independent of each other, yet they are so one, that membership in one is member- ship in all, and separation from one is separation from all. The member of the Scottish Church presents his credentials to the French, or Italian, or African Church, and has a right at once to all its privileges, at least in actio primo. The Scottish excommunicate is a heathen man and a publican over the Church universal. Though every separate organization of the Catholic Church has an ecclesiastical completeness belonging to it, so that the presbytery, for example, can by inherent right ordain and exercise discipline in all its forms, just as if it had been constituted a separate Church, yet in order of nature, as it was said, all these powers and rights are bestowed first on the visible Church Catholic. A presbytery has the power of excommunication ; but that power in idea belongs primarily to the Church Catholic, and the excommun- ication is catholic. A presbytery has the power of ordination, and ordains a minister over a congregation ; but ordination in idea belonGfS to the Church Catholic, and the ordination makes a man a minister of the Church Catholic. Frimarily, as it was said, the power of the keys was given to the universal visible Church of Christ. This conception of the Church, of which, in at least some aspects, we have ^practically so much lost sight, had a firm hold of the Scottish theologians of the The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 9 7 seventeenth century. It enabled them to meet the Church idealism of Eome — in many ways so grand and attractive — with a nobler Church idealism. It enabled them to throw back the charge that Protest- antism fails to realize the Bible doctrine of Church unity — that it dismembers and breaks up the kingdom of heaven upon earth, in severing it from its visible centre of unity — with the reply that Protestant unity is as much a reality as Eoman unity, only that the centre of it is in heaven, not on the banks of the Tiber. Of this great visible Church the various separate true Churches are members — in communion with one another — related to one another like the departments of a kingdom ; and though differences may exist between them, they are not on that account to be regarded as in opposition or conflict. In accordance wdth this idea, the CEcumenical Council or Assembly was acknowledged to be the supreme Church authority on the sort of questions which naturally fall within its scope, — questions bearing on such matters as are necessary not indeed to the Church's being or well-being, but certainly to its highest well- being. It was also held that it was only the evil of the times that prevented a Protestant CEcumenical from assembling and pronouncing sentence of excommunica- tion on the Church of Piome as a false Church, or in some form cutting it off from ecclesiastical fellowship. True Churches of Christ, side by side with one another, forming separate organizations, with separate governments, seemed to them utterly inadmissible,!! G 98 Scottish Theology. unless it might be in a very limited way, and for some reason of temporary expediency. When the Independ- ents proposed to the Westminster Assembly a friendly co-existence and occasional communion, it was, as is well known, resolutely declined. " That will be no plain and total separation," said the former ; " we shall be working substantially towards the same end." "So," it was answered, " might the Donatists and Novatians have pled, and indeed almost all the separatists who have figured in the Church's history. Such separation was unknown in the apostles' time, unless it were used by false teachers : all who professed Christianity then held communion together as one Church. If you can join with us occasionally in acts of worship, you ought to act with us in joint communion, not in separated congregations. God's way of revealing truth to such as are otherwise minded, is not by setting men at a distance from each other. That you should be a distinct Christian oro-anization, takincj members from our Churches who may have scruples of conscience, is schism undoubted in the body of Christ." Separation from a true Church seemed to these good men to mean either that the Church on earth is not one, — " which truth of the unity of the Catholic visible Church, it was said, is the manifest OTound of all Church union and communion, or that this one Church may be of such heterogeneous parts, as that one part ought not to have communion with the other," — a thing which was held to carry in it the destruction of the very idea of unity. The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 9 9 " These great Churches of Eome and Carthage," says Eutherford, " made one visible body ; and the innov- ators were not schismatics because they separated from one single congregation ; but, saith Socrates, they hindered the Churches from union. Auojustine, and Optatus, and the Fathers, make the Donatists schis- matics in separating from the Catholic Church. . . . The Novatians, Donatists, and others of old, and the Ana- baptists of late, have been all by their fellow-Christians branded with this, that they went and separated from the Church, which certainly can be understood of no par- ticular congregation." " It is impossible," says Durham, " for those that maintain that principle of the unity of the Catholic visible Church to own a divided way of administering government or other ordinances, but it will infer either that one party hath no interest in the Church, or that one Church may be many, and so that the unity thereof in its visible state is to no purpose. This we take for granted." When it was urged, in behalf of secession and separate organization, that there were impurities and errors which people felt themselves bound to have no connection with, it was answered : '' See what impurities and errors there were in the Jewish Church ; see how idolatry sometimes prevailed in it ; see how, even in its better days, the high places were not taken away ; — yet did its good men withdraw from it, or any of the prophets preach secession ? See how it was in the Church of the apostolic age — at Corinth, at Sardis, at Thyatira ; what departures from the truth, what lacking of right 100 Scottish Theology. discipline ; what offences against sacred order ! Have we any call from the Master or His inspired servants to ecclesiastical severance ? Is your conscience tenderer than that of prophets and apostles ? Must you have a purism which Isaiah and Paul would not have required ? We separate, indeed, from Papists, Anabaptists, idolaters, because, though they profess the true God, as Edom did, yet they dearly evert the funda- mentals ; but you cannot say that either we or any of the Eeformed Churches, in words or by consequence, overthrow the essentials of salvation. We separate, too, from all corruption in the Church ; we cannot have communion with the best of Churches in what we be- lieve to be wrong ; but separation from the corruption of the Church and separation from the worship of the corrupters are things entirely different. If a preacher be sound in the main, though he mix errors with his teaching, you may sit under his ministry ; for what you hear you are to try ere you believe. ' Try all thins^s, hold fast that which is cjood.' Are we not told to hear the Pharisees, but to beware of the doctrine ? Nor can it be said that separation is the only way of testifying effectually against sins and errors ; for if you have liberty, such a testimony can be far more effectu- ally borne in union than in severance. You have an instance in the conduct of Joseph and Xicodemus, who continued in connection with the Jewish Church, and took part in its councils, even when very sinful and dreadful things were done by it, and who yet, because they dissented and testified, are not merely exonerated The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 101 from all blame, but their act has more honourable men- tion than if they had made a formal secession." And, adds Eutherford, the substance of whose statements I give in a modified form, "The unity of the Church hath the same ground, and no fewer motives to press it now than then." So it was argued. Positions sufficiently startling were thus laid down by men whose whole life was nevertheless a battle for orthodoxy. You might have supposed that the divines of the seventeenth century would have sympathized with the Donatists rather than with the Church, when it had so much in it to shock a seventeenth century Presby- terian. But it was not so. In Augustine's views of the Catholic Church and of schism they seem to have heartily sympathized. " Better," says the Westminster Committee, in their reasonin^js with the five brethren, " that a man want the Lord's Supper if his conscience scruple about some things in it, than make a separation from the con!]jreejation of which he is a member. The one thing is safer than the other. See," they added, " how they, who thought kneeling in the act of com- munion unlawful, neither in Endand or Scotland made any secession ; instead of that, some of them with zeal and learning defended the Church against the separ- atists." There is a tract or pamphlet of Gillespie's, very little known, on the subject of toleration. It is decidedly against toleration, and in the worst cases of heresy almost pitiless ; but, upon the whole, it is won- derfully sober and mild — far more generous and kindly than Piutherford's Liberty of Conscience. It concludes 102 Scottish Theology. with what the author calls a Para^netick, in which you have the ideas and longings of the time in regard to the unity of the visible Church : " Let there be no strife between us and you, for we be brethren ; and is not the Cauaanite and the Perizzite yet in the land ? Oh, let it not be told in Gath, nor published in the streets of Ashkelon. Let it not be said that there can be no unity in the Church without Prelacy. Brethren, I charge you, by the roes and by the hinds of the fields, that ye awake not nor stir up Jesus Christ till He please : for His rest is sweet and glorious with His well-beloved. It shall be no grief of heart to you afterward, that you have pleased others as well as yourselves, and have stretched your principles for an accommodation in Church government as well as in worship, and that for the Church's peace and edification ; and that the ears of our common enemies may tingle when it shall be said, The Churches of Christ in England have rest, and are edified, and, walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the joy of the Holy Ghost, are multipHed. Alas! how shall our divisions and contentions hinder the preaching and learning of Christ, and the edifying of one another in love ? ' Ls Christ divided ? ' saith the apostle. There is but one Christ ; yea, the Head and the body make but one Christ, so that you cannot divide the body without dividing Christ. Is there so much as a seam in all Christ's garment ? Is it not woven throughout, from the top to the bottom ? Will you have one half of Israel to follow Tibni and another half to follow Omri? Oh, brethren, we shall be one in The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 103 heaven; let us pack up differences in this place of our pilgrimage the best way we can. Nay, we will not despair of unity in this world. Hath not God pro- mised to give us one heart and one way ; and that ' Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim, but they shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the west ; they shall spoil them of the east together ' ? Hath not the Mediator (whom the Father heareth always) prayed ' that all His may be one ' ? Brethren, it is not impossible ; pray for it, endeavour it, press hard toward the mark of accom- modation. How much better is it that you be one with the other Eeformed Churches, though somewhat straitened and bound up, than to be divided, though at full liberty and elbow-room ! ' Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than a house full of sacrifices with strife.' " ]^ow all this did not mean that the Church was to be lax. She was, on the contrary, to be the pillar and ground of the truth. She was to hunt out all scandals from her borders with a holy zeal. It is needless to say that Paitherford and Dickson were not latitudinarians. What ought to be borne from the Church, without breaking its visible unity, was an entirely different matter from what was the Church's duty in keeping purity of doctrine and life within her pale. In regard to the former point, the point in hand, it seems to me quite clear that a very high doctrine of the Catholic visible Church was the doctrine of these old days. Schism was a great reality. The question 104 Scottish Theology. was not merely whether a certain community of pro- fessing Christians was orthodox and pure, but whether it belonged to Christ's visible empire. The Donatists held the fundamentals, yet they were to be abandoned for the Catholic Church. It is not clear to me what, according to this view, was the exact position of a schismatical Church. If it had the main truth, it was still a Church, — a Church, I think they would have said, m concreto and materially, and salvation work might go on there ; but formally and m ahstracto, it could not be recognised as a Church, or communion held with it as such. A Church recjarded as schis- matic could only hold its ground on the principle that severance was necessary, because communion was no longer possible or lawful on Catholic communion ground. The doctrine I have briefly explained was the doctrine eminently of the Confession period, — the doctrine of our Presbyterianism in the day of its power and its glory. The first seeds of a change were early sown in the fierce controversy between the Eesolutioners and Protesters, one of the saddest yet most influential controversies in our ecclesiast- ical annals. It put ill blood into our Church life, which a century and a half did not expel. What might have come of it had the Church been free of the Commonwealth disabilities, it is impossible to say. When the days of suffering came, you might have expected an end to divisions, and a union of heart and effort against the common enemy. But, as you know. The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 105 it was far otherwise. Bitter variances — srrowincr ever more bitter — arose. The persecutor, with his indul- gences, threw in an apple of discord among those noble witnesses of Christ, and they took to fighting in the furnace. Was it lawful to accept the indulgence ? Was it lawful to hold any communion with the indulged ? Was it lawful to hold communion with those who held communion with the indulged ? When the field-preacher John Welsh, — bravest of the brave, with not merely the blood of John Knox in his veins, but the spirit of John Knox in his soul, — whose story is the very romance of our martyr era, — when John Welsh came into the Covenanting camp of Bothwell Bridge, he was looked on as a sort of messenger of judgment, because he had had friendly converse with some who had touched the king's grace-act. A moor- land union conference took place in the killing times. Good men who were perilling their lives every day for the same truths — of one heart about Prelacy, and Erastianism, and indulgence, as well as about every article in the Calvinistic creed — met in some western solitude to see if they could have one banner. It would not do. One party demanded, and the other refused, contrition on account of past defection, as it was called. It speaks, all this, of change. The idea of Catholic visible unity, at least as to its practical power, was passing away. Yet, after all, it still cluug even to the mountain-men. What seems to us an intense separatism, was ingeniously represented as the best that could be done in that churchless time to supply 106 Scottish Tlieology. the kind of discipline which the Church in full action would have carried out ; or rather, it was the effort of individuals to keep their own souls blameless till the Church could act again. As the Cameronians explained themselves, at least in the Informatory Vindication ^ they did not think that the exclusiveness under wdiich the famous societies were managed was to be applied to Church communion. In the same book, written, I believe, by Eenwick the Cameronian, they indicate an expansiveness of view which could not be supposed to belong to them from looking at their outside history. You have still the idea of the Catholic Church and Catholic fellowship maintained by them ; and schism is, at least in expression, made out to be as bad as ever. ]N"o man had more to do than MacWard with the indulgence-conflicts, and all the casuistry in which the sufferers became adej)ts. Yet, in his True Noncon- formist, he treads very much in the old paths. Answering a prelatic disputant, who tries, through Eutherford and Wood, to make the Presbyterians schismatics because they refuse to accept the actually existing State Church, he has no difficulty in throwing off the accusation. He asserts that the institution which then claimed to be the Church of Scotland is not, in fact, of the gc7ius Church at all, — that, by its mere physical force-raid on the real Church of Scot- land, it has proved itself to be absolutely devoid of ecclesiastical rights.^ But he puts a case in which ^ I believe the Erastian doctrine to be absolutely alien to the old Presbyterian idea of the Church, far more so than it is to a Church The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 107 he admits he might have been ready to acknowledge some validity in his opponent's arguments : " I freely acknowledge," he says, " that if God had permitted this whole Church to slide into the present evils of your Prelacy and corrupt ministers, and thereafter had blessed us with a discovery ; yet I would not in that condition allow the same necessity and expediency of separation that now I find to plead for a non-compli- ance, inasmuch as our present non-compliance is not only a more certain, seasonable, and safe duty, but is also attended with a faithful and edifying adherence to our true and sent teachers, who, though removed to corners, do still remain the Lord's ministers and our pastors ; which things do much difference it from the case of a proper separation as above described." You have there clearly enough the old tone of thought. Brown of Wamphray was, without doubt, the most important theologian of this period. We have an essay from him on the visible Church, in the shape of an introduction to his book in reply to Velthusius ; and he belongs, let us remember, to a period when the Catholic conception was waning. It is thus he writes : " To the Catholic visible Church Christ gave the ministry, the word, and the ordinances of God, for the ingathering and perfecting of the saints ; and all the members of this Church are bound to keep holy where there is a claim of proper priesthood, or of supernatural virtue in the person of the minister. I must also add, that a clerical head- ship in any priest or person as necessary to the Church Catholic, or to its oecumenical relations, was held by our fathers to be altogether a prelatical figment. 