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 THM GENERAL ASSEMBLY OE THE 
 EREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND 
 
 IN 
 
 1896 
 
 THE MODERATOR 
 
 The Hon. the Eet. WILLIAM MILLER, OLE., LL.D. 
 
 Fdlow of the University of Madras 
 
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 THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE. 
 FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND 
 
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 1 896 
 
 BY 
 
 THE MODERATOR 
 
 The Hon, the Kev. WILLIAM MILLER, 0.1.K., l.Ll). 
 
 Fellow of the Universitif of Madras 
 
 BDinbucQb 
 
 MACNIVEX & WALLACE 
 
F athers and Brethren, —With reluctance as well as grati¬ 
 tude I take the place to which you call me. This is not so much 
 on account of my want of acquaintance with the forms which 
 your business follows. In that respect my defencelessness 
 will be my best defence. It will call forth guidance from 
 those who have held this place before and aid from the 
 friends who have been gathering the experience of which I 
 have none, in the years since we sat together in the class¬ 
 room or held unforgotten debate in the society. My cause 
 of fear lies deeper. To me it seems unfit that one called, 
 both in providence and by this Church, to work which has so 
 much of the common earth in it as mine, should preside over 
 a body which, though in the world, ought to be in no sense of 
 it. I yield to no man in my sense of the importance of my 
 work. It has its own place in the plan of God. But 
 surroundings leave their mark on men’s characters till 
 
 “ almost thence their nature is subdued 
 To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” 
 
 My work has been, and will be while strength remains, 
 scarcely even that of laying the foundations of the Temple of 
 the Lord in India ; rather that of digging, amidst darkness 
 and dust around and soiling damp beneath, the trenches in 
 which the great corner stones will be laid by those without 
 whom the labourers of this generation were not intended to 
 be made perfect. To call one engrossed in work like this 
 to the foremost place in a comparatively completed Temple is 
 
4 
 
 a too sudden and too great transition. I cannot lay aside 
 the fear that its inappropriateness will become as plain to 
 others as to me. 
 
 Yet I am bound to add that this matter bears also another 
 aspect. Your action shows that the lowliest work for our 
 Master’s cause has a place in your esteem. It shows that you 
 look upon the Church of Christ as a living body, in which it 
 may sometimes happen that the uncomely parts have the 
 most abundant comeliness.” In that point of view I can 
 thank you iieartily for this honour, especially wiien I reflect 
 how the step you have taken will encourage many—not within 
 the Free Church of Scotland alone—who are doing work for 
 God of which the value is not yet universally discerned. 
 This reflection alone has enabled me to withstand the con¬ 
 siderations which bade me shrink from a position in which a 
 saintly character developed in the most sacred avocations 
 appears to be indispensable. 
 
 If I were what your Moderator ought thus to be, I should 
 turn your thoughts on some of the present urgent needs of 
 the individual spiritual life. As things are, I mean simply to 
 lay before you some of the thoughts about the Church as an 
 organised body which bulk largely with me in my special 
 work. I know how common-place they will appear. Yet 
 obvious truths are not seldom those of which men, pushed 
 along in the hurry of modern life and dominated more fully 
 than they know by tendencies caught from the common 
 course of the world’s affairs, have greatest need to be re¬ 
 minded. 
 
 I make no apology for inviting attention to those aspects 
 of the Church which the work of the missionary leads him to 
 put in the forefront of his thinking. For it is only in the 
 missionary’s work or through thought about it, that the 
 nature of the Church can be rightly seen. For what is this 
 body of believers upon Christ to which as a whole, and also 
 to each part of it that has separate and complete organisation, 
 we apply the name of Church ? It is not the field in which 
 God is working. It is not the body for which He primarily 
 cares. '' The field is the world.” “ The earth is the Lord’s 
 and the fulness thereof.” “ The world and they that dwell 
 
5 
 
 in it/’ are those whom he desires to save. The purpose of 
 believers upon Christ being collected into an organic unity 
 is the good of those who are not yet sharers in the Church’s 
 inner life. Ideas of what the Church ought to be or do can 
 be correct only if they are based on a clear perception and a 
 constant remembrance of this, which is its main design. The 
 Church is the army of God for causing His will to be done 
 on earth. That is the figure which best brings out its nature 
 and its duties. 
 
 It is strange, in appearance it is sad, that the best 
 figure for the Church should be based upon one of the 
 worst forms of evil. Yet by means of war some necessar^^ 
 lessons have been always taught, and some necessary thoughts 
 made clear, which have got access to men’s minds through no 
 other channel. Legitimately then we may call the Church 
 God’s army in the earth. Now an army may or may not be 
 on active service, or a part of it may be so and a part may 
 not; but it is by the requirements of active service that 
 everything about all parts of it must be regulated. It is 
 exactly thus with the Church of Christ. This does not 
 mean that all the energy and all the money of the Church 
 are to be spent on Missions. But it does mean that by 
 its bearing upon Missions everything about the Church is 
 to be tested and appraised. And it does mean that every 
 lesson which the work of Missions teaches has an immediate 
 bearing on the Church’s life. An army has other duties than 
 those of warfare. Most of the time of those who provide for 
 it or command it is spent in seeing that the things which con¬ 
 tribute to its efficiency are supplied. But all they do is deter¬ 
 mined by the nature and the needs of actual campaigning. So, 
 whatever we who are missionaries have learnt from experience, 
 whatever we make a regulative principle of our thinking, is, 
 if it be true and be applied rightly, as important for you here 
 as for us yonder. Let me therefore tell you some of the things 
 on which experience leads us to lay emphasis when we think 
 about the Church and about its work. 
 
 Foremost of these I am disposed to place this—that the 
 Church have some working conception of the whole plan of 
 God for man,—that it understand the methods which God 
 
G 
 
 uses for bringing bis whole purpose of love to pass. Not 
 indeed that every member of the Church must be guided in 
 everything by ideas of the scope and method of the divine 
 work for the world at large. Consciousness of sin, acceptance 
 of the pardon secured by the Redeemer, whole-hearted sub¬ 
 mission to the Spirit—these will make the soul alive. And 
 the trivial round, the common task,” gives scope for that 
 exercise which spiritual life, like every form of life, requires. 
 Out of elements like these a life-structure may be raised on 
 which the verdict of “ Well done, good and faithful servant,” 
 may be graciously passed. But if the Church is to succeed in 
 her work, nay, if the fullest attainable spiritual life is to 
 animate her members, there is need of more than this. There 
 must be so much acquaintance with God’s plan as will enable 
 each member to fall into his proper place, so much as will 
 save him from supposing that his own welfare is all he needs 
 to care for and save him from taking his ideas of duty simply 
 from the views which happen to be popular in the circle within 
 which he moves. 
 
 In one point of view, the man is a good soldier who is perfect 
 in his drill and ready to obey commands in the face of wounds 
 or death. Yet an army that should have no more in it than 
 this would be of small account. Even the best soldiers in such 
 an army would deteriorate ere long in every quality of which 
 warlike efficiency is made up. Beyond these good things 
 there is need of insight into the principles of warfare. There 
 is need to discern when patient self-restraint, and when the 
 extreme of forward daring, is the thing that the time 
 demands. If there be no such knowledge anywhere, the 
 soldiers may be models of faithfulness and courage and yet 
 disaster may be sure. But the more widely such knowledge 
 is diffused in it, the more likely is an army to be victorious. 
 If every soldier appreciated the ends in view and the 
 means of gaining them so as to be an intelligent fellow- 
 worker with his general, would not the army be irresistible ? 
 Such an army Christ’s Church is meant to be. Our Redeemer 
 means us to be priests and kings—priests to enter into the 
 dwelling-place of the Most High and there to learn His will, 
 —kings to put forth well-directed power on all that at any 
 
7 
 
 time environs ns. He calls us to be friends, not servants. 
 The servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth. The friend 
 works with effect because he knows and sympathises with his 
 Leader s purposes. 
 
 There is danger, it is true, lest we take imaginings of our 
 own for inspirations from above. From that we may be 
 guarded by acquaintance with the book of history. For what 
 is history but the record of the actings of the Lord, who has 
 ever in some sense done according to His will on earth ? 
 Dimly, and yet clearly enough to keep us from going far 
 astray, we may see the ways of God in the records of the 
 past; and the flood of light which is being poured in our day 
 on the events of bygone ages, is for nothing else so valuable 
 as for the hints it gives, to those with whom there is some¬ 
 thing of the secret of the Lord, about the methods in which 
 His designs are brought to pass. 
 
 But there is a surer preservative from self-willed vagaries 
 than the whole vast range of human story. A portion of 
 that story has been so written by inspiration that in its 
 light all other portions are available for guidance. The 
 record of the divine dealings with Israel is for all time 
 an object-lesson in the divine ways of dealing with man¬ 
 kind. What happened in providence to Israel differs in 
 detail from what happened to other nations, but in its 
 inner principles it does not differ. Only an account of 
 it remains to us in which these principles are made plain. 
 To see how God sought to guide Israel step by step from 
 stage to stage, is to see in outline, though not in detail, 
 how He sought to guide other races also to the working 
 out, not of the same good, but of good of some kind which 
 might become part of the divine structure as truly as the 
 parts of it that were reared by Moses or by Gideon. To see 
 how Israel refused that guidance is to see how other nations 
 came short, like it, of the good they ought to have done and 
 the glory they might have gained. And to see these things in 
 the past is, if we apply what we discern to the problems of 
 the present, to understand what the work of God in our own 
 day is like, what ends we ought from time to time to aim at 
 as we do it, what expectations it is permissible from time to 
 
8 
 
 time to cherish, and what contribution every force around us 
 is capable of making to the 
 
 “ One far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves.’’ 
 
 The story of Israel has been given us in detail not merely as 
 an antiquarian curiosity, and not as an account of things which 
 have lost significance since the Christian Church has become 
 a factor in the world’s affairs. That story is in the Word of 
 God because it opens the principles and methods of what 
 He does, and serves as an outline of His plan. 
 
 Now, the most familiar facts show how important it is that 
 those who wish to attain practical ends should be acquainted 
 with the general plan of the sphere in which they work. 
 To subdue the earth—to make all earth’s hidden powers 
 available—was the earliest commandment to our race. In 
 some degree it has always been obeyed. But how much 
 better has it been obeyed since men began to grasp one 
 feature after another of the scheme of the material uni¬ 
 verse ! That scheme is encompassed with mystery still; but 
 since darkness began to roll away from it, discovery has followed 
 fast upon discovery, and one application of old familiar things 
 upon another, until the greatest danger which threatens the 
 foremost portions of mankind is that of becoming intoxicated 
 with the extent to which the earth has been subdued, so 
 that no relish remains for those realities compared to 
 which material glories are but the vestibule that leads 
 onwards to the shrine. 
 
