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 THE FREE CHURCH OF 
 SC JTLAND 
 
 HER AN^ ^STRY, HER CLAIMS, AND 
 
 HER CONFLICTS /^liTi^/ 
 
 MOV 28 V^^% 
 
 \- ^^ 
 
 By HE <i^lQC^h\^^>' 
 
 Rev. C. G. M'CRIE, D.D. 
 
 V. ' ;7^ GEORGE 
 
 ^"^ lARSHALL, HAMILTON, KE. , C0.(l1 \) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter IV.— The Free Church of Scotland 
 
 AND her Fifty Years 82 
 
 I. The i8th of May 1843 — 2. Thomas Chalmers — 3. 
 The Deed of Demission — 4. Worship in Strange Places 
 — 5. Site Refusing — 6. Building Manses for Homeless 
 Ministers — 7. Providing for a Disendowed Ministry — 
 8. Lengthening the Cords and Strengthening the Stakes 
 — 9. Possible renewal of State Encroachments — 10. The 
 Cardross Case — 11. The i8th of May 1893 — 12, The 
 Free Assembly Hall — 13. Opening of the Jubilee Assem- 
 bly — 14. Fifty Years' Contributions to the Lord's Trea- 
 sury — 15. Over Fifty Years of Work in Mission Fields — 
 16. Jubilee Memorial Proceedings — 17. Lord Macaulay 
 on Identity of the Free Church with Church of Revolu- 
 tion and Union — 18. An Oxford Principal in the Jubilee 
 Assembly — 19. Close of the Assembly of 1893 — 20, The 
 abiding Strength of the Church. 
 
HISTORY OF THE 
 FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A.D. 360-1559. 
 
 THE SCOTTISH CHURCH BEFORE THE 
 REFORMATION. 
 
 [For fuller information the following works may be consulted : — 
 Skene's "Celtic Scotland," vol. II.; Robertson's Preface to 
 "Concilia Scotiae;" "Sketches of Early Scotch History," by 
 Prof. C. Innes ; " Lives of Ninian, Kentigern, and Columba," 
 in vols. V. and VI. of " The Historians of Scotland ;" " Kalen- 
 ders of Scottish Saints," with Preface by Bishop Forbes ; 
 " Scotland in Early Christian Times," by Dr Joseph Ander- 
 son ; " Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents," by Hadden 
 and Stubbs ; Warren's " Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic 
 Church ;" Dr Thomas M'Lauchlan's " Early Scottish Church ;" 
 *' The Aberdeen Breviary," edited by Blew, with preface, printed 
 separately, by David Laing ; John Hill Burton's " History of 
 Scotland," vol. I., chaps, vii. viii. and xii. ; Prof. Grub's 
 "Ecclesiastical History of Scotland." vols. I. and II.; Belles- 
 heim's "History of the Catholic Church of Scotland;" First 
 Series of " St Giles' Lectures," Lectures I. to IV.] 
 
 § I. THE CHURCH FREE.— As the geography 
 of a country has its watersheds, the history of a 
 country has its great dividing Hnes. In the history 
 of Scotland there are such Hnes, notably the great 
 movement of the sixteenth century which is best 
 
lO 
 
 known as the Reformation. It is customary to take 
 the year 1560 as the date of the Scottish Reforma- 
 tion ; and our narrative may begin there, if we are 
 to trace the Free Church of Scotland to its origins. 
 It may begin indeed even before that. For if we 
 are to understand what the Reformation meant for 
 the life of the Scottish Church and nation and for 
 the after history of our land, we must know the 
 state of matters which preceded the event and pre- 
 pared the way for it. 
 
 Going back then as far as the close of the ninth 
 century (878-896) we come upon an ecclesiastical 
 act of no small importance. It is the doing of a 
 King of the Scots called Girig, Grig, or Gregory. 
 Of him it is reported that he was the first "who 
 gave freedom to the Scottish Church, which had 
 been in bondage to that time, according to the rule 
 and custom of the Picts." Two things are to be 
 remarked in this statement. Here we meet for the 
 first time in the written records of our country with 
 the honoured name — " Ecclesia Scotticana," the 
 Scottish Church, or the " Kyrk of Scotland " as 
 Prior Wyntoun calls it in his Metrical Chronicle of 
 the action. Here, too, we find the Church men- 
 tioned in connection with its deliverance from a 
 condition of bondage. In all likelihood the servi- 
 tude in question had taken the form of an exaction 
 of secular imposts from the clergy and monks of 
 Pictland similar to those levied upon their brethren 
 in England. 
 
 But there was another bondage of which the 
 Church of Scotland was destined to have long and 
 bitter experience, deliverance from which was to 
 
II 
 
 come from another hand than that of any earthly 
 sovereign. 
 
 §2. THE CHURCH ENTHRALLED. — The 
 Church which had been made free to that effect, 
 became again the Church in bondage, through the 
 introduction of foreign diocesan bishops. As far 
 back as the days of Ninian (360-432), Kentigern 
 (514-601), and Columba (521-597), we meet with 
 the title and function. Thus, early in the fifth cen- 
 tury, a stranger landed in Ireland, and sailed for 
 Britain, arriving in South Pictland toward the 
 close of 431. This was Palladius, a deacon of the 
 Church of Rome, who, being raised to the epis- 
 copate by Pope Celestine, was thereafter sent to the 
 Scots as their " first bishop." However widely 
 opinions may differ as to the precise mission of 
 Palladius, no one credits him with a particular 
 diocese either in Ireland or Scotland. 
 
 Then in the Columban Church at lona there were 
 bishops whose peculiar function was ordination, 
 while in every other department of conventual life 
 they were subject to the Abbot; rendering to him 
 monastic obedience. Thus the bishops of the 
 Scottish Church before she became Romanized re- 
 sembled those of the Moravian Brethren of modern 
 times, who hold their office, not for the administra- 
 tion of affairs in dioceses, but mainly for the con- 
 ferring of holy orders. 
 
 In the course of time this state of matters gave 
 place to another. But so gradual was the transition 
 that when Alexander I. died in 1124 there were only 
 four diocesan bishops in all Scotland. There was 
 the Bishop of Moray, who had for his diocese the 
 
12 
 
 fertile plains watered by the Findhorn and the Spey, 
 and ultimately for cathedral the grand structure 
 at Elgin which Alexander Stewart, " the wolfe of 
 Badenoch," burned in 1390. There was the Bishop 
 of Dunkeld. With the valley through which the 
 Tay rolls broad and clear for the centre of his terri- 
 tory, this ecclesiastic ruled over the rich straths 
 and mountain ranges of modern Perthshire, while 
 southward his jurisdiction extended to the banks 
 of the Forth, and embraced Lochleven with its 
 Columban brotherhood, and Inchcolm with its small 
 colony of Augustinian monks. There was the 
 Bishop of Glasgow. The erection of the diocese of 
 Glasgow in 1121 was the work of Alexander's 
 younger brother, David, the "sair saint for the 
 crown," while yet Prince of Cumbria, and the terri- 
 tory stretched from the banks of the Clyde to the 
 waters of the Solway. And there was the Bishop of 
 St Andrews, whose venerable cathedral city was for 
 many a long day the ecclesiastical capital of the 
 country, and whose diocese embraced the kingdom 
 of Fife and the well-cultivated Lothians. 
 
 In this last-named diocese troubles and difficulties 
 arose which led to the enthralment of the National 
 Church by the See of Rome. For when the 
 bishopric became vacant by the death of Fothad 
 (1093), last of the line of Celtic prelates, Alexander I., 
 following out the policy of his mother, resolved to 
 confer the appointment upon Margaret's confessor 
 and biographer, a Saxon by descent and a monk of 
 Durham. Turgot, the bishop designate, naturally 
 applied to the Archbishop of York for consecration, 
 whereupon Anselm, then Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
13 
 
 intervened and dared his brother of York to infringe 
 upon his rights. 
 
 The Scottish clergy, on their part, refused to 
 acknowledge the right of consecration claimed by 
 the dignitary of York, and, as in their refusal they 
 were supported by their sovereign, a dead-lock was 
 the consequence. Ultimately a comprorrtise was 
 reached. The Archbishop of York, it was agreed 
 by all, should raise Turgot to the Scottish episcopate, 
 but this was to be done with an express reservation 
 of the rights of all parties. The consecration ac- 
 cordingly took place at York on Sunday, ist of 
 August, 1 109. When five years had come and gone 
 the diocese of St Andrews was again vacant, and 
 the battle of jurisdiction had to be fought over 
 afresh. King Alexander took the initiative by 
 opening communication with the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, Anselm's successor, Ralph by name, 
 and requesting that Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, 
 be sent for promotion to the vacant see. The 
 Scottish King lived to regret the day his request 
 was complied with, for when the man of his choice 
 arrived in Scotland (1120), troubles began. Follow- 
 ing use and wont, the investiture of the new bishop 
 should have been carried out by his acceptance of 
 pastoral staff and ring from the sovereign. With 
 some difficulty Eadmer was got to receive the latter 
 at the hands of Alexander, his superior in matters 
 secular, but he insisted that the crozier should be 
 laid on the altar and lifted therefrom by himself. 
 Investiture ought to be followed by consecration, 
 and this the invested bishop insisted on receiving 
 from Canterbury, which, he maintained, held the 
 
H 
 
 primacy of all Britain. This was more than the 
 King had counted upon, and more than he was pre- 
 pared to concede. This time compromise was 
 impossible. Alexander told the ecclesiastic that so 
 long as he reigned, the Bishop of the Scots would 
 never be allowed to be subject to an English 
 primate ; to which Eadmer retorted, '• Not for all 
 Scotland will I renounce being a monk of Canter- 
 bury." The conflict only ended when the bishop 
 elected, received, and invested, returned the ring to 
 its donor, placed the pastoral staff on the altar 
 whence he had taken it, and left Scotland never to 
 return. Before taking these steps Eadmer had con- 
 sulted a friend, probably an old fellow-student at 
 Canterbury, named Nicholas, from whom he re- 
 ceived significant counsel. The advice was to 
 reject all claims of English prelates to primacy in 
 Scotland, and to put an end to all differences between 
 Canterbury and York, between England and Scot- 
 land, by applying for consecration to the ApostoHc 
 See of Rome. 
 
 § 3. THE CHURCH AND THE PAPAL SEE — 
 By the close of the twelfth century that advice was 
 acted upon with fatal results to the Church of Scot- 
 land. David, the youngest son of Malcolm Canmore 
 and Queen Margaret, had succeeded his brother 
 Alexander on the Scottish throne, and had added 
 six dioceses to the four already created, those, viz., 
 of Aberdeen, Ross, Caithness, Brechin, Galloway, 
 and Dunblane. Malcolm the Maiden (so styled 
 because of the girlishness of his features and the 
 effeminacy of his disposition), had been followed on 
 the throne by his brother William, known in history 
 
IS 
 
 as the Lion, to commemorate the fact that he 
 blazoned on the national flag the lion-rampant in 
 place of the time-honoured dragon. This Scottish 
 monarch was captured in the neighbourhood of 
 Alnwick by a body of EngHsh horsemen, and carried 
 to Falaise in Normandy, where his cousin the King 
 of England was at that time fighting. Liberty to 
 return to Scotland could only be procured for the 
 captured Lion on the condition that he did homage 
 to Henry of England for his whole dominions. 
 