108 Scottish Theology. fellowship, both in divine worship and in the perform- ance of such spiritual offices as tend to promote mutual edification. But since all the members of this Church cannot in actual fact meet together for God's worship, particular Churches, less or greater, are instituted as convenience may require. So all who in these par- ticular Churches have fellowship with each other in celebrating divine worship, also in some way have and profess communion with the w^hole Catholic visible Church ; for, as I have said, there is only one Church of Christ, as there is only one King of the Church, and one Head. For of this Catholic Church all the Churches are members in particular; and though in their particular meetings they have a nearer com- munion with those who are parts of the given meeting, yet they have a potential and remoter communion with all the members of the visible Church ; just as the guests at a great feast have all communion, though that be more intimate between those who are seated at the same table or in the same apartment." You see there is not only the one Church invisible, the communion of the saints in the high and transcendent sense ; there is — clearly and boldly — the one visible kingdom, under the one heavenly King, to which primarily all the rights and privileges of the visible Church belong, and of which, as it were, all professors are primarily and fundamentally subjects. The prin- ciples of Eutherford in regard to the non-responsibility of members for the imperfections or pollutions of the Church are reiterated by his disciple. In the case of The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 109 a true Church, no separation in point of actual Church- fellowship can be lawful, although you must certainly separate yourself from its errors in doctrine and worship, — which indeed is all that the arguments of the separatists prove lawful. It is only from a Church corrupted in fundamentals, and in which you cannot have communion without sin, especially if the faithful are compelled to take part in the worship, that separa- tion is lawful. After all, it is clear to me that there is now a change of view or feeling. What used to be called the Separatist view, that every member of the Church is to hold himself responsible for the corruptions that exist in it, for the defections or shortcomings of its ofiSce-bearers, for its failures in the exercise of dis- cipline, even if he does what is competent to him in his place, is making way. It is curious and significant to read how the brave and gifted Eenwick has to debate out, in the wild regions between the Dee and the Cree, with the bloodhounds on his track, whether he was justified in accepting ordination from the Dutch Church, since there was something ritualistic about its form of baptism. Then " the Testimony," the peculiar word of Scottish patience, consecrated as it was in its every part by the blood of so many martyrs, has risen up to an overshadowing height. Any departure from, any shade cast upon, attained-to reformation, is to many of the best men something dreadful above all expression. Every item and atom, they are dis- posed to say, let us stand for, as for hearth and home. 110 Scottish Tlieology. Defection is a terrible thoudit, a terrible word. Brown of Wamphray, the leader of the day, thunders against it. From everything of the sort Christ's people are bound to keep themselves entirely separate ; to break — so I interpi'et him — from all communion with such as are guilty of it, at least in that way of intra- ecclesiastical secession which used to be so well known in Scotland, and which at a later period was so often practised. The Eevolution came. The Presbyterian Church was reconstructed. The great mass of the people at once connected themselves wdth it. It was very far from the ideal of Presbyterian longing. It was to the best, or at any rate to the most earnest, of the ministers and the people, what the second temple was to the old men who had seen and remembered the glorious structure of King Solomon. They had much trouble of conscience about it ; they had fears and forebodings as to its future. Still it was a true Church of Christ, from which they dared not separate. And how was it with the followers of Cameron, who had been standing more and more aloof from the rest of the country, as though they could never hope to conquer till they were reduced to Gideon's three hundred ? They were not much given to compromise, and no one would ever think of accusing them of cowardice. Of the more extreme, or the more resolute, one party broke off from both Church and State. Another party declined to take so decided a course. To this latter party the State was far from what they would have liked it to The Doctrine of the Visible Cliurch. Ill be ; but they were tliankful for the deliverance God had wrought, and loyal to King William. As for the Church, it was full of blemishes, covered from head to foot with wounds and bruises ; but they retained their connection with it, laying long black lists of grievances before Synods and Assemblies, earnestly and pathetic- ally pleading for repentance and reformation. They found a pastor after their own mind in Mr. Hepburn of Urr, Dumfriesshire, a man of spiritual power, who bore witness for God not merely in ecclesiastical deeds, but iu human consciences ; and with him they kept up for many years their negative separation, forming a sort of distinct community within the Church. Mr. Hepburn was suspended, deposed, imprisoned ;^ but yet he and the people who sympathized with him struggled on in their resolute, impracticable way, and would not be schismatics. Boston tells us in his diary how some of them in his day came to Ettrick. They recognised him as one of the faithful, w4th whom they could hold fellowship, and sought Christian privileges at his hand. " I found them," he says, " to be men having a sense of religion on their own spirits, much affected with their circumstances as destitute of a minister, endowed with a good measure of Christian charity and love, and of a very different temper from that of Mr. M'Millan's followers. I perceived their separation ultimately to resolve into that unwarrantable principle, viz. That joining in communion with the Church, in the ordin- ances of God, is an approbation of the corruptions in her; the very same from which all the rest of the 112 Scottish Theology. separations do spring, some carrying that principle further than others, in different degrees." Still these men were not separatists; rather than become such, and break the order and unity of the visible Church, they were willing to be long years without the ordinances which were so precious to them. And it is to me full of interest and significance, that there was nothing of superstition about them. They held their own through long years against Church courts, higher and lower, as they remained long without the communion of the Supper, after which they longed intensely. But they did not form a new Church communion ; they shrank, as they would have said, from rending the seamless robe — from making any breach in the Saviour's kingdom. I may add that the three Cameronian field-preachers — all they possessed — joined the Scottish Church at the Eevolution. They did so with a saving testimony, which they laid on the table of the Assembly, and which must have been distasteful enough to many of its members ; at the same time adding that, whatever treatment their paper received, they had made up their minds " not to separate from the Church, but to maintain union and communion in truth and duty with all its ministers and members who followed, and in so far as they followed, the institutions of Christ." One of these men, the well-known Alexander Shields, vindicated the course he took in a work on " Church Communion," which was once well known and often referred to. To a large extent it takes the ground of The Doctrine of tlw Visible Church. 113 Eutlierford and Durham, of whose work on Scandal it is little more in many parts than a re-edition. The old idea of the visible Church is firmly held. Separat- ism is still under the ban. " Such differences as do not make communion in a Church and in its ordinances sinful," says Shields, '' cannot be a ground of separation." Yet in this work of Shields I see the marks of the previous half-century. In many practical applications it is more separatist than the works of early theo- logians ; the purist and nationalistic elements are more predominant. In regard to the Eevolution Church itself, it stood in the old ways. Principal Eule has a chapter on Schism in liis Good Old TVctij, not characterized by brilliance or literary taste, but by moderation and good sense. " Our Presbyterian principle," he says, " is that a Christian should part with wliat is dearest to him in the world to redeem the peace and unity of the Church ; yea, that nothing can warrant or excuse it but the necessity of shunning sin." He then goes on to show what was the idea of Catholic unity in the early Church, and how the basis of it was the essential and fundamental articles of the Christian faith, where nothing positively sinful was required. Eead the Principal's work, if you wish to see what sort of man a true-blue Presbyterian of the old school was, who believed in the divine right of his Church system, who hated ceremonies and holidays, and perhaps would have died rather than practise them. Yon will see what room his ideas left him for a generosity and H 114 Scottish Theology. expansiveness to which his prelatic antagonists were, I should think, utter strangers. Eule, however, was evidently disposed to deal more tenderly with con- scientious separation than the divines of other days, and, I believe, spoke the mind of the great majority of his contemporaries. Yet the Assemblies of the Eevolution Church were not slack in their charges of schism, nor slack in their censures. The most devout and least devout appear in this to have concurred. No man has spoken more strongly than Boston in his sermon on Schism, which is almost an echo of lluther- ford's extreme utterances. The only eminent man of this time in whom I have, noticed, I might say, a kindlier view of conscientious separation — views akin to what are now more generally entertained — is Lauder, the author of Ancient Bisho]js. For more than one hundred and fifty years, the idea, in short, of a visible ! empire, of a Catholic visible Church of Jesus Christ, 'had an immense hokl of the Scottish mind. They clung with affection to the Eeformed Churches, and sought to make excuses for their shortcomings. They were to them fellow-members, as it were, of the glorious confederacy. Separatism was detested. Schism was a word of power. They could not see how two Churches, side by side, could be members of the sacred republic, and not members of each other. At the very least, it seemed extremely unnatural to them ; and they were glad to have the aid of the civil magistrate to relieve them of a theological difficulty. They held resolutely and strongly to the views of the ancient Church in The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 115 regard to the Donatists and Novatians, with whose struggles, I have no doubt, our Scottish peasantry were at one time quite familiar. Yet during the latter half of the seventeenth cen- tury, you have tendencies and developments which betokened, and led on to change. It is remarkable to me that the Cameronian Secession was not much more numerous. The same manner of viewincj thinofs produced in the course of the next forty years one or two small offshoots, which soon disappeared, and of which now-a-days very few have ever heard. Then came the Secession of 1733. That secession, I have always thought, had very much to justify it. I do not wonder that the Erskines, once extruded, shrank from venturing back into that strong current of rationalism and defection in the National Church ; and their com- plex statement of reasons for secession, — for they were always careful to show that it was not one or two corruptions which led them to their final severance, — their complex statement of reasons, I say, is truly weighty. I doubt, however, more than I once did, whether they have successfully vindicated their action on the old principles of the Scottish Church. I have read both the Church and the Secession advocates, Currie of Kinglassie and Wilson of Perth ; and though in grasp and power of argument the latter is immeasur- ably superior to his opponent, I am not convinced that he has answered him on some points successfully. At any rate, the results of that memorable Secession have been very notable, — such, in some respects, as 116 Scottish Theology, none of its first leaders for a moment tlionglit of. Its watcliword was the Second Eeformation. Its roots were all in the past. It was intensely historical and traditional. In fact, it was not a separation from the Church of Scotland, that ideal Church of 1638, which had so great a hold of all good Presbyterians ; it was a mere secession from the present occupants, as it were, of this divine temple. But events ran their course, and in its larger representatives this most historical of Scottish Churches became less historical in some respects than any other Presbyterian community in Scotland. That, indeed, was only, shall I say, a tran- sient ecclesiastical mood ; for no Church, as no nation, long forgets a glorious past, which is, in fact, one of the great spiritual forces by which God works. Nevertheless Secession bred Secession. Scarce a de- cade had gone, when Adam Gib, with the same weapon the Erskines used to sever their connection with the National Church, split the Secession into two. And yet, even in that scoffing age, there was in his excom- munication of the Secessionists, as he held them, for contumacy, a transient blaze-up of the old principles. According to those principles, he would not have been faithful to his Master, he could not have justified his position, if he had done otherwise ; for either he or his opponents were breaking the order of the sacred empire, and offending the King. Adam Gib ! he is one of the little known men of the past century by whom, I confess, I have been strongly impressed. Perhaps I over-estimate him ; but to me The Doctrine of the Visible Churcli. 117 there is sometliing very remarkable about liim. He is altogether a unique figure in that eighteenth century. He ruled his Antiburghers with a firm, strong hand ; and I do not know but that an Antiburgher Synod was as difficult to rule as many a great empire : they tried rebellion once, but it utterly failed. A clear- headed man, with no imagination, plodding away in the old theologies, — I should suppose a dull preacher, save to persons of his own type, — given to formulas, — he had in him the elements of the enthusiast or the fanatic. He wrote, we are told, his first covenant with God in the blood of his own veins. Not without mellowness of soul withal: his elder brother was disinherited for bad behaviour, but the Antiburgher chief burned their father's will on his promise to amend ; and his plan was successful. Ultimus ecclesi- asticorum ! I have sometimes been disposed to exclaim over him. And yet, full of the past, this singular man sowed many of the seeds of the ecclesiastical develop- ments of our own day. At any rate the process of Secession still went on, till the old ideas seem to have passed away in the presence of the patent fact that you had several Christian communities separate from each other, with separate governments, and yet apparently having all very much the same sort of claims to be reckoned visible Churches of Christ. And, in fact, at this moment, with our various kindly related and more or less co-operating Churches, we have a state of matters which to Eutherford or Brown, or even Boston, would have been exceedingly 118 Scottish Theology. perplexing. It seems all very natural to us. We are not put about on account of it. But I confess this whole question of the visible Church, in some of the aspects I have hinted at, seems to demand our earnest study. Is there indeed that Catholic visible kingdom of which our old divines made so much ? Is every Christian body, with the profession of the fundamentals of Christianity, a member of it ? Is there such a thing as schism ? If so, what does it mean or imply ? Is the Catholic visible Church a mere genus, a mere ens rationis, as they scornfully said two hundred years ago ? Can we realize it under a confederacy of co-operating Churches, non-propagandist, and quietly acting out their own individuality ? Could we have at this day a Protestant (Ecumenical Council with anything of authority ? I can only ask these ques- tions; but it appears to me that a serious consideration of them is required. IF. I shall have time to say a few words on another point closely connected in my way with the present — the constituent elements, the actual members, of the visible Church. We must clearly understand here that the visible Church signifies the Church in that aspect of it of which visibility is the distinguishing characteristic, or, in the old phraseology, its form. In this aspect it is a society not of believers, but of professors of belief, of saints not in internal reality, but as " adorned with external holiness," irrespective of the existence or The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 119 non-existence of true grace. Admission, accordingly, to this society is not on the basis of any judgment of a man's being really a Christian, but on the basis of what appears to be a morally serious profession of Christianity, and a promised subjection to the laws of Christ. He should indeed be a Christian, Many members of the Church are Christians ; the invisible Church is within the visible. But they are not admitted formally in that character ; they have no standing in that character ; and if it were revealed from heaven that a man was in the gall of bitterness and bond of iniquity, he would not be extruded on the formal ground of his irregeneracy. The charitat- ive judgment of the Independents, founded on a less or more thorough inquisition into soul-experience and examination of the fruits, was utterly disclaimed. Where, it was asked, is there anything like that in the New Testament ? John made no such inquisition or trial in the case of the multitudes who came to his baptism ; nor did Christ Himself, nor Christ's disciples. But did not the old theologians mean that, if a man made a serious profession, or what could be regarded as such, he might, apart from any trial of his inward state, be simply on that profession reckoned, in the judgment of charity, a subject of saving grace ? Statements may be occasionally made that look in this direction ; but if not to be interpreted from some point of view with which we are not now familiar, they are mere slips or inaccuracies. The doctrine was that, for example, of Eichard Baxter as developed 120 Scottish Tlieology. in his work on Baptism. The Scottish divines, how- ever, though taking generally the same view as the English Puritan, dissented from him here. " I agree," in substance said Wood, " with the learned author, that a serious profession of faith, combined with a professed subjection to the commands and ordinances of Christ, without any searching of the heart, is the ground on which members should be admitted into the Church ; but I differ from him when he teaches that they are to be admitted under the notion of true believers," judged to be such even probably. " I agree with him, that if a man's outward conduct were such as to show that he was not a member of the invisible Church, he should not be taken into the fellowship of the visible Church ; but not on the formal ground that such conduct was a proof of his irregeneracy, but on the ground of its being materially inconsistent with his very outward profession of faith. And my reason for holding that irregeneracy, or anything considered formally under the notion of a sign of irregeneracy, ought not to exclude from the visible Church, is, that I conceive ' it is God's revealed will in His w^ord that men may be received into the visible Church that they may be regenerate, and that the ministerial dispensation of ordinances is by God's revealed will set up in the Church to be means of regeneration and conversion,' as well as means of edification to God's true people." In keeping with this, it was said that faith does not belong to the essence of the visible Church — it is an accident of it : The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 121 faitli is a moral necessity of every visible Church member, but not a physical necessity ; that is to say, if, though with unbelief in the heart, you profess the faith and live decorously, you are homogeneous with the nature of the visible Church as such, and are therefore entitled to its membership. You have a partial development of this idea of the constituent elements of the visible Church in the power which was ascribed to the magistrate to enforce a Church profession. " Seeing, then," says Eutherford, " the Church has no other mark and rule to look to, in the receivino' of members into a visible Church, but external profession, which is no infallible mark of a true convert, the Church is right-constitute when all born within the visible Church and professing the faith are received, though there be many wicked there. And as time, favour of men, prosperity accom- panying the gospel, bring many into the Church, the magistrate may comjDcl men to adjoin themselves to the true Church. Simon Magus, Ananias, and Sapphira turned members of the visible Church on as small motives as the command of a king, on the motives of gain and honour, and were never a whit nearer Christ for all." Those doctrines, however, began to be modified, and the modification seems to me to go almost side by side with the modification I have pointed out in regard to visible Church unity. I am not sure that Gillespie ever held them as strongly as Eutherford and Ward and Dickson. There are some indications that he tended towards the moderate 122 Scotiish Theology. Independent views, and it almost seems to me that he avoided the question. There were a great many things in the latter part of the seventeenth century which naturally led men to what might appear more spiritual views of the visible Church. You see the fruits of this in the writings that appear after the Ee volution ; and Boston enters into the subject at large in his celebrated treatise on Baptism, which almost reads like a polemic against The Due Right of Presbytery. It is indeed a most singular and startling transition from the Due Bight, or The Little Stone, or The Thera- peutica Sacra, to the seventh of Boston's Miscellany Questions. " True heart conviction," says the earlier writer, " regeneration, sanctification, inward saving grace, in reality of existence, or at least conceived to be so in the judgment of charity, is not represented as the qualification necessary in the ecclesiastical court, in order to admitting persons to be members of the visible Church." " Those who cannot be judged," says the later divine, " probably to be within the covenant really and savingly, have no right to admis- sion to the Church." Almost with vehemence Ruther- ford argues that the children of wicked parents who have themselves been baptized, and profess the faith even though they should be excommunicates, are to be baptized. Boston argues against such a doctrine as simply monstrous, " That those who cannot be probably judged to be within the covenant, have no visible right to baptism ; but the children of openly-wicked The Doctrine of the Visible Church. 