 Similar results will follow if once there be similar ac¬ 
 quaintance with divine methods in the moral and spiritual 
 spheres. These methods are written in the records of the 
 Chosen People as truly as the laws through the under¬ 
 standing of which men learn to subdue the earth are 
 Avritten in the book of nature. But in both cases research 
 and care are needed. The method of the hiohest work 
 
 O 
 
 of all needs to be inquired into and to be brought home to 
 the consciousness of the Church. It needs to be applied in 
 practice, and the ideas entertained about it must be modified 
 and enlarged as experience increases. This will never be 
 
9 
 
 done if we will not admit the possibility that new light has 
 still to break from those ancient records, or if we insist 
 upon thought and action being for ever guided either by the 
 traditions of the past or by what happens to be popular in 
 the present. Such light, if it comes at all, will naturally 
 come through those engaged in the work of Missions or who 
 apply themselves to studying it. In that quarter, light is 
 being cast on some principles which, when rightly followed 
 out, will help to set us forward in spiritual work with as 
 greatly accelerated steps as have been made towards subduing 
 the material earth since light began to rise on some few 
 features of the plan of God in nature. Of such features of 
 the plan according to which God invites the Church to work 
 along with Him, I shall ask attention to one or two. 
 
 A feature which grows soon familiar to every thoughtful 
 missionary is that God means His real work in non-Christian 
 lands to be progressive—to be carried out from stage to stage, 
 not all at once as if by might or power. The process of 
 revelation was progressive. The process of applying divine 
 love is intended to be progressive too. In regard to both 
 processes, the thoughts of God differ widely from the thoughts 
 of men. The progressiveness even of revelation has but lately 
 got full admission into our scheme of thought. Not long ago 
 every Scripture text was regarded as standing on the same 
 footing, and as being in all respects of equal value. It was 
 held, for example, that the things said or done by Deborah 
 or Samuel were as authoritative for us as the words of Isaiah, 
 if not even of St Paul. I suppose we have all got beyond 
 that stage now. We see that much imperfection, and imper¬ 
 fection of many kinds, mingled in early days with the thoughts 
 of men who were certainly inspired. Nay, we have begun to 
 recognise that such imperfection was an essential element in 
 real revelation, so that things which may rightly be called 
 defect, if not even error, in one point of view, are an excellence 
 in another and a truer. Each stage, however imperfect, and in 
 some sense because of its imperfection, was beautiful in its 
 season. 
 
 As regards the process of revelation, this lesson of its neces¬ 
 sary progressiveness has been somewhat adequately learnt. But 
 
10 
 
 the lesson that the process of working out the moral and 
 spiritual welfare of mankind is divinely meant to he as pro¬ 
 gressive, as much needing to pass from stage to stage, as 
 certain to be marked by defect and incompleteness for a time, 
 has not been similarly learnt. Those who insist upon it are 
 regarded with suspicion like that which used to be bestowed 
 on one who allowed that any kind of imperfection could 
 co-exist with inspiration. Too few among us will even yet 
 allow any moral or spiritual work to be valuable if it is in¬ 
 complete. To preliminary stages we are prone to attach no 
 importance. We fail to recognise that if God’s end is to be 
 attained by God’s methods—and it will never be attained by 
 other methods—these preliminary stages, with all their im¬ 
 perfection, are essential in their own place. 
 
 As regards this matter, the prevailing tendency seems to 
 be resolutely to close our eyes to all but a single portion 
 of the narrative which, with curious inconsistency, we admit 
 to be both inspired and profitable in all its parts. The 
 work of our Lord’s immediate followers was that of heralding 
 their Master and forming into societies those who believed the 
 glad tidings which they told. It was the highest form that 
 divine work has taken or will take on earth. It is the form 
 of work which ambassadors of Christ must ever keep before 
 them as the central type of Christian labour. It is the form 
 of work which they must reckon it their chief joy and 
 highest honour to be privileged at any time to have a share 
 in. But it does not follow that this is the only mould into 
 which spiritual life can run, or the only work which God’s 
 army in the world ought to set itself resolutely to do. It 
 was done in obedience to the call of Providence at that par¬ 
 ticular time,—the time that was in a special sense the 
 harvest of the ages. It was done at the command of 
 Christ by men whom He sent to reap the fields when they 
 were white already to the harvest.” But work of many 
 varied kinds had made the fields thus white. The Teacher 
 who alone was never one-sided in His teaching took care 
 to remind his reapers that, though theirs was the highest of 
 duties and of privileges, it was far from being the only speci¬ 
 men of either. ‘'Other men,” said He, “ laboured, and ye 
 
11 
 
 have entered into their labours.” With reverence we may 
 say that God rejoiced when the Church arose on the day of 
 Pentecost, when multitudes were added to it in the months 
 that followed, and when, as years passed on, Christ was pro¬ 
 claimed with rapid success among the Gentiles. But did He 
 rejoice less in any one of the steps, which, by His own design, 
 were necessarily preliminary to that great outbursting ? The 
 forming of those who went out from Egypt into a new nation 
 in the wilderness, the glad renewal of the force of Israel 
 under David, the Return under that Zerubbabel to whom the 
 promise was that he should be as the signet ring on Jehovah’s 
 finger—in all these there was large admixture of the mean 
 elements of earth, yet without these things, and a hundred 
 more as commonplace by comparison as they, such a day as 
 that of Pentecost could never have arrived. And did God 
 rejoice less truly in any one of them than in the harvest 
 which Peter and the apostles reaped ? And if God’s mind be 
 in us, shall we not aim, when His providence leads the way, 
 at things which prepare for events that may be distant still ? 
 Shall we not feel as much of grateful joy when one of the 
 lower stages has been reached as if the thing accomplished 
 were complete and final ? It is not the special thing we do 
 for God, it is the being permitted to do any thing which He 
 weaves into His own work that is our honour and ought to 
 be our joy. 
 
 This too great failure to see the progressive character of 
 the divine plan has evil effects in many ways. It does not 
 indeed prevent missionaries from following the divine method. 
 Even under the Church’s eye much besides the proclamation 
 of the Redeemer enters, and is entering more and more, into 
 the scheme of home missionary effort. It is the same with 
 all foreign missions. The divine life within the workers leads 
 them, in spite of the theories that prevail, to adopt to some 
 extent the methods which God’s plan suggests. But they do 
 this too often as if half-ashamed. Thus they make but a 
 weak defence against criticisms based upon the opinions which 
 have greatest currency, and receive in consequence too little 
 of that sympathy which is the sorest of their human needs. 
 They are tempted also to let the plain facts about their 
 
12 
 
 work put on an apparent congruity with popular views, 
 till some not inconsiderable tinge of unreality is imparted 
 to what ought to be the most simply, grandly real of 
 all the things about which men are busied upon earth’s 
 broad face to-day. Still worse than even this, the life of 
 the Church is impoverished when it refuses to hear God 
 speaking in occurrences in which His voice is loud, when it 
 relegates to the category of what is merely secular, if not of 
 what is profane and wicked, a hundred things in which a 
 heavenly power has come very close. 
 
 Let me illustrate this from work in India. For many years, 
 and with growing force as years pass on, a striking movement 
 has been in progress there. The down-trodden and oppressed 
 have been seeking Christian protection, are assuming the 
 Christian name, are even being received in numbers into the 
 Christian fold by baptism. The bright prospect is opening 
 that the scores of millions on whom the social system of the 
 land bears with crushing weight will find in Christian truth 
 the enlightenment, and in Christian civilization the uplifting 
 of which their need is terrible. To help on such a movement 
 and make it subserve the highest spiritual ends, is about the 
 grandest work which any one can do in our day. But its 
 grandeur will pass away if it be based on false ideas or 
 carried on upon other lines than those which harmonise with 
 divine methods. And there is danger lest it be so. For it 
 is not hunger for spiritual things that gives this movement 
 its growing impulse. God’s Spirit is at work on those who 
 are invoking Christian help ; but that Spirit is working as He 
 did in the earlier, not in the fully developed, stages of the 
 divine progressive plan. The desire for freedom from 
 crushing burdens, for elevation in the social scale, for many 
 good things of the world like these, is the mainspring of this 
 movement, as certainly as the longing to pass from slavery 
 into the good land beyond the desert inspired the multitude 
 that went out from the house of bondage. Yet the impres¬ 
 sion has got abroad that those who are thus gathering to 
 Christ’s standard are in the full evangelical sense converted 
 men, in short that we have in India a repetition not of Moses 
 and the Exodus, but of Peter and the day of Pentecost. And 
 
no very strenuous effort to correct the false impression is 
 made by those who lead the movement. 
 
 No doubt the temptation to keep silence is a strong one. 
 They know how important it is that their work should be 
 maintained. They know that if it be regarded as a spiritual 
 work all effort needed to maintain it will be gladly made. 
 They know,—or think they know,—that if the Church learns 
 how small the spiritual leaven in the whole lump is, if it 
 learns how the thoughts of those who have gathered round 
 them are almost wholly still of lands and bullocks and wages 
 and cases in the law courts, then their own efforts will be 
 reckoned worthless, and the good that they have done be 
 allowed to languish and pass away. It is not so very wonder¬ 
 ful that, for the sake of a work which they know to be of 
 God, they should hold their peace while false impressions 
 gain too wide a currency. Yet, if such impressions be not 
 timeously corrected, ruin, through failure of support, will, in 
 the end, be the more complete. There will be ruin, too, if 
 these false impressions lead to the type of work being of a 
 different kind from that which the case requires. Doubtless 
 the spiritual man who enters on this service will find many 
 an opening for his spiritual message, and will find responses 
 to that message in strange quarters and unexpected ways. 
 Yet the bulk of his work, if it is to be part of God’s work, 
 will not be purely spiritual. Everything in its own season. 
 The Spirit that guided Moses was the same that guided Paul, 
 yet the arguments and the methods which the latter used 
 were very diverse from those which that Spirit suggested to 
 the former. 
 
 Thus, if this great movement is to advance Christ’s cause, 
 there is need to speak plainly of its character ; and there 
 is equal need that all the Churches should study until they 
 understand the principles of the Word of God which are 
 really applicable to the work this movement calls for. If it 
 once be understood that, though what is going on be far less 
 purely spiritual than the movements which Paul was en¬ 
 abled to set on foot at Ephesus and Corinth, it is yet as 
 thoroughly in harmony with the mind of God as they were, 
 there need be no vestige of fear that it will lose the sympathy 
 
14 
 
 or help of any single man whose aim in life is to be a 
 fellow-worker with the God whom Christ has taught him 
 to adore. 
 