 The treaty of Falaise (1174) was intended by 
 those who signed it to affect the ecclesiastical no 
 less than the political independence of Scotland ; 
 but the carelessness of draftsmen or the diplomacy 
 of northern ecclesiastics resulted in such ambiguity 
 of wording as rendered the part touching the Church 
 capable of different constructions. Two years after- 
 wards the effort to secure the supremacy of the 
 English Church was renewed. For in 1176 Cardinal 
 Petrileonsi held an ecclesiastical conference or coun- 
 cil at Northampton. Out of respect for so great an 
 official as the Pope's Legate, both Henry of England 
 and William of Scotland were present, as were also 
 the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and six 
 Scottish prelates. The Cardinal, speaking from a 
 chair elevated above the seats of the surrounding 
 ecclesiastics, counselled the Scottish clergy to im- 
 plement the treaty of Normandy, and yield sub- 
 mission to the English Church. But this they 
 positively refused to do. Archbishop Roger affirmed 
 that the bishops of Glasgow and Galloway had, in 
 the days of his predecessors, yielded obedience to 
 his See of York ; to which Joceline, bishop of Glas- 
 
i6 
 
 gow, replied that his See was the special daughter 
 of Rome, and exempt from all jurisdiction except 
 that of the Pope. More sweeping was the assertion 
 of a young canon named Gilbert Murray, who 
 boldly declared that the Church of Scotland, ever 
 since the faith of Christ was embraced in the 
 Kingdom, had been a free and independent Church, 
 subject to none but the bishop of Rome, a claim so 
 bold as to lead the Archbishop of York to step up 
 to the speaker, and say in his ear, "That arrow 
 came not from your own quiver." Happily for the 
 Scottish Church these assertions of independence 
 were followed up by a wrangling between the English 
 primates, which so perplexed and irritated King 
 Henry that he allowed the gathering to be dispersed 
 without any decision being reached. 
 
 On their return from Northampton the Scotch 
 bishops took another step in the surrender of their 
 independence to the See of Rome. They despatched 
 messengers to the Italian pontiff, and these in due 
 course returned with a papal bull which was at once 
 a triumph and a humiliation for those whom it most 
 affected. For while, on the one hand, the mandate 
 prohibited the Archbishop of York from exercising 
 jurisdiction over the dioceses of Scotland, it forbade 
 the northern ecclesiastics, on the other hand, to 
 acknowledge any superior but the Pope himself. 
 
 Only one thing remained to render the subjection 
 of the Scottish Church to the papal See complete, 
 namely, a declaration of that subjection in respect of 
 the entire Church. What was wanting was speedily 
 supplied. In 1178 the bishopric of St Andrews was 
 again vacant. Of their own accord the chapter of 
 
17 
 
 the diocese elected Joannes Scotus or John the 
 Scot, a nephew of the bishop of Aberdeen and 
 archdeacon of the See. WiUiam the Lion resented 
 what he deemed an ignoring of his rights in the 
 matter, all the more that he had designs upon the 
 benefice in the interest of his chaplain Hugh, and 
 he swore by the arm of St James that John would 
 never be bishop of St Andrews. The goods of the 
 bishop elect were confiscated, and he himself 
 banished from the kingdom, while Hugh was put in 
 possession of the temporalities of the See, and the 
 Scottish bishops were ordered to proceed with his 
 consecration. This summary procedure led the 
 nominee of the chapter to appeal to the Pope, and 
 to visit Rome for the vindication of his rights. 
 Alexander the Pope sent a Legate to determine the 
 cause in Scotland. At a General Assembly of the 
 Scottish clergy held in the Church of Holyrood, 
 Edinburgh, in the summer of [ 1 80, the papal nuncio 
 heard parties, and gave judgment in favour of John, 
 who was accordingly consecrated by the bishop of 
 Aberdeen on Trinity Sunday of the same year. 
 William set the Pope and his Legate at defiance, 
 issued a fresh sentence of banishment against John 
 Scot, associating with him the bishop of Aberdeen 
 and other clerical supporters, and maintained Hugh 
 in the enjoyment of the benefice. 
 
 It was now a pitched battle between the power of 
 the sword and that of the keys. Acting under in- 
 structions from head-quarters, the Legate laid the 
 diocese of St Andrews under interdict, and when 
 this failed to move the recalcitrant King, the device 
 was adopted of making the Archbishop of York 
 
 B 
 
i8 
 
 Legate of Scotland, and investing him with authority 
 to excommunicate all persons, lay and ecclesiastical, 
 and to place the whole kingdom under interdict. 
 Excommunication and interdict were actually pro- 
 nounced in 1181. 
 
 We, at this time of day, may think lightly of such 
 fulminations from the Seven Hills ; but the men of 
 the twelfth century trembled before what they 
 regarded as veritable manifestations of Divine wrath. 
 And even the stoutest heart might quail when a 
 papal interdict was laid upon a kingdom, for then 
 all the Church's ministrations were withdrawn and 
 the channels of grace were sealed. No masses were 
 said at the altar for the souls in purgatory ; marriages 
 could not be celebrated ; infants could not be bap- 
 tized ; the dead could not be buried in consecrated 
 soil, but were flung into ditches with neither dirge 
 nor requiem sung over them. The very gates of 
 Paradise were closed against the entrance of de- 
 parted spirits, who were condemned to wander in 
 gloom, coldness and solitude, till the terrible inter- 
 dict was lifted off. 
 
 How long William would have remained obdurate 
 with this state of matters existing among his subjects 
 cannot be said ; but happily for all concerned, Pope 
 Alexander III. died before many months had passed, 
 and he was succeeded by Lucius III. To the new 
 Pope, a lover of peace, the Scottish King despatched 
 an embassy consisting of a bishop, two abbots, and 
 a prior, who succeeded not only in obtaining the 
 annulling of the excommunication and the recalling 
 of the interdict, but in procuring for their sovereign 
 a special mark of favour — a golden rose rendered 
 
19 
 
 fragrant by the Pope's blessing. The difficulty 
 regarding the vacant See was ultimately got over 
 by Hugh, the King's nominee, getting St Andrews, 
 and John, Dunkeld, which was also vacant ; but 
 there continued to be differences and disputes about 
 their respective rights so long as these rival prelates 
 lived. 
 
 Bishop Hugh died in 1188. In that same year 
 William sent another commission to Rome and 
 obtained from Clement HI. an explicit recognition 
 of the independence of the National Church so far 
 as'that of England was concerned. But the price 
 paid for the recognition was a great one. Scotland 
 only escaped from the pretensions and domination 
 of York and Canterbury by consenting to prostrate 
 herself at the feet of the Roman pontiff. For, in a 
 papal bull, Clement, who styles himself Servant of 
 the servants of God, addressing William as his most 
 dear son in Christ, declares that the Church oi 
 Scotland is the special daughter of Rome, and as 
 such immediately subject to the apostolic See. 
 
 When that bull was brought to Scotland by the 
 Italian Cardinal, John de Monte Celio, on the 13th 
 March 1188, the National Church was committed 
 to a spiritual bondage which was destined to last 
 for more than three hundred years. 
 
 §4. THE CHURCH UNDER THE JURISDIC- 
 TION OF ROME. — Over these years of papa 
 domination it is not needful to linger. The general 
 character of the period can be gathered from the 
 following particulars. // was a time of great ignor- 
 ance aifiong all classes. There was no lack of what 
 might seem to favour religious education and sacred 
 
20 
 
 learning. There were Religious Houses in abund- 
 ance. One historian of the times enumerates 120 
 monasteries as founded before the Reformation, 
 and, if the monastic establishments omitted by 
 Spottiswood be taken into account, there must have 
 been well-nigh 200 dotted over the land. Then 
 there were the Religious Orders, representatives of 
 which swarmed in every town and even village in 
 Scotland. Distinct from the purely secular or 
 parochial clergy there were the Augustinian Canons 
 Regular, so styled because they followed the rule of 
 St Augustine ; the Red Friars, or Redemptorists ; 
 the Black Friars, or Dominicans ; the bare-footed 
 Franciscans, or Grey Friars ; the Carmelites, or 
 White Friars, who claimed to be descended from 
 Elijah and Elisha. 
 
 Besides these, in smaller numbers were the 
 Praemonstratenses from Premontre in France ; the 
 Cluniacenses from Clugny : the Cistercians or 
 Bernardines ; and even the Carthusians, whose 
 rule was one of solitude and silence and confine- 
 ment to the cloisters, had an establishment in St 
 Johnstone, the Perth of these days. 
 
 While all these orders had three vows in common — 
 obedience, chastity, poverty — certain of them, notably 
 the Black, White, and Grey Friars, were mendicant, 
 and so were forced to itinerate the country and beg 
 from house to house for their subsistence. With 
 such a plentiful supply of Religious Houses and 
 Religious Men it may be thought there would be an 
 instructed people and an educated, if not learned, 
 ministry. But two things require to be borne in 
 mind. First, that among the secular or beneficed 
 
21 
 
 clergy, preaching had been given up, both by 
 bishops and by parsons, and had been left to be 
 done by the friars or preaching brothers. The 
 preaching of the friars might be at times diverting, 
 it could rarely be edifying, the sermons being for 
 the most part devoted to a recital of saintly legends, 
 descriptions of the pains of purgatory and laudations 
 of the mass. From the report of a sermon preached 
 by a reforming friar we learn that cursing formed 
 an important part of a preacher's Sunday work. 
 While a plack, or third part of an Enghsh penny, 
 would buy a letter of cursing warranted to last for 
 a year, it was deemed a more effectual method of 
 recovering lost property to hire the preaching friar to 
 utter a curse from the pulpit. And so Friar Airthe, 
 who considered it his duty and office to pray for the 
 people, described the preacher of his day as say- 
 ing : — " One has lost a porridge-stick ; there is a 
 flail stolen beyond the burn ; the goodwife on the 
 other side of the road has lost a horn spoon. God's 
 malison and mine I give to those that know of this 
 gear and restore it not." Second, that in those days 
 the services of the Church, apart from the preach- 
 ing, were gone through in Latin, a sealed language 
 to the people, and one imperfectly known to most 
 of the clergy, many of whom had never seen the 
 Vulgate and were ignorant of its contents. Even 
 bishops did not show to advantage when using the 
 dead language in which they mumbled over their 
 missals. Thus Andrew Forman, bishop of Murray, 
 and papal legate for Scotland, when saying grace 
 at a supper which he gave to the Pope and Cardinals 
 in Rome, so blundered in his Latinity that the com- 
 
22 
 
 pany lost their gravity. The bishop thereupon lost 
 his temper, and wound up by consigning all the 
 false carles to the devil ^ in 7iomine patris^ Jilii, et 
 sancti spiritus ; to which his guests, happily ignorant 
 of their host's Scoto-Latin, devoutly responded 
 Amen, Well may the historian Pitscotie, to whom 
 we are indebted for the story, say that "the holy 
 bishop was not a good scholar, and had not good 
 Latin." No wonder the masses were sunk in the 
 rudeness, coarseness and ignorance that are re- 
 flected in the poems of William Dunbar, the satires 
 of Sir David Lyndsay, " The Gude and Godhe 
 Ballades " of the Wedderburns, and the Franciscan 
 verses of George Buchanan. 
 