123 parents cannot be judged to be within the covenant." Rutherford grounds baptism upon the federal or external holiness, and strongly rejects the connecting it with the personal faith of the parents. Boston takes as decidedly the opposite view, — that the only valid baptism of infants is with respect to the faith of immediate parents, as when they are regarded in the judgment of charity or probability as real believers. Some of the seventeenth century divines seem to teach that baptism is a seal of the external or conditional cove- nant to members of the visible Church as such, which appears to me to be very much equivalent to making it a seal of the gospel offer. Boston denies that there is properly any such conditional covenant at all, and maintains that baptism is only a seal to those who are in internal real covenant with God in His Son, in actual possession of covenant blessings. Kutherford maintains that a Church (a Church, he means, in the real sense — " a mystical believing Church ") and a visible Church — a visible Church as visible, and con- sisting formally of professors of belief — may be opposed by way of contradiction, as a number of believers and a number of non-believers {Peciccahle Plea, 107). " Christ," writes Boston, " hath not two Churches — one visible and another invisible — but one Church, which is in one aspect visible, and in another aspect invisible." And the change was not in a theologian or two. Under the shelter of the vague phrase, ''a credible profession," which I have noticed in the earlier Scottish writers, it went on ; and I suppose 124 Scottish Theology. something like Boston's doctrine is very generally prevalent, at least so I have found in my experience ; but the older divines did not hold, any more than Boston, that there were two Churches. All parties found an extreme difficulty in stating their doctrine of the Church. Eome had its tremendous difficulties, and could not he consistent. So had the Inde- pendents. So had the Presbyterians. These last certainly did not hold that the visible Church was, so to speak, an aspect or expression of the invisible. It was rather a case like that of the union between soul and body. The body is not the soul, or the expression of the soul, as the soul is not the body ; yet they are not separate — they make one person. It was some- thing of this kind in the Church, the visible as it were the body, the invisible as it were the soul ; and there was something like a communio idiomatum. Of course this is a mere illustration. It seems to me very noticeable the two courses of historical development I have been pointing out. On one side you seem to have the sense of the sacredness of the visible Church as such growing feebler, — a tendency, you might say, to the notion of a society based on a common profession cf Christian belief, and using Christian symbols — to the notion of a society rather than a Church ; on the other hand, you have the sacredness of the visible Church apparently grow- ing, in so far as in men's ideas it is more tlian once it was a communion of saints in vital union to the Lord. You see the same thing in the Independents in the Tlie Doctrine of the VisiUc Church. 125 seventeenth century. And the connection is not far to seek. Let the kingdom idea of the visiljle Church, with the sacredness which belongjs to it, grow faint, that sacredness will be sought for in some other way, as by making the society more select, more spiritual ; let the idea of the visible Church as a communion of real saints, in vital fellowship with the Lord, or something like that, prevail, and you must either in some way reduce your Church doctrine, or it will be very difficult not to be borne on to the con- clusion that the visible Church is in idea the true bride of Christ. Our old theologians disliked both views. The visible Church was to them a real kingdom of Christ, in which were His laws and ordinances, accompanied by supernatural forces and energies bringing these home to His true people. There was a communion of visible saints, and so far a connnunion of real saints, but Christ Himself was the real source of life and of blessing. The visible Church was rather an instru- ment by which He wrought His gracious work, than a community for mutual spiritual help and quickening — than a fellowship for moral impulse ; and so, for example, its ordinances were not marred to good men by the presence of those impure elements wdiich you must always have on earth. There was no need for an extreme purism, which has always been a failure ; proud division ending sometimes in formalism, some- times in mysticism; though, at the same time, the Scottish doctrine of scandal developed a discipline 126 Scottish Theology. stricter in many respects tlian the opposite theory. It was equal-handed upon all. There was no charity of action, as when you had the charitative judgment that a man was in heart devout. On the other hand, if with the doctrine of the Divine Kingship you made the Church in its idea a company of saints, our theo- logians thought, as I have hinted already, you thus made it in idea the real mystical body of Christ, and you were landed in Eomanism. This was one of their strong arguments against the Independents. Christ, as head of the Church visible, they said was not a vital head, but a political head ; and in this respect it was called His body in a gracious sense. In a word, then, their struggle was to get a temporary home, as it were, on earth for the human spirit, a Canaan here below, a try sting-place where the gracious Lord might meet His people in a peculiar fellowship, while yet they avoided the sacerdotalism, the despotism, the materialism of Eome. There are some extreme positions in both the sub- jects I have spoken of to-day. They are accidents you can easily put away, but I am well convinced that in the Presbyterianism of the seventeenth century we shall obtain the elements of the Church system we need. And we need such a system. If there is any- thing the history of Christianity proves more decisively than another, it is that we need (and our condition at the present time proves it most emphatically) some- thing more than a mere religious society — we need a Church. CHAPTER V. THE HEADSHIP OF CHEIST AND ERASTIANISM. [I would like to say, before I go on to this Lecture, that I am not to be held as assenting to all the views which I do not contradict : there are points which the close study of our old divines has raised, about which I confess to be in some perplexity. I would like also to say that I am not desirous in tliese Lectures to hide or cover up anything that might appear to be extreme, but to state what I have found. Some- times I may do injustice by not being able to put in all needful ex- planations : e.g. in regard to the old doctrine of the proper matter of the visible Church, where you have Brown of Wamphray closing a devoted ministry with the assertion that you may have a true visible Church without a single Christian in it ; giving Laodicea as an example. You would mistake, however, if you supposed that he held loose views about the duty of self-examination in the case of the Lord's Supper, or that any but a converted man should come there. The truth is — and why should I not say it ? — I have been startled by find- ing what an approach there was in the divines of the seventeenth century to what is known in this age as the Highland idea, about which I give no personal opinion.] ITI TiS^)!^'^^^^^ ^^^^ ^® ^^^ doubt that one of the ^ 9M most serious blots on Protestantism is the Erastianism of so many of its Churches. This is the result partly of the reaction from the State- dishonouring doctrine of Ptome ; or perhaps we may connect it still more closely with the use which the Church of Ptome made of the State as its mere instru- ment to put down all opposition to it, — so necessitat- ing State action in self-defence whenever it could be 127 128 Scottish Theology. obtained. The religious struggle of the sixteenth century, in the actual circumstances of the case, gave such a prominence to civil power in the cause of truth, as almost inevitably led to a confusion of the civil and ecclesiastical, and hence to the ascendency of the former over the latter. Certainly Erastianism is neither necessarily nor naturally a Protestant thing, and does not either necessarily or naturally belong to, or come of, the Eeformed doctrine as that was held in the sixteenth century. The case of the Scottish Church is a proof in point. In relation to the Church of Eome, that Church may be described as the very dissidence of dissent, and yet it has indicated no proclivities in the Erastian direction. In fact the spiritual freedom and independence of the Church, as Christ's visible kingdom on earth, has been the dis- tinctive word of our testimony through all these three hundred years. It has been more or less connected with almost every struggle-period of our history — with the struggles of 1580, of 1596, of 1605, of the High Commission Period, of 1638, of the thirty years of fiery persecution, of 1733, of 1843, — all have the crown rights of Christ imprinted on them. JSTot less notable is the presence of this doctrine as an inspiring element in our periods of religious life. It was active in the re- vivals which preceded and heralded the second Eeforma- tion, in the glorious sacraments of tlie Commonwealth time, in the spiritual harvests which signalized the martyr days. It was in the very heart and soul of the Marrow-preaching, and the thousands to whom that The Headship of Christ and Erastianism. 129 preaching was blessed ; and if it ever has gone away, it has come back again, as we know so well, with the singing of birds, to re-animate and re- invigorate us as before. Here it is, still with us, that old truth of the Headship — fresh and living — working, and with work to do, in the Church and the world. This great doctrine could never have taken the hold it has of our country and our Church, — could never have played the part it has in our religious history, — unless it had in some way been fundamental to our Presbyterianism. I believe it to be thus fundamental in various aspects. It is for us what the Papacy is to Eorae, what the priesthood is to the Greek and the High Anglican Churches. It gives us the reality of a Church without ritualism or sacerdotalism, and enables us to take that sort of mediatory position in the great Church controversy which will yet, I believe, be far more recognised. The old writers did not think so much as we are apt to do, of Christianity as beginning with the actual historical appearance of our incarnate Lord among men. They much more usually regarded the Christian Church as the Old Testament Church in a new manifestation, — as ancient Israel, its shackles exchanged for a crown, the types and shadows gone in the rising of the Sun of righteousness, the merely local and temporal thrown away, with, as it were, such new dress, in the form of sacred ordinances, as befits the altered circumstances, — breaking out from its confinement among the hills of Judah, to clasp in its embrace all the nations in the order and way of I 130 Scottish Theology. that special providence which still as of old belongs to the covenant people and the holy kingdom ; that is to say, the Christian Church is really the old theocracy on a grander scale, and with a more glorious Shechinah of the Holy King in its truths, and ordinances, and spiritual influences, — in which, indeed, as in a kind of open Holy of Holies, He abides ; and, in short, none but Himself, the theocratic Saviour, must rule or legislate within it. The making of a new sacred rite was something in kind like the putting of idols into the temple by a Persian or Syrian conqueror. This view lay at the bottom of both the old theology, and the old sentiment, in the so-called Erastian con- troversy. I propose to-day to give some account of Scottish theological teaching in regard to the Headship of Christ, as that is connected with the controversy I have just alluded to. I. They meant that Christ is the real King, the politic King and Head, of the Church, as a visible organization, ruling it by His statutes, and ordinances, and officers, and forces, as truly and literally as David or Solomon ruled the covenant people of old. It is not a mere society for mutual religious improvement. It is not a sacred association with an order of its own, by which it uses up, if I may so speak, the general religious influences lying to its hand for its own good and the good of mankind. It is a kingdom. It is a kingdom with a divinely appointed order administered The Headship of Christ and Erastianism. 131 in the name of the Divine King, and enforced by Him when truly administered in His name, as certainly as any order is enforced by the guns and bayonets of an earthly monarch. Accordingly the " sent minister," regularly called to his office as Aaron was, is not a mere expounder of doctrine, or a pious or eloquent orator. He is an ambassador of the King ; and as he delivers objectively the King's message, he has the King's power with him — not in him — as a real supernatural energy to bind and loose. God may or may not work with the godly and earnest who are unsent ; but conversion or harden- ing as naturally goes on where the legate, when duly authorized — in some cases, it may be, an unconverted man — delivers the Kincj's words, as the walls of a fortress crumble under the material forces of an earthly power, or the chains are locked on the prisoner's limbs with keys of iron. Excommunication by the King's messengers, when it is according to His laws, clave non errante, is not simply severance from Christian brotherhood, from the Church-society, — an act, as it were, of natural self-defence, and fitted in its own nature to produce contrition and penitence ; it has also belonging to it a supernatural enforcement. " I conceive," says Kutherford, " that excommunication hath neither election nor reprobation, regeneration nor non-regeneration, for its object or terminus ; but only it cutteth a contumacious person from the visible Church on earth, and from the Head Christ in heaven, not in regard of his state of regeneration, as 132 Scottish Theology. if Christ, ratifying the sentence in heaven, did so much as cut him off conditionally from being a member of His body. ISTo, but in regard of the second acts of the life of God, and the sweet efficacy and operation of the Spirit, by which the ordinances are less living, less operative, and less vigorous, — the man being, as Mr. Cotton says, as a palsied member, in which life remaineth but a little withered and blunted, and he in Satan's power to vex his spirit ; and therefore I grant all to imply that excommunica- tion is not a real separating of a man from Christ's body, — only unbelief does that, — but it follows not — therefore it is a separation only from the external society of the Church. For (1) this external cutting off is ratified in heaven ; (2) Christ hath ratified it by a real internal suspension of the influences of His Spirit in heaven." Certainly the Scottish theologians had no belief in either ministerial or synodical infallibility. They taught the very opposite. They urged men to read the word, and try their message by it ; and no people were ever more sturdily independent than the Scottish people, at the very time when the sacredness of Church ordinances was most intensely held by them. Witness the Cameronians and others, who clung resolutely to their own convictions and beliefs, and yet would not for anything break the sacred order. Neither, as we have seen from Eutherford, did they imagine that they had any power of severing the soul from Christ. In truth, excommunication in their view did not even put The Headslii'p of Christ and Erastianism. 133 a man without the pale of the visible Church. That could be done only by the excommunicatio maxima, which perhaps it scarcely belonged to the Church ever to pronounce, unless by direct intimation from above ; in fact, our best theolodans held that it should never take place without the consent obtained of the congregation. But they held that the word and ordinances, administered according to Christ's laws in the Bible, had Christ's living power with them. Wliether for salvation or destruction, Christ was King in Zion. The visible Church was the region or sphere of the ordinary supernatural action of the ascended Saviour. Not that there was anything magical in the matter of this action. Word and sacraments and dis- cipline had all an instrumental fitness for their various objects. Only there was more than that. The glorious One, who has His oroin^s amonor the ojolden candle- sticks, was with them, too, in His living energy. So it used to be taught, and so to be believed. ISTo grand ceremonial, no aw^ful sacrifice was needed ; in their barest simplicity, the Christian ordinances were to these old Scotch people the trysting-place of a wondrous fellowship, the mount of expected manifestations. The Church, they said, was supernatural ; indeed, this word almost haunts the long-forgotten pamphlets and little books of even the good Seceders of last century. II. But still higher ground was taken up. Christ is not merely King of His Church, but the only King and Head of it. By this it was meant that no depute 134 Scottish Theology. headship like that of the Pope or that of the civil magistrate is admissible. Jesus is given to the visible Church as Head, in respect of government as well as in respect of saving influence ; and there is not the slightest hint of any other being given to the Church, to whom even in a subordinate sense that designation beloncjs, so that it is neither more nor less than the Saviour's office that the Eoman Pontiff takes to him- self. No doubt there is truth, so far, in Hooker's argument, that the physical analogy fails to hold in reference to the political organization. In this case there is no such monstrosity in the idea of head with his under-heads. A pure absolute monarchy, in a sort of improper sense, admits of other heads ; only any claim to the exercise of regal powers under any pre- tence whatever, without the indubitable conveyance of them from the sovereign, is a direct assault upon the throne — is the very highest conceivable offence. Now all Christians admit that, in a very peculiar and blessed sense, Christ is King of the Church, absolute Monarch of it. It must be a great thing to claim or exercise vicarial authority under Him. He alone can give the right ; and if given, it must be in such a way as to put the fact beyond all possibility of doubt. But there is not in all the Bible the dimmest hint of a vice-Christ. On the contrary, the pervading idea of the New Testament is that of bringing men face to face with the King Himself. He is, in short, the King Himself alone. The old theology was far-seeing in this matter. TJie Heaclsliip of Christ and Erastianism. 135 Where there is an earthly monarchy, you have the vice-regal court, and all the ceremonies and forms which belong to the actual power of the monarch. The greater the distance of the real, the higher the responsibilities given over to the substitute, the more important the latter becomes. By the same law, a vice-Christ upon earth becomes to himself, and those who think of him as such, a kind of Deity. We have seen the Papal vicariate develop in our day into that idea of a sub-incarnation which some of the Eomish theologians have begun to entertain. It was on the same principle that Prelacy, with its claims to legisla- tion and priesthood, was viewed in every shape with such dislike. That always implied more or less of the vicariate, and of distance from the Lord Himself. Prelacy, priesthood, sacraments, ceremonies, were a scheme to put the veil on the sanctuary. In regard to the earthly king, the case is, if possible, stronger. If he enter the Church, he also enters with a vicariate, unless he change his character — become something else than what he is : he comes wearing a crown where no crown but one has any place ; he takes with him legislative authority, where all the legislation is in the hands of the heavenly Master. In principle, a magis- tratical headship is still more indefensible than a pontifical headship. If the external government of the Church be an inherent right of the Crown or the supreme State-power, does not that imply either that a heretical, or infidel, or heathen magistrate may be the subordinate head under Christ of an institution 136 Scottish Thiology. whose highest object is to destroy unbelief, and error, and idolatry, or that heresy or unbelief makes the authority of the magistrate null ? In fact, you require of him, in such a case, Church qualifications, destroying his natural rights, and yielding the arguments to king- destroying Eome, or falling into the wildest Anabaptism. In their sphere, their ends, their instruments. Church and State are entirely different. The distinction between them is, indeed, drawn in the boldest and strongest way. They are said to differ toto genere. " The civil power hath for the object of it the tilings of this life, matters of peace and justice, the king's matters and the country's matters, — those things that belong to the external man ; but the ecclesiastical power hath for its object things pertaining to God, the Lord's matters as they are distinct from civil matters, and things belonging to the inward man, distinct from things belonging to the outward man." So, too, the Church and the State differ in the instrumentalities and the forces by which their ordinances are adminis- tered and their statutes enforced. The symbol of the one is the keys, and it can produce only spiritual effects. The other has the sword for its symbol, and it can produce only civil and temporal effects. The Erastians, however, had many plausible things to say. They made great use, for example, of the famous doctrine of the " Custos." What ! they urged, is not the civil ruler keeper of the first table of the law as well as of the second, having therefore author- ity in religion ? Has he not by universal consent. The Headship of Christ and Erastianism. 137 as custos et vindex ulrmsque tahulce, the right to put down idolatry, to punish heresy, and profanity, and blasphemy, to command men to keep the Sabbath, to attend the house of God and hear Christ's Gospel? and what does that amount to but a plain admission that the visible Church sphere belongs to his juris- diction ? It was answered, that, as Christ Him- self is its Head, so the visible Church is a keeper of the law, a custos utriusque tahulce as well as the State ; and that, for that part of it, the supremacy of the Church over the State might be just as validly argued as that of the State over the Churcli. Every father of a family is a custos ; every master of a household is a custos; every individual man is a custos. Plainly, the Erastian reasoning is based on a vague and equivocal premiss, which seems to sweep all into the domain of the magistrate ; whereas he only has with others a charge in the matter, which he is to fulfil in the way and manner suitable to the nature of his office. In fact, he just guards the law by his sword, as the Church guards it by its censures, and the individual by his private counsels and ad- monitions. He is in this matter, as it was said, only a bit, so to speak, of an ordinance. Besides, there was some distinction made about the tables of the law. The second table, it was held, is the magistrate's more special field, as directly impinging on men's temporal interests ; and only there, in his exercise of power, has he extrinsically or objectively 138 Scottish Theology. proper jurisdiction.