 Another point which the Church needs to apprehend more 
 fully, is that what men regard as delay, disappointment, and 
 defeat, is an essential feature of the divine plan. This is more 
 than a corollary from that plan being progressive—more than 
 another way of stating the same fact. Not only must successive 
 stages be passed through ; it is no part of God’s ordinary 
 procedure that any of these stages should be arrived at easily 
 or at once. Difficulty and delay are such inseparable features 
 of every stage in effecting a divine purpose by the hands of 
 men that work from which such things are long or entirely 
 absent is thereby shown to be merely human. '^For those 
 ^who do God’s real work there are no royal roads. In special 
 circumstances, for special ends, the walls of Jericho fell down 
 without human intervention ; and the army of God on earth 
 may still receive encouragements like this when He sees fit to 
 send them. To exclude from our notion of God’s plan the 
 4 possibility of such forth-putting of His power as encouraged 
 Israel at the commencement of the conquest, would be a 
 virtual denial of His presence in the world. But to say that 
 the whole, or even that much, of God’s work is done in this 
 catastrophic fashion, is to shut our eyes to the plainest lessons 
 of His Word, and to shut ourselves out at the same time from 
 the greatest of the benefits that He wishes to confer on us. 
 It was not by sudden miracle, it was by patient undergoing 
 of daily toil and exposure to daily danger, that the strongholds 
 of Canaan were to be taken and the good land to be possessed. 
 / Nor is the reason for this feature of the divine method 
 at all difficult to understand. Not otherwise could that 
 people be rightly trained or fitted for the work they had to 
 \ do. It was well that, for once, they should stand still and see 
 
 \ salvation come to them. It was also well—it was, in fact, 
 
 their greatest blessing—that in all other cases thought and 
 toil should be their appointed way of exercising faith and 
 l^rriving at success.^ It is the same with us. The Church 
 
 needs to learn innumerable lessons before it can enter into the 
 
 mind of God, or become an intelligent and effective fellow- 
 
15 
 
 worker with Him. It cannot learn those lessons without the 
 difficulty and delay at which we are inclined to murmur, as the 
 Israelites did when the report of the spies was laid before 
 them. 
 
 There is a notion abroad that faith makes difficulties dis¬ 
 appear, and that wherever there is delay it is simply because 
 faith is wanting. Such is not the teaching of history. Such 
 was not the experience of those who through faith subdued 
 kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, and out 
 of weakness w^ere made strong.” Faith kept them steady in 
 their appointed toil until difficulties w^ere not melted suddenly 
 away, but patiently overcome,—it might be by themselves, it 
 might be (as oftener fell out) by men in some later age to 
 whom they had passed down their struggling cause as the noblest 
 inheritance they could bequeath. 
 
 And even when it is admitted that effort must go along 
 with faith, the idea seems far too prevalent that a multi¬ 
 plication of believing effort is the only thing required. How 
 often are we told that if the church would but send labourers 
 into the field in three-fold or ten-fold numbers, and if the 
 labourers would but have faith, perfect victory would come at 
 once ! Now, I am reluctant to say a word which it may be 
 possible to misconstrue into indifference to an increase of the 
 far too little strens^th which anv church as vet devotes to that 
 ingathering of the nations which is the reason why churches 
 exist at all. But the ideas that are abroad come dangerously 
 near to trusting in an arm of flesh. The greatest need is not 
 that of increased effort, but the quiet believing maintenance 
 of what is being done in non-christian lands,—its mainten¬ 
 ance by an unfailing succession of men whose faith and courage 
 wax stronger in the face of difficulty, of men ready both to 
 receive and to convey to the church, whoever may gainsay them, 
 that access of wisdom and spiritual power which comes from 
 learning lessons which cannot be taught without trial and 
 difficulty and delay. Not by might and not by power, but 
 only by the Spirit of the Lord, will the nations be brought to 
 Christ. The number of missionaries and the amount of outlay 
 may be increased; but if the increase come from a desire to 
 find the easiest way to what may pass for success, or if it be 
 
16 
 
 trusted to as certain by itself to bring success, we shall not 
 be nearer, we shall only be farther away from doing the will 
 of God on earth and finishing the work that has been given 
 us to do. 
 
 I can touch on but one feature more of the divine plan 
 which it seems important to impress on those who have to work 
 out that plan. When we go as messengers of Christ to those 
 who have not heard of Him, we do not go to lands where the 
 Lord of all the earth has had no work of love before. He 
 has not left Himself without witness anywhere. In some 
 cases it is possible to see, in all it is becoming to believe, that 
 this witness has in part fulfilled His ends. It is not yet 
 possible to speak with precision on this subject. It is certain 
 that the dark picture of the Gentile world which St Paul 
 drew in writing to the Homans is as true in our day as 
 his. It is equally certain that in the most civilised of 
 non-christian lands, as much as with ourselves on the 
 one hand or the most degraded tribes on the other, 
 the hope of men lies in the full reception of the one Re¬ 
 deemer. Yet it is quite as certain that non-Christian systems 
 of thought and schemes of life are not unrelated to the plan 
 of God. In them also there is some divine element. By 
 means of them also some good thing for our race was meant 
 to be wrought out. 
 
 Our Lord declared that he had sheep not of the Israelitish 
 fold who would thereafter hear his voice, but who, even 
 when he spoke, belonged to his flock in some sense—in 
 this sense at lowest, that his Father even then was caring for 
 them and preparing for what the time of ingathering was 
 to bring. The apostle too who counted all things worthless 
 compared with the knowledge of Christ crucified, declared the 
 Gentiles, as they were, to be fellow-heirs with Israel and fellow- 
 members in all that it was the divine purpose to effect. And 
 if they too are heirs, it follows by this apostle’s teaching that 
 they are under tutors and governors until the time appointed 
 by the Father. That they have been as perverse as Israel 
 was, or even more so if that be possible,—this may be at 
 once conceded. And that corruption has mingled with the 
 practical development of whatever elements of good were com- 
 
17 
 
 mitted to their care, is too plain to be denied. But it is as 
 undeniable,—to us who are children of the Beformation it 
 is a commonplace,—that corruption mingled for century on 
 century with the development of Christianity itself, till nearly 
 every ray of its light had been obscured, and nearly all its 
 power for good was gone. 
 
 Solemnly mysterious although it be, the fact is certain that 
 systems in which terrible evil abounds have yet their place 
 in the divine economy, and are not to be regarded either 
 as insignificant or as pure inventions of the Wicked One. 
 This is admitted without question regarding ethnic systems 
 which have passed away. Who raises a clamour or hints a 
 doubt when it is maintained that God was at work amidst the 
 evil of the ancient world, whether classic or barbaric, or even 
 if an attempt is made to trace how elements of moral life 
 were there developed which the Church was intended to 
 inherit, and without which the Church would be an even 
 poorer and weaker thing than it is ? This admission, which 
 it costs us no effort to make with regard to those perished 
 systems, needs to be made, and made as if we meant it, with 
 regard to the systems that are still alive in lands like India or 
 China. 
 
 It seemed at one time as if those systems might be re¬ 
 garded in some degree aright, in virtue of a belief that they 
 are corrupted relics of a supposed primeval revelation. That 
 view has proved but a passing fancy. Certainly, in the old 
 sense, it is tenable no longer. Yet crude as it was, it might 
 have led us to a better attitude towards them than that which 
 is common now. For the present view of Christians—not, 
 indeed, of those who have prayerfully thought out the subject 
 either at home or abroad, but the view that dominates the 
 practice of the Church,—appears to be that the one thing to be 
 done with these systems is to sweep them at once away, and 
 that a man must utterly disown the thoughts, the tendencies, 
 the customs, the features of character, they have nourished, 
 before he can become in any sense Christ’s disciple. 
 
 I wish that I could here explain what distortions of the truth 
 such views result in, what hindrances to the Gospel they build 
 up among such as are inclining Godward, and what evil effect 
 
18 
 
 they have upon those who entertain them. I shall refer to 
 but a single danger, of which it is easy to perceive the ap¬ 
 proach : the danger that under the influence of such views 
 the active portions of the Church at home, and the native 
 Church as it rises into strength and has its attitude and 
 character determined, may be weakened, if not ruined, by the 
 temptation to which the Jewish Church succumbed. Like it, 
 the Christian Church may come to be engrossed with its own 
 position and its own privileges, may regard its prosperity 
 as the one thing for which God takes care, and, shutting 
 its eyes to everything divine around it, may sink into the 
 moral position of those whom it was needful to remind 
 that God is “ able from the stones to raise up children unto 
 Abraham.” In no land, whether nominally Christian or not, 
 can the Church do her appointed work without cordially re¬ 
 cognising that divine power acts as well around her as within 
 her. She is the pillar and ground of the truth ; she is meant 
 to be the central force in all that is done for the salvation of 
 mankind. But she can fulfil this great ideal only by assimi¬ 
 lating whatever of truth and goodness the divine compassion 
 works out by other agencies than hers,—only by accepting the 
 servant’s place,—only by confessing sadly that in proportion to 
 her opportunities she has failed more shamefully than even 
 the votaries of the systems from which she is tempted to turn 
 away with self-sufficient loathing and contempt. If the 
 Church is ever to be the tree that veils the mountains with its 
 shade, she needs the dew of the Spirit for continual reviving. 
 But she needs also, and needs equally, to send her roots into 
 every corner of the darksome soil which, by means of the 
 creeds and customs which have endured for ages and also by 
 means of the novel thoughts which the training of the race 
 evolves from day to day, God has Himself been fertilising. 
 We need frankly to acknov^ledge that God has been at work 
 in love amid pagan perversity and corruption, as truly as 
 amidst the still more shameful perversity and corruption of 
 the nominally Christian world. 
 
 To say exactly how a divine work has been going on 
 beyond the bounds of Christendom, to define its character or 
 its limits or its precise effect on individuals either in this 
 
19 
 
 life or in the life to come,—these are subjects on which we 
 are not competent to pronounce as yet. We shall learn the 
 truth about them only by long experience and discussion. 
 Such discussion must be free from accusation and recrimina¬ 
 tion, for, as the poet says, 
 
 “ For what can war but endless war still breed 
 
 In the nature of the case, we must look forward to, and must 
 tolerate for a time, both over-statement and under-statement 
 of the amount of divine light in the systems by which 
 thoughts have been directed and character formed where the 
 Sun of Righteousness has not yet risen. But if tliere be 
 humble willingness to learn, the day will come for a fuller 
 understanding of this mysterious portion of the divine ways. 
 That day, when it comes, will bring with it an enormous 
 widening of our whole horizon, and an equal increase of that 
 sympathy with God and rejoicing in His ways which is the 
 one secure foundation for influence that is to be beneficial and 
 enduring. There need not be the smallest fear that those in 
 whom the new life is begun will work less,—they will work with 
 threefold insight, and therefore with tenfold vigour, for the good 
 of all mankind, when they have come to understand the ways 
 in which God has prepared, in every land and age, for that 
 coming glory to which every believing w’orker may make an 
 infinitely small, but, in the reckoning of our gracious Father, 
 not on that account an unvalued contribution. 
 
 The points that I have touched are but a few out of 
 many features of that plan of God which it is my main posi¬ 
 tion that the Church is bound to study, and to make the one 
 guide of her activity. What I have advanced, and what more 
 I should add if there were time, is, so far as theory goes, a 
 kind of truism. The need is to translate it from mere 
 speculation into practice. There seem to be reasons why the 
 Scottish Church should be among the first of the divisions of 
 God’s army to recognise the need of studying His plan and 
 conforming her thoughts, her expectations, and her methods, to 
 it. For the points that I have dwelt upon are emphatically 
 truths for the present time. And whatever the failures of 
 our Church, it has been among the most marked of her 
 
20 
 
 characteristics to see the truths required within her own sphere 
 by each age as it arrived, and to make some attempt to reduce 
 such truths to practice. Of preaching to the times there 
 has seldom been too little, there may occasionally have been 
 too much, in our bygone story. 
 