 It was also a time oj clerical negligence and 
 scandal. There were diligent and learned ecclesi- 
 astics in those days as there have been in even the 
 darkest ages of the Church. There was James 
 Kennedy, bishop of Dunkeld, thereafter of St 
 Andrews, founder in the last-named diocese of St 
 Salvator's College (1456-58). Of him it is on record 
 that he not only required his clergy to reside in their 
 charges for the effective performance of minis- 
 terial duty, but preached four times a year in every 
 parish kirk of his see. And there was William 
 Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, founder of the 
 northern University, and to whom Celtic scholars 
 are indebted for the printing of that ancient 
 Church Service Book, the Breviary of Aberdeen, 
 in 1509-10. But the purity of life, official efficiency 
 and scholarly attainments of such men as these 
 only serve to throw into greater vividness the short- 
 comings and scandals of their brethren. Of the 
 
23 
 
 prelates as a body it is no breach of charity to say 
 that they were more concerned about matters 
 political and military than about spiritual interests. 
 At a convention of Scottish peers and prelates held 
 in 15 17 at the house of Archbishop Bethune in Black 
 Friars' Wynd, Edinburgh, there was present James 
 Beaton, who, in addition to being Archbishop of 
 Glasgow and holder of the Abbacies of Arbroath 
 and Kilwinning, was also Chancellor of the kingdom, 
 and as such deeply implicated in the troubles that 
 agitated the minority of James V. This militant 
 dignitary found it necessary in the course of the 
 proceedings to protest upon his conscience that he 
 was powerless to prevent a certain line of action 
 being taken, and to give the protest greater emphasis 
 he beat on his breast with his hand. A rattling 
 sound was the result, in consequence of a coat of 
 mail being concealed under the episcopal robes 
 of the protester. This drew forth from Bishop 
 Douglas of Dunkeld the sarcastic rebuke, " How 
 now, my Lord, I think your conscience clatters ; we 
 are priests and to put on armour or to bear arms is 
 not altogether consistent with our character." 
 
 Another fruitful cause of clerical scandal was such 
 an accumulation of offices as is seen in the mailed 
 prelate just referred to. A flagrant instance of this 
 abuse and prostitution of the sacred office occurred 
 in the career of Alexander Stewart who fell on the 
 field of Flodden (1513) fighting by the side of the 
 king, his father. When only a youth of sixteen, the 
 metropolitan see of Scotland, purposely kept vacant 
 for a considerable time, was in 1509, bestowed on 
 this illegitimate son of James IV. The education 
 
24 
 
 of the youthful prelate was completed by a course of 
 study on the Continent ; and on his return to Scot- 
 land he was invested with the office of Chancellor of 
 the Kingdom, and appointed Commendator of the 
 Abbey of Dunfermline and the Priory of Colding- 
 ham, drawing the revenues of these Houses but not 
 discharging any of their functions. 
 
 There were scandals of a grosser nature tainting 
 the names and characters of bishops, parish priests, 
 monks, friars, and even nuns, springing out of that 
 celibate system which, as an outrage upon the 
 Divine constitution of man, has wrought ruin 
 wherever and whenever enforced. Over these 
 fouler sores of the cloister and the convent it is 
 well to draw a concealing veil. 
 
 § 5. EFFORTS TO RECTIFY AND REFORM. 
 — Popular debasement and clerical corruption were 
 telling so disastrously upon the Church of Scotland 
 that, in more than one quarter, efforts were put 
 forth to rectify, purify, and reform. 
 
 Thus, in the reign of James V., a Parliamentary 
 ordinance was issued in which all grades of the 
 clergy were called upon to amend their manner of 
 living. In affixing his imprimatur to the ordinance, 
 the sovereign gave it as his conviction that the 
 negligence, ignorance, and scandalous and dis- 
 orderly lives of prelates and clerics caused the 
 Church and churchmen to l^e scorned and despised; 
 and he strongly advised the bishops to work upon 
 reforming lines, accompanying the advice with a 
 threat that if they neglected his warning he would 
 deal with them after another fashion, even that of 
 his uncle Henry of England ! Unfortunately, James 
 
25 
 
 was himself dissolute, bestowed wealthy abbacies on 
 his own illegitimate children, and trafficked largely 
 in ecclesiastical patronages, so his efforts to amend 
 the lives of others could not be attended with any 
 measure of success. 
 
 The Church herself then tried to deal with the 
 evils within her border. On the 27th November 
 1549, a General Convention and Provincial Council 
 assembled in the Church of the Black Friars, Edin- 
 burgh, under the presidency of the Archbishop of 
 St Andrews, Primate of all Scotland. 
 
 The sederunt numbered six bishops, two vicars- 
 general of vacant sees, fourteen abbots, priors, or 
 commendators — one of whom was only eighteen 
 years of age, and two were illegitimate sons of the 
 late King ; seven doctors of divinity, three licen- 
 tiates, one bachelor and one student of theology, 
 three Dominican and four Franciscan friars, seven- 
 teen secular priests, including archdeacons, canons, 
 provosts or deans of collegiate churches ; a dean 
 and a sub-dean, and the rector of a parish church — 
 in all some sixty persons. By this Council no fewer 
 than sixty-eight canons were enacted, having for their 
 main object the reform of the lives and manners of 
 the clergy, the preaching to and instructing of the 
 people, the abolishing of pluralities, and the enforc- 
 ing of residence on the part of parish priests. 
 
 Ten years later the Church of Scotland was again 
 assembled representatively in the same place and 
 for the same purpose. The sittings of this Council 
 extended from the ist of March till the loth of April 
 1559. Before the clergy when met in conclave there 
 were laid certain remarkable Articles of Reformation 
 
26 
 
 drawn np by a body of laymen, nobles and barons, 
 submitted to the Queen Regent, and by her remitted 
 to the Council through the Earl of Huntly as Chan- 
 cellor of the realm. One of these articles asked 
 that in future bishops be chosen with the consent of 
 the nobility and barons of their respective dioceses, 
 and that parish priests be appointed with the consent 
 of the parishioners. The answer of the Synod to 
 this Claim of Right was that in the matter of elec- 
 tions the rules of the canon law must be observed, 
 that the election of prelates belonged to the Crown 
 with consent of the Pope, and that nothing affecting 
 Crown rights could be entered upon during the 
 Queen's minority. When it addressed itself to 
 independent legislation the Synod enacted thirty- 
 four canons, all of which pointed in the same direc- 
 tion as the sixty-eight of the Synod held ten years 
 earlier. 
 
 The last act of this Provincial Council was to pro- 
 vide for what never took place. The next Synod, it 
 was agreed, should meet on Septuagesima Sunday 
 next, that is, on the nth February 1560. That 
 Synod never assembled, for before the day fixed 
 upon had dawned, the Reformation had triumphed, 
 the Church of Scotland was lost to Rome. 
 
27 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 1560 — 1689. 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST AND SECOND 
 REFORMATIONS. 
 
 [Authorities on Reformation Period : — " The Booke of the Uni- 
 versal! Kirk of Scotland," 1560-1618, 3 vols.; Knox's " History 
 of the Reformation in Scotland," vols, I. and II. in Laing's 
 edition of works ; Principal Lee's " Lectures on the History of 
 the Church of Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution 
 Settlement," 2 vols.; Prof Lindsay's "The Reformation," part 
 II. chap. v. Authorities on Westminster Period : — " Minutes 
 of the Sessions," edited by Prof. Mitchell and Dr Struthers ; Gil- 
 lespie's " Notesof Debates and Proceedings ; " Baillie's " Letters 
 and Journals," edited by Laiiig, 3 vols.; Hetherington's " His- 
 tory of the Westminster Assembly of Divines," edited by 
 Williamson ; Prof Mitchell's " Westminster Assembly ; its 
 History and Standards." For information regarding the Lol- 
 lards in Scotland, see Laing's edition of Knox's Works, vol. I. 
 appendix ii. The fullest and most reliable accounts of those 
 who figure in this chapter will be found in the following works : 
 — Hamilton — Knox's Works, vol. I. appendix iii., and Prof. 
 Lorimer's " Patrick Hamilton, the First Preacher and Martyr 
 of the Scottish Reformation." Wishart — Knox's Works, vol. I. 
 appendix ix., with "Additional Notes and Corrections" in vol. 
 VI., and Moffat Scot's " Martyrs of Angus and Mearns." 
 Knox — M'Crie's "Life of John Knox"; Laing's Preface to 
 Works, vol. VI.; P. Hume Brown's "John Knox, a Bio- 
 graphy," Melville — M'Crie's "Life of Andrew Melville"; 
 "The Diary of Mr James Melvill, 1556-1601." Henderson — 
 M'Crie's "Life of Alexander Henderson" in "Miscellaneous 
 Writings." Rtitker/urd — "Notice of Rev. Samuel Ruther- 
 furd" in Prof. Mitcliell's "Catechisms of the Second Reforma- 
 tion"; A. T. Innes in " Evangelical Succession Lectures," second 
 series, 1883 ; and Dr Bonar's Edition of Letters, 1894. Gil- 
 lespie — Hetherington's " Memoir," prefixed to Meek's Edition 
 of Gillespie's " Notes of Debates and Proceedings," 18.16; and 
 
28 
 
 for Baillie — Laing's " Memoir of the Life and Writings of 
 Robert Baillie," in vol. III. of the " Letters and Journals."] 
 
 There were Reformers before the Reformation 
 m Scotland as in the other countries of Europe. 
 These precursors drew their inspiration largely from 
 the teaching and writings of Wickliffe " the morning 
 star" of the English Reformation, of Huss, the 
 Bohemian martyr, and of Luther and Melancthon 
 the German Reformers. 
 
 § I. THE LOLLARDS OF KYLE.— Wickhfife 
 died in 1380, and the persecution which broke out 
 after his death drove many of his followers from the 
 South to find shelter among the moors and mosses 
 of the North. Some of these refugees settled in 
 " an ancient receptacle of the servants of God," the 
 districts of Kyle and Cunningham in Ayrshire, and 
 obtained the name of the Lollards of Kyle. In 
 that haunt of Bible-lovers and Gospel-singers no 
 fewer than thirty persons were summoned before 
 James IV. and his Council in 1494, accused of hold- 
 ing thirty-four heretical opinions. Although on that 
 occasion the Lollards escaped punishment, three of 
 the most resolute of them — Campbell of Cessnock, 
 his wife, and their chaplain, a priest who was guilty 
 of reading the New Testament to them — were only 
 released at the stake. 
 
 §2. RESBY, CRAWAR, PATRICK HAMILTON. 
 — Other districts of Scotland were not without con- 
 fessors and martyrs of the evangelical faith. There 
 was James Resby, an English priest, who penetrated 
 as far north as Perth, where his preaching attracted 
 such attention that Laurence of Lindores, the 
 Heretical Inquisitor of the country, felt called upon 
 
29 
 
 to convene a council of the clergy for his trial. 
 Condemned as a heretic, Resby was burned at 
 Perth in 1406-7. Another precursor of the Re- 
 formed fiiith was Paul Crawar or Craw, a native 
 of Bohemia, who was sent from the heart of 
 Germany to preach to the Scots the doctrines of 
 Huss and Jerome of Prague. At the instigation 
 of Lawrence, who had an evil reputation for giving 
 no rest to heretics, he was convicted of heresy and 
 handed over to the secular power to be burned, 
 which was done at the market cross of St Andrews 
 in the summer of 1433. Better known than either 
 of these worthies was Patrick Hamilton. 
 