^ As the Churcli has to do with injuries done to persons or property, not as they are civil offences injurious to civil society, — has no ^ " The magistrate's power in spiritual causes is formally civil, and only objectively spiritual ; and he neither hath nor needeth any spiritual power to attain his temporal end, nor needeth the Church any power formally civil to attain her spiritual end. The reason is, because powers have their specification and nature from their formal object, not from the material. Because the magistrate punisheth heresies and false doctrine as they disturb the peace of the civil State, therefore his power is civil ; and because the Church censureth injustice, incest (1 Cor. v. 1, 2), and sins against the second table, because they are scandalous in the Church, and maketh the name of God to be ill spoken of, though materially those sins be punish- able by the magistrate, yet is the Church's power spiritual, because it judgeth those as scandalous and offensive to God, and therefore the power is spiritual, because the object, to wit, as scandalous to the Church, and as offensive to God, is spiritual, although, as destructive to civil peace, it is formally a civil object. The magis- trate, without any spiritual power, judges what is the true Church and trae ordinances, and setteth them up by his sword. He doth set them up only for a civil end, because they conduce most for the peace and flourishing condition of the civil State, whereof he is head, not that the members of his State may attain life eternal : for the magistrate intendeth life eternal to his subjects in setting up a true Church and true ordinances, not as a magistrate, but as a godly man (as the woman of Samaria brought out the Samaritans, that they might receive Christ in their heart by faith as she had done); but as a magistrate he intendeth not life eternal to his subjects. So, a master, as a master, hireth a man to serve who is a believer, and as a master he judgeth such a one will be most faithful and active in his service. Now the master judgeth him not to be a saint, that he may be a fit member of the Church. The Church only, as the Church, is to judge so of this servant. Nor doth he judge him a believer that he may obtain life eternal, nor doth he love and choose him as his servant that he may obtain life eternal ; Christians, as Christians, judge and love one another that way." "So the magistrate, as a magistrate, judges, loves, chooses, and setteth up true ordinances, a true Church, as means of a flourishing kingdom, and of external peace, and pulleth down the contrary, as means destructive to the peace and safety of his subjects." The Headship of Christ and Erastianism. 139 jurisdiction in civilihus, but only ci7'ca civilia, as they are ecclesiastical scandals, — so the State has to do with distinctly religious offences, not as they are religious, but only as they may be breaches of civil order. It is not for a civil end that the Church censures dishonesty, though civil ends may be the result ; neither is it for a spiritual or ecclesiastical end that the magistrate suppresses heresy or schism. The magistrate, as such, has only civil ends in view, and never can produce more than a civil effect, whatever may be the religious advantage incidentally accruing. The Church takes no juridical cognizance of men as citizens, but only as members of the Church ; and neither does the State take juridical cognizance of men as members of the Church, but only as citizens or members of the State. Not as belonging to Christ's kingdom, but as one who, being a subject of Christ's kingdom, is also a subject of the State, is the heretic punished : for the argument seems sometimes to be put on tlie assumption that he is punished for having committed a direct breach of civil order, or for the injury he inflicts on an institu- tion which, whether as established or even tolerated, is so far part of the civil order of a country. Not as belonging to Christ's kingdom, but as a subject of the State, is the Cliurcli office-bearer or the Church member commanded to be faithful to his duties in a visible organization which has civil protection, and whose well-being concerns the State. Accordingly it involves a manifest confusion of thought, to argue 140 Scuttish Thcolurjy. from the fact that the State has jurisdiction over the same person and about the sauie actions as the Church, that it has jurisdiction in and over the Church. It might just as well be said that Great Britain has jurisdiction over France, because our courts punish a riotous or dishonest Frenchman, who, being a Frenchman, comes incidentally within our civil order and breaks it. Erastianism seems to me to involve persecution ; but what we may regard as the persecuting doctrines of our fathers were never put on an Erastian basis, and thus gave the magistrate no place within the Church. Non- tolerance of murder and non-tolerance of schism were both purely civil acts, and contemplated directly and primarily civil ends. Everything must somehow become civil before it comes within the magisterial sphere. It may be materially religious and spiritual ; but unless in some respect it has a civil side, in virtue of which it comes into the civil ruler's domain, he cannot see it, touch it, minister praise or blame to it. To this effect says Eutherford, at the close of his book on Liberty of Conscience : " We grant, with Calvin and Beza, that Eomans xiii. is meant of the duties not of the first, but of the second table of the law ; but it follow^s not that the magistrate's punishing of ill-doers, and so of seducing teachers, is excluded, for that punishing is a duty of the second table of the law. Though the object be spiritual, as sorcery is against the first commandment (Eom. xiii.), though sorcery be a sin formally against the first table of the law, it is The Headship of Christ and Urastianism. 141 punished as ill-doing ; and why should the magistrate punish one sin against the table, and not all, in so far as they are against the peace and safety of human societies ? " There is nothing, then, of a Church character in the action of the magistratical " Gustos." He does not punish heresy or blasphemy in a Church sense, or for Church ends, but as it comes out of the Church into civil order, and is injurious directly or indirectly to man and society. And so there is nothing ecclesiast- ical in his action about sacred things, either in the authority he exercises, or the instruments he uses, or the end he contemplates. All is done by him in his own civil sphere, and in his own civil way. At the same time, I think the notion runs through the reasonings of the old divines, that the breach of the precepts of the first table was not only remotely, but directly, as an external thing, an infringement of civil order, and so directly, as it seems, a civil offence. God was to them, as it were, the supreme civil Euler. If, again, it was said that the magistrate, when a Christian, could not but have a place in the Church, and by necessity jurisdiction, it was answered that his Christianity is only a gracious accident. It neither confers on him new magistratical powers ; nor by a general legitimization of his authority — that is, suppos- ing that, if he were a heathen or an infidel, he was not then a magistrate at all — does it give him a place in Christ's kingdom. There is no hint of such a thing in 142 Scottish Theology. the Bible. The heathen, or infidel, or heretical magis- trate is as essentially a magistrate as the Christian. Everything circa sacra which the Christian magistrate can do, the heathen magistrate can do. Tiberius had the same right to call a Synod of the Christian Pres- byters living in his day in the Eoman Empire, and to preside in it sua modo, as James of Christian Scotland, or Charles of England, or William of Orange, or Henry of Navarre. There were examples at hand which our old theologians often referred to. His Catholic Majesty of France was always present, by his commissioner or representative, in the General Synods of the French Protestant Church, and was always welcome. Antonio De Dominis stated in his book, Dc Christiana Bepublica, that in his diocese of Spalato, within the Turkish dominions, he enjoyed Turkish toleration, but that his civil master kept a watchful oversight of him and of his flock, carefully looking to it that they kept their own order, as being so far part of his. They did only, it was held, what they had a right to do. Mahomet or Solyman, under the Crescent, had all the powers circa sacra of Coustantine or Theodosius under the Cross. The Christian magistrate is, no doubt, able to perform his duties better than the heathen ; but his Christianity does not change the nature of his office. He has nobler motives, he has fuller light, he is in a condition more perfectly to carry out God's will in his special sphere ; but, as a magistrate, he has not altered ends, nor a larger jurisdiction. You cannot make a new power out of The Headship of Christ and Erastianism. 143 Christianity and magistracy, any more than you can make a creature of a new genus out of a horse and a lion. You cannot make an ens per aggregationem. If the Erastian argument has any good basis, a Christian monarch may take possession of a heathen neighbour's rich domains ; or a Church, when she reforms, may claim the unreformed king's sceptre. In short, Chris- tian or heathen, the end of the magistrate is only civil and temporal, and it can only produce directly civil and temporal effects. The inner man, the spiritual life, are out of his range ; and so the Church which deals with these is out of his jurisdiction. This may appear, perhaps, a low view of State- duty, and hardly in keeping with the impressions our national religious history seems naturally to convey. But you have a catena of testimonies in its favour which it seems impossible to resist. Hear how the leaders of the Church of 1590, with Andrew Melville at their head, in a memorable document, addressed King James : " There are two jurisdictions exercised in this realm : the one spiritual, the other civil ; the one respects the conscience, the other external things ; the one directly procuring the obedience of God's word and commandments, the othQj" obedience unto civil laws ; the one persuading by the spiritual word, the other compelling by the temporal sword ; the one spiritually procuring the edification of the Kirk, which is the body of Jesus Christ ; the other, by entertaining justice, procuring the commoditie, peace, and quietness of the Commonweal, the which, having ground in the 144 Scottish Theology. light of nature, proceeds from God, as He is Creator, and so termed by the Apostle Humana CreaturaJ' Already have we seen Gillespie's views : and I might multiply quotations from him. But let me give what is said by the writers of the Flea for the Persecuted Ministers : " That government whose immediate and essential ends are specifically different from the im- mediate and essential ends of the magistrate's govern- ment, is distinct from the government of the magistrate. But here it is so : the essential and immediate ends of Church government are different from the essential and immediate end of magistracy, as will be clear to any that compares them together. The ends of Church government are the saving of the soul, the conversion and edification of sinners, etc. The ends of magistracy are the outward public peace and prosperity of the commonwealth, the execution of justice in the main- taining and preserving of property. With these the Church's government does not meddle, nor intend them of itself." Brown also says : " It cannot be denied that the proper end of the republic is the con- servation of human and political affairs. The principal remote cause of the civil republic is God, the author of Nature ; the principal remote cause of the Church is God, the author of Grace. The principal proximate cause of the civil republic is the natural tendency with which man is endowed, as born to cultivate society with others ; but the principal proximate cause of the Church is a supernatural disposition with which the Christian man is endowed. The less principal cause The Headship of Christ and Erastianism. 145 of the civil republic is tlie need of those things which have respect to this our natural and civil life ; the less principal cause of the ecclesiastical republic is the need of those things that have respect to the good of the soul, and without which the spiritual life cannot well be preserved and cherished. The ecclesiastical power is spiritual, having to do with those things which look to the soul and the conscience and the inner man ; but the political is natural and mundane, touching only the external man." The early Seceders liad the whole question of the civil magistrate in his relation to religion to discuss soon after they separated from the National Church, while yet the principles of the second Eeformation were regarded by them with an almost idolatrous admiration ; and we have their testimony carefully preserved. " The public good of outward and common order in all reasonable society unto the glory of God is," they say, " the great and only end which those invested with magistracy can propose in a sole respect to that of^ce. And as, in prosecuting this end civilly, according to their office, it is only over men's good and evil works that they can have inspection, so it is only over these they must needs take cognizance for the said public good ; while, at the same time, their doing so must be in such a manner and proceed so far only as is requisite for that end, without assuming any lordship immediately over men's consciences, or making any encroachments on the special business and privi- leges of the Church. And, moreover, as the whole K 146 Scottish Theology. institution and end of tlieir office are cut out by and lie within the compass of natural principles, it were absurd to suppose that there could or ought to be any exercise thereof towards that end in the foresaid cir- cumstances, but what can be argued for and defended from natural principles." There is indeed one great theologian who at one time differed from his contem- poraries on this point. Rutherford, in his Due Rigid, 437, teaches unequivocally that the civil magistrate has directly spiritual and supernatural ends. That view, however, he was led to modify, and in his later books he often rather extremely takes up another view. Thus he explains himself in his Divine Right of Church Government, after he had passed through the Erastian conflicts of the Westminster Assembly : " It is true I have said that the intrinsical end of the magistrate is a supernatural good : But, 1. That I speak, in opposi- tion to the author of The Bloody Tenet, to Socinians and such as exclude the magistrate from all meddling with religion, or using of the sword against heretics, apostates, and idolaters. 2. That I understand only of the material end, because the Prince, punishing idolatry, may joer accidens and indirectly promote the salvation of the Church by removing the temptations of heretics from the Church ; but he doth that, not in order to the conscience of the idolater, to gain his soul (for pastors as pastors do that), but to make the Church quiet and peaceable in her journey to life eternal. But all this is but to act on the external man by worldly po^Yer " {Church Government, p. 592) The Headsliip of Christ and Erastianism. 147 And these views of the civil magistrate, let me observe, were inwrought into the whole ecclesiastico- political theory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were intimately connected, in fact, with their more religious notions of the magistrate. The magistrate, they held, was God's vicegerent, in so far standing on a peculiar elevation which to no Church officer belonged. In relation to the Highest a servant, lie was in relation to men, in a great and signal sense, a master. He commanded and issued his commands in his own name. Unless, in fact, he acted in this sovereign way, with the sword behind all his enact- ments and injunctions, he did not act in the proper sense magistratically. But such a sovereignty as this within the soul and conscience would have been in- tolerable ; so it was limited to the external man. Emphatically, all his sovereignty in regard to religion was external : it only produced, as magistratical, and was only meant to produce, external effects ; effects in fact, though in a sense religious, merely bearing in themselves on the outward man and the outward order of society. Then the very fact that it was uni- versally held that the magistrate had the power to command all outward religious acts — to attend Church, profess the truth, to punish men for idolatry, heresy, schism — made it absolutely necessary to keep him out of the soul-region ; for if he did the same things materially which the Church did, and in the same sphere and in order to the same spiritual ends, what was this but giving him an authority in sacred things? 148 Scottish Theology. That would have been paving the way to a depute Headship under Jesus ; and therefore, that, with safety to the Church's liberty, the Church might have the advantage, as they said, of the King's sw^ord in an extrinsic way in driving the wolves from the flock, our fathers kept him carefully in the external sphere. The truth is, we can go further with safety than our fathers in the religious direction, just because we have materially excluded the magistrate from using his sword in the religious sphere by our doctrine of toleration. They certainly found no difficulty under their views in securing for the Church a high enough place in the earthly kingdom. They were enabled to do that in various ways. The State, in their idea, had a coUaterality with all rights belonging to the natural order of society : such as the right to hold property and use it ; as the right of men to practise a particular art according to, as it were, art-laws ; the right of husband, father, master ; and it was, at the same time, protector of these natural rights and institutions, bound to give them all encouragement — to be custos d nutrix to them all. But, on the same principle that the State gives its support to these natural institutions, some of them diverse in nature and in immediate object from itself, when another institution appears and claims that it is of God, and demands a place in civil order, and the protection of that order in all that is p)eculiar to it, there does not seem any reason why, if its claims are proved, it should not be admitted. Well, the Christian Church makes these claims, the Pi'otestant Church The HcaclsJiip of Christ and Erastianism. 149 makes these claims ; they are considered and admitted, and with the family or the household it straightway belongs to the civil order of the country. And this, in fact, is the establishment of the Church. Establishment is the State giving the Church a place, with all its inherent rights, among the positively tolerated societies and institutions of the country. What are those ric^hts ? o (1.) There is tlie right of self-government under its glorious Head. That, as I have said, was not con- ceived to be in the least foreign to the idea of civil society, which admitted and existed for the protection of collateral rights and institutions. The old divines made a great deal of this. They pointed out, for in- stance, how in the conjugal relationship and in the paternal relationship there was a sphere in which the State has properly no intrinsic authority, but merely, as it was said, an extrinsic and cumulative authority. (2.) Then, again, this acceptance of the Church into civil order implies that the State is bound in all fitting ways to cherish and nourish it, just as it does with whatever else it has taken into its great house or family. Here, it seems to me, is the old principle of endowment ! The idea was not that the State, as desirous to convert men — having that as one of the objects of its existence — in a sort of way employs the Church as the fitting instrument ; but rather that the Church, having that as its glorious work, appointed to that end by God, comes to the State, and says, " I have 150 Scottish TheoloQTj. God's commission ; examine it, and see. Let me have full and free course within thy domain for my blessed work." The old divines had an immense dislike to anything like State precedence, either in legislation or in action about religion. But, the commission examined, the claims acknowledged, the Cliurch, ac- cording: to its necessities, and as it is faithful to its character, has its claim, like any other institution, to the civil rewards and praises. You see how ample was the scope thus given to the magistrate, or the State de faxto Christian. I do not much believe in the modern notion of a concordat, or an alliance between Church and State, as very vividly present to the minds of our old orthodox divines. Certainly I utterly disbelieve in their having any notion of the Church ever bartering any of her liberties for earthly gain. She had freedom and independence under heathen princes ; and was she warranted to give that away under Christian princes ? All that the State could do in her case was cumulative, not privative. It could, in a sense, add something in the way of defending and affording external aids, just as it did in the case of the family ; but to take was sacrilege, as for the Church to surrender was treason. At least that was the theory ; but I do not think that endowment was very prominent. For (3.) I think it was strongly held that the divine kinc^dom, as it widened out from the narrow bounds of ancient Israel, took its sacred rights with it, had an indefeasible claim to the tithes, and other things ac- cruing to it, by a kind of common law or custom. The Headsliip of Christ and Urasticmism. 