 And our Church has often been the first to struggle 
 for truths which were by-and-by received with universal 
 approbation. It was so in the sorest of our trials. Even 
 in Scotland there were but few to follow Richard Cameron 
 in throwing off allegiance to a perjured and a persecuting 
 king. Yet eight years had hardly passed when three kingdoms 
 put the views in practice, for which the forlorn hope of the 
 Church died so gallantly at Airsmoss. It has been the same 
 in more recent days. Those principles in defence of which we 
 have some among us still who were privileged to suffer—those 
 principles bearing on her collective life by which the Scottish 
 Church held fast in the face not only of earthly power but of 
 many within her pale—have been nearly all acknowledged 
 till even the section of our broken Church which has risen 
 in the room of those once most hostile seems disposed to claim 
 
 that they are as faithful Free Churchmen as ourselves. 
 
 «/ 
 
 The principle that the practical programme of the Church 
 must be shaped on all features of the divine plan which she is 
 able to discern, will find similar acceptance if it be weighed and 
 tested, and its details arranged in conformity with what experi¬ 
 ence will show to be the mind of God. And this principle is 
 well within our special sphere. It lies at the root of that 
 scheme of Christian education in India, which is the most 
 original and influential contribution we have made to the carry¬ 
 ing of gospel light to the lands that sit in darkness. For be it 
 remembered that every section of the Church at work in India, 
 not those alone that are nearest of our kin, but that part of 
 England’s Church to which Protestant ” is a distasteful 
 word, and the organisations also which are in obedience to 
 Rome, have followed the example which Scotland set when the 
 sanctified statesmanship of Dr Inglis found its fitting instru¬ 
 ment, perhaps its necessary complement, in the evangelical 
 fervour of Dr Duff. It is worth while to give labour and 
 to give life to the perfect working out of a principle which has 
 
21 
 
 done so much already, and which will be found, when it gets 
 free scope, to be able to do infinitely more. 
 
 There is need that we lose no time in adjusting ourselves 
 to whatever guidance there may be in this whole view of how 
 the Church is to work on earth. It is not merely that for 
 each of us the time is short. That is always true, and recent 
 reminders of it are numerous and solemn. On these I do not 
 propose to dwell, though that appears to be your kindly custom. 
 The names of some whom we have lost will occur at once to 
 every one—among them those of Dr John Laird of Cupar, who 
 held this chair in 1889, and of Dr William Balfour of 
 Holyrood. There are others, some more widely and some 
 less widely known, of whom I should like to speak, not 
 only because the Church is weaker through their loss, but 
 because it is to myself so great a sorrow that they are no 
 longer here to aid me by counsel and by sympathy. Will you 
 suffer me to refer to one who will long be mourned by 
 many, and who was among the oldest and most valued of my 
 friends in Dr Neil Macleod of Newport, and to one of the 
 best instructors at whose feet I ever sat in Mr John Fiddes of 
 Killearn ? But doubtless there are many others as worthy of 
 remembrance as these, whose places have been left vacant in the 
 bygone year. Comparatively a stranger, I cannot judge whom 
 among those taken from us it would be right to mention here, 
 and I cannot say aright what ought to be said of those whom 
 it would be fitting in this way to commemorate. I think it 
 better to leave this matter in the hands of the Committee 
 which will draw up notices of ministers and elders deceased 
 since last Assembly. That Committee will judge what it is 
 appropriate in each case to put on record far better than one 
 who could say nothing in almost any case from any knowledge 
 of his own. 
 
 But it is not merely because for each of us separately the 
 time is short that we are called to study the designs of God, 
 and to apply all the knowledge we can gain of them to the 
 problems which confront us. For the Church as a whole the 
 time when this can be done seems to be passing fast. We 
 have come to, or are near, a crisis in this whole undertaking of 
 vindicating the world for the servant of the Lord on whom 
 
the chastisement of its peace was laid. Look back but for a 
 generation and see how clear are the signs that some epoch- 
 making events are near. Scarcely a land or tribe remains in 
 which there are outward hindrances to the proclamation of 
 our glad tidings. Moral barriers have at least begun to be 
 removed. Throughout the world men’s minds seem more open 
 to new thoughts than they ever were before. If light come 
 to them which they see to be true light, they seem readier 
 to walk in it than earlier generations were. I do not speak as 
 if difficulty and opposition were about to disappear. Far from 
 it. There is still the heart of unbelief, and I have given 
 reasons already why it is not the divine intention that our 
 victory should anywhere be easy. Difficulties not yet thought 
 of are certain to arise as time goes on. But it is much that 
 there is in many pagan lands some dim perception that things 
 are not what they ought to be. And in some lands, in that 
 India, for example, where missionary problems call most loudly 
 for solution, there is more than this. Largely—not ex¬ 
 clusively, but very largely—through the quiet effect of 
 Christian education, India has manifestly begun to stretch 
 out her hands towards God. As yet in broken accents, 
 as of one but half awake, nevertheless not inaudibly, 
 India, through the most thoughtful, of her sons, has begun to 
 ask : “ What must I do to be saved ? ” This awakening of 
 inward life takes on a variety of forms. A form which is 
 very prominent is regarded by some with sorrow and alarm. 
 It may not unnaturally be so if no account be taken of the 
 larger features of the divine plan. For an outstanding char¬ 
 acteristic, in the meantime, of India’s awakening is a reviving 
 Hinduism,—is an attempt to purify the ancient system, and to 
 read into it as much as may be of Christian truth. But that a 
 part—and a large part—of the current of new life should set in 
 this direction is only natural. I will venture to add that it 
 is rio^ht. For what of the merchantman who sought for 
 goodly pearls ? He may have had to travel far before the 
 pearl of price was found ; but did not his search begin in the 
 land where he was born ? Did he not first resort to the 
 markets that lay nearest to his home ? If India’s search be 
 such as his, we know where her search will end. The im- 
 
28 
 
 portant thing is to understand how largely it depends on us 
 what the end of her search will be. Let it appear as if the 
 one thing that the Christian Church regards is her own hon¬ 
 our, her own increase, her triumph over systems regarded as her 
 rivals ;—let there thus be nothing before men’s eyes of which 
 devotion to the glory of God and the good of men is plainly the 
 impelling power, and what can be expected but that India will 
 sink back into the death of her immemorial routine ? But let 
 it be seen that the one thing the Church desires, is that God’s 
 will be done in God’s own way,—let the Church act in the spirit 
 of her Master, whose foremost characteristic, as the anointed 
 Servant, was that He did not strive or cry or cause his voice 
 to be heard in the streets,” that he did not '' break the bruised 
 reed or quench the smoking flax,”—in that case progress may 
 well be looked for, whether fast or slow, along the narrow path, 
 until India become again, but with transcendently nobler effect 
 than in ancient days, the centre of thought and moral force to 
 all lands and nations round. 
 
 I would not speak as if this incipient awakening were con¬ 
 fined to India. Only in speaking of India, or at least of 
 Southern India, I speak of what I know. If the same thing 
 be traceable, as I believe it is, in other lands as well, it only 
 makes these passing years the more important for all the bound¬ 
 less issues of the future ; it only makes the call more loud that we 
 should make ourselves better acquainted with the ways of God 
 to men, and should take heed that all our work is done in the 
 spirit and with the aims which acquaintance with those ways 
 inspires. 
 
 And if the magnitude of this crisis in the spiritual history 
 of mankind be recognised, and if its demand on us for right 
 views and patient effort be responded to, may it not be the 
 means of bringing blessings on the Church in her domestic 
 life—some blessings, perhaps, of which her need is still unfelt, 
 but others also for which she has begun eagerly to long ? 
 For example, there are few things,—I suppose that there is 
 nothing connected with the Church as an organised body,—for 
 which there is so much desire among us as the reunion of its 
 fragments, so that it may work with the gathered force of 
 brotherhood in Christ. The difficulties in the way are great. 
 
24 
 
 It is not for one like me to express, or perhaps even to have, 
 a,n opinion about how those difficulties can best be dealt 
 with. But much would surely be contributed towards their 
 removal by more intelligent and purposeful devotion to the 
 end for which every Church exists. If all the parts of our 
 divided Scottish Church give themselves to the work which 
 this crisis of the world’s history demands, if they learn the 
 lessons and acquire the strength which the doing of this work 
 in the divine way is fitted to impart, if thus they come 
 nearer to their Master and mould their aspirations and 
 procedure upon His, until they are ready like Him for their 
 work’s sake even to lay down their lives—may it not be 
 found that, in the heat of sympathy with God, difficulties 
 begin to melt away which are irreducible in the meantime? 
 
 Fathers and Brethren, I have detained you, I fear, too long 
 with views of which my heart is full, because, trite although 
 they be in theory, they have not yet had their rightful influence 
 in shaping the action of that Church which exists only to 
 be the instrument for carrying into effect the divine plan, and 
 which cannot carry it into effect unless in some fair degree it 
 understands it and sympathises with it. It is more than time 
 that I should ask you to begin the deliberations for the sake 
 of which we are assembled here. Only whatever be your 
 opinion of what I have made bold to say, I think myself secure 
 of approval from you all when I ask you to conduct these 
 deliberations with the abiding and solemn remembrance that 
 their object is to make this organised body of believers upon 
 Christ more fit to be a light to lighten all mankind. 
 
 TUliNBULL AND 3PKAU.S, PiaNTI'.RS, KDINRUKOII 
 
CLOSING ADDRESS. 
 
 Fathers and Brethren, —It is now my duty to bring your 
 proceedings to a close. I cannot do so without acknowledging 
 how easy you have made it, even for one so inexperienced as 
 I am, to bear the official burdens of this high position. On 
 that score I told you that I had little fear. I knew that I could 
 count on guidance from my predecessors, on all kinds of' 
 support from our clerks and from many friends of bygone days 
 like them, on forbearance and consideration from the vastly 
 greater number to whom I am unknown. In this respect the 
 Assembly has been what I expected ; and if I use no stronger 
 language, it is because the expectations of this kind which I 
 had formed could by no possibility be exceeded. 
 
 Of fears of another kind, which I expressed when I first 
 addressed you, I shall say nothing here. Only I would thank 
 our God humbly in the first place, and in the second I would 
 thank you that it has been my happy privilege to preside over 
 an Assembly so remarkable for its brotherliness of feeling, an 
 Assembly in which no single occasion has arisen for the taking 
 of a formal vote, an Assembly which has voiced so well our 
 Church’s overmastering desire to give itself wholly, so far as 
 providential cabs allow, to its central work of bearing the gospel 
 into every corner of our land and into every land where we see 
 it to be the divine will that we should labour. And in par¬ 
 ticular I would thank you, if I may turn for a moment to 
 what concerns my own work most, for the reply you have 
 returned to the friends whom God has given me in the land 
 to which you sent me long ago. That touching reply, and the 
 speech as touching which secured for it such cordial and 
 unanimous acceptance at your hands, will do much to remove 
 prevailing misconception and to help the thoughtful to under- 
 
4 
 
 stand the true aims and motives of the Christian Church in 
 all her missionary efforts. 
 