 Born in or about 1503, of good family connec- 
 tion, and intended from boyhood for the ministry, 
 '' Maister Patrik Hammyltoun," as Knox styles him, 
 received a liberal education, and studied for some 
 years at Paris and Louvain. When he returned 
 to St Andrews in 1523 the graduate was not only 
 versed in the philosophy of Plato and the logic of 
 Aristotle, but had also formed acquaintance with 
 the writings of Luther, had probably been in inter- 
 course with Erasmus, and had certainly adopted the 
 reformed theology. But for one who had imbibed 
 Lutheranism Scotland was no place of safety. James 
 Beaton, the cruel, crafty, and utterly unscrupulous 
 Archbishop and Chancellor of the kingdom, with a 
 keen scent for heresy, made " inquisition " regarding 
 the tenets of the suspected student, and satisfied 
 himself that he was a rank Lutheran. Before he 
 could be summoned to answer for himself, the 
 heretic had fled to Germany. There he visited 
 Wittemberg and Marburg, and became acquainted 
 
30 
 
 with Luther, Melancthon, and William Tyndale, the 
 translator of the English Bible. After little more 
 than six months the young Scot returned to his 
 native country, there to preach the gospel which 
 had become dearer to him than life itself. When 
 thus engaged the Primate sent a message, which 
 Hamilton rightly construed to be a mandate, re- 
 quiring his presence at a frank, friendly conference. 
 The conference with Beaton and his councillors ex- 
 tended over several days, after which Hamilton was 
 left at liberty to declare his opinions in public dis- 
 putations and private interviews for nearly a month. 
 When matters seemed ripe for the closing acts of 
 the tragedy, the captain of the Castle waited for 
 nightfall, drew a band of armed men round the 
 lodging which had been provided for the victim, 
 and took Hamilton into custody. The Cathedral 
 was the scene of trial, the chief bench of the heresy 
 tribunal being occupied by the Archbishop, the 
 Prior of St Andrews, the Abbot of Arbroath, and 
 the accused being placed in a pulpit where he could 
 be seen and heard by the immense crowd of people 
 who had flocked to the building at an early hour. 
 The conclusion was soon reached. " Magister 
 Patrick Hamilton " was pronounced to be an 
 heretic, condemned to be degraded from office, 
 and delivered over to the secular power to be 
 punished, and his goods confiscated. For fear of 
 an attempt at rescue, the execution of the sentence 
 was hastened with indecent hurry, and in a few 
 hours after Hamilton had heard his doom in the 
 Cathedral, his stake was reared in front of the gate 
 of St Salvator's College. Shortly after noon he set 
 
31 
 
 out from the Castle for the place of execution with 
 quick and firm step. "When in sight of the spot he 
 uncovered his head and engaged in silent prayer. 
 He then gave to one of the few friends allowed to 
 be beside him the copy of the gospels which he 
 carried in his right hand, and handed over his 
 cap and gown to his attendant. The executioners 
 stepped forward to do their work. An iron chain 
 was passed round his middle, and an attempt was 
 made to set fire to the pile of wood and coals. But 
 although some powder placed among the faggots 
 exploded, and the martyr's left hand and cheek 
 were scorched, the flames took no steady hold of 
 the pile. " Have you no dry wood — have you no 
 more gunpowder?" were the piteous appeals for a 
 merciful termination of his agony with which the 
 sufferer sought to quicken the steps of those who 
 brought fresh billets and powder from the Castle. 
 At last he was encircled by fierce flames. In his 
 torment he remembered his widowed mother, and 
 commended her to the sympathy and care of friends. 
 When nearly burnt through his middle by the fiery 
 chain, in response to a call from the crowd for a 
 sign of his constancy, he raised three fingers of his 
 half-consumed hand and held them steadily in that 
 position till he ceased to live. His last audible 
 words were, " Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." It 
 was six o'clock in the evening of the last day of 
 February 1528 before the body was quite reduced 
 to ashes, and the execution had lasted for wellnigh 
 six hours. 
 
 What were the heresies on account of which the 
 Church of Rome consigned this noble youth to an 
 
32 
 
 early and cruel death ? He had spoken against 
 prayers to the dead and to the Virgin Mary : he 
 had condemned the use of images, and had denied 
 the existence of purgatory. But the head and front 
 of his offence was expressed by the Prior of the 
 Dominicans when, turning to the tribunal, he said, 
 " My Lord Archbishop, you hear he denies the in- 
 stitutions of holy kirk, and the authority of our holy 
 father the Pope. I need not to accuse him any 
 more." 
 
 The sympathy excited by the cruel sufferings of 
 this noble youth was so wide-spread and deep, that 
 the proscribed doctrines became more extensively 
 diffused. The popular feeling was such that Arch- 
 bishop Beaton was advised by a shrewd observer 
 to put no more heretics to death ; " but," added the 
 adviser, " if ye will burn men let them be burned 
 in how (low) cellars, for the reek of Maister Hamil- 
 ton has infected all on whom it blew." 
 
 § 3. FORREST, STRATOUN, GOURLAY, 
 FOR RET, RUSSEL.— In disregard or defiance of 
 this caution, Henry Forrest, a Benedictine monk, 
 was burned at the North Kirk stile of St Andrews 
 in order that the heretics of Angus might see 
 the fire and take warning. That was in 1532-3. 
 About a year later David Stratoun, laird of Whit- 
 stoun in the Mearns, and Norman Gourlay, a 
 secular priest, were tried before a council held in 
 Holyrood in the presence of the king, and " adjudged 
 unto the fire." They were hanged and burned at 
 the Rood or Cross of Greenside, then a suburb of 
 Edinburgh, choice being made of that locality to 
 intimidate the inhabitants of Fife. 
 
33 
 
 On the 1st of March 1539, five persons were 
 burned at one pile on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, 
 one of whom was Thomas Forret, a canon regular 
 of Inchcolm and vicar of Dollar, That same year, 
 Jerome Russel, a Cordelier friar and preacher of the 
 gospel at Dumfries and Thomas Kennedy of Ayr — a 
 youth of eighteen — were brought before Archbishop 
 Dunbar of Glasgow on a charge of heresy, and 
 sentence having been pronounced against them, 
 both were burned in front of the Cathedral of 
 Glasgow. 
 
 § 4. WISH ART. — Our enumeration of Scotland's 
 precursors of the Reformation may fitly close with 
 the honoured name of George Wishart. As an 
 itinerant evangelist, this scion of an ancient house 
 in Kincardineshire, testified of the gospel of the 
 grace of God in such districts of Scotland as Angus 
 and Mearns, Ayrshire and the Lothians, taking for 
 his favourite fields of labour the towns of Montrose 
 and Dundee. His ministrations were brought to an 
 abrupt close by his arrest at Ormiston, East Lothian, 
 on the i6th January 1546, followed up by his trial in 
 the subsequent month within the Cathedral Church 
 of St Andrews. Found guilty of heresy and sen- 
 tenced to the burning, on the following day he was 
 led to the fire outside the Castle gate, with his hands 
 bound behind his back, a rope round his neck, and 
 a chain of iron circling his waist. Just as the execu- 
 tioner applied the lighted match to the powder and 
 wood a wild storm burst upon the scene, and fan- 
 ning the fire into a blaze, hastened the termination of 
 the martyr's torments. So died GEORGE WiSHART, 
 at the age of thirty-three, on the first of March 1546. 
 
 c 
 
34 
 
 § 5- GENERAL FEATURES OF THE PIONEER 
 WORK.— Two general remarks are suggested by 
 this sketch of the Reforming precursors in the 
 Church of Scotland. 
 
 First. — The greater number of the confessors, 
 evangelists and martyrs of the XV. and XVI. 
 centuries were drawn from the ranks of the priest- 
 hood, regular and secular, of the unreformed, 
 unemancipated Church. In monasteries, abbeys 
 and priories, in orders Dominican, Augustinian, and 
 Franciscan there were those who sighed in secret 
 over prevailing abominations and corruptions, who 
 longed for the coming of a better day, and did what 
 they could to prepare the way for it At least 
 twenty priests in 1559-60 joined the reformed 
 congregation at St Andrews ; of these more than 
 one had sat in judgment on the early martyrs, and 
 assented to their condemnation. This had an 
 important influence on the struggle for light and 
 liberty when at a later date things came to a crisis 
 in Scotland, as may afterwards appear. 
 
 Second. — In all the contendings and testifyings 
 of our Reforming fathers there was a repudiation of 
 papal jurisdiction over the national Church and an 
 assertion of the rights and liberties of the Christian 
 people. Thus, one of the heresies laid to the charge 
 of James Resby was the denial of the claim of the 
 bishop of Rome to be the vicar of Christ ; Norman 
 Gourlay was charged with teaching that the pope 
 was not a true bishop and had no jurisdiction in 
 Scotland ; and one of the thirteen articles regarding 
 which Patrick Hamilton was interrogated was 
 " that the pope is antichrist, and that every priest 
 
35 
 
 hath as much power as the pope," Then, George 
 Wishart was pronounced a heretic because he held, 
 among other things, that every layman was a priest 
 and that the pope had no more power than any 
 other man. What Wishart held respecting the 
 Headship of Christ, and the Government of His 
 Church can be gathered from the only literary 
 product of his pen which has come down to us. 
 This is a translation from the Latin of the Confession 
 of Faith drawn up by the churches of Switzerland 
 in 1536. The eighteenth article of that venerable 
 document has for title, " The Head and Shepherd 
 of the Church," and is in these words : — " Christ, 
 verily. Himself is the very true Head of His Church 
 and congregation, and the only Pastor and Head ; 
 and He also giveth presidents, heads and teachers 
 to the intent that in the external administration they 
 should use the power of the Church well and lawfully. 
 Wherefore we know not them that are heads and 
 pastors in name only, nor yet the Romish head " ! 
 
 § 6. THE REFORMATiON PLATFORM OF 
 DOCTRINE AND POLITY .—A quarter of a century 
 had not passed before the Church of Scotland drew 
 up a Confession of her own, worthy of taking a place 
 alongside of the Swiss one translated by Wishart. 
 This is how that came about. When in the besrinnine- 
 of August, 1560, the Scottish Parliament met in the 
 old Tolbooth of Edinburgh, a petition was presented 
 in the name of several Protestant laymen and 
 ministers praying for the disavowal of errors, for the 
 recognition of evangelical truth, and for reformation 
 of the power of the pope and the patrimony of the 
 Kirk. Those who had drafted that paper were 
 
36 
 
 requested to prepare a summary of the doctrines 
 they wished to establish. Within sixty-four hours 
 a document was presented, which purported to 
 be "The Confession of the Faith and Doctrine, 
 beheved and professed by the Protestants of Scot- 
 land." This earliest in the series of Scottish 
 Confessions was first read over to the Lords of the 
 Articles, as those were styled whose business it was 
 to judge of the measures submitted to the Supreme 
 Court, and thereafter it was laid before Parliament. 
 Ultimately the Confession was sanctioned as the 
 national profession of faith. The Duke of Chatel- 
 herault, following ancient usage, gave a piece of 
 silver to the Clerk of the Register, and the document 
 became ratified and approved as wholesome and 
 sound doctrine, grounded upon the infallible truth 
 of God's Word. 
 
 On the 20th December of the same year the first 
 meeting of the General Assembly of the Reformed 
 Church of Scotland was held at Edinburgh in the 
 Magdalen Chapel, the quaint old tower of which may 
 still be seen at the Cowgate-head. There a small band 
 of six ministers and thirty-four elders " convened to 
 consult upon those things which are to set forward 
 God's glory and the weal of His Kirk in this realm." 
 From an early stage in the work of reformation the 
 attention of Scottish Protestants had been directed 
 to the polity of the re-constituted Church. But 
 it was not till after the dissolution of Parliament 
 that the Privy Council gave a commission to five 
 Protestant ministers to construct a platform of 
 ecclesiastical polity from material contained in the 
 Word of God. The work, in revised and completed 
 
37 
 
 form, was laid before the General Assembly, by 
 which Court it was approved and thereafter it was 
 submitted to a convocation of noblemen which met 
 at Edinburgh in January 1561. Although not for- 
 mally ratified by the convention, the document was 
 subscribed by the larger number of those present ; 
 and it has taken its place among the subordinate 
 standards of the Church of Scotland under the 
 name of The First Book of Discipline : or The 
 Policy and Discipline of the Chuixh. 
 