151 But the State, in acknowledging the Protestant Pres- byterian Church to be the Church, the true kingdom of Christ within the realm, ipso facto gave it all Church rights, just as it gives a man in the permission to trade all trade rights, or in the permission to hold property all property rights. Ordination by a true Church, in a regular way, conferred essential and indefeasible rights to the benefice. This was very strongly held by many of our divines. That the State had no liherum arhitrium properly in that case in regard to the stipend, though it was dealing with its own, was, I think, a later idea. With all deference, it does not seem to me that at the Eeformation the State took the Church's property, and then gave it at its pleasure. According to the idea of Calderwood and Eutherford and Brown, what the State did, or should have done, was liker what takes place now, when either a court of law or Parliament determines, concerning some ecclesiastical property, to which of two ecclesiastical claimants it rightfully belongs. Hence, when the State power said, " This is, in our view, the Church," her real rio-hts and her civil ridits became, as it were, one. (4.) And, once again, in the very fact that the State gave the Church a place as the true Church in its civil order, it first of all excluded all other claimants in the same line, and thereupon recognised it as the rightful religious instructor of the country. The State could not be that itself. The spiritual training of the people w^as beyond its sphere, just as the family training of 152 Scottish Theology. children, or the management of wives or servants, was beyond its sphere. But here the true spiritual trainer of humanity appears ; and the Church claims, and the State gives, the civil liberty of his civil house to it. I may add that, in keeping with these views, there was long in Scottish theology a peculiar dread of the positive toleration of non-orthodox religious bodies ; down at least to the end of the last century you have this feeling very strong. If you give them anything of positive acknowledgment, anything of positive pro- tection, what is that, it was said, but taking them into your house ? And if you give them recognition and shelter, what difference is there between that and giving them, as it were, bed and board ? There was something in it. These old writers had clear vision, and in their patient way looked round and round things in a way in which we are perhaps deficient. One of the difficulties of our time is, that you have established, as one of the approved forms of society, freedom of opinion and free religious asseveration. That was then dreaded, as we now dread universal endowment. When the Toleration Bill of 1712 was passed, it was regarded as equivalent to the establish- ment of Episcopacy, and denounced in that character. The truth is, that the apparently low doctrine of the civil magistrate as the protector of civil order — giving all rights their place, and becoming their defender, while it kept the civil magistrate from intruding where he ought not — did not interfere with the amplest recognition of religion and of the Church of Christ. The IlcadsJdjJ of Christ and Erastianism. 153 And there were other ways of putting it. While reliaion, it was said, is not the end of the magistrate's office, yet it is all-important for the ends of his office. The Christian magjistrate or State recomises Chris- tianity as from God, and, as hy God's blessing the highest renovator of society, he is bound to give it all encouragement. III. Once more. It is not merely that Christ was King in His Church ; but that the Church was His special, if it was not His only, kingdom as Mediator. Some great divines have certainly held this latter view. The question was debated in England, for instance, between Hooker and Cartwright. The great Puritan taught " that the civil mai^istrate cometh from God immediately, as Christ doth, and is not subor- dinate to Christ ; " that Christ governs " kingdoms and commonwealths as the equal of the Father ; but the Church, as His mediatorial kingdom, as the Father's delegate and deputy." The great Anglican tells us that at such views, as very strange, he mused in a kind of astonishment ; and arGjuimy that kinqs are Christ's as kings, not less surely than as saints, he, from his point of view, developed therefrom his High Church Erastianism, and asserted that " civil government is a branch of Christ's regal office,*' that the " civil magis- trate is an under subordinate head of Christ's people." The subject was also largely discussed by continental divines. The celebrated work of Apollonius, the Dutchman, on the rights of the civil power circa 154 Scottish Theology. sacra, is, you may say, based on the doctrine that Christ is only King of the Church as Mediator ; and King of the nations, Lord of the universe, in respect of His essential Deity. This distinction, he maintains, is of itself sufficient to settle the Erastian controversy. Thus he lays down some of his fundamental positions : " The economical kingdom and dominion of Christ as Mediator is different and of another nature from the kingdom of God and the natural universal sovereignty of the Son of God, as He is one God with the Father ; which kingdom of divine excellence and majesty is independent and supreme. The universal kingdom and natural sovereignty the Father possesses in common with the Son and the Holy Ghost, qua 6/ji,ooi/(tco<; Deus ; but the special economicfil kingdom is proper and peculiar to Christ, as depending on His mediatorial office, and having frora it its origin and its constitu- tion. By such differences as these the kingdoms are distinguished : (1.) The mediatorial kingdom, viewed in itself and economically, is subordinate to God, dependent on Him ; and in it the King Mediator is less than God, and inferior to God, unequal to Him, and His servant, — which things cannot be affirmed of the natural universal divine kingdom. The right of the Mediator's sovereignty is based on the merit of the satisfaction which the Mediator performed in place of the Church ; but God possesses the right of natural and universal dominion from His divine nature, and the glory which belongs to His Deity. Hence the act and effect of the sovereignty of the Mediator is the acquisition. The Headslii;p of Christ and Erastianism. 155 government, and defence of the Church ; but of the universal King is providence, government, and dis- position in regard to the whole world, and all things in it. The office and power which the magistrate bears are not subordinated to the mediatorial kingdom of Christ, but to the universal kingdom of God. ... In respect of his office, the magistrate is not, nor is called in the Scriptures, a servant of Christ-Mediator, to fulfil his office in Christ's name, a leirate of Christ, or in the name of Christ to acquit himself of his legation." This is the fundamental doctrine of the " circa sacra." It runs through and gives direction to the whole argu- ment by which the writer vindicates the liberties of the Church, and unfolds the peculiar nature of those adventitious or accidental relations between Church and State which are signified by the title of his book, and under the shelter of which the Erastians took up chiefly their ground and waged the most plausible contention. It has been subject of dispute whether this be the view of the seventeenth century divines of Scotland or not, but I shall not enter into the discussion. All at least agree in this, that in a very close and blessed sense, Christ, as Mediator, is King of the Church. He is King in Zion. From Zion goes forth the rod of His power. It was this, intensely realized, that moved the Scottish heart once so profoundly. And Erastianism was not merely an error in theology; it was offensive, in the very thought of it, to all right and holy feeling, — an assault in no mitigated sense upon His crown, 156 Scottish Theology. and notliiiiG^ less than a turning^ of tlie kinc^dom of heaven into a kino^dom of this world. There was more than in a general way the freedom and independence of the Church, something nearer and more touching that concerned them in the matter. There was the thought of membership in a kingdom of which incar- nate Deity had said, with a glorious emphasis : "This is my kingdom ; in it I reign as nowhere else in the universe ; I have won it by my blood, and all to myself I claim it and its people." Above all, it was this appropriating of Christ as King to the Church, which developed those intensities of personal affection and sacred loyalty, that kingdom-patriotism, if I might so speak, which are so notable in our religious history. It might be fairly debated whether you have not, as another result less favourable, some want of expansive- ness, some tendency to the Church seclusion of the Old Covenant. Never, however, since apostolic times was the personal Jesus more truly, never in a popular religion more fully realized. That old doctrine of the Headship did for the Scottish Church wliat Eome tries to do with the Mass : it brought the Lord of Glory very near, and gave gracious souls " heavenlies " here below; and this without any materializing of the sacred ordinances, or any use of priestly magic. CHAPTER VI. PEESENT MISREPKESENTATION OF SCOTTISH RELIGION. jT is not an uncommon allegation that Scotch religion is harsh, austere, gloomy ; — a stern and frowning^ thinsj, revellins^ in the dark, dread mysteries of a stern theology. Well, sometimes it is not very easy to know what is meant by the alleojation. If it is meant that the doctrines of man's fallen and guilty state, of the reality and punishment of sin, of regeneration, of vicarious atonement, — doc- trines which Scotch theology has always taught and Scotch preachers have always strongly proclaimed, — are of the sort alluded to, then, of course, I have merely to answer that these doctrines are no peculiar heritage of our country : they have a place in every creed in Christendom ; they were the belief of Luther and Cranmer, of Hooker and Baxter. Even in its doctrine of the Sovereign Electing Grace of God, the Church of Scotland only treads in the footsteps of the greatest of the Fathers, whom all Western Christendom venerates. All the Churches of the Eeformation, as we know, were on this point substantially Calvinistic. Certainly the Anglican Church was so, and it has never wanted a great and influential Calvinistic party 158 Scottish Theology. ■within its pale. Our Anglican friends, who are very often the fault-finders in this matter, might do well to remember that we have no Athanasian Creed, and that our days of sacred rejoicings are not darkened, as their Christmas is, by its dread Anathemas. I suppose it is w^ell known how strongly Mr. Buckle has put this point, in what dark colours he has painted the severity of that seventeenth century religion from which we draw so much of our religious impulse, and to which so many of our grand traditions cling. Now I am not going to enter into lengthened controversy with this writer, who, by so completely overdoing his case, has perhaps made his work comparatively harm- less. He reasons from a point of view which I utterly repudiate. He regards as abject superstition what I hope I shall ever count dearer to me than life. Nor can I imagine that an author who can give the mean account he does of our greatest national movements, to whom Knox and Melville are little better than turbulent demagogues, not seldom carrying out with dirty tools w^hat w^e, I trust, shall never cease to regard as a glorious revolution, and who pins his faith so often to the most extreme of our Prelatic vilifiers, will have any great weight among Scottish people. Very extravagant, indeed, are the blunders he some- times makes. He tells us, for example, — covering three -fourths of the page with proofs, — that in that dismal seventeenth century, whoever presumed to dis- obey the minister w^as excommunicated, and was be- lieved to have incurred the penalty of eternal perdition. Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Religion. 159 His first authority is a quotation from a Spottiswood Miscellany, which sufficiently indicates its value. Not content with that, Mr. Buckle goes to the fountain- head. He refers to Gillespie as an influential divine of his time, who puts the matter of the asserted per- dition beyond all question, by plainly declaring, he says, that an excommunicated person is given over to Satan. Of course we all know that excommunication, so far from meaning to give a man over to perdition, means the opposite ; and that, in truth, it was used as a means of grace. If Mr. Buckle had happened to possess a very ordinary acquaintance with the E'ew Testament, — and I think that, even on the grounds of patriotism, every thoughtful Englishman might well be expected to have that, — he would have been aware whence the phraseology came ; and at least he ought to have known that this terrible blot on our Scottish religion belonged to every Church in Christendom, if not in actual exercise, at least in profession. Besides, there does not seem any reason to believe that excom- munication was ever frec|uent in our Church. Baillie states that it was very uncommon in his time ; and Gillespie taught that it should only be exercised with consent of the people. But however that be, when exercised it was, it had salvation, not perdition, as its end. Mr. Buckle has a paragraph in which he gathers together, as into a focus, all that is appalling in our religion of the period in question. He rises from step to step, till he reaches a climax of the dreadful, at 160 Scottish Theology. wliicli, bold man as lie is, lie seems to stand agliast. He accuses the Scottish preachers of fostering for their own ends the most fearful and soul-oppressive delusions. They told their hearers, he asserts, that what was spoken from the pulpit was binding upon all believers, and was to be regarded as immediately proceeding from the Deity. Does not Durham, he says, teach, in his exposition of the Song, that directions given by Christ's ministers from His word are to be accounted by him as if He did immediately speak them Himself ? But Mr. Buckle was surely aware of the fact that the Scotch people had the Bible in their hands, and that they knew it to be their duty and right to search it, and try all things by it ; that " Search the Scriptures " is the very motto of Protestantism, especially of Calvinistic Protestantism. Durham, in his work on the Pievelation, which Mr. Buckle also quotes, lays down the principle that it belongs to believers even to try apostles, who are not lords of their faith, but helpers of their joy. And the thing was done. It was in anything but a crouching spirit that many of these old blue- bonnets sat under the preaching of the word. At the very time to which he makes special reference, there is good reason to believe that ministers had their own difficulties in dealing with them. Again he says, " The clergy believed that they alone were privy to the counsels of the Almighty." It is sheer illusion. When Samuel Paitherford said that his pteople had heard of him the wdiole counsel of God, Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Eeligion. 161 he merely meant to say that, so far as he knew, he had spoken fully and faithfully the gospel of Christ as revealed in the Holy Book. It is one of the commonest counsels given to a young pastor, to do what Eutherford says he did ; and it means nothing more than that he is to tell holdly out the truths of life, holding back nothing of God's Word, whether through fear or favour ; and any idea of its implying acquaintance with all the secrets of the Eternal Mind is as far away from its meaning as the east is from the west. The miscon- ception furnishes another instance of how thoroughly out of his range was this able man, when, all unfamiliar with it, he entered the field of theological literature. Nor was this all, says Mr. Buckle. Not merely did the Scottish ministers claim infallibility in their sermons, and the full knowledge of the counsels of the Almighty : they claimed to be able to predetermine every man's future state ; and with a simplicity that is almost touching, he gives as his only authority Wishart's Memoirs of Montrose. Alas ! these good men had oft- times sore struggles of spirit about their own eternal state ; dark clouds came over their dearest hopes. And instead of its being as it is represented, one of their favourite maxims was, in regard to others, De occultis non judicat ecclesia : they held that it did not belong to them to say of one or another that he was or was not in a state of grace, the heir of life or death. But there was what Mr. Buckle thought yet more out- rageous. Why, these men, he declares, did not scruple to afiQrm that, by their censures, they could open and 162 Scottish Theology. shut the kingdom of heaven ; and he refers in proof to Dickson's Truth's Victory. Well, if he had read the whole chapter there, he might have been led to at least suspect that he was somehow mistaking things ; and if he had turned to his friend Durham On Scandal, he would have found that the " key of discipline doth only shut out from outward privileges, and doth not shut out from any spiritual interest in Christ, but as it concurreth to confirm some threatening of the word. The same key doth admit or restore men to outward privileges, and absolve men from outward censures." Mr. Buckle might have also known, by a little inquiry, that in censures, as in doctrine, the Church claimed no infallibility, and that the clavis errans was every way unavailing. It is not possible that he could have done more than turn over in the most cursory way these dozens of dusty volumes to which he refers, or some light as to the meaning of the old theological terminology would have dawned on him. Yet, accord- ing to him, even this was not all. There is still some- thing more, which, he says, is " utterly horrible." " As if this were not enough, they also gave out that a word of theirs could hasten the moment of death, and, by cutting off the sinner in his prime, could bring him at once before the judgment-seat of God." Who gave it out ? Was it given out in some Church confession ? Eutherford writes to his people, in his own vivid way, as many a fervid orator has preached from the pulpit : " Gird up the loins of your mind, and make you ready for the meeting the Lord. I have often summoned you, Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Beligion. 163 and now I summon you again, to compear before your Judge, to make a reckoning of your life." And upon a bit of bold and earnest rhetoric, which the simplest, you might think, could hardly misinterpret, an enor- mous charge is made against a whole Church, and far- reaching conclusions drawn in regard to a people and an age. Samuel Eutherford is one of the objects of Mr. Buckle's intense dislike. And one does not wonder at it. The old divine has been a mark to fire at ever since he gave a book to the world. But you cannot slay the immortal ; and my belief is, that human souls will be getting life and nourishment from the wondrous Letters, when the History of Civilisation is lying unheeded and unread on the high shelves of our great libraries. I affirm that those blunders are a scandal to our modern literature. What would be thought of the writer in philosophy who had not made himself familiar with its nomenclature ? The friohtful spectre which literary art has conjured from the vasty deep, or some other quarter, dissolves like the illusions of disease when you stretch forth your hand to touch them. I do not mean to assert the ideal perfection of seven- teenth century religion. N"o doubt it had its blemishes. There were superstitions connected with it, as there are great superstitions, I think, connected with the highest culture of our own time. Suppose that, by any chance or mischance, table-turning had been a Covenanting thing ! In regard to the witch-mania, which did not touch Scotland alone, I have to say that the whole subject is singularly inconspicuous in our 164 Scottish Theology. higher theological literature. I remember reading, some years ago, in one of the accomplished Broad School thinkers of the English Church, an attempt to prove that it is to Satan our Lord refers when He says : " Fear not them which kill the Lody, but are not able to kill the soul ; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." I have found nothing like that in all the Scottish theology I have read. I have nothing to say in defence of the non- toleration which our fathers so skilfully vindicated, save that it was the all but universal theory of the time, and that till the conflict and strife of the Eeformation, and the ground-swell of sw^arming sects, which were so triumphantly pointed to by the adversaries of Protestantism to its disadvantage, had quietly settled down into a calm, it w^as very natural there should be timidity in the direction of freedom of thought. There are emergencies in the moral as in the political sphere, when action like that of the State in suspending Habeas Corpus, or instituting martial law, is, if not to be jus- tified, at least to be palliated. It seems to me sheer nonsense, or rather the indication of an animus from which nothing but injustice can be expected, the attacks that have been made, say upon Calvin in the matter of Servetus. Calvin and his contemporaries stood openly out, not upon the ground of liberty of conscience, but upon the ground of truth ; and if they had taken any other ground, they would have exposed themselves to a fire from the Eomish controversialists which they would have found it difficult to withstand, Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Religion. 