 It might he interesting or possibly instructive if, on coming 
 among you after these long years, I said something of the 
 impression left on me by what I have been able to see, or at 
 all events to guess at, of the state of matters here. But, for 
 many reasons, it is only with hesitation and under limitations 
 that I can speak of such things. I cannot pretend in regard 
 to anything to go far beneath the surface. But I can say with 
 truest thankfulness that I have come among you again to find 
 that, by every test I am able to apply, this branch of our Scot¬ 
 tish Church is as healthy and as strong, as ready for the duties 
 of the present, as hopeful in facing the problems of the future, 
 as our Church has been in the brightest periods of her story. 
 
 I have no wish to make too much of merely external 
 prosperity. I know well, and I trust. Fathers and Brethren, 
 that you will ever teach your people to remember, that God’s 
 work goes on in shade as well as sunshine, and that a nation 
 or a church when it is harassed or depressed may be as 
 effectually preparing for the glory of the latter day as when 
 its shout of victory is sounding most loudly and most justly. 
 Nevertheless there is reason for gratitude and joy when per¬ 
 plexities for a season pass away, and when strength is felt to 
 be abundant for all the things which it is one’s call and one’s 
 delight to do. And there is special ground for thankfulness 
 when such strength comes from an unseen source and shows 
 itself in the midst of opposing forces. It appears to me that 
 this is how matters stand with you. 
 
 To this Free Church of Scotland, it is, I fear, beyond a doubt, 
 that many of the strongest things in Scotland are opposed. The 
 bulk of the wealth, and perhaps, though not certainly, of the 
 culture of the community, but undoubtedly the bulk of the poli¬ 
 tical and social agencies which are most prominently powerful, 
 are not in your favour but against you. It is certain, too, 
 that the bulk, though not the whole, of the power which 
 does most to sway men’s minds in our day—the power of 
 the public press—is adverse to your cause. It is true that 
 this particular adverse influence may safely be discounted 
 somewhat largely, for attack that is based on misconception 
 
5 
 
 has a knack of recoiling upon those who make it. I mistake 
 tlie character of my countrymen if tiie readiness of so many 
 organs of public opinion to make the utmost of whatever can 
 be said against our Church does not in some degree incline 
 
 o o 
 
 them to favour an institution which gets less than the fair- 
 play which all who speak our tongue have learned to regard 
 as the right of every man. All the same, it is an enormous 
 disadvantage that a decided preponderance of the newspapers 
 which seem to be most widely read are pronounced oppo¬ 
 nents of our Church. It is much, therefore, to see with one’s 
 own eyes, as this Assembly has enabled me to see, that, in the 
 face of adverse influences so potent as these and others 
 which it would be easy to refer to, the Church is ready, with 
 hopeful and cheerful faith, to undertake every duty that 
 Providence lays on it, to confront every difficulty that rises in 
 its way, and to bear itself as those should do who know that 
 an unseen power protects them and that a higher wisdom 
 than their own is at hand to guide them. 
 
 It is much, if I may take the most vulgar but the readiest 
 of tests, to find, in the face of these opposing forces, that the 
 work of the Church is receiving a steadily increasing measure of 
 support, and receiving it not only on the whole but in every 
 department of its varied efforts. I know not whether this en¬ 
 couraging fact points chiefly to an extension of the boundaries of 
 the Church or to a growing readiness in her members to con¬ 
 secrate to God’s service what He has entrusted to their care. 
 Of the two, the latter is the explanation which, if it be the 
 true one, is the more satisfactory and encouraging. Espe¬ 
 cially encouraging is the success that has attended the plans 
 which the Church is forming for the lengthening of her cords 
 and the strengthening of her stakes—I mean the various 
 projects of which the Miners’ Mission, in the hands of my 
 honoured predecessor, and the Church Extension Fund for 
 Glasgow, in the vigorous hands of Mr Howie, are, in the 
 meantime, the most notable examples. 
 
 Turninof to indications of buovant life of another kind, let 
 me refer, especially in connection with the desire for union 
 which is so characteristic of our present state, to the projects 
 of which we have had various adumbrations for making 
 
6 
 
 the principles of the Church better known and impressing 
 them more deeply, especially on the rising generation. To 
 see this well done, has long been one of my chief desires. To 
 find, as I have now found, how many there are by whom this 
 desire is shared, is to me a peculiar joy. For this is a duty 
 to which we are called by many considerations. 
 
 We owe it to ourselves. It is but right to make even 
 superfluously clear the reasons why we retired from the vantage 
 ground of express alliance with the State—for, say what men 
 will on this thorny question, a vantage ground and an im¬ 
 portant one it was. It is but right to let all men know that 
 the thing which has placed us where we are is no joy in being 
 separate from our brethren and no wish to undervalue any 
 power that can be employed in our Master’s service, but only 
 the resolve to follow what seemed to us, and still seems, the 
 manifest guidance of God Himself. 
 
 But to make the principles of the Free Church of Scotland 
 as impressively clear as may be, is a duty that we owe still more 
 to the other sections of our broken church,—with every one of 
 which I believe it to be among the strongest passions of our 
 hearts to be, and be for ever, reunited. It is on the duty 
 which in this respect we owe to them that I should wish you 
 to dwell with me for a moment. 
 
 We seek to march on towards reunion with all sections of 
 the Scottish Church. With some of them it seems more than 
 possible that the meeting-place may be at hand. I believe we 
 all are thankful that steps towards this first reunion have been 
 taken at this Assembly,—steps all the more likely to lead to 
 the end desired because they have been taken with caution 
 and without display, with plentiful self-distrust and with 
 reliance on the guidance of providence alone. With others of 
 our separated brethren the place where they and we may meet 
 seems to be more distant than we might wish. But whether 
 ' it be near or far, in what condition ought all of us to reach 
 the place of rendezvous ? I trust that we do not wish that 
 our brethren, and I will not believe that any of them desire 
 that we, should gather to the trysting-place in scattered or dis¬ 
 ordered bands. Hot so, but with ordered ranks and colours 
 flying free, and all the well-trained force of disciplined array, 
 
7 
 
 let us meet, when the time for meeting comes, ready from the 
 moment of our junction to stand shoulder to shoulder in united 
 strife against all forces and forms of evil. It is not in an¬ 
 tagonism to our separated brethren, it is out of regard to the 
 aid which we can give to them, as they to us, that both they 
 and we ought in the meantime to walk steadily along different 
 yet converging paths, making the principles on which we 
 act as clear as may be and thereby making our organ¬ 
 isation as complete as we can get wisdom and grace to 
 make it. And till the state of separation ends, it is the 
 duty of each fragment to rejoice in the welfare of the others, 
 in their growing strength for every Christian work, and their 
 growing faithfulness to the special testimony which each of 
 them feels that it is called to bear. 
 
 On the Free Church of Scotland its most fundamental prin¬ 
 ciples impose this duty with peculiar weight. For while we 
 acknowledge to the full that others must follow their own ideas 
 of what is right and are not bound by ours, we must yet for 
 ourselves maintain that the Assembly which comes to a close 
 to-night is the highest court of the Church which had Iona for 
 its cradle, which was carried on in corrupted forms under foreign 
 domination through many a darkened century, which has now 
 for three centuries and a half been in some tolerable measure 
 free to serve that Saviour of whom it had almost wholly lost 
 sight so long. We seek to force such views on no one. Only 
 in quietness we must maintain them for ourselves. Moreover 
 to us it cannot but appear that State recognition and connec¬ 
 tion is a thing which may be valuable at one time and not so 
 at another, but which in either case is but an accident to the 
 real Church of Christ. To us it cannot but equally appear 
 that it is on no mere counting of heads, but infinitely more 
 on the inheritance of principle, of spirit, and of aim, that 
 historical position and historical continuity depend. We 
 turn for lessons upon this point to the civil history of the'• 
 little land we love. We remember 
 
 “ Those who perished 
 For her birthright, at the time 
 AVhen to be a Scot was treason 
 And to side with Wallace crime.” 
 
8 
 
 In those days all elements of earthly power, ay and the vast 
 majority of Scotsmen, were arrayed upon the one side and 
 yet the real nation was always on the other. For is there 
 a man from Solway to the Shetlands who will deny to-day 
 that the true Scotland of those days was the dauntless few 
 who, though they triumphed for a moment at Cambuskenneth, 
 had untold hardness and almost hopeless struggle to pass 
 through before the nation gathered round them and they 
 stood at last victorious at Bannockburn ? 
 
 But if we are entitled to apply the lessons of those days in 
 the way I have, ventured to suggest—in other words, if it be 
 true (at all events for us) that the Free Church of Scotland is 
 simply the Church of Scotland free, what practical duty is hereby 
 laid upon us ? That is the question which I would ask with 
 the utmost earnestness. Surely it is a case to which the grand 
 old French saying of noblesse oblige is most strictly applicable. 
 The position which, with all toleration and respect for those 
 whose judgment differs, we claim to be ours by right, obliges 
 us to make the advancement of the divine purpose within 
 Scotland and by means of it the one thing for which we 
 supremely care. It obliges us to take readily every step, 
 whether it be pleasant or unpleasant to ourselves, which the 
 advancement of that purpose calls for. It obliges us to put 
 our sectional interests and honour entirely in the background. 
 It obliges us to give way to no fits of temper and no dis¬ 
 couragement when unexpected obstacles cross our path—such 
 obstacles as that on which a few days ago we stumbled. For 
 we had hoped that the essential brotherhood of all branches of 
 our broken church was to be made plain, and some small 
 contribution towards their reunion to be made, by their all 
 adopting the hymnal which their representatives had framed. 
 That hope has been disappointed in the meantime. It re¬ 
 mains for us and for those who share our aspirations to call to 
 mind that delay is not defeat. To be patient and hopeful in 
 regard to this matter and to every matter like it, and to 
 endure, not with scorn but with quiet forbearance, any hard 
 things that, in connection with such matters, may be said of 
 us—all this is but an elementary portion of our duty, if the 
 motto of noblesse oblige is to express the spirit that controls us. 
 
9 
 
 It is only thus, by taking in all things the servant’s place 
 and seeking the good of others rather than our own, that the 
 position we think we have a right to will be proved to be right¬ 
 fully our own. Dynasties which learn nothing and forget 
 nothing,” which place their own interest and honour above 
 the well-being of the nations they belong to, may be kings 
 de jure in the eyes of an ever dwindling faction of adherents, 
 but they are righteously set aside de facto from influence 
 on the world’s affairs. If this Church allows anything less 
 noble than the highest good of every fragment of Scotland’s 
 broken Church to be its animating motive, it may make what 
 claim it pleases but it need not hope that its claim will ever 
 be vindicated at the bar of history or ratified by the approval 
 of the Most High. 
 