 In the work of constructing the new platform 
 for the Church of Scotland there was one man of 
 commanding genius and dominating force who, 
 more than any other, gave to the work the impress 
 of his personality. That man was John Knox. 
 Strangely varied and chequered was the career of 
 our great Scottish Reformer. When forty-two 
 years of age he was chained to the oar in a French 
 galley, and continued a galley slave for nineteen 
 months. For five years he was a preacher, and for 
 a portion of that time a royal chaplain in England. 
 The greater part of other five years he ministered 
 on the continent to congregations at Dieppe, Frank- 
 fort, and Geneva ; and from 1559 to 1572, the year 
 of his death, he did most to make that portion of 
 Scottish history the narrative of which he has given 
 in his immortal work, " The Historie of the Reforma- 
 tion in Scotland." In the course of these eventful 
 years, Knox played many parts and had intercourse 
 with all sorts and conditions of people. But whether 
 he is bearing a two-handed sword before the 
 martyr Wishart ; haranguing statesmen, noblemen, 
 and politicians ; preaching with impassioned 
 
earnestness from the pulpits of London, Edinburgh, 
 and St Andrews, bringing tears to the eyes of Mary 
 the Queen of Scots ; arguing for three days with 
 the Abbot of Crossraguel, or matching his broad 
 sword with the dialectic rapier of Maitland of 
 Lethington — it is always the same personality that 
 dominates the intercourse. The motive force is 
 intense religious conviction. The dominating pur- 
 pose of the life work is that " the reverent face of 
 the primitive and apostolick churche" should be 
 once more presented to the eyes and knowledge of 
 his countrymen. His spirit might at times seem 
 savage, and his bearing bold even to rudeness ; but 
 no one with any knowledge of the man and his 
 times has ever doubted the love of country and of 
 church which animated his dauntless soul, and 
 sustained him in that deadly conflict with prevailing 
 powers which he was called upon to wage during 
 the greater part of his troubled life. The eulogy 
 pronounced by the Regent Morton on the day when 
 the worn-out body was laid in the burial-ground of 
 St Giles is not less truthful than sententious, "Here 
 lies one who neither flattered nor feared any flesh." 
 
 When the living voice and " dead hand " of 
 that intrepid spirit were no longer with her, a 
 mongrel species of government, framed by the 
 Convention at Leith, and made up of presbytery, 
 prelacy, and popery, was forced upon the Church. 
 To meet and rectify the evils arising from this ill- 
 assorted compromise, the staunch Presbyterians of 
 the land set themselves, under the guidance of the 
 learned and courageous Andrew Melville, to draw 
 up a form of Church rule agreeable to the Word of 
 
39 
 
 God, and adapted to the state of the country. The 
 result was the compilation of a directory which re- 
 ceived the sanction of the Assembly that met in 
 April, 1578, with Melville for Moderator. This en- 
 larged book of policy ranks among our subordinate 
 standards as " The Second Book of Discipline : " or 
 " Heads and Conclusions of the Policy of the Kirk." 
 The principles laid down in the thirteen chapters of 
 this treatise were given effect to by the Assembly 
 which met at Dundee on the [2th July, 1580, when 
 the Laird of Lundie was His Majesty's Commis- 
 sioner and James Lawson was Moderator. It was 
 then and there declared that the office of bishop was 
 neither founded, grounded, nor warranted within the 
 Scriptures ; and it was ordained that all persons 
 holding said office must demit it and cease from all 
 preaching, ministering of the sacraments, or using 
 in any way the office of pastors till they received de 
 710VO admission from the General Assembly. 
 
 Not content with her own declaration on the 
 subject the Reformed and Presbyterian Church of 
 Scotland resolved, at the meeting of her supreme 
 court in 1 592, to obtain from the Scottish parliament 
 a legal recognition of her liberties. This she re- 
 ceived in June of the same year, when parliament 
 passed an act ratifying the ecclesiastical findings, 
 and declaring an act of 1584 respecting the royal 
 supremacy to be in no wise prejudicial to the rights 
 of her office-bearers. This act of parliament has 
 always been regarded by historians as the charter of 
 the Church of Scotland's liberties so far as the State 
 has to do with them. 
 
 By the time she was called upon to add another 
 
40 
 
 plank to the platform of her polity, the church of 
 Wishart, Knox, and Melville had passed through a 
 chequered experience and was then enjoying a brief 
 space of deliverance from the intolerant and intoler- 
 able attempts of the House of Stuart to fetter her 
 liberty and confiscate her rights. 
 
 § 7. THE WESTMINSTER PLATFORM OF 
 DOCTRINE AND POLITY.— At first sight it seems 
 strange that one of the most important contributions 
 to the subordinate standards of the Scottish National 
 Church should have emanated from a body of 
 divines the bulk of whom were Englishmen, the 
 Scots among them expressly disclaiming the char- 
 acter of members and only calling themselves com- 
 missioners. When the history of the Westminster 
 Assembly, however, is more carefully gone into, 
 these things become manifest. 
 
 First. The desire for unity in religion and uni- 
 formity of government took earliest shape in Scot- 
 land, and from Scotland extended to England. As 
 early as 1640, before the civil war had begun, a paper 
 written by Alexander Henderson and given 
 in to the Lords of the Treaty at London, expressed 
 the wish " that there were one Confession of Faith, 
 one form of Catechism, one Directory for all the 
 parts of the public worship of God, and for prayer, 
 preaching, administration of sacraments, etc., and 
 one form of church government, in all the churches of 
 his Majesty's dominions ; " and by the General 
 Assembly of 1642 the assurance was given to the 
 English parliament that whatever was required of 
 the Kirk of Scotland for the furthering of this 
 object would be most willingly performed. It was 
 
4^ 
 
 this cherished desire that led to the drawing up in 
 Scotland of the Solemn League and Covenant " for 
 the peace and safety of the three kingdoms of Scot- 
 land, England, and Ireland," and to the adoption of 
 what was intended to be both a civil bond and a 
 religious compact by the English Lords and Com- 
 mons assembled in St Margaret's, Westiiiinster. 
 This desire, moreover, had a powerful influence 
 in bringing together the Westminster divines, the 
 parliamentary ordinance that authorized the Assem- 
 bly expressly declaring that it was not only for the 
 treating of such things as concerned the Liturgy, 
 Discipline, and Government of the Church of Eng- 
 land, but also for the promoting of " nearer agree- 
 ment with the Church of Scotland." 
 
 Second. Although in the matter of numbers the 
 Scottish commissioners formed a small band, yet 
 the part they took in the discussions, and the in- 
 fluence they exerted in the decisions arrived at was 
 supreme. This was largely owing to the fact that 
 the constant Scottish quantity in the Assembly was 
 one of the first quality, and could not fail to wield a 
 moulding power, irrespective and independent of 
 numbers. The massive, finely balanced intellect of 
 Alexander Henderson, the subtle and piercing 
 reasoning of Samuel Rutherfurd, the learning 
 and dialectic skill of George Gillespie, the 
 aptitude for affairs of Robert Baillie — the four 
 ecclesiastical commissioners from north the border 
 — rendered them front-rank men who left their 
 mark broad and deep upon Westminster thouo-ht 
 and theology. 
 
 Third. Of the negotiating churches the Church 
 
42 
 
 of Scotland is the one that has remained true to the 
 Westminster platform. For a while, the Confes- 
 sion of Faith then formulated was the official creed 
 of England as well as vScotland, and so had the 
 unique distinction of being, to use the language of 
 Dean Stanley, "the only Confession of Faith which 
 was ever imposed on the whole of the United King- 
 dom" reigning "with undisputed supremacy for ten 
 years, under the authority of Parliament, from Cape 
 Wrath to the Land's End." 
 
 But with the Restoration in 1660, that state of 
 matters came to an end, and the standards which 
 were then set aside in England never regained their 
 position, but came to be more and more regarded 
 and treated as purely Scottish documents. 
 
 From the English and ^Scotch divines assembled 
 within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and 
 continuing their meetings from 1st July 1643 to 
 22nd February 1648-9, in a series of 1163 sessions, 
 there issued in successive instalments, and in the 
 following order, these standard documents : — 
 
 I. A Directory for the Public Worship of God 
 throughout the three Kingdoms of Scotland, Eng- 
 land, and Ireland. 
 
 II. The Form of Presbyterial Church-Govern- 
 ment, and of Ordination of Ministers. 
 
 III. The Confession of Faith, agreed upon by 
 the Assembly of Divines at Westminster ; with the 
 assistance of Commissioners from the Church of 
 Scotland. 
 
 IV. The Larger and the Shorter Catechisms. 
 Each of these documents, so soon as it was 
 
 forwarded from London to Edinburgh, was care- 
 
43 
 
 fully examined by Scottish divines, and was there- 
 after formally approved by the General Assembly 
 as part of the covenanted uniformity in religion 
 betwixt the Churches of Christ in the Kingdoms of 
 Scotland, England, and Ireland. 
 
 § 8. POSITIONS LAID DOWN BY THE 
 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND IN HER STAN- 
 DARDS. — From the documents enumerated and 
 described above it is easy to gather the position 
 taken up by the founders and builders of the Scottish 
 National Church regarding her constitution and 
 government. 
 
 That position may be stated under these two 
 heads. 
 
 I St. The Church is a spiritual body of which Jesus 
 Christ is the alone Head. Both Reformers and 
 Westminster Divines distinguished between the 
 Catholic Church viewed as visible to God but in- 
 visible to man, and the same Church as visible 
 both to God and man. According to them when 
 the Church is viewed in the latter light she consists 
 of "all those throughout the world that profess the 
 true religion together with their children — the King- 
 dom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family 
 of God." 
 
 Of this Kingdom, wherever it is found, the only 
 notes or marks are the true preaching of the Word, 
 the right administration of sacraments, and eccle- 
 siastical discipline uprightly exercised. Of the 
 Church thus distinguished, Jesus Christ is the only 
 Head, the Sovereign, the Supreme Governor. This 
 definition of the Church Catholic and visible leaves 
 no room for her being regarded and treated as a 
 
44 
 
 part of and a creature of the State, as a society or 
 club with a purely civil contract. 
 
 In 1596 this Scriptural view of the Church was 
 placed before a Scottish monarch by Andrew 
 Melville. On that occasion, addressing King James 
 in a strain, " perhaps the most singular in point of 
 freedom that ever saluted royal ears, or that ever 
 proceeded from the mouth of a loyal subject who 
 would have spilt the last drop of his blood in defence 
 of the person and honour of his prince," the reformer 
 reminded his hearer of what he did not hear then 
 for the first time, " that there are two kings and two 
 kingdoms in Scotland ; there is King James the 
 head of this commonwealth, and there is Christ 
 Jesus the King of the Church, whose subject James 
 the VI. is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, 
 nor a lord, nor a head, but a member." 
 
 2nd. The Scripture form of Church government 
 is presbyterial^ that form in which the Spiritual 
 Indepe7idence of the Church and the rights of the 
 people are conserved. In the Second Book of Dis- 
 cipline, and more explicitly in the Form of Church 
 Government, it is affirmed that the ordinary and 
 permanent office-bearers appointed by Christ are 
 pastors, teachers, elders, and deacons, and that 
 Christ has, from the days of the apostles, furnished 
 some men with gifts for these offices ; that the 
 Church is to be governed by assemblies or courts — 
 Kirk Sessions, Presbyteries, Synods, and General 
 Assembhes ; and that there is a subordination and 
 gradation of these judicatories, inferior, superior, 
 supreme. It is in this connection of Church govern- 
 ment that the Scottish Presbyterian Church has, 
 
45 
 
 ever since she became reformed, claimed to be 
 spiritually independent, her contention being that 
 Christ her Divine Head has given her all authority 
 and power to regulate her own spiritual affairs in 
 obedience to His revealed will, free from State 
 interference, dictation, or appeal. 
 