165 and the result might possibly have been the turning back of the Eeformation. In reference to Scotland, we at least can say that the martyr-roll of anti-Presby- terians is very brief, and not very bright ; and to all these charges of ghostly tyranny which is said to have prevailed, I give the general answer, that the very time when the hateful thing is said to have most flourished, was the time dearest to the memories of Presbyterian Scotland, — its golden age, whose glory almost hid out of sight the days of Knox and Melville ; and that, instead of the spirit of the Scottish people being crushed, their intellectual energies were quickened and roused to the utmost: there came upon them a new and powerful sense of individual responsibility and dignity, such as they had never known before. Did Drumclog and Dunkeld speak of a people cowed and stricken ? Have you the natural products of a priestly tyranny in those brave peasants, who, loving the old ways even to idolatry, and without a minister to head them, held at bay in the western shires the whole power of the British Empire, nay, shook the old torn flag full in the very face of the tyrant ? See how the little moorland farmer or the farm lad meets with gaze unquailing the scornful and merciless soldier, whose terrible name still ghost-like haunts the glens and wilds of Galloway and Ayrshire ! What does that mean ? The truth is, there were forces in that memorable time, of which Mr. Buckle, I suppose, had not a glimmering. Those same ministers, whom he so utterly misunderstands, spoke much to their people 166 Scottish Theology. of a liberty wherewith Christ makes His people free ; told them that in Christ they were sons of the Most High, that they were a holy priesthood, having access through the riven veil to the nearest intimacy of their Maker ; that the Book of Life was open to them as well as to their teachers ; and lonc^ ere French Eevoliitionists, in their godless levelling way, pro- claimed it, the Scottish pulpit, amid that ghastly gloom which is said to have surrounded it, was ever declaring in a nobler sense, no way impinging on God's holy order, a blessed " equality and fraternity " in Jesus Christ. Nor was this done in any extreme and fanatical style. Shrinking and trembling, a good old Scotchman took home to himself the great news. But it was real to him ; and in so far as it was real to him, he was elevated and ennobled, and could not but feel and claim his rights. He could not be a o slave. That very system of discipline, severe it may be, and too inquisitorial, he was disposed to be thankful for as a staff on which he could lean, as he tried to climb up those heights of holy attainment towards whose summits he aspired, and by a very necessity of his nature aspired. It was thus that in the heart of a civil intolerance there was going on a work, without which theories of toleration and Parlia- mentary enactments would have been of little value ; without which, let me add, we should never have had our " Cottar's Saturday Night," nor, with all his dislike in many things to that which made him, a Burns to sing its glories. Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Beligion. 167 But let us make the closer acquaintance of some of these old divines. The types and representatives of the religion of their time, let us see really what manner of men they were, these Livingstones, Durhams, Eutherfords, Blairs. Now I affirm that, whatever peculiarities, or, if you will, blemishes of their age, belonged to those good men, it certainly cannot be affirmed of them that the stern and the frownino- was their distinguishing characteristic. Durham, who was but a young man when he died, and who seems to have made a very great impression on his contemporaries, was remarkable for the mild elevation of his character. He was the peacemaker of his time ; and in one of the fiercest controversies of which I have ever read, retained, without declaring for either party, the love and respect of both. I need not say how the love-element characterized Samuel Eutherford, — how his whole soul seemed to be on fire with it — how, if he was the extremest of Calvinists — how, if he could speak of the terribleness of divine wrath and the awful claims of the divine righteous- ness, the love of Christ was still, above all, his theme, about which he spake as it would be scarcely wise for any to become his imitator, — and how from his very soul he longed to bring about the sacred match between the glorious Emmanuel and the simple people of his charge far away on the Solway's shores. No man was in his own way more conspicuous in those old days, as I have said already, than John Livingstone. He was perhaps their most successful preacher. 168 Scottish Theology. Memorable awakeniriG^s, both in Scotland and in Ireland, occurred under his ministry. The Shotts revival — an event which, as it strikes us, has not had sufficient importance given to it in the history of the Scottish Church — took place through the instru- mentality of his preaching. AVell, what sort of person was he ? He was a man of soft and gentle spirit- He had passed through no tragic conversion-experi- ences, giving any gloomy intensity to his piety. "I do not remember," he says, " any particular time of conversion, or that I was much cast down or lift up." He describes himself at Shotts as visited "with a wonderful melting of heart ; " and there is little doubt that his power lay, above all, in his tenderness and pathos, speaking out against sin, indeed, and threaten- ing doom, but above all proclaiming, as out of the very heart of the Weeper of Olivet, the calls and invitations of the gospel. With a keen relish for music, an eager, thirsty, and somewhat indiscriminate reader, out of his element in fierce ecclesiastical controversy, and witness- ing from his dying bed, that if his heart had been ever lifted up, it had been in preaching Jesus Christ ; this ideal man of the seventeenth century is as unlike as may be to the scowling religionist of whom some have dreamed. William Guthrie of Fenwick seems to have been a remarkable person, perhaps niore of a genius than any of his contemporaries. His Trial of a Christian's Saving Interest is part and parcel of the religious life of our country. " He was," says Livingstone, " a great light in the west of Scotland." Present 3Iisrc2orescntation of Scottish Religion. 169 But, as everybody knows, he was the most genial of men, joyous, hearty, full of laughter ; and his famous book is calm, and wise, and. kindly. He was not out of his element taking a hawking excursion over the Ayrshire moors, with the good county gentlemen of his acquaintance. Take even the field-preachers of persecution's hottest days. One would not like to pledge himself to all they said or did. " Oppression makes " even " the wise man mad." Perhaps they spake too readily sometimes — and I think that was no cause of surprise — of God's judg- ments, though we should not forget that there is an opposite error which is the indication of feebleness of moral conviction ; and we must not hold as gospel all the stories that have come down to us about their pro- phetic words and such like things. But go and listen, say to Eichard Cameron, in some Clydesdale solitude, where hundreds or thousands hang upon his lips. He preaches Christ with a glorious freeness, with a pathetic fervour, till under his appeals his hearers and himself are greatly moved. " They fall into a quiet weeping;" hearts melted — not shivered by the lightning's stroke — drawn to Jesus as with bands of a man, not driven with scourges of flame. These Scotch worthies, let me add, had little of the ascetic about them ; nothing? of his more unnatural developments. It is told of Francis Xavier, one of the highest names on the roll of the Papal canon, a heau ideal saint, that on going away to his noble work, he passed by his father's gateway without turning aside to bid adieu to any in 170 Scottish Theology. the liome of liis cliildliood — without, perhaps, so much as casting a last lingering look on the dear place. Such a spirit was utterly foreign to the old Scottish religion. The fire of domestic love, kindled from God's own altar, grace, instead of quenching, strengthened and made all family ties more tender and more hallowed. John Welsh of Ayr, the man of prayer above all others, whom our Church annals mention as eminent in this respect, of whom it is said that he was some- times eight hours out of the twenty-four upon his knees, and of whom it might have been thought that the earthly and the human would have been at least overbalanced, — John Welsh, when God took from him his eldest daughter in the bloom of early womanhood, was, we are told, almost bent to the ground under the bereavement ; and when he sought sympathy from Trochrigg, his closest friend, he told how his hand was too unsteady with grief and agitation to hold the pen, and another had to write in place of him. Perhaps there was quite as much of the ascetic element in Boston as in any of the eminent persons I have mentioned, though I shall utter no word against these family fasts, which seem to have been a kind of institution among good folks a century and a half ago. But Ettrick Manse was, if ever home was, a home of love and tenderness. How the pastor mourned when one little Ebenezer was removed ; and how he gave thanks when another, to whom he could give the same dear name, came to supply the vacancy ! I almost wish I could have read to you the quaint eulogy Present Misre]prese7itation of Scottish Religion. 171 on his wife, whom, he says, he passionately loved, and of whose beauty he speaks as if with the ardour of an admiring youth, after twenty years of married life have passed. A tenderly pathetic human element seems to me to run through even the last testimonies of the cloud of witnesses. Every one knows the dying apostrophe of Hugh M'Kail : "And now I leave off to speak any more to creatures, and turn my speech to Thee, Lord I And now I begin my intercourse with God, which shall never be broken off. Farewell, father and mother, friends and relations ; farewell, the w^orld and all delights ; farewell, meat and drink ; fare- well, sun, moon, and stars. Welcome God and Father ; welcome sweet Lord Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant; welcome blessed Spirit of grace, and God of all consolation ; welcome glory ; welcome eternal life ; welcome death." It became, as it were, a kind of martyr refrain. It beats like a pulse through these affecting, if, as the struggle thickens, sometimes rather too lurid, scaffold utterances of the dark years that followed. And is there not here, in a beautifully pathetic way, with the tender home element I have noticed, a simple genial appreciation of the ordinary conflicts of ordinary life ? There is a story told by Livingstone, — a mirror, I think, in so far of the time. The Covenanting army was across the border, and one of his people who was about to join it came, before leaving, to ask the mini- ster whether he had any messages for him to the camp. The thought occurred to Mr. Livingstone that he might 172 Scottish Theology, have a collection from his little flock for the friends who were fighting for them ; and he resolved accord- ingly. It was taken in the church, and proved large above all expectation. One woman, a maltster's wife, contributed eight sterling pounds of it. She was asked about her liberality. " It was a tocher," she said, " which I had gathered for my only daughter. The Lord has been pleased to take my daughter to Him- self, and I thought I would give Him her tocher too." The case brings out the twofold aspect of Scottish religious life — the natural and the supernatural — a supreme homage to the Highest, with a real and true human interest and tenderness of soul. And what I maintain is, that the latter, so real, so genuine, so deep, is an answer in itself to all those attacks which have been made upon it as a grim, surly, anti-natural thing. I am old enough to have known some Scotch country people of a type which has very much passed away, — men whose eyes would have flashed fire if you but spoke of the martyr times, — men of prayer, who would have gone many a long mile to liear a famous preacher — Calvinists to the backbone; and whether you can explain it or not, they were hearty, happy, genial men. It is quite possible that the good old man of whom James Hamilton used to tell, one of his father's elders, who, when he took him to the strawberries, uncovered and besought God's blessing ere he plucked, might have had the voice of loudest and merriest riiicj out in the winter bonspiel. Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Religion. 173 I need hardly add that it is also a complete mistake to suppose that in Scotch religion you have selfishness as the mainspring — men driven into Paradise, as it were, in spite of themselves, by ghostly terrors. Why, if there was anything carefully guarded against, it w^as that. Even the law-work, as they spoke — by which was just meant the experience of a man coming to see his sins and his wants — is only subordinately helpful in the way of leading or pointing you towards Jesus. A man, says William Guthrie, must, as it were, in cool blood make choice of Christ as his Lord and Saviour, and dedicate himself to the Divine Eedeemer freely, and generously, and heartily. One of the great points of the noble Marrow-men was their determined oppo- sition to what they called federal holiness — holiness in order to get the bliss of the better world. Holiness — that is, the love and the likeness of the All-blessed — was itself the very essence of heaven, the Cross's noblest purchase ; and to ask them whether they thought holiness requisite in the saved, seemed to be equivalent to asking them if a man could be saved without being saved — if a man could have the enjoy- inent of heaven without entering the Golden City. One of the main points in the Secession reasons of disruption from the Established Church — and they spoke the mind of the Scotch evangelicals — was the introduction by the semi-rationalists of a utilitarian theory of morality and religion. " God knows," said good J. Livingstone, " that I would rather serve God on earth, and then endure the torments of the lost, 174 Scottish Theologij. than live a life of sin on earth, and then have for ever the bliss of the ransomed." 11. Then, again, I think the idea has taken pos- session of many in our day, that Scotch religion is a religion of speculative dogma, with little in it of the personal Christ. iSTow it seems to me there is a great deal said at present about Doctriue or Dogma which means nothing. How can you act in regard to or feel about a thing, save as you have some conception and some opinion concerning it ? You must have some opinion about the person of Christ, if He is to be an element in your practical life. How can He act on you otherwise ? And, therefore, as you are Trinitarian, or Arian, or Unitarian, or Humanitarian, or something else, so will be the effect on you. And, in fact, the man who abuses docjmas is as much a dealer in doGjmas as his neio^h- hours. What is it but a dogma — generally asserted, indeed, with a fierce and contemptuous fanaticism, and carried out with a remorseless logic — that there should be no dogmas ? Like scepticism, this sort of thing kills itself. Say what men will, all action, all organ- ization, all religious or irreligious fellowship, is based upon a Credo. In regard to many who bring the accusation most readily about Scottish doctrinalism, I assert that there are none more doctrinal than themselves. The Broad Churchman maintains the doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood ; puts that doctrine into definite concep- Present 3Iisre/presentation of Scottish Religion. 175 tion ; argues on the basis of that doctrine to immense conclusions, which make ilhisive a large amount of the deepest and most powerful experiences of Christian history. The Unitarian maintains the doctrine of the Divine Unity, and evolves therefrom proposition after proposition, overthrowing, as he thinks, all the life- giving Christian beliefs. The real truth is that ortho- doxy is chary of the speculative. Mystery is one of its fundamental ideas. The Theosophic belongs far more to heterodox Alexandrianism than orthodox Augustinianism. I do not think that it can be affirmed of Calvin, that he was as supreme in the metaphysical or speculative as in all else. Certainly our Scottish theology is not in any proper sense a metaphysical system, though there has been often a cloud or a halo of metaphysics about it, but the pro- duct in the main of an honest study of the Bible and a practical religious experience. The doctrines which have been prominently taught among us, such as the atonement of Christ, justification, the new birth, the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, are not in any sense speculative human reasonings, but transcendent facts, — mysteries which, according to all experience, tell with prodigious power on the human soul, and take hold of the deepest convictions of the least philosophical and cultured. ISTot, however, to dwell on this. I wish to say a few words about the other point. I find the following statement in an able paper by an English High Church- man. It applies to all Protestant theology, and is of 176 Scottish Theology. the same type as accusations which I daresay you have seen made against us Scotch people in particular : — " From the twelfth century, for instance, down to the very outbreak of the Eeformation, there is an unbroken chain of evangelical teaching, beginning, we may say, with St. Bernard and Eichard of St. Victor, and ending with Henry Harphius and Girolamo Savonarola. Im- mediately upon the Eeformation, the personal Christ almost disappears from the theory and sermons of the new learning ; and we find in His stead a number of doctrines, theses, and speculations — the substitution, in short, of a dead system for a living King. I may give you a forcible illustration of this fact, by drawing vour attention to the contrast between two highly typical books, one Catholic and one Protestant. I mean the Imitation of Christ and the Pilgrims Progress. In the former, Christ is present throughout, conversing, teaching, warning, comforting the disciple. In the latter, Christ is absent, save for a casual glimpse or so, from the beginning to the end of Christian's pilgrim- ao-e. He is not with him in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, nor amidst the temptations of Vanity Fair, nor when crossing the Black Eiver ; and that because the doctrine of personal union with Christ is no part of Protestant theology, whence its nearly unanimous rejection of the full mystery of the Eeal Presence." Now, while, of course, in seasons of religious declen- sion, when, though the life is gone, the words and forms still cling to men, and are used by them, we have had these o-reat doctrines among us without a living Christ Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Ecligion, 177 to animate them, that has certainly not been so in our best days. A living personal Christ, we believe, has never been more of a reality since apostles lived and laboured, than it has been in the Eeformed Church of Scotland. A living personal Christ was the very soul of the seventeenth century struggle ; it was the heart and soul of Marrow divinity and experience. As I had occasion to remark in a former Lecture, the Scottish struggle concerning the Headship brought the personal Christ into an exceeding prominence. Here are the words of a devout squire or county gentleman of 1665: " My children, the consideration of your own hazard may be the mean to make you flee unto a Saviour. But oh, when you come to know Him, who is the chief of all the thousands in heaven and earth, then you would not quit His service, even though there were not a reward for the righteous. To stand before Him as a servant in this lower world, and to go through the hardest pieces of service for Him, is in itself a very rich reward. This testimony of Him and of His ways I desire to leave on record to you, my children, with this confession, that I cannot express the thousandth part of that worth which is in Him ' who is altogether lovely.' " " I here," writes a lady of the Covenant, " give my hearty consent. Lord Jesus, to Thy coming in and taking possession of my soul, and to Thy casting out of all there that stands in opposition to Thee. I desire here to take Thee for my all, to be ruled and governed by Thee, acquiescing to whatsoever shall be Thy way of dealing with me ; give me Thyself, and this M 178 Scottish Theology. shall be all my desire." Is that heartless, Christless dogma ? Eead these martyr testimonies. It does not seem to me that, in a doctrinal point of view, they are often very full and rich; rather the opposite. But King Jesus is always there, in realization intensely vivid. When the younger of the two sufferers in the waters of Blednock exclaimed, as she cast her eyes on her martyr- sister, now in her last agonies, " What do I behold but Christ wrestling in one of His members ? " it was no brave metaphor she spake; it was a breaking on her view of a Stephen's vision. Or take the old teaching about the covenant of grace, especially that doctrine of the administration of the covenant. Christ, as they said, not merely obtains the blessings of redemption, but He has had conferred on Him their management, as the Great Steward of the Father's house. He is the Trustee of the covenant. All its blessings are put into His hands — the spirit of life, pardon and justify- ing righteousness, sanctifying, establishing, glorifying comforting: o^race, resurrection, and eternal life — and from those blessed hands must all be taken. He is the Testator of the covenant. And beautiful and affluent are the old ways of developing this. A rich man dies and leaves vast bequests, but he cannot be his own executor ; the execution others than himself must see to. But here, in our salvation, the same glorious Person at once bequeathes and executes. You must get His owm precious legacies from His very self ; your hand must take them from the nail-pierced hand that wrote the sacred will, and sealed it with His blood. Present Misrejpresentation of Scottish Religion. 