 Such, Fathers and Brethren—so far as we can see the path 
 which is marked out for us b}^ Providence for the present— 
 such is the immediate duty of our Church in her domestic life. 
 We must give ourselves with all our might to the doing of 
 our proper work, and at the same time proclaim our 
 principles unflinchingly and act upon them quietly—must act 
 upon them especially in the way to which they bind us over 
 of seeking the welfare, and, at the earliest possible date, the 
 reconstruction of The Scottish Church, whatever be the 
 cost of that process to ourselves. If its cost be our suffering 
 and loss, nay, if in man’s esteem it should load us with dis¬ 
 honour, our experience will bring us all the nearer to Him 
 who for us endured the cross and despised the shame. And 
 God’s alchemy will some day turn all that sorrow in our case, 
 as it has turned it long ago in His, into everlasting joy. 
 
 We are not to forget that there are bodies of believers upon 
 Christ beyond our Scottish Church which have representatives 
 here in Scotland, and with which, in other lands as well as 
 here, we are bound, as far as may be, to have the friendliest 
 relations. With them, however, in the meantime, we are not 
 concerned in this particular way. The divine purpose in the 
 separation between them and us has manifestly not as yet 
 been served. The time for union or for intimacy Avith them 
 also may arrive some day ; but the over-ruling principle of every 
 church must be to walk in the ways of the living God and not 
 
10 
 
 to run before any more than to lag behind what His provi¬ 
 dence rings out as His summons for each hour as it goes by. 
 
 No doubt the variance and strife within the universal 
 church are the fruits of its unfaithfulness and sin, but they are 
 also chastisements by which God means to humble and to 
 prove us, that He may do us good at our latter end. Separa¬ 
 tion and reunion have both their parts to play in the evolution 
 of that divine plan which as yet we so imperfectly understand. 
 It was so in that civil history of our land to which I have made 
 reference already. For it is easy now to see that we have 
 equal reason to be thankful for the disruption which, under 
 God, was effected in the fourteenth century by King Robert, 
 and for the union which came about long after,—that union by 
 which Scotland became a sharer in the fuller life and larger 
 heritage of her sister, and in virtue of which both nations, in 
 spite of many and undeniable defects, have become in wonder¬ 
 ful measure a blessing to mankind. Experiences not quite 
 dissimilar may be perhaps in store for churches that stand in 
 pitiable isolation now. 
 
 But with such dim and airy speculations it would be wrong 
 to allow our thoughts to be entangled. The watchword is— 
 
 “ Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see 
 The distant scene : one step enough for me.” 
 
 And for as that one step for the present is to draw close, and 
 portion by portion to build together into one, those who still 
 hear the divine voice in the teaching that awoke Scotland 
 from spiritual slumber in the sixteenth century,—those who 
 would help to carry to its full result the movement of which 
 the centre and the soul was the great Reformer, I had almost 
 said the Refounder of our Church, whose statue I count it the 
 chief honour of my life, that, as your representative, I recently 
 had entrusted to my care. 
 
 It has been whispered in this assembly,—it is said some¬ 
 what loudly, I am told, in other quarters,—that the reason for 
 such high honour having come to me is that those who had 
 the power to say what should be done or not done in this 
 metropolis of Scotland had no desire to perpetuate the memory 
 or do honour to the name of Knox. If there be any ground 
 
11 
 
 for the accusation, let the shame be with those only who 
 deserve it. I will not readily believe that it is deserved by 
 any one, but I am sure that it is not deserved by the Scottish 
 people. They at least are not ungrateful to the man who did 
 more than any other in their story to make them what they 
 are. Their gratitude, too, will become more lively when they 
 have had time to become acquainted with the three important 
 works upon this hero of our Church which—and surely it is 
 a noteworthy fact—have seen the light in the compass of 
 a single year. Especially will their gratitude grow warmer 
 when they read the latest published of the three. For it is not 
 partiality arising from long years of friendship which makes me 
 sure that those who wish to know what manner of man this 
 God-given teacher was, will turn particularly, and turn for 
 many a day to come, to the succinct sympathetic account of 
 him which was given us a week ago by Mr Alexander Taylor 
 Innes-. 
 
 We of this Church—and all faithful sons of every Scottish 
 Church—are proud of the work that Knox was privileged to 
 do. We do not worship him. We are as ready as any 
 one else to criticise him. We find no fault with those who 
 point out defects in him, as in any other of the statesmen or 
 the churchmen of his time, or of any time. But let his 
 defects have been what they may, he did a mighty work for 
 Scotland, and a wnrk of which the noble fruitage has not yet 
 by any means been wholly gathered in. It would be a poor 
 compliment to him or to any other of heaven’s messengers 
 to swear in all things by his words. For his greatness lay in 
 this, that he guided men into a path along which each 
 generation as it travels may get ever-widening views of all 
 the country round. Elijah, too, was a preparer of higher 
 things than he was himself aware of. He was ‘^a man of like 
 passions with ourselves.” The passions which he shared with 
 us may have mingled in the work he did, but none the 
 less his work vras the work of God for the generation 
 which he served so well. Under a higher spirit we have 
 risen beyond Elijah now. Whatever view be held about the 
 progressiveness either of revelation or of the divine work on 
 earth, no man for a moment dreams that methods like those 
 
12 
 
 of Elijah are to be employed in our day. That will not 
 hinder his being^ venerated to the Church’s latest a^e as the 
 restorer of life to Israel, and thus as an indispensable link in 
 the chain of God’s purpose for mankind. That did not 
 hinder the greatest of conceivable honours being done to him 
 when, in the most mysterious transaction in the whole of 
 earth’s long story, he appeared along with Moses on the Mount 
 of Transfiguration and spake with our Lord Himself concern¬ 
 ing the decease that was to be accomplished at Jerusalem. It 
 is thus that we honour Knox. We honour him most truly 
 when we put in practice many a lesson which neither he nor 
 any man of his age could understand, but which it was his 
 noble function to guide those who came after him into the 
 way of learning. 
 
 So much. Fathers and Brethren, I have made bold to say 
 on the more external aspects of the questions which the 
 Church seems called to face in the time immediately before 
 us. It would be only becoming that one who has held, how¬ 
 ever undeservedly, the foremost seat among you should go 
 forward in the next place to give some general review of your 
 deliberations and to deal with the moral and spiritual ques¬ 
 tions which underlie these deliberations if they do not appear 
 upon their surface. But I am quite unfit to go any serious 
 length in this direction. 
 
 Nevertheless, there is one general topic suggested by the 
 tendencies of discussion and by the whole church-life which 
 they bring out, to which, though with considerable diffidence, 
 I shall venture to turn vour thoimhts. It seems to me, and 
 I cannot but give expression to the view, that we need a 
 somewhat stronger sense of the sacredness of common things. 
 At least I would suggest the question whether the feeling is 
 as deep among us as it ought to be that God speaks to men 
 and desires to be in contact with them in evervthin" that 
 evokes thought or expresses itself in action, not in those 
 things only which are the acknowledged channels of His 
 grace. To recognise that God does this is an admitted duty. 
 The recognition of it is part of the theory of the new life with 
 everyone in whom that new life is begun. But when theory 
 is correct practice may be grievously defective. Perhaps it is at 
 
13 
 
 this point that we of the Scoittish Church, firm in evangelical 
 principle, faithful as we are, and I trust will ever be, to that 
 strong type of piety which got impressed on us in Reformation 
 days, run most risk of narrowing our Christian life and lessening 
 our power for good. No doubt all things are imperfect, and 
 it belongs, one may say, to the very essence of a National 
 Church to be in some respects one-sided. It is by diversity in 
 unity that strength and beauty come to the Church universal 
 as to all other parts of creation,—both the material and the 
 moral. But the variety of the whole will never be too 
 much interfered with by appljdng such remedy as may be 
 possible to defects in any of the parts. The special charac¬ 
 teristics of races, of nations, and of churches, will retain pro¬ 
 minence enough after each has assimilated all the good it can, 
 whether from its fellows or from the source that gives life to all. 
 
 O 
 
 Is there not then in the t3^pe of piety which is our Scottish 
 model a certain defect on this side,—a defect which it ought to 
 be our effort and our prayer to get remedied as far as may be ? 
 
 Most rightly we set the great truths of man’s help¬ 
 lessness in sin, of Christ’s complete redemption, and of 
 
 justification through faith alone, in the forefront of our testi¬ 
 mony. We summon every man to deal for himself with God 
 in Christ and to rest content with nothing short of a full, a 
 felt, a personal appropriation of all that Christ has done and 
 is for sinners. Both logically and practically it is the right 
 procedure. Bor this is the heart of religion. Everything 
 
 else, if this be wanting, is nothing worth. Nevertheless, 
 
 though these things be the heart of religion, they are not the 
 whole of it. If the religious life is to do all it can for the 
 individual, for the community, or for mankind, there is need 
 of a great deal more. So with any fruit-producing shrub or 
 tree. The thing that secures its life is ffhe great tap-root 
 that goes downward straight and deep. For the very pos¬ 
 sibility of fruit this tap-root may rightly be described as the 
 one thing needful. Yet a great deal more is needed if the 
 fruit is to be either abundant or of worthy quality. Good 
 fruit is borne only when there is an interlacing wealth of 
 rootlets which the life wdthin the tree pushes constantly into 
 closer contact with every particle of surrounding soil, and which 
 
14 
 
 i 
 
 contribute as constantly to the nutriment which that life 
 converts, in due succession, into flower and fruit. In their 
 own place these rootlets are indispensable. The tree that has 
 little but a tap-root may be fairly secure against the tempest. 
 It may also be fairly secure against any premature arrival of 
 natural decay. It is not equally secure against the sentence, 
 “ Behold I come seeking fruit on this tree and find none ; cut 
 it down, why cumbereth it the ground ! ” 
 
 Is it not here that defect is chiefly visible in the form of 
 Christian life which is most esteemed among us ? And is not 
 this defect manifestly hurtful both to those who fully share and 
 to those who do not share the Church’s inner life ? Men come 
 in contact with the living God in the crisis of their history which 
 we rightly name conversion, that is a turning of the direc¬ 
 tion of their central thoughts and feelings and desires. But 
 the force and sometimes the suddenness of this turning brings 
 danger with it lest the character as a whole be less altered 
 than it ought to be. Attention may be wholly given to the 
 things which are well entitled to the foremost place,—to 
 thoughts about sin and the one propitiation for it, to the 
 ordinances and practices—the prayer, for example, and the 
 Scripture study—by which such thoughts maintain their in¬ 
 fluence on conscience and on feeling. But the powder of 
 attention is limited in every man. Especially is the power of 
 attention to spiritual things severely limited when the new life 
 is taking shape, when a man’s whole being has not yet been 
 energized through habitual intercourse wdth God. If all of 
 this power that there is in any man be given to central 
 realities alone, is there not a risk that his common life will 
 continue to be ruled by the opinions and the practices of the 
 world ? Is there not a risk that while at the heart of the 
 converted man there is real and important change, there may 
 be little change, or none, in all that lies nearer to the circum¬ 
 ference than the centre of his being ? Is there not danger 
 thus of a contradiction being introduced into his life, which 
 cannot but impair its vigour even if it be not 
 
 “ The little rift within the lute, 
 
 That by-and-by will make the music mute, 
 
 And ever widening slowly silence all ” ? 
 