 § 9. THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY AND REV. 
 ROBERT MONTGOMERY.— And the Church of 
 Scotland has from time to time made good that 
 claim in very practical forms. As an instance, take 
 the way in which the General Assembly dealt with 
 the Rev. Robert Montgomery of Stirling in the 
 XVI. century. Intimation was made to the 
 Supreme Court that that minister had accepted 
 nomination to the See of Glasgow simply at the in- 
 stance of the Duke of Lennox, who offered him the 
 appointment on condition of making over to himself 
 its emoluments, with the exception of a small pen- 
 sion. Immediately Montgomery was summoned to 
 the bar of the Assembly. At the several stages of 
 the collision that ensued, there were the King, the 
 Duke of Lennox, the Magistrates of Glasgow on the 
 one side, and on the other the Presbyteries of Stir- 
 ling and Glasgow and the General Assembly. 
 Matters were brought to a crisis in 1582, when 
 Andrew Melville, as Moderator, preached a sermon 
 in which he fearlessly denounced the bhidie gullie 
 (bloody knife) of absolute power whereby men in- 
 tended to pull the crown off Christ's head, and to 
 wring the sceptre out of His hand. 
 
 § 10. ANDREW MELVILLE'S "WE DARE." 
 — The Assembly drew up a spirited remonstrance 
 to the King and Council, and Melville with others 
 
4b 
 
 was appointed to go to Perth and present the pro- 
 test and appeal. When the document was laid 
 before the King in Council the Earl of Arran de- 
 manded, "Who dare subscribe these treasonable 
 articles ? " " We dare^ and will subscribe them and 
 give our lives in the cause " was the reply of Mel- 
 ville ; then, suiting the action to the word, he 
 advanced to the table, took the pen from the clerk 
 and appended his signature. The other commis- 
 sioners did the same, and all were allowed to depart 
 without molestation. That We dare of Andrew 
 Melville aptly sets forth the attitude of the Scottish 
 Church in the maintenance of her Spiritual Inde- 
 pendence ; but the fact that before it was uttered 
 Montgomery had been proclaimed Bishop of Glas- 
 gow at the Edinburgh Cross, and his ecclesiastical 
 excommunication declared null, sets forth no less 
 aptly the determination of an Erastian State to 
 coerce the Church in the exercise of spiritual privi- 
 lege and function. 
 
 § II. THE RIGHTS OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 PEOPLE. — Closely connected with the independ- 
 ence of the office-bearers of the Church are the rights 
 of the members' of the Church, the maintenance of 
 which has from the first been a distinctive feature of 
 Scottish presbyterianism. The right of congrega- 
 tions for which our Reformers contended most 
 strenuously was that of having a voice in the elec- 
 tion of their ministers. Wilh admirable lucidity 
 and force the First Book of Discipline, when it 
 came to treat of ministers and their election, made 
 these affirmations : that it appertaineth to the 
 people to elect their ministry ; that the violent in- 
 
47 
 
 trusion of any man upon a congregation is to be 
 avoided ; and that the liberty of popular suffrage 
 must with all care be reserved to each several kirk. 
 From these positions the Church of Scotland never 
 resiled so long as she was left uninterfered with and 
 uncoerced. It was the fearless assertion of the 
 principle of non-intrusion that led to the first rupture 
 in the hitherto unbroken Church of the land, as will 
 be seen in the following chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 1660 — 1 842. 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT. 
 
 [In Covenanting Times : — Consult Wodrow's " History of ihe Suffer- 
 ings of the Church of Scotland" ; Patrick Walker's " 13iographia 
 Presbyteriana" ; James Howie's "Scots Worthies," Carslaw's 
 edition; " The Cloud of Witnesses," Thomson's edition, 1871 ; 
 M'Crie's "Sketches of Scottish Church History," or Part L 
 of " The Story of the Scottish Church," chapters x. to xvi. ; 
 Dodds's " Fifty Years' Struggle of the Scottish Covenanters'' ; 
 Johnston's "Treasury of the Scottish Covenant," 1887 ; Kerr's 
 "The Covenants and the Covenanters," 1B95. 
 
 T/ie Revolution, William Carstarcs, The Union, Restoration of 
 Patronage: — Consult "State Papers and Letters of Carstares," 
 with M'Cormick's Life prefixed; Prof. Story's "William Car- 
 stares : a Character and Career " ; John Hill Burton's " History 
 of Scotland," vols. VIL and VIIL ; Dr John Cunningham's 
 "Church History of Scotland," vol. IL ; M'Crie's "Scotland 
 and the Revolution of 1688." 
 
 The Secession :— The standard authorities are M'Kerrow's " History 
 of the Secession Church," and M'Kelvie's "Annals and Statis- 
 tics of the U.P. Church." Dr Blair's "The U.P. Church: A 
 Handbook of its History and Principles," is an admirable com- 
 pendium. "Synod Hall Lectures on Church and State" (1S83) 
 contains much historic^il information. 
 
48 
 
 Moderatism and the Evangelical Revival: — Consult Morren's 
 "Annals of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland," 
 1739-1766, .2 vols.; Dr John Witherspoon's "Ecclesiastical 
 Characteristics," 1753, vol. VI. of Works. "Autobiography of 
 Dr Carlyle of Inveresk," edited by J. H. Burton, i860; Dean 
 Stanley's "Lectures on the History of the Church of Scotland," 
 Lecture IIL "The Moderation of the Church of Scotland"; 
 Principal Rainy's " Three Lectures on the Church of Scotland," 
 Third Lecture ; Prof. Blaikie's " Preachers of Scotland," 
 chapters ix., x., xi. ; M'Crie's "Story of the Scottish Church," 
 part n. 
 
 The Veto Act, The Atichterarder Case, The Battle of the 
 Standards, &c. — The standard work upon the conflicts of the 
 Churchfrom 1834 to 1843 is Dr Robert Buchanan's "Ten Years' 
 Conflict," 2 vols. The story of conflict and catastrophe is 
 succinctly and gracefully told by Dr Hanna in the fourth vol. of 
 his "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Dr Chalmers." For 
 fuller treatment of certain portions of the field the student should 
 acquaint himself with relative chapters in the "Life of William 
 Cunningham, D.D.," by Dr Rainy and Rev. James M'Kenzie; 
 Dr W. Wilson's " Memoirs of Dr R. S. Candlish " ; Dr Walker's 
 "Robert Buchanan, D.D., An Ecclesiastical Biography"; 
 and "Memoirs of Dr Thomas Guthrie," by his sons. The legal 
 aspects and bearings of the Cases in the Ten Years' Conflict 
 are handled with judicial impartiality and balance by A. T. 
 Innes in his valuable " Law of Creeds in Scotland." The Chal- 
 mers Lectures of Sir H. Moncreiff (1883), Dr W. Wilson (1887), 
 and Dr Thomas Brown (1891), exhibit the doctrinal basis and 
 the historical development of Spiritual Independence. Several 
 of Hugh Miller's Witness articles reproduced in the vol. of his 
 collected writings entitled "The Headship of Christ and the 
 Rights of the Christian People," are splendid contributions to 
 Conflict and Disruption literature.] 
 
 § I. IN COVENANTING TIMES.— The ashes of 
 the bonfires that had blazed in honour of his restora- 
 tion (May 1660) were scarcely cold when Charles II. 
 set himself to subvert the Presbyterian polity of the 
 Church of Scotland and to undo everything which 
 he had sworn to maintain. Early in 1661 "The 
 Drunken Parliament " passed an act which affirmed 
 
49 
 
 the royal prerogative and declared the king to be 
 supreme in all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil. 
 An oath of allegiance was thereafter imposed which 
 bound the subject to acknowledge the royal supre- 
 macy ; and on the 4th October 1662 a proclamation 
 was issued banishing from their parishes all minis- 
 ters ordained since 1649 (^he year of the abolition of 
 patronage), unless they obtained presentation from 
 the patron of the parish and collation from the 
 bishop of the diocese before the ist of November. 
 The enforcing of these legislative measures brought 
 severe and protracted sufferings upon our covenant- 
 ing forefathers. When the ist of November ar- 
 rived Four Hundred good men and true, constitut- 
 ing one-third of the ministers of Scotland, gave up 
 their all in this world at the behest of conscience. 
 For the quarter of a century from that day the ruth- 
 less hand of such plunderers and persecutors as Sir 
 James Turner, General Dalziel, Graham of Claver- 
 house, Johnston of Westerhall, and Grierson of 
 Lagg, lay heavy upon all who refused to conform. 
 Without regard of age, sex, or rank, they were fined, 
 spoiled, and many of them utterly ruined by mili- 
 tary quarterings. They sickened and died in the 
 dungeons of Dunottar and Blackness, on the bleak 
 Bass Rock, and in the open churchyard of Grey- 
 friars, Edinburgh. They were transported as felons 
 to Tangiers, the Barbadoes, or the plantations of 
 Virginia and Carolina, where they were sold as 
 slaves to toil under the lash in the canefields and 
 the rice swamps. Many of them were cruelly tor- 
 tured. The royal dragoons, who scoured the coun- 
 try, sought to extort information by sometimes sus- 
 
 D 
 
so 
 
 pending men and boys from trees by their thumbs, 
 sometimes by binding a cord round the forehead of 
 a victim, and, with the butt end of a pistol for lever, 
 tightening the cord till the flesh was cut into the 
 skull, at other times by tying a piece of the fuse 
 used for firing their matchlocks between the fingers 
 and keeping it burning there till the flesh was burnt 
 from the bones. In the Parhament House Cham- 
 ber, in which the Privy Council and the Court of 
 High Commission "put the question," the instru- 
 ments employed were the thumbscrews and the 
 boot, the latter being a cylinder of wood or iron 
 into which the leg was forced, and wooden wedges 
 then driven in with blows from a hammer or mallet. 
 So excruciating were the agonies of the victims and 
 so piercing their shrieks that even hardened officials 
 hastened out of the room when these engines of tor- 
 ture were brought in, and it was found necessary to 
 pass an order of Council that members keep their 
 seats while "the question" was being thus "put." 
 The Covenanters were put to death in great numbers 
 and in a variety of ways. Many of them were hung, 
 many bent their heads to the loaded knife of " The 
 Maiden." Thus died for Christ's Crown and Cove- 
 nant the Marquis of Argyll, James Guthrie, minister 
 of Stirling, the youthful Hugh Mackail, and James 
 Renwick, the last named perishing on the scaffold, 
 upon the i8th February 1688, when only twenty-six 
 years of age, the last of Scotland's Covenanters that 
 suffered martyrdom. Two were drowned together in 
 the waters of the Blednoch — Margaret M'Lauchlan, 
 a widow of sixty-three, sentenced to death for con- 
 venticle keeping and for refusing the oath of abjura- 
 
51 
 
 tion ; and Margaret Wilson, a maiden of eighteen, 
 whose crime was " keeping the mountains " to escape 
 hearing the curates — 
 
 " Ay, earth had many martyrs, but these two were of the 
 sea." 
 