179 Christ is the King of the covenant. He sends forth its calls and invitations of heavenly grace. He subdues His people under Him by His word and Spirit. He gathers the chosen into a holy kingdom under His special care ; establishes, upholds, and energizes ordin- ances of spiritual life ; gives the great old law which Adam broke, no longer a covenant of works, threatening and condemning, but rather now a cove- nant blessing. He writes it anew in brighter characters upon the human soul, as with a pen dipped in the cross's love; in a supernatural covenant -providence He watches over His own, an Israel still, when out in the great wilderness of the nations, as when locked up in the land of promise ; making all things work together for their good, turning the world for them, as it were, into a sort of purgatory, in which by light and shadow, battle and victory, sorrow and joy, life and death, and by noble work, akin in some measure to His own, making them, as though it were His angels, to gather together His elect from the four winds. He, as their Divine Priest-King, sanctifies and ennobles them into ever-growing meetness for the higher life they hope for. He must be all in all. None of His blessings can be enjoyed apart from Himself. Of doctrine and precept, of hope and of promise, the joy of the present, the light and the glory of the future. He must be the constant principle. " He is their companion on to the edge of the dark flood, enters it with them, breaks the swelling current for them, and takes them safely to the Canaan 180 Scottish Theology. of brioliter licrlit and fuller manifestations." Here it is also in tlieologic formula: "Christ," say the Marrow theolocjians, " and the benefits of His purchase cannot be divided. Wherefore we are made partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ, or of the benefits procured by His death, only through the effectual application thereof to us by His Holy Spirit, working faith in us, and thereby uniting us to Christ. And whoever do actually receive and enjoy any benefits of His purchase, as they do it only in the way of enjoying Himself, so they will all be brought forward in due time to the full enjoying of Himself and all His benefits for ever. And whatever things are actually received or used any otherwise than hj faith in a state of union witli Christ, are not to be reckoned among the benefits purchased by His death." It is thus an older writer closes a book, once famous, on the Covenant : " If you ask, When do we receive Christ ? I answer : (1) When we receive the very bonds of the word, and that which doth meet our own corruption and straiten the looseness and liberty of our flesh ; (2) when we embrace and kiss the promises, that is, when we love them dearly and welcome them kindly for the Cfood that is in them — for the things which o o they carry forth to us ; (3) when we find and receive something sweeter and better in the promises than salvation, even Christ Himself." " This is my beloved, and this is my friend, daughters of Jerusalem." A temporary may receive the word with joy, and the Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Religion. 181 promises of the word, but how ? for salvation that is in them; but the believer finds in them something better than salvation. " Then Simon Peter answered Him, Lord, to whom shall we go : Thoic hast the words of eternal life. Whom have I in heaven but Thee t and there is none upon the earth that I desire besides Thee." III. In the third place, it seems to be not an un- common idea, that what is called Scotch religion is a mere rigid Sabbatarianism ; that Sabbatarianism is very much its essence ; that, after its own way, it is a kind of ritualism, with feeble presence of the moral in it. And how stands the matter ? I take some of the representative names I have mentioned. We have an autobiograpliy of John Livingstone. We have a fare- well sermon to his people at Ancrum. We have a number of his letters, some of them long and elaborate. In not one of those writings has Sabbatarianism any prominence ; in the whole of them taken together, there are not five lines devoted to the subject of the Sabbath and Sabbath observance. I daresay some of us are familiar with Livingstone's long letter, from the place of his exile, to his former Ancrum flock. It is a sort of treatise on practical religion ; and it closes with a sort of summary of practical directions, nine- teen in number. He urges fidelity to one's calling, and freedom from covetousness ; diligence in worldly duties ; care in having^ children taught to read; alms- 182 Scottish Theology. giving to the poor ; love to enemies ; watclifulness against the disposition to speak of the miscarriages of others, and various things besides ; but there is no more than an indirect reference to the holy day, which, withal, he does not call the Sabbath, but the Lord's day. In Guthrie's Saving Interest, where you have the marks of grace in the soul largely described, and where there is a close dealing with the nature and the manifestations of the relisrious life, as a famous Scotch theologian of the second Reformation regarded it ; and where, according to the notions which some entertain, we might have expected to find Sabbath -keeping a main, if not the principal, theme ; in that work, so dear to the good men of the past, the Sabbath is only mentioned once, and in a single clause. Boston, in his Fourfold State, — another book in which our old Scotch religion finds its expression, — has a chapter on the nature of regeneration, in which are set forth the more notable fruits or indications of the great change ; and I do not think anything is directly said in it about the Fourth Commandment at all. Now I do not mean by this that the Sabbath was not regarded and kept as a sacred day by the worthies to whose works I have been referring. The very opposite was the case. One of our highest men has given his utmost strength to the defence of the Sabbath's unalterable obligation, and to our Scottish views of that. But I think that, in the simple facts I have mentioned, I have offered conclusive proof that the old Scotch religion was anything but a mere Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Beligion. 183 religion of Sabbatarianism, or that it bad Sabbat- arianism as its chief and dominating thing. Scottish Sabbatarianism had, properly speaking, nothing ritual- istic about it at alL It was never held that there was any virtue in merely ceasing from ordinary toil and ordinary recreations on the first day of the week. These things they held, indeed, to be commanded of God, to whom men were bound to give a reverent and dutiful obedience, and obedience to whom, wlien in a right spirit, was spiritually elevating ; but the day of rest was ever and chiefly regarded as a means to a blessed end. The mere presence in the public con- gregation, apart from an intelligent and spiritual entrance into its services, was never counted an act of worship. The mere outward partaking of the elements in the Sacrament of the Supper, apart from spiritual discernment of, and communion with, the divine realities which they symbolized, was never counted homage to Christ. And no more was out- ward and physical resting, apart from tlie fitting exercises of prayer and meditation, and converse with God and Christ and Eternity, counted a keeping of the Sabbath of the Lord. A man who attended to the outward resting might be so far better than a man who made any gross public exhibition of his contempt for God's precept ; but he certainly was not thought of as an observer of that precept. And, for my part, I do not comprehend how any person with religious feelings and sympathies should not be ready to admit that at least there is something 184 Scottish Theology. very grand about the Scottish Sabbath, in its idea of a day of communion with the Unseen and Eternal ; of adoration of our Maker and our Saviour ; of self- examination and moral exercise ; of acquisition of religions knowledge ; and all this in order to the spiritual elevation of the soul, the replenishing of our moral energies, and a closer hold of the verities which have a place in our creed. Of course, Scotch religion has had its formalism ; and that formalism very natur- ally connects itself with the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the thing among us in which the Pharisaic tendency and conscience find readiest exercise. It is our chief opportunity for religious display. And no doubt we have had our share of the miserable thing. JSTor do I hold myself obliged to defend all the minutiae of Sabbatic observance which you may find in presbytery records, or of which people may have heard stray reports. In breaking in a turbulent, and energetic, and uneducated people, a certain rigour was, I believe, both necessary and advantageous. But is there more of sham and unreality in the North than the South of our Island ? Under any of the ordinary tests which you apply in such cases, can it be said that Scottish religion, when it has been a day of power with it, has been deficient comparatively in vital moral force ? At the same time we admit that Scotch religion has been distinguished by a certain Sabbatic stringency. We have regarded the outward observance of the day of holy rest as resting upon direct divine command, Present MisrejJresentation of Scottish Religion. 185 and as includinf? in it a larojer measure of abstinence from work and the ways of ordinary every-day life. Have we suffered from this ? I do not believe it. It seems to us that one of the most perilous tendencies of our time is the kicking of men against law. They rebel against all " Thou shalts." They accept and act the eternal moralities, but not as obeying the will of a personal God — of a supreme Lawgiver. They may adore, and praise, and commune with the Highest ; but they choose the right and true as well as He, and very much in the same way as He. There may be more of this abroad than we imagine. And it simply goes to make men gods ; to overthrow all that is funda- mental in Christianity, or rather in religion. Does it not indicate the great importance of the positive pre- cept, as such, in the religious discipline of the human soul, — of the precept which, so far as we see and feel, rests back entirely on the divine authority, or shows that at least to be very prominent ? And we may come to find our strict Sabbath doctrine something more vital, having deeper reaches than we had ever dreamed ; in so far as it is not a mere human super- stition, like the rites of the Church of Rome, but that by wdiich the Scottish conscience has been kept in loving connection with a Law^giver and an objective law, as our religion has thereby been endowed with a faith and reality which may be greatly helpful in a trial-day. I think there is everything to make us cling in this matter to the old paths, instead of being ashamed of theni. Suppose you took it in no other 186 Scottish Theology. way, who shall say what Scottish intellect owes to the Sabbath. It had a thinking day as well as a worship- ping day in that. Ettrick, for instance, was for twenty years the centre of intellectual stimulus to a whole country-side ; there was more fresh thought going there than perhaps in most of our divinity halls. You may say that those shepherds and peasants could make little of it. I think otherwise. I know the power of culture. I regret that literary taste was so little cultivated by our eminent men of other times. But good thoughts are good thoughts in any guise ; and strong heads are strong heads, apart from all literary attainment. The way in which some people speak, sounds very lilve the proposition that you cannot have brawny limbs save under a dress coat. Mr. Buckle, I may notice, is pained exceedingly that Scotch people long ago walked such distances to hear favourite preachers. There is a tradition of my own neighboai'hood, that a farmer went regularly to Ettrick, a distance, to and from, of — say fifty miles, during the preaching of the Fourfold State. I shall not say whether he was right or wrong, wise or foolish ; but I think it extremely probable that that man was face to face with many of the problems which philosophers are still discussing, — face to face with the great questions of man, and God, and nature ; and that he is just a specimen of what the Ettrick pulpit every Sabbath-day was doing with a hundred others, send- ing an impulse of intellectual life over broad Scotland, which, finding its way in course of time to the cities, Present Misrepresentation of Scottish Religion. 187 gave us, or helped to give ns, our Glasgows and Dundees, — sent, or helped to send, our country for- ward in that race of material progress in which she has, I believe, kept relatively more than up to any of her European sisters. On mere grounds of patriotism, I think no Scotchman should be over-ready to find fault with the Sabbath of his country, and should be very chary in meddling with an institution so entwined with our history, and I believe our nation's progress. In closino; : — Our fathers themselves called no man master, and it is not in their spirit that we should bend at their feet. But it is a dutiful thing to defend them when you can honestly do so. Would that, in what constitutes their glory, we were liker them ; that we followed them so far as they followed Christ, — in their wrestling prayers, in their great love to Christ and souls, in their pathetic earnestness, in their close inter- course with the word, in their gravity, in their habits of self-inspection and penitential exercise ! May I not with a real propriety say, with the apostle, " Wherefore, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the Author and the Finisher of our faith " ? CHAPTEE VII. DO PEESBYTERIANS HOLD APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION ? ^HERE is no doubt that Scotch Presbyterians have held what, in some sense, might be called a doctrine of Apostolical Succession. That is, they have held that those who were ordained by apostles to the ministerial office were endowed with the authority to ordain others to that office, and so to continue the succession — that ordinarily neither the possession of the needed gifts, nor the call of the people, superseded the solemn setting apart of the Presbytery. When the Westminster Assembly " voted that ordination is the act of a Presbytery," they expressed the view unanimously held by the Scotch theologians of the period. " Ordination," says Gillespie, " is necessary and essential to the calling of a minister. Ambassadors . . . generals, admirals . . . do not run unsent. Shall the visible Church of Christ have less order than a civil republic ? " " The estab- lished and settled order of calling of pastors," says Eutherford, " is by succession of pastors to pastors." We have an illustration of how strong was the feel- ing in this matter in the conduct of the Cameronians. Apostolical Succcssio7i. 189 After the martyrdom of Cargill they were without a minister, and there was no minister in Scotland whom they could acknowledge. But instead of ordaining at their own hands, they sent Eenwick to Holland to get theological training from Dutch professors, and orderly instalment in the sacred office from Dutch presbyters ; and from the middle of 1G81 to the end of 1683, they had neither preaching nor sacraments. Shields men- tions that Eenwick, in the first year of his wonderful ministry, kept note of five hundred baptisms performed by him, and at that number " lost count." At the Eevolution, they were again pastorless, — Shields and Linning having gone into the Established Church, — and they did as before. Instead of making a minister, they waited on, till, sixteen or seventeen years after, God in His providence sent them Mr. M'Millan, ex- truded from the Church for his sympathy with Came- ronian principles. And further, as one presbyter could not ordain, they still waited and prayed for about thirty years more, when the seceder Nairn became a convert to their views ; and, holding his deposition invalid, clave erranic, at the end of half a century they were enabled to form themselves into a complete Presbyterian Church. When the Presbyterians in these days were taunted about their " orders " coming to them through such an impure channel as the Church of Eome, they answered — (1) that they could trace a visible Protestant succession down through the centuries; and (2) that "the substance and essence of ordination consist in the appointing men to the holy ministry by persons in office. But all the 190 Scottish TheologTj. corrupt rites added by the Church of Eorne take not away the essence and nature of ordination." "We are told," says Gillespie in substance, " that if we hold ordination to be necessary and essential to the calling of a ministry, we are wrecked on the dilemma of either acknowledging that those who ordained the Eeformers were true ministers of Christ, or that we have got our orders from those who had no commission from Christ to make ministers for Him ; but ... I answer, as a learned countryman of mine did seventy years ago, that although Eome was morally corrupted and defaced, yet it luas even then a Church. . . . Wherefore, I con- clude that those who were ordained in the Church of Eome hefure the Reformation, in so far as they were ordained in the name of Christ, by those who had themselves been ordained presbyters as well as bishops, w^ere thus far . . . truly and lawfully ordained." IS'or would Gillespie, Eutherford, and Dickson have been startled by the declaration which has been recently quoted from a paper issued by the London Provincial Assembly in 1654, to the effect that " their ministry was derived to them from Christ and His apostles, by succession of a ministry continued in the Church for sixteen hundred years." Our good forefathers would, we think, rather have enjoyed the palpable hit, as it seems to us, so well delivered against the haughty Prelatists, who boasted of their long succession, which, after all, shorter by a century at least than that of the Presbyterians, could not go back beyond the middle of the second century without tlie aid of forged or Apostolical Succession. 191 dubious documents, and whicli even then was incom- plete and undeveloped. But let ns explain. The Church was not, in the idea of these men, a mere voluntary association for moral and religious impulse and improvement ; but a supernatural institution, whose ordinances were effective, not merely by their instrumental fitness for the objects of their appointment, but, when rightly used, as means in connection with which, supernatural grace was bestowed ; and they shrank from any apparent divergence from scriptural ways. Further, they liked things to be done decently and in order in the Church as well as in the State ; and they were perhaps too much afraid of anything that had an anarchical appear- ance or tendency. But there was no superstition in connection with their views — their high views, if you like — concerning ordination. They had no trouble of mind about any historical gap or any break in the succession chain. They held that when a mere adherence to the letter was opposed to the great objects of the institution, and when there was a real necessity for the infringement of the order so greatly prized, the ordinary way of pastoral succession might and ought to be departed from. Samuel Eutherford says : " Ordination of pastors is not of that absolute necessity, but in an exigence (of necessity) the election of the people or some other thing may supply the want of it." " What if all your presbyters were to die," asked the Independents, somewhat scoffingly ; " shall there then be no ministry ? " Eutherford 192 Scottish Tluology. reminded them of a King in the heavens from whose grace and power pastors and teachers ever came ; and further replied that even in that case there would be no difficulty ; "a ministerial power is then immediately conferred on some in a Church which is removed from any Church consociation with other Churches." Gillespie expresses similar views. " Suppose," he says, " those Protestant ministers who first ordained other ministers were themselves ordained by such as had no power to ordain them ; nay, suppose the first reforming ministers to have been no ministers, hut 'private ijcrsons, not pre- tending to be ordained, what will they conclude from this ? It proves nothing against that which we hold concerning the necessity of ordination, for we plainly say that, in extraordinary cases, when ordination cannot be had, and when there are none who have authority from Christ to ordain, then and there an inward call from God, enlarging the heart, stirring np and assisting with the goodwill and consent of a people whom God makes willing, can make a minister authorized to do ministerial acts." Then it is to be remembered that with the Scotch doctrine of " succession " there was connected no mystico-magica.1 virtue. (1) There is nothing sacra- mental in the Scotch idea of order. This is carefully disclaimed by our theologians. The "laying on of hands " was still retained, but it w^as not regarded " as the substantial part of ordination." " I hold the laying on of hands," says Gillespie, " to be no sacra- ment, nor efficacious and operative for the giving of Apostolical Succession. 