15 
 
 Conscious, intentional, planned hypocrisy is a rare thing ; 
 but I fear it can hardly be denied that with us, more often 
 than where spiritual life tends to conform to a type that is 
 weaker and less intense, men are met with who are earnest in 
 religious profession and earnest in religious work, yet hard, 
 unloving, and unlovely in their character—men who, in the 
 course of worldly business, yield to temptations to which even 
 those who have no better guide than the dictates of common 
 justice and common honour do not ordinarily succumb. The 
 evil seems to be, that the influence which is powerful within 
 certain limits is never directed into large regions of thought 
 and character, and that these accordingly continue to be ruled 
 by desires and tendencies which have their way unheeded 
 because the common things they are concerned with are 
 regarded as beyond the religious sphere. Thus there is loss 
 and danger to a man himself if his inward life finds con¬ 
 scious expression only in thoughts and exercises which bear 
 directly upon divine realities alone. At best the condition of 
 such a man comes too near to that of a nation surrounded by 
 deadly enemies which has an impregnable fortress for its 
 capital, but the frontiers of which are undefended so that 
 spoilers can ravage as they please till they come within view 
 from the central stronghold. A nation like this may maintain 
 its freedom. It may even rejoice in the security of its national 
 life. But harmoniously developed or beneficently powerful it 
 cannot be. Half the territory will lie untilled on which a 
 busy population might be building up the nation’s power, if 
 only the strength which it possesses were more wisely and 
 more evenly distributed. 
 
 And if defect in the prevalent type of religious life lead thus 
 to inconsistency and weakness in men who are spiritually quick¬ 
 ened, the effect on those who have not entered into conscious 
 fellowship with God is bound to be disastrous also. It may 
 be granted at once that when men are either deeply con¬ 
 vinced of sin or drawn by the love which the Cross reveals, they 
 do not stop to think of the inconsistencies of others. And 
 it may equally be granted that the inconsistencies of professing 
 Christians are far more often spoken of by those who seek a 
 plausible excuse for predetermined irreligion, than by those who 
 
16 
 
 have any genuine inclination Godward. Nevertheless, in that 
 sub-conscious region which is so important for us all, the per¬ 
 ception of what is selfish and unlovely in those who are accepted 
 specimens of piety must have its powerful and injurious 
 effect. There is reason to fear that there are many in whom 
 the first feeble flow of what might have become the strong 
 current of a life setting steadily towards God in Christ is 
 checked and turned aside, without their being aware of it 
 themselves, by their observing how men who claim to be 
 converted, and who speak much of the necessity for conversion, 
 are little changed in regard to their dealing with public 
 questions, in regard to their management of business, in 
 regard to the countless matters which make up our daily 
 lives, and of which common men take most account. 
 
 Be it remembered, too, to revert to the figure I have used 
 already, that in the economy of a plant any rootlet may 
 develop into a central taproot. At the outset of its history, 
 the plant may be linked to the ground only by a single fibre 
 and a weak one. But let that little root live on and from it 
 there will in due time spring that whole apparatus beneath 
 the soil which enables the plant to bear abundant fruit. So 
 the smallest contact with the living God at any point may 
 result, if that feeble connection be kept up, in a man’s enter¬ 
 ing into the full round of Christian experience and living 
 upon every aspect of evangelical truth. Thus the breaking of 
 a single rootlet, too small almost to be discerned, may be 
 as fatal, when a plant possesses but that one, as the 
 severing of the taproot in a plant which is comparatively 
 mature. 
 
 Now, would it not be in some degree a remedy for such 
 evil effects, both upon Christian men and upon those for 
 whose spiritual awakening they long, if thought and teaching 
 turned more than they ordinarily do upon the sacredness of 
 common things ? Would it not be a distinct gain if men 
 were made to feel that the Saviour is as near us in the 
 market as the church and as much interested in what we do 
 in the one place as the other,—that by accurate book-keeping, 
 or honest pipelaying, or solid building, according as our calling 
 is that of a clerk, a plumber, or a mason, we are pleasing 
 
17 
 
 Christ as much as hj teaching in a Sabbath School or 
 addressing an evangelistic meeting ? Of course, no one 
 denies that this is so. Every one of us will say at once that 
 in fitting time and place the one thing is as much to be 
 honoured and as useful as the other. I only plead that the 
 universally admitted truth needs greater accentuation in the 
 Church’s teaching and the whole impact of the Church’s 
 influence than for the most part it receives among us. I 
 only plead that it is one among the chief wants of the 
 religious life and religious training of our time to have 
 more attention given to the harmonising of the new life 
 which the knowledge of Christ imparts with, that common 
 life by which God touches all men and seeks to train them— 
 that more attention should be given (if academic language 
 may for a moment be employed) to the great department of 
 Christian Ethics. 
 
 It may be held, indeed, that if the spiritual influence at 
 the man’s heart be but made strong enough, it will find its 
 way into all the details of his daily life and spontaneously 
 remodel all his actions and all his influence. Tt may be 
 therefore held that it is safe for the Church to confine her 
 work to providing an abundant supply of Christ’s own living 
 water, leaving that w^ater to find for itself its fertilising way 
 into every recess of each man’s character and conduct. There 
 is much truth in views of this kind ; but the appearance of 
 truth in them is more than the reality. In India we see 
 much of irrigation. Enough is known of it here to make it 
 useful by way of illustration. Now, when land is to be irri¬ 
 gated, the great thing is to have water enough drawn from the 
 well. This is so mjich more important than anything else, 
 that, in merely popular language, one may fairly say that it is 
 the only thing that the irrigator needs to care for. And yet, 
 if one speaks accurately, it is not by any means the only 
 thing. The channels that convey the water through the 
 cultivated area must be opened out and kept in order. If 
 this be not done, it will soon be found that there is such an over¬ 
 supply of water in the neighbourhood of the well as may easily 
 become a stagnant puddle, while half the area is lying barren 
 on which crops ought to be flourishing and green. In its 
 
18 
 
 entirely subordinate yet not unimportant place, the keeping 
 open of the channels is as essential as the raising of the water. 
 Similarly the Church needs to make it part of her teaching, 
 and a part on which emphasis is habitually laid, that to men 
 who are redeemed in Christ there is nothing common or unclean, 
 —that in literally everything they think or do they ought to 
 have fellowship with God,—in short, that (to use the language 
 of the prophet) in this dispensation of the latter days, the 
 pots in the Lord’s house are like the bowls before the altar : 
 yea, every pot in Jerusalem and Judah is holiness unto the 
 Lord of Hosts.” 
 
 I may be told at this point that teaching like this is 
 dangerous. I may be told that it is likely to lead men to 
 forget that except a man be born again he cannot see the 
 Kingdom of God.” I admit the danger, and I wish to 
 emphasise it. It is a danger against which Scotland has 
 had special warning in the “ Moderatism ” which blighted her 
 religious life for generations. For whatever of good there was 
 in that system—and something beautiful and good was not 
 seldom to be found in it—was exactly such an excess of 
 attention to the sacred ness of common things that men let go 
 their hold on still deeper truths and came to regard fellowship 
 with God as a fantastic dream and the converting agency of 
 the Spirit as a merely theoretic superfluity. The funda¬ 
 mental truths remained in the Confession ; but, where 
 Moderatism was developed to the full, they were held as 
 far apart from the current of influential thought as if they 
 had been detected falsehoods. So lamentable is the result of 
 over-emphasising a single truth to the practical neglect of those 
 other truths which are meant to form a divine harmon}’^ along 
 with it. 
 
 Undoubtedly, then, there is danger, and a danger from 
 which we may suffer in the future as we have suffered in the 
 past, in summoning men to see God in the common things of 
 earth, and to turn every work they undertake into a kind of 
 sacramental service. But such teaching does not stand alone 
 in being encompassed thus with danger. Human nature so 
 easily corrupts what it touches that there is not one Christian 
 doctrine which may not be, and has not. been, misused. 
 
19 
 
 Certainl}^ the doctrine of justification by faith, which we 
 rightly place at the head of our whole scheme of religious 
 thought, has often been turned into an instrument of evil. 
 That also is a dangerous doctrine. There were those in the 
 age when it was first unambiguously proclaimed, who, being 
 unlearned and unstable, wrested the writings which have 
 impressed it upon the Church’s heart for ever, as they wrested 
 other Scriptures also, to their own destruction. And, ever 
 since, while this test of a standing or a falling Church has 
 made those who used it rightly into God’s most efficient ser¬ 
 vants, it has also had effects profoundly evil upon those who 
 misapplied it. Like every Christian truth, it has been the 
 savour of life unto life to some but of death unto death to 
 others. 
 
 Nay, if we look at this whole matter as we ought, perhaps 
 it will appear not that the fact of a doctrine being dangerous 
 is sufficient to condemn it, but rather that the clanger of a 
 doctrine bears a tolerably exact proportion to its truth and its 
 practical importance. The things which are noblest in their 
 proper nature become the most harmful when their relation to 
 other things falls out of view, and when they thus become 
 dead because they are alone.” 
 
 “ The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, 
 
 Though to itself it only live and die ; 
 
 Tut if that flower with base infection meet, 
 
 The basest weed outbraves his dignity : 
 
 For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds ; 
 
 Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” 
 
 Thus the admitted danger of laying emphasis on the principle 
 that all things are holy, is no reason for this principle being 
 allowed to disappear from the list of our regulative thoughts. 
 Rather, it is the most forcible of reasons for its being made 
 prominent among them—certainly with due precaution, cer¬ 
 tainly not in any fashion that will obscure the still deeper 
 truths with which the supernatural life that fits the Church 
 to do its work on earth is indissolubly bound up. 
 
 But the wise application of this principle appears to be 
 about the greatest of the Church’s needs at the present hour. 
 Our time demands that every institution shall prove its value. 
 
20 
 
 Nothing now-a-days commands respect, nothing is so much 
 as safe to preserve existence, in virtue of old prescription. 
 Like all else, this tendency to prove all things has attendant 
 dangers. It may be applied unwisely. It may be carried 
 much too far. But upon the whole the tendency is right. 
 It draws m.uch of its strength from the teaching of our Lord. 
 
 Ye shall know them by their fruits,” was one of His most 
 pregnant sayings. It is not our part to complain when men 
 apply it to ourselves. The Church, then, must bear fruit, 
 fruit that can be understood and prized by ordinary men, 
 fruit of humility, unselfishness, and kindness,—all the fruits 
 wdiich St Paul was never tired of enumerating to those who 
 had received the Holy Ghost. If the Church does not bear 
 tolerably abundant fruit of this kind, it need not expect to 
 increase, or even to retain, its present power. And such 
 fruit it cannot bear unless, to a larger degree than is custom¬ 
 ary with those whom we tend to accept as models, it makes 
 it an all-directing thought among its loyal members that their 
 every act ought to contribute something to the advancement 
 of God’s plan, and ought to be made a channel by which 
 heavenly power may both flow into them and flow out to 
 others through them. How this can most effectively be done 
 is another question, and a hard one. 
 