 Many were shot down in cold blood, without a trial, 
 without the sentence of judge or magistrate, by the 
 word or the hand of a military bully. It was so with 
 John Brown of Priesthill, the Christian carrier whom 
 "bloody Ciavers" shot before his own door in pre- 
 sence of his wife and children. And it was so with 
 Andrew Hislop. This lad had seen his widowed 
 mother's house plundered of all that was portable 
 and then pulled down, while his mother, brother, 
 and sisters were turned adrift in the fields. Later in 
 the same day he fell into the hands of Claverhouse and 
 Johnston. It carried that he should be put to death. 
 When everything was ready for the execution of the 
 stripling he was told to draw his bonnet over his 
 eyes. He refused, and told his murderers he could 
 lock them in the face without fear, for he had done 
 nothing of which to be ashamed. Then holding up 
 his Bible he charged them to answer for their doings 
 that day on the Great Day, when they would be 
 judged by what is written in that Book. The body 
 of Andrew Hislop lies buried where it fell at Craig- 
 haugh in Eskdale Moor, The cause in which all 
 these sufferings were endured was that of the Cove- 
 nanted Reformation. Our Scottish martyrs were 
 plundered, exiled, and tortured because they ap- 
 proved of the various steps of Reformation which 
 the Church of Scotland had taken ; they were put 
 to death because they held aloft a banner dyed in 
 
52 
 
 blood, on which were displayed the National Cove- 
 nant of 1639, the Solemn League and Covenant of 
 1643. If it be asked on what particular truth the 
 testimony in Covenanting times was made to bear, 
 the answer is — the prerogative of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ as the only King and Head of the Church. 
 
 §2. THE REVOLUTION.— With the flight of 
 James, and the arrival of William in the waters of 
 Torbay on the 5th November 1688, the Stuart dynasty 
 went down, and Great Britain entered upon the epoch 
 of the memorable Revolution. Inafew weeksachange 
 was effected from tyranny and terrorism to national 
 freedom and security, from Caesarism in Church and 
 State to constitutional government and independ- 
 ence in both. In the settlement of the Revolution, 
 the Church of Scotland had a place. " The Claim 
 of Right," adopted by the estates of Scotland and 
 passed, along with an offer of the crown, to William 
 and Mary, declared prelacy and the superiority of 
 any office above a presbyter, to be a great and 
 insupportable grievance and trouble to the nation, 
 contrary to the inclinations of the generahty of the 
 people ever since the Reformation, which ought 
 therefore to be abolished. At a subsequent stage 
 of the settlement the Scottish parliament dis- 
 established and disendowed prelacy ; rescinded the 
 Act of Supremacy, 1661, which made the King 
 supreme over all persons and in all causes ; gave 
 civil sanction to the Westminster Confession ; con- 
 firmed the Presbyterian government of the National 
 Church as it had been established in 1592; and 
 reinstated in their charges all those ministers who 
 had been ejected since 1661. 
 
53 
 
 "When all this was done the Church of Scotland 
 rose from her ashes, the same Church which, whether 
 in freedom or in bondage, whether under the shade 
 of royal favour or hunted as a partridge on the 
 mountains, had maintained, as she continues to 
 maintain, her unbroken identity with the Church of 
 the First and Second Reformation. 
 
 § 3. PRINCIPAL CARSTARES.— For the settle- 
 ment at the era of " the glorious Revolution " no man 
 worked more patriotically than William Car- 
 stares, whobegan his public careerwhen a student at 
 the University of Utrecht, and closed it as Principal 
 of the University of Edinburgh. Suspected of com- 
 pHcity in the Rye House plot, and believed to 
 possess secrets relative to the plans of the Whig 
 plotters, he was examined by the Scottish Privy 
 Council in 1684. When he persisted in refusing to 
 answer questions torture was applied. A new pair 
 of thumbkins, so constructed that much greater 
 force could be applied to the screw, was produced. 
 Carstares' thumbs were put in the apertures, and 
 the upper bar was screwed down till the bones were 
 crushed to pieces, and the sweat of agony broke out 
 upon the sufferer's brow and streamed down his 
 cheeks. For upwards of an hour the councillors 
 occupied themselves in bullying their mangled 
 victim, one member assuring him that if he did not 
 answer the queries he should be tortured day by 
 day, and another (General Dalzell, who is credited 
 with having brought the little engine of torture from 
 Muscovy) vowing that he would roast him alive next 
 day if he continued obdurate. The order was then 
 given to apply the boot, the thumbs being still held 
 
54 
 
 fast under the steel screws. But from inexperience in 
 the work the hangman found a difficulty in adjust- 
 ing the cylinder and wedges, and contented himself 
 with repeated turns of the thumbscrews. When the 
 Lords of Council gave orders to ease the prisoner 
 for that time it was found necessary to employ a 
 smith's tools before the screws could be reversed 
 and the crushed fingers released. Then Carstares 
 was sent back to the Tolbooth to toss all night in a 
 fever of pain, with the warning that another 
 attempt would be made at nine o'clock next morn- 
 ing to subdue his obstinacy with the boot worked 
 by a skilled operator. Further torturing was, how- 
 ever, rendered unnecessary by an arrangement come 
 to in the ante-room of the hall, according to which 
 he undertook to answer certain queries, and the 
 Council promised that his depositions should not be 
 used against any accused party. It was as private 
 chaplain of the Prince of Orange, afterwards William 
 III., that Carstares rendered greatest service to the 
 Church of Scotland. So great was the influence he 
 wielded that the Presbyterian chaplain came to be 
 known at the public offices and in Court circles by 
 the title of "The Cardinal." How grandly he 
 served the Church, at the risk of forfeiting royal 
 favour, one memorable occasion testifies. The 
 King had consented to an oath being imposed upon 
 all ministers before taking their seats in the 
 Assembly, which bound them to acknowledge him 
 to be sovereign by right as well as in fact. Instead 
 of being moved by the representations made to him 
 that Scottish Presbyterians objected to an oath 
 being imposed upon the Church by the State, 
 
55 
 
 William, in the temporary absence of Carstares 
 from Kensington, was moved to despatch a sum- 
 mons to the Assembly to meet on a certain day, 
 with instructions to his Royal Commissioner to im- 
 pose the obnoxious oath, and, in the event of 
 members refusing to take it, to dissolve the gather- 
 ing in the King's name. At this juncture Carstares 
 arrived upon the scene, ascertained the nature of 
 the despatches that had left the King's hands, found 
 the bearer of them as he was on the point of setting 
 off, and demanded that the documents be given up 
 to him. Although it was late at night he insisted 
 on entering the royal apartment, turned aside the 
 curtains, threw himself upon his knees, and startled 
 his royal master by announcing that he had come 
 to ask for life. Astonishment and indignation gave 
 place in the breast of William to conviction, when 
 the chaplain reasoned with him about the danger of 
 collision between the Government and the Church 
 of Scotland. The despatches were thrown into the 
 fire, and fresh instructions were drawn up by Car- 
 stares and signed by the King, dispensing with the 
 obnoxious oath. The delayed messenger was sent 
 off post haste, and only arrived in Edinburgh on the 
 morning of the day fixed for the sitting of the 
 Assembly. The promptness, boldness, and tact of 
 the midnight intruder saved the Church from the 
 Erastian endeavour of an earthly monarch to fence 
 the door of her Assembly with a Parliamentary 
 oath. 
 
 Carstares died in 171 5, the last words he was 
 heard to utter being, " I have peace with God 
 through our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
56 
 
 § 4- THE UNION OF PARLIAMENTS IN 1707. 
 — When proposals for a Treaty of Union were first 
 made, the Church of Scotland was not represented 
 among the commissioners selected from the northern 
 kingdom, on the ground that no civil body had 
 power to affect her position secured by the Revolu- 
 tion Settlement. But while the articles of Union 
 were being discussed, the Church of Scotland in- 
 sisted that parliament should provide for the security 
 of her rights and liberties as a presbyterian estab- 
 lishment. This was done by an Act separate from 
 and prior to the Treaty of Union, in which it was 
 stipulated that it be repeated as part of the Act of 
 Treaty both in Scotland and in England. That 
 Act provided that the Presbyterian Church govern- 
 ment as established by successive Acts of Parlia- 
 ment, with the Westminster Confession, its discipline 
 and ecclesiastical judicatories, should remain for 
 ver unalterable, the only government of the Church 
 within the Kingdom of Scotland. It further pro- 
 vided that, while other oaths were to be taken at 
 the coronation, every Sovereign of Britain must, 
 at his accession^ take an oath to protect the govern- 
 ment, worship, discipline, rights and privileges of 
 the National State Church of Scotland. Notwith- 
 standing all the pains taken to secure the Scottish 
 Establishment in the exercise of her constitutional 
 rights and liberties, ominous changes took place 
 within five years. A coalition of High Church- 
 men, Jacobites, and Tories secured the passing, in 
 the reign of Queen Anne, of an Act of Parliament 
 which has been the fruitful occasion of internal strife 
 and of conflict with the State. 
 
57 
 
 § 5. RESTORATION OF PATRONAGE IN 1712. 
 — In days before the Reformation the builders of 
 parish churches and the founders of ecclesiastical 
 endowments claimed and exercised the right to 
 appoint the man who was to officiate. This right of 
 presentation the first Reformers did not deem incom- 
 patible with the right of the people to have a voice 
 in the formation of the pastoral relation, and, as we 
 have seen in the previous chapter, they provided for 
 the exercise of the layman's right as early as 1 560, 
 in the First Book of Disciplme. It was, however, 
 soon discovered that patronage, whether of Crown 
 or of Baron, and popular election would not work 
 harmoniously, and the Scottish Church began to 
 move for deliverance from the yoke of the former 
 with a view to the exercise and enjoyment of the 
 latter. Thus, in the Second Book of Discipline, 
 agreed upon in 1578, among certain special heads of 
 reformation craved, mention is made of the liberty 
 of election. This order, it is affirmed, " cannot 
 stand with patronages and presentations to bene- 
 fices," and so ought not any longer " to have place in 
 this light of reformation." 
 
 When, at the famous Glasgow Assembly of 1638, 
 the Church of Scotland set her house in order 
 according to Scripture precept and Apostolic prac- 
 tice, she enacted " that no person be intruded in any 
 office of the Church contrary to the will of the con- 
 gregation to which they are appointed." The 
 Moderator of that Assembly, Alexander Henderson, 
 was not a man given to boasting or one likely to 
 advance a statement without carefully considerino- 
 his ground, and yet he felt justified in affirming of 
 
58 
 
 these times that " no one is here obtruded upon the 
 people against their open or tacit consent and 
 approbation." 
 
 Then, in 1649 — ^^e year in which Charles T. met 
 his doom at Whitehall — the Scottish parHament, on 
 the urgent presentation of the Church, completely- 
 abolished patronage, as an evil and bondage under 
 which the people and ministers of this land had long 
 groaned, and as having no warrant in God's Word, 
 but founded merely on Canon Law. 
 
 Again, in 1690, when the Revolution Settlement 
 was finally adjusted and received parliamentary 
 ratification, the power to present ministers to vacant 
 congregations was withdrawn from patrons, and the 
 nomination was vested in the Protestant heritors 
 and elders of the parish. In the event of the con- 
 gregation expressing disapproval of the nominee, 
 their reasons for so doing were to be laid before the 
 presbytery of the bounds, by whom the whole matter 
 of calling and settling is to be ultimately " ordered 
 and concluded." But now, in 17 12, despite all 
 efforts of the Church of Scotland to prevent what 
 was rightly regarded as a violation of the Revolution 
 Establishment and the Union Treaty, there was 
 rapidly passed through the Commons and the 
 House of Lords, a statute " to restore the Patrons 
 to their ancient rights of presenting ministers to the 
 churches vacant in that part of Great Britain called 
 Scotland." To a greater extent than holds good of 
 any other piece of parliamentary legislation affecting 
 Scotland, it has been the fate of this one to exercise 
 a disturbing influence over Scottish ecclesiastical 
 affairs from the year in which it was perpetrated down 
 
59 
 
 to 1874, when a bill was carried once more taking 
 patronage from those possessing it, but only to con- 
 fer it, as a matter of civil right, upon a body 
 unknown to and unrecognised in the standards of 
 the Church, one composed of " adherents " as well 
 as communicants. 
 