193 the Holy Ghost." (2) While it was thought that ordination — whether in regular succession or not — was generally necessary to the right administration of the sacraments, High Church sacramentalism was unknown. There was no belief in baptismal regenera- tion, or in any transubstantiation or consubstantiation of the communion bread and wine. Take baptism, for example. Instead of its being the ordinary and divinely-appointed means or instrument of regeneration — ''As the Israelites w^ere first brought out of Egypt before they w^ere brought through the sea, so we are first redeemed by Christ, and find grace and favour in His eyes, before we receive the seals of the covenant grace. Baptism is intended only for the redeemed."' The view that was held of the union between Christ and His true people made anything like baptismal regeneration offensive above measure. For baptismal regeneration means the doctrine that the visible Church, with its masses of unbelief, and ignorance, and immorality, is Christ's true mystical body and bride. Mr. Gladstone, w^e think, in a notable article, spoke of Presbyterians and others as denying a visible Church, But the Scotch theologians had a most dis- tinct idea of the visible Church. It consisted not of believers and regenerate, but of professors of the Christian faith, having a reputable outward "walk and conversation ; " not Christ's mystical, but His politic body ; His earthly house, in which there were food, and shelter, and training for His people, where also were the power and working of the Holy Ghost, 194 Scottish Theology. — blessed manifestations of the King ; and of which, too, there is this record, that multitudes " are born there." (3) As every one knows, an essential idea of High Church orders is that of their indelibility. There may be deposition, there may be degradation, but the character, the sacred brand, still remains. When the Presbyterians were accused of teaching a similar doctrine about their orders, the charge was indignantly denied. " We see," says Paitherford, " no indelible charoxter because a pastor is always a called pastor ; if the man commits scandals the Church may call his character from him, and turn him into a mere private man." Presbyterian ordination is installation in an office ; the other is the infusion of a mystical or miracle-working power. This is an essential differ- ence. (4) Then important as pastoral ordination was regarded, there was also something else important and generally necessary, of a very unsacerdotal character. One of the Articles of the Savoy Conference (In- dependent) is to the effect, that " ordination to the work of the ministry, though it be by persons rightly ordained, does not convey any office power ivithout a previous election of the Church!' The Scotch Presby- terians, if they did not go so far, tended in the same direction. Describing how it was in his days, Euther- ford says that " no man is obtruded on a flock against their consent, and no man appointed a pastor but of a certain flock." In the w^ords of Calvin, quoted with approval by Gillespie, " Any one intruded without the approbation of the people is destitute of a legitimate Apostolical Succession. 195 call." But this, if it does not give the people any part properly in the act of ordination, seems to make their consent necessary to the constitution of a ministry that can " rightly administer " the ordinances of the Church. At a later period it was very strongly held that an " intruded " minister was not " a lawful " minister of Christ, and many of the people would not accept the sacraments at his hands. And no one can fail to see how little akin such ideas are to sacer- dotalism or sacramentalism ; though Calderwood, in his Altar e, points out how — a remnant of early and better times — in the Anglican Ordination Service there is a recognition of the people, however unreal. (5) We may add that the Scotch Presbyterians, and certainly some English ones, acknowledged the orders of In- dependents. That is implied in some things we have mentioned already. Gillespie and Livingstone must have preached in Independent pulpits in London ; and such able and thoroughly representative Presbyterians as the authors of the Plea for Persecuted Ministers teach, that while the difference between Presbyterians and Prelatists is vast, that between Presbyterians and Indejoendents is trifling, and by mutual explanation might be got over. Altogether, whatever high and stringent views of .Church authority and Church order were held by Gillespie, Eutherford, Dickson, Wood, Durham, and others, we think they cannot be charged w^ith any sympathy with a doctrine of orders such as is developed in. our times out of apostolical succession. In regard to the preaching of laymen, Presbyterians 196 Scottish Theology, certainly held that, ordinarily, it belonged to pastors regularly ordained to administer the sacraments and to instruct the flock. The matter of teaching they thought to be of very high importance, as God's word from the lips of faithful and qualified men was, in their view, the great power of Christian life, without which, indeed, sacraments would become mere forms and superstitions. And their opinion was decided that it was neither right, nor in any aspect of it expedient, for a private person, at his own impulse, to take on him the pastor's function, whether in the pulpit or at the communion table. The circumstances of the time no doubt led them sometimes to express themselves very strongly about this. There is scarcely anything sadder in the Church's annals than the story of English Presbyterianism. Among its ministers were many admirable men, — men of intellect, of learning, and, above all, of piety. But they failed to use aright the day of their opportunity. They were made for quieter times. And when the press of conflict came they had no chance with the ruthless unscrupulosity of the Prelatists, on the one hand, and the intensity and energy of the Independents, on the other. Was there ever anything nobler than that Presbyterian St. Bartholomew ? And yet what came of the secession of the two thousand ? There was no organizing among them. There was no real effort to rouse the nation. Instead of getting from their heroism life and power, it almost seems as if they had been exhausted by it. And while Independency Apostolical Succession. 197 survived and strengthened, and kept its orthodoxy, Presbyterianism — respectable, slow, unimpulsive — collapsed to a large extent into a miserable Eation- alism. "We have an instance of this want of discernment on the part of the Presbyterians in the paper already referred to. "When, after Cromwell's assumption of the Protectorship and grant of toleration, London was all astir with " sectaries " and enthusiasts, and perhaps very many offensive and disorderly things were done, we do not wonder that the sober and dignified Pres- byterian divines were greatly disturbed. This state of things was all out of their way. According to pre- vailing ideas, it was an open insult to them, as still the established Church of the nation. And they com- mitted the mistake of meeting the crisis with an assertion of their Church's claims, and an attack upon opponents, many of them devout and orthodox, as sinning after the manner of Korah and his company, because of certain disorderly Church doings ; the chief immediate occasion of the manifesto, according to Neal, being that " pulpit doors were set open to laymen and gifted brethren." But comparisons with Old Testament incidents were made in those days in a somewhat general way, and they are not to be pressed. Cer- tainly these men w^ere not sacerdotalists. Besides, the London Presbyterian ministers were not quite representative of their brethren. They were known as very high and rigid. If reference is made in their manifesto to the Independents, it is a suggestive and 198 Scottish TJieology. interesting fact that at this very time, in some parts of Enghmd, there were associations which held regular meetings, composed of Presbyterian, Independent, and Episcopal ministers, of which the London clergy did not approve. Baillie mentions that he and his friends had a stout fight, in the Westminster Assembly, with Calamy and some other Presbyterians, on the proposi- tion that a minister should not be ordained without designation to a certain church, and that they carried their point with difficulty, — the success, in fact, not being very complete. It is another proof of a High Presbyterian party, whose want of success may be a warning to us. High Church Presbyterianism will not do. Give a taste for the sacerdotal, and people will quickly betake themselves where they will get the genuine article, — the old wine of the Apocalyptic " woman," with pith and body in it, and a flavour all its own. There was, moreover, some difference among Scotch Presbyterians on this point. While all agreed in the general view we have stated, there was a party more strict and a party less strict. Shortly after 1638, there arose a hot discussion, which was not easily repressed, in regard to certain religious meetings, which seem to have originated with Presbyterians from Ire- land, who, when their ministers were driven from them, had acquired the habit of meeting among them- selves for religious exercises. The matter was brought before the Church by Harry Guthrie, a turbulent, ill-set man, afterwards Bishop of Dunkeld, to whom Apostolical Succession. 199 the " innovation " was very offensive, and who was almost fanatical in his determination to have it stamped out at once. There was an immense excite- ment on the subject in the Assembly of 1640 at Aberdeen. It became sometimes quite tumultuous, and the grave men hissed and cheered. But though Henderson — strong and authoritative — did not like the thing, and would have put an end to it, such men as Eutherford, Dickson, Livingstone, and even Blair, had other views. Notwithstanding a judgment rather adverse in the Assembly of 164:7, the issue was the firm establish- ment of the fellowship meeting, in which the laity had religious communion and discussion among themselves, and which became a vitalizino- element in Scotch o religious history, developing, as we know, at one period into a system of lay religious activity, whicli has had very notable results in the Northern Highlands of Scotland. The difficulty was not exactly in the lay element. The Scotch probationer for the ministry is a layman, and may preach for a lifetime as such. During the Persecution some of the field - preachers were only probationers. For a considerable period Cameron had no more than a probationer's licence. The Church, in the view of these great men, was a kingdom with mighty forces in it, and it needed order and organiza- tion, men of might and wisdom to rule under the Heavenly King. In conclusion, let the great importance Presbyterians 200 Scottish Theology. attach to the preaching of the Word be carefally observed. Sacerdotalists have no difficulty about lay preaching. With them, preaching is a mere accident of the priestly office, which has chiefly to do with the Holy Sacraments. The Scotch rule was never to administer the sacraments without the preaching of the Word. NOTE. The Scotch theologians, at the same time, urgently asserted that the Sacraments were not mere sims. There was always efficacious grace connected with the true receiving of them. Regeneration might take place at Baptism. In the Lord's Supper there was a real giving of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine, as to all their redeeming benefits, to the true recipients. It was admitted that there was some mystery about that blessed ordinance, any change or any inherence of grace in the elements being always denied. Says Eutherford : " ]N"os dicimus auctiorem gratiam dari per sacramenti receptionem ; et quamvis actio organica sacramenti sit nobis incomprehensibilis, an ideo res ipsa neganda est ? " " We say that increase of grace is given by the reception of the sacrament, and although the organic action of the sacrament is to us incomprehensible, are we on that account to deny the thing itself?" — Ex. Arminiaiiismi, 721. INDEX. Anglican Ordiiiatioii Service, 198. A])ollonms on the Mediatorial Sovereignty, 153. Apologetics, Scotch, 40. Apostolical Succession, 188. Articles of Savoy Conference, 194. Atonement, The, 67 tf. Augustine, St., 37, 99. Baillie, Principal, 7, 15, 198. Baptism, 122, 193, 200. Bernard of Clairvaux, 13. Bible its own Evidence, 40. Binning, Hugh, 7, 20. Blair, Robert, 7, 199. ]3oston, Thomas, 30-33, 86, 123, 170. ^ l>oston's Literary Neighbours, 33. Boyd of Trochrigg, 4, 5, 49, 53. Bradwardine, 9. Broad Church Dogmatism, 174. Brown of Wamphray, his Works, 24, 48, 107, 144. l^ruce, Robert, 44. Buckle's, Mr., Misrepresentations, 158 tf. Calamy, 198. Calderwood, David, 6, 195. Calvin, 38. Calvinism and Necessitarianism, 62. Cameron, Principal, 6. Cameron, Richard, 169, 199. Cameronians, 106, 110, 132, 188. Campbell, " The great Mr.," 27. Campbell, Principal, of Aberdeen, 46. Cargill, 189. Carmichael, Professor Gershom, 46. Catholic Character of the Church, 95. Chalmers, Dr., 62. Church, Sanctity of, 124. Church, Visible, 95 ff. Church more than a Religious Society, 126. Church the Kingdom of Christ, 133. Church of Rome, 189. Common Blessings — Whence ? 83. Concursus, Doctrine of, 55. Confession, The fir.st Scotch, 1. Conscience : Its Place in Ethics, 48. Covenant of Redemption, 77. Covenants of Works and Grace, 51, 73. Currie of Kinglassie, 115. "Gustos," Doctrine of the, 136. De Dominis, Antonio, 142. Dickson, David, 7, 15, 103, 162, 195, 199. Discipline, First Book of, 1. Discipline, Second Book of, 2. Dogmatism not peculiar to Scotch Religion, 174. Donatists, 98. Due Right of Presbytery, 11, 122, 146. 202 Index. Durliam, 7, 16, 17, 80, 99, 1G2, 167, 195. Edwards, President, 62. Entities, Doctrine of, 61. Erastianism, 106 ; note, 127 ff. Erskine, Ealpli, 75. Erskines, The, 33, 115. Excommunication, 131, 158. Extent of Redemption, 79. Ferguson, Mr., 7. Fisher, Mr., 33, 47, 62. Flint, Mr., 29. Forrester's Writings, 26, 27, Eraser of Brea, 71, 80, 83. Gib, Adam, 33, 64, 83, 116. Gillespie, George, 7, 14-15, SO, 101, 190, 192, 194, 195. Gillespie, Patrick, 7, 19, 71, 85. Gladstone, Mr., 193. Glasgow, Assembly of, 1638, 7. Gray, Mr., 7. Guthrie, Harry, 198. Guthrie, William, 7, 173. Haddow, Principal, 33. Halyburton, 29, 41, 44, 45, 84, Headship of Christ, 127. Henderson, 199. Hepburn of Urr, 111. Hog of Carnock, 44. Hutchison, 7, 16. Independents, 195, 196, Indulgence, The, 105. Informatory Vindication, The, 106. Jamie.son's Cypriann>i, etc., 28, Kames, Lord, 64. Knox, John, 1. Lauder's Ancient Bishops, 28, 33, 114. Linning, 189. Livingston, John, 23, 167, 171, 173, 195, 199. Lockyer's Sto7ie ont of the Moun- tain, 18. London Presbyterian Ministers, 197. London Provincial Assembl}^, 190. Magistrate's Headship Re- nounced, 135, Magistrate's Power circa sacra, 137. Marroio of Modern Dicinity, 40, 51, 71, 86-94. M'Kail, Hugh, 171. M'Laren, Mr., 29. M'Laurin, Mr., 33, 74. M'Millan, Mr., 82, 111, 189. M'Ward, Mr., 22, 106. Mediatorial Sovereignty, Christ's, 153. Melville, Andrew, 2, 143. Membership in the Church, 119. Misrepresentations, 158 tf. Moncrieff, Mr., 33. Xaphtali, 26. Natural Religion, 40, 86. Nature, God in, 55. jSTecessitarianism, 62. Nice, Council of, 38. Novatians, 98. Ordination, 189-195. Patristic Writings, 37. Persecuting Period : Its Litera- ture, 22-27. Personal Christ, The, 77, 177. Plea for Persecuted Ministers, 26, 144. Pontifical Headship, 134. Prayer, Answer to, 57. Prayer and Natural Law, 66. Precursus, Doctrine of, 56. Predestination, Knox on, 1, 49. Predestination and Providence, 36. Prelatists, 190, 195. Presbyterianism, English, 196. Presbyterianism, High Church, 198. Presbyterianism, Scottish : Its First Century, 21. Index. 203 Protesters and Resolutioners, 19. Providence, 36. Redemption : Its Necessity, 67. Reformation, The Second, 7. Reid, Dr. Thomas, 47. Renwick, 44, 189. Resohitioners and Protesters, 104. Revohition Church, 110, Riccaltoun of Hobkirk, 33. Rights of the Church from Civil Magistrate, 149. Robe, Mr., Cambuslang, 47. Rollock, Principal, his Writing.«, 2, 49. Roma, Racoviana, 28. Rule, Principal, 27, 113. Rutherford, Samuel, 8-13, 37, 41, 49, 58, 68, 99, 121, 131, 146, 163, 190, 191, 194, 200. Sabbataiuanism, Scottish, 25, 181. Schism— A great Reality,103,113. Secession of 1733, 115, 145. Separatism, Doctrine of, 109. Servetus and Calvin, 164. Sharp, John, 3. Shields, Alexander, 112, 189. Simpson, Professor, 63. Simpsons, The Three Brothers, 3. Sin, Rutherford on, 49. Sternness of Scotch Theologians, Alleged, 157. Strang, Dr., 18, 55. Sufferings of Christ : How viewed, 79. Superstitions, Old and New, 163. Trinitarian Controversy, 36. Toleration, 11, 101, 152. Twiss, Dr., 9. Unity of the Church, 96. Yelthusius, Brown's Reply to, 24. Visible and Invisible Church, 123. Welsh of Ayr, 3, 170. Westminster Assembly, 21, 40, 198. Wigton Martyrs, 26. Wilson, Mr., of Perth, 33, 115. Wood, James, 7, 18, 120, 195. panbkoks for gibk Classes AND PEIVATE STUDENTS. In crown Sw, price 2s. 6d., THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. BY A. B. DAVIDSON, M.A., LL.D., PEOFESSOK OF HEBREW, ETC., NEW COLLEGE, EDINBURGH. ' An admirable example of lucid and methodical conjecture. . . . 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DORNER, PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY, BERLIN. 'The work has many and great excellences, and is really indispensable to all who would obtain a thorough acquaintance with the great problems of theology. It is a great benefit to English students that it should be made accessible to them in their own language, and in a form so elegant and con- venient.' — Literary Churchman. In Three Volumes, 8vo, price Sis. 6d., CH.RISTIAIV ETHICS. By Dr. H. MARTENSEN, BISHOP OF SEELAND. ^Translatcti from ti)e ^utljor's €t£rman ^tjition. Volume I.— GENERAL ETHICS. „ II.— INDIVIDUAL ETHICS. ,, III.— SOCIAL ETHICS. 'It is no ordinary book, and we commend it to the study of all who are interested in Christian Ethics, as one of the most able treatises on the subject which has ever yet appeared.' — Watchman. ' Dr. Martensen's work on Christian Dogmatics reveals the strength of thought as well as the fine literary grace of its author. . . . His chief ethical writings comprise a system of Christian Ethics, general and special, in three volumes. Each of these volumes has great and singular excellence, and it might be generally felt that in them the author has surpassed his own work on "Christian Dogmatics." ' — Rev. Principal Cairns. T. and T. Clark's Publications. LCTZE'S MICROCOSMUS. Just publislied, Second EditioD, in Two Vols., 8vo, price oGs., MICROOOSMUS: CONCERNING MAN AND HIS RELATION TO THE AVORLD. By HERMANN LOTZE. Contents:— Book I. The Body. 11. The Soul. III. Life. IV. Man. V. Mind. VI. The Microcosmic Order; or, The Course of Human Life. VIL History. VIII. Progress. IX. The Unity of Things. ' These are indeed two masterly volumes, vigorous in intellectual power, and translated with rare ability. . . . This work will doubtless find a place on the shelves of all the foremost thinkers and students of modei-n times.' — Evangelical Magazine. ' The English iDublic have now before them the greatest philosophic work ju'oduced in Germany by the generation just past. The translation conies at an opportune time, for the circumstances of English thought just at the present moment are peculiarly those with which Lotze attempted to deal when he wrote his " Microcosmus " a quarter of a century ago. . . . Fcav philosophic books of the centm-y are so attractive both in style and matter.' — Athenceum. ' Lotze is the ablest, the most brilliant, and most renowned of the German jihilosophers of to-day. . . . He has rendered invaluable and splendid service to Christian thinkers, and has given them a work which cannot fail to equip them for the sturdiest intellectual conflicts and to ensure their victoiy.' — Baptist Magazine. In Two Vols., 8vo, price 21s., NATURE AND THE BIBLE: LECTURES ON THE MOSAIC HISTORY OF CREATION IN ITS RELATION TO NATURAL SCIENCE. By Dr. FR. H. REUSCH. Eevised and Corrkcted by thr Author. Cranslatcli from tfjc JFourtfj lEDition By KATHLEEN LYTTELTON. ' Other champions much more competent and learned than myself might have been placed in the field ; I will onJv name one of the most recent, Dr. Keusch, author of "Nature and the Bible.'"— The Eight Hon. VV. E. Gladstone. „ . , , .■,.,., ' The work, we need hardly say, is of profound and perennial interest, and it can scarcely be too highly commended as, in many respects, a very success- ful attempt to settle one of the most perplexing questions of the day. It is impossible to read it without obtaining larger views of theology, and more accurate opinions respecting its relations to science, and no one will rise from its perusal without feeling a deep sense of gratitude to its &ui\\ov:— Scottish Review. T. and T. Clark's Publications. In demy 8vo, Third Edition, price 10s. 6d., THE TRAINING OF THE TWELVE; OR, EXPOSITION OF PASSAGES IN THE GOSPELS EXHIBITING THE TWELVE DISCIPLES OF JESUS UNDER DISCIPLINE FOR THE APOSTLESHIP. BY A. B. BRUCE, D.D., PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW. ' Here we have a really great book on an important, large, and attractive subject — a book full of loving, wholesome, profound thoughts about the fundamentals of Christian faith and practice.' — British and Foreign Evangel- ical lieview. ' It is some five or six years since this work first made its appearance, and now that a second edition has been called for, the author has taken the oppor- tunity to make some alterations which are likely to render it still more accept- able. Substantially, however, the book remains the same, and the hearty commendation with which we noted its first issue applies to it at least as much now.' — Rock. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. In demy 8vo, Second Edition, price 10s, 6d., THE HUMILIATION OF CHRIST, IN ITS PHYSICAL, ETHICAL, AND OFFICIAL ASPECTS. SIXTH SERIES OF CUNNINGHAM LECTURES. ' These lectures are able and deep-reaching to a degree not often found in the religious literature of the day; withal, they are fresh and suggestive. . . . The learning and the deep and sweet spirituality of this discussion will com- mend it to many faithful students of the truth as it is in Jesus.' — Congrega- tionalist. ' We have not for a long time met with a work so fresh and suggestive as this of Professor Bruce. . . . We do not know where to look at our English Universities for a treatise so calm, logical, and scholarly.' — English Independent. KEIL AiVD DELITZSCH'S INTRODUCTION TO AND COMMENTARIES ON THE OLD TESTAMENT. In 27 Volumes, demy 8vo. Messrs. CLARK have resolved to offer complete sets of this work at the Original Subscription Price of £7, 2s. Single volumes may be had, price 10s. 6d. ' This series is one of great importance to the Biblical scholar; and as regards its general execution, it leaves little or nothing to be desired.'— ^.^m- hurgh Review. , j:, .V- V 'cdS^, '^:v ■>• . ' I. .... 1 V".'! •;• 'Ml! V K .A Mi.- ■':^J??i5S^ rU^-->'*t-*tfLrf*V i^^