 We know how various sections of the Church have tried to 
 solve this problem by bringing each detail of ordinary life 
 under the supervision of church oflficials, by connecting each 
 recurring season with special thoughts and special services, in 
 short, by teaching the man who wishes to live a Christian life 
 to rely at every turning upon some external authority sup¬ 
 posed to be fitter than himself to mark out for him his line 
 of duty and thought and feeling. I trust we are not in¬ 
 sensible to the beauty of the type of piety that has sometimes, 
 when circumstances were favourable, been developed under 
 influences like these. Who among us that knows anything 
 about it has not occasionally longed to submit the more 
 rugged type of our spiritual life to such soothing, such dis¬ 
 ciplinary influence as is enshrined in mediaeval manuals of 
 devotion, or as presents itself in forms better suited to our 
 time in the poems of Herbert and of Keble ? We feel the 
 
21 
 
 charm of the spirit that breathes in these, and we see the 
 need amon^ ourselves of something that shall somehow 
 
 O O 
 
 correspond to it. And yet we feel that the path along which 
 those sections of the Church have journeyed in which that 
 spirit rules, is a path that is closed for us. 
 
 In the meantime that path is closed by the broken condition 
 of our Church. For each fragment of that Church to prescribe 
 an external rule of recurring feast and ceremony for its own ad¬ 
 herents, or to try to mould their inner lives on a special pattern of 
 its own, would be not only a hopeless but an absurd endeavour. 
 But even if Scotland’s Church should once again gather practic¬ 
 ally the whole of the Christian life of Scotland into a single 
 organised society, this path would not thereby be opened for us. 
 We have learnt the dangers that beset it, and dangers into 
 which we are not divinely led are not to be courted but to be 
 shunned. We have learned that evervthing that savours of 
 sacramental religion or of priestly power has spiritual ruin 
 for its certain end. The wisdom or the holiness of those by whom 
 such power is wielded may in any given case put off the evil 
 day ; but the ultimate issue of every form of sacerdotalism 
 has ever been, and will ever be, that the blind will lead the 
 blind so that both must fall into the ditch. 
 
 The felt necessity for more of religion in common life has 
 combined with social influences which are entitled to but scant 
 respect, to make a temporary eddy of the stream in our day; 
 but Scotland has decided, as irrevocably, I believe, as wisely, that 
 whatever price has to be paid for it, its type of religion will con¬ 
 tinue to be pervaded by the thought that each man must deal 
 for himself with God in Christ, and by all the thoughts which 
 properly arise from it. With us the Church cannot, even if it 
 would, but we have learnt that it must not, even it could, attempt 
 to mould men’s inner lives by authority or regulations of its 
 own. And yet for us as well as others the need remains that 
 each man’s life in its entirety should come under law to Christ, 
 and that in every part of every day’s activity men should 
 have fellowship with God. 
 
 A thought has played a large part in Scottish story, which, 
 if it became familiar again in a form adapted to our time, 
 may go far to give the impulse that we need, and to give it so 
 
that it will harmonise with all that the course of providence 
 has made to be our peculiar spiritual inheritance. Side by 
 side with the intense type of personal piety, there was, in Re¬ 
 formation and in later days, an equally intense perception of 
 the duty not only of a Church but of a nation to its God. 
 The one thing must not be taken without the other by those 
 who wish to understand what Scottish religion is. If re¬ 
 garded by itself, our typical form of individual religious life 
 may be deemed a narrow thing. It lends itself easily to mis¬ 
 understanding, to misrepresentation, to caricature. But when 
 this is taken, as it ought always to be taken, along with the 
 old desire to make the collective life of the community sub¬ 
 serve the ends of righteousness, to make the nation an in¬ 
 strument for the doing of God’s will on earth, our hereditary 
 idea] of religion,—I at least will not hesitate to avow it,—is 
 the grandest, the most catholic, the broadest, which any 
 Church or land has endeavoured to embody throughout the 
 nineteen Christian centuries. 
 
 It is needless to remind any leal-hearted Scotsman of the 
 attempts to realise this other side of our ideal in the ‘ Cove¬ 
 nants ’ which were the outcome of our Church’s most heroic 
 time. Probably these attempts were in a measure premature. 
 Certainly they succeeded most imperfectly. And they were 
 marked—it is impossible to deny it—by much of that liaste, 
 and violence, and ferocity, which were but too congenial to a 
 perfervid race which had hardly begun to understand the 
 patient methods of the Master whom it sought to serve. 
 Nevertheless, the thought of a covenanted nation was both 
 great and true—a thought most difficult in virtue of its great¬ 
 ness to apply in adequate detail but better fitted to raise 
 man’s daily practice out of selfishness and sin and to make 
 them fellow-workers with the risen Christ, than any separate 
 thought in the history of the universal Church. 
 
 Our forefathers had, it is true, an insufficient comprehension 
 of what a nation is and of how it can be led to do the will 
 of the Most High. They thought of it too much merely 
 on its political side, and sought to influence it too ex¬ 
 clusively through the mere machinery of its Government. 
 And, therefore, in their brief and broken periods of power. 
 
28 
 
 there were many risks. There was risk on the one side lest 
 the Church’s life should be corrupted by the lust for such 
 authority as had physical force to back it up. There was 
 risk on the other side of the life of individuals being narrowed 
 and destroyed by slavish or hypocritical submission to the 
 little that the Church understood in those days of God’s plan 
 for the salvation of mankind. It is easy now to see that 
 larger views about many things were needed before the idea 
 of a nation devoted to the doing of the divine will could 
 receive a healthy and practical embodiment. 
 
 We have learnt, or are in course of learning, that the political 
 is but one of the many sides of a nation’s life and that the ad¬ 
 justment of relations between the Government and the Church 
 is but one of a hundred problems of which some working solu¬ 
 tion must be found before the idea of a covenanted people can 
 be even approximately realised. We are learning that the cor¬ 
 porate life of a nation finds expression in its industry and trade, 
 in its domestic and social economy, in its literature, in its art, 
 and in countless ways besides, as truly as in the machinery by 
 which its laws are administered or its place in the family of 
 nations asserted and maintained. We ought to be learning 
 how it is among the foremost functions of the church to 
 bring Christian truth to bear on all these sides and aspects of 
 national life, not by the way of authority or power but by the 
 quiet pervasive influence of the life which Christ brought 
 down to earth and which ought -to stream in every direction 
 from those in whom '' Christ is formed, the hope of glory.” 
 Yet of all that we are learning, or may hereafter learn, 
 along this line, there was the germ in that ideal 
 of a covenanted nation which has never been obliterated 
 from the hearts of earnest Scotsmen. Just because that 
 ideal has been at work in them, Scotsmen have not become 
 the fanatical, the narrow, the self-centred beings into 
 which their accepted model of the individual religious life 
 might seem certain to convert them. Every part of the 
 British Empire and every form of religious and philanthropic 
 work within it, will bear testimony that the}^ have not become 
 so. On the contrary, they have always, as a class, been readier 
 to take wide views, readier to learn the new lessons that pro- 
 
viJence is ever teaching, readier to rise superior to sect or 
 party as well as to tradition, than those whose principles seem 
 at first sight to he more liberal, whose type of personal religion 
 seems less exacting and intense, but who have not learnt, as 
 we have learnt, that God means to work by nations as well as 
 Churches and means all His gifts—the so-called secular as 
 well as the so-called sacred—to be rendered gloriously fruitful by 
 being returned into His treasury and expended in His service. 
 
 For this widening of our whole horizon we are indebted 
 to those who saw so clearly and held so firmly, even to 
 the death, • that a nation collectively rejoicing to learn and 
 do the utmost particle of the divine will is the highest mani¬ 
 festation of the godlike which this world can hope to see, and 
 that without this to be its complement all possible spiritual 
 life in the individual or the Church is but a maimed thing at 
 its best. In external form the Covenants have passed away ; 
 but it is only as the water has passed away when it is seen no 
 longer separately on the ground, yet is nourishing, the more 
 effectively because unseen, the daisied grass and ripening corn 
 with which the earth is clothed. So far have the words of the 
 Covenant’s first martyr been fulfilled. He saw the storm that 
 was bursting on his country and his Church, but he saw the 
 clear shining after rain which would also come, and so he died 
 with this prediction about Scotland on his lips: 
 
 “ They may scatter their dust on the winds of heaven 
 To the bounds of the utmost sea ; 
 
 But her Covenants—burned, reviled, and riven,— 
 
 Shall yet her reviving be.” 
 
 That reviving needs to go farther than it has gone. Let 
 
 us have clearly before us the ideal for which our fathers strove. 
 
 «/ 
 
 Let us understand that the Church exists, not in any sense for 
 its own sake, and not even for the benefit of the individuals 
 that make it up, but as the central means of carrying out the 
 divine jjurpose for mankind. Let us understand that a 
 foremost part of that purpose is to make the peoples 
 of all lands aware that they, as truly as Israel of old, 
 have special things to do for the God of all the earth, 
 special aspects of truth to develop, special kinds of good 
 to embody in tangible and effective forms, in order that 
 
they may thereby work out the salvation of mankind. 
 Let us understand that the honour and success of a national 
 Church lies not in securing advantage to itself but in making 
 the nation aware of what its particular duties as God’s servant 
 are, and in sending the nation forth both determined and 
 well-equipped to do them. Let us understand that such ends 
 cannot be gained by might or power, not by sudden strokes 
 of any kind, only by patient walking along that lowly path 
 of service and self-effacement which our Head deliberately 
 chose when He refused to hcove the kingdoms of the world 
 and all their glory put into His power at once. Let us 
 understand such things as these, and will not all common 
 duties be in large measure transformed for those upon whom the 
 divine spirit has come with power ? Will not each of those 
 common duties be felt to be a part, and a means of awakening 
 and moulding a thousand other parts, of a collective life which 
 will draw communities and nations to submit to a heavenly guid¬ 
 ance which has shown its transforming power in actual experi¬ 
 ence. Thus there may come to be spread wide and far among us 
 that intensity of personal piety which is the root of everything 
 that is good or hopeful, and side by side with it the constant 
 sense that the common details of common life are holy because 
 inseparably inwoven in the plan according to which God is 
 effecting His loving purpose for the nation and for all man¬ 
 kind. Thus may the ancient vision be fulfilled in more glorious 
 fashion than could be understood either by those who first 
 shaped it into words or by our covenanting fathers, whom the 
 rude sketch of it that came before them so greatly uplifted 
 and inspired ;—the vision with which, as it stands in the 
 writings of Micah and Isaiah, the proceedings of this Assembly 
 may, I trust, not unfittingly be closed :—In the latter days 
 it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the Lord’s house 
 shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall 
 be exalted above the hills, and peoples shall flow unto it. 
 And many nations shall go and say. Come ye, and let us 
 go up to the mountain of the Lord ; and to the house of the 
 God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we 
 will walk in His paths : for out of Zion shall go forth instruc¬ 
 tion, and the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem.” 
 
FEINTED BY 
 
 TUENBULL AND SPEAES 
 
 EDINBEEGH 
 

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