 § 6. THE SECESSION OF 1733.— The evil 
 leaven of patronage worked in the inner life of 
 the Church, and after twenty years it suddenly 
 struck outwards with disastrous results. During 
 that same period the blight of Moderatism had 
 set in, and continued to exercise its withering 
 influence upon evangelical life and preaching during 
 the rest of the eighteenth century. The working of 
 these two forces, Patronage and Moderatism, made 
 a cleavage within the Church. There were worldly 
 patrons who insisted upon their rights in spite of 
 reclaiming congregations, and these were supported 
 by ecclesiastical leaders who disregarded the wishes 
 of the people in order to give effect to the will 
 of the patron, and who, in the event of the local 
 court failing to ordain and induct an obnoxious 
 presentee, secured a Riding Committee from the 
 Assembly, and so forced upon parishes men whom 
 none wished and none respected. And there 
 were those in the membership of the Church 
 who successfully resisted the leaven of moderatism, 
 who loved Gospel truth and evangelical preaching, 
 and who gladly availed themselves of the ministra- 
 tions of such preachers as continued the Evangelical 
 Succession of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
 turies. 
 
 When the yoke of patronage and the rule of 
 
6o 
 
 ttioaerate leaders became intolerable, four ministers 
 of the Church of Scotland — Ebenezer Erskine, 
 Alexander Moncrieff, William Wilson, and 
 James Fisher — having been first suspended from 
 the exercise of ministerial functions and thereafter 
 declared to be no longer ministers of the National 
 Church, met on 5th December, 1733, in a humble 
 and lonely wayside inn at Gairney Bridge near 
 Kinross, and constituted themselves into what was 
 afterwards called " The Associate Presbytery." 
 Even when thus driven outside the pale of their 
 mother church and asserting separate jurisdiction, 
 the Fathers of the Secession and those who joined 
 them were careful to assert their adherence to 
 the principles of the true Presbyterian Covenanted 
 Church of Scotland in her doctrine, worship, govern- 
 ment, and disciphne ; their secession was from the 
 prevailing party in the Established Church ; and 
 their appeal was to the first Free^ Faithful, and 
 Reforming General Assembly. 
 
 §7. THE RELIEF PRESBYTERY OF 1761.— 
 For well-nigh twenty years after the first Secession 
 the forces of Patronage and Moderatism continued 
 to dominate the membership and ministry of the 
 State Church in Scotland. While the Church of 
 the Secession was rooting herself in thp affections 
 of God's people and branching out over the land, 
 the Establishment was becoming more lax in 
 doctrine and morals, more regardless of the con- 
 victions and wishes, the rights and liberties of con- 
 gregations. Another crisis was reached in connec- 
 tion with a settlement at Inverkeithing, when, in 
 1749, the Rev. Andrew Richardson of Broughton 
 
6x 
 
 received the presentation. The parishioners op- 
 posed, and the Presbytery of DunfermHne refused to 
 proceed with the induction. The case travelled the 
 weary way of Presbytery, Synod, and Commission, 
 till, in 1752, it came before the Assembly, when 
 that court instructed the Presbytery to proceed and 
 gave orders that five ministers and not three were 
 o form a quorum. Only three clerical members 
 put in an appearance on Thursday, the day ap- 
 pointed. Upon Friday six ministers were cited to 
 appear at the bar of the Assembly to answer for 
 their disobedience. One of the six, Thomas Gil- 
 lespie of Carnock, was deposed and thrust forth 
 from his parish. The motion for his deposition 
 was moved by the Rev. John Home, author of the 
 tragedy "Douglas," who, at an after-stage of his 
 career, only escaped being deposed by a timely 
 resignation, and it was seconded by WiUiam Robert- 
 son, afterwards Principal of Edinburgh University, 
 and leader of the Moderate party in its palmy days. 
 For a term of years Gillespie stood alone ; but on the 
 1271(1 October 1761, other two ministers — Thomas 
 Boston of Oxnam in Roxburghshire, and Thomas 
 Colter of Colingsburgh in Fifeshire, joined him 
 and his congregation and formed a Presbytery of 
 Relief, " for the relief of Christians oppressed in 
 their Christian privileges." 
 
 The rapid growth of dissent in Scotland, once the 
 exodus from the State Church had set in, was brought 
 unpleasantly before the General Assembly of 1765 
 by the " Schism Overture," in which it was stated 
 by Churchmen that 120 meeting-houses had been 
 erected, to which more than 100,000 persons. 
 
62 
 
 formerly in communion with the Established Church, 
 resorted. 
 
 § 8. MODERATISM DOMINANT. — Whatever 
 salutary influences the Secession and Relief 
 Churches may have exerted upon the religious life 
 of the country they cannot be said to have affected 
 the policy of those who formed in the Establish- 
 ment what the Fathers of the Secession termed 
 "the prevailing party." Under the leadership 
 of such men as Principal Robertso7i, Dr Hugh 
 Blair ^ Dr Alexander Carlyle^John Home and Prin- 
 cipal Hill of St Andrews, intrusions or forced 
 settlements were constantly and rigidly carried out 
 with a callous disregard of representations, peti- 
 tions, protests, and dissents ; the call of the people 
 was avowedly regarded as a useless formality, a 
 nugatory procedure, and military aid was invoked 
 to enforce the ecclesiastical mandate and the 
 patron's missive. How settlements were carried 
 out in these days can be gathered from what 
 took place in the parish of Shotts, the scene of 
 a great revival in the previous century. To this 
 parish in the middle ward of Lanarkshire there was 
 presented Mr Lawrence Wells. The presbytery 
 of the bounds found the knowledge of the pre- 
 sentee, particularly in the department of divinity, 
 to be " very low and mean," and his acquaintance 
 with the rules of grammar ^' very defective," while, 
 in aptness to teach, he came far short of the char- 
 acter which the apostle gives of a minister of the 
 Gospel. Notwithstanding this finding and repeated 
 refusals to proceed, the Assembly of 1768 pro- 
 nounced Mr Wells qualified, and ordered his ordina- 
 
63 
 
 tion to take place. A military force was called out 
 to over-awe the excited parishioners, bands of 
 whom nevertheless contrived to intercept members 
 on the day fixed for the ordination and forced them 
 to return to their manses ; and so, on reaching the 
 parish kirk, the soldiers found neither presbyters to 
 protect nor people to intimidate. The farce of an 
 ordination was afterwards carried through at the 
 table of the presbytery house in Hamilton, some ten 
 miles distant. A meeting house was quickly erected 
 in the neighbourhood to which the bulk of the 
 people betook themselves, and the illiterate intruder 
 was left in an empty church to minister to the pre- 
 centor and the beadle. 
 
 Another instance of the arbitrary way in which 
 the right of patronage was exercised under Moderate 
 management, and of the scenes to which it gave 
 rise, is to be found in the ecclesiastical annals of St 
 Ninian's, near Stirling. To this parish the minister 
 of Gargunnock, David Thomson by name, — an 
 aged and infirm man, received a presentation in 
 1767. The people opposed the induction, and for 
 seven years the Presbytery of Stirling contrived to 
 delay the intrusion. At last the Assembly of 1773 
 issued peremptory orders and required the presence 
 of every member of presbytery at the induction 
 service, all absentees to answer for themselves at 
 the bar of next Assembly. 
 
 When the coerced presbytery met, instead of pro- 
 ceeding in the ordinary way, the Moderator called 
 upon the presentee to stand up, and then addressed 
 him in a remarkable strain. He reminded the in- 
 truder that he had been opposed by all the elders of 
 
64 
 
 the congregation save one, by sixty of the heritors, 
 and by six hundred heads of famihes ; he informed 
 him that one minister of the Church had stated that 
 he would gladly go twenty miles to witness the de- 
 position of the Gargunnock incumbent rather than 
 his induction, and that 2000 other persons shared 
 that feeling ; he warned him that he could never 
 hope to be more than a "stipend-lifter" in St 
 Ninian's district, and that if he persisted he would 
 be despised, hated, and insulted ; and he conjured 
 him, by the mercies of God, by the number of souls 
 who would never hear him — never submit to him, in 
 view of a dying hour and his account to God, to 
 '■'■give it up" The old presentee broke the profound 
 silence that followed by assuring the Moderator of 
 his forgiveness, and calling upon him to proceed to 
 obey the orders of his superiors. The induction 
 went on, but without the usual questions being put, 
 without a prayer of consecration, and without 
 charges being delivered to minister and people. 
 For his conduct on the occasion the Moderator, Mr 
 Robert Findlay, was summoned before the Assembly 
 and sentenced to be severely rebuked. Leaning on 
 the bar with folded arms, the sturdy, undaunted 
 presbyter said in broad Doric, " Aweel, come awa' 
 wi' the rebuke, Moderator, it'll break nae banes.'' 
 
 § 9. THE REVIVAL OF EVANGELICAL LIFE 
 AND ACTION: JOHN ERSKINE, ANDREW 
 THOMSON.— All this time, with the leaven of 
 Moderatism and the force of Patronage in active 
 operation, evangelical life had not wholly died out 
 of the Church of Scotland. All along there had 
 been an evangelical party within her borders as 
 
65 
 
 well as outside her pale. For many years that 
 party had as leader Dr John Erskine, the col- 
 league of Principal Robertson in Greyfriars, Edin- 
 burgh. Sir Walter Scott has described Erskine 
 the preacher as Colonel Mannering is supposed 
 to have seen and heard him on a certain Sunday 
 in the Metropolis. On that occasion the pulpit 
 was occupied by a man of remarkable though 
 somewhat ungainly appearance. A narrow chest 
 and stooping posture, no gown, not even a Geneva 
 one, tumbled bands, and gestures the reverse of 
 gainly — these characteristics did not favourably im- 
 press the stranger. But they were speedily forgotten 
 when the sermon was reached and the preacher 
 warmed. Learning, metaphysical ingenuity, energy 
 of argument and delivery were all pressed into the 
 service of a Calvinistic and Evangelical discourse 
 which carried the thoughts of the well-read stranger 
 back to Reformation days. As a leader of the Evan- 
 gelical side of the House in the General Assembly, 
 Dr Erskine is seen to best advantage in the cele- 
 brated debate on Missions which took place in 1796. 
 Two overtures pleading for a favourable considera- 
 tion of the claims of missions were before the House. 
 Dr George Hill of St Andrews, the recognised leader 
 of the Moderates, prepared the way for Mr Hamil- 
 ton of Gladsmuir moving the rejection of both over- 
 tures. When the latter sat down, the venerable 
 leader of Evangelism (then in his 75th year) rose 
 and pointed to the Bible, which always lies on the 
 table of the Assembly. " Moderator," he said, " Rax 
 me that Bible " — one of those laconic sayings which 
 men never forget. The overtures were ultimately 
 
 £ 
 
66 
 
 dismissed by a majority of 14 in a house of 102 
 members, the Moderate majority agreeing with the 
 minister of Gladsmuir that it was improper and 
 absurd to propagate the gospel abroad while there 
 remained a single individual at home without the 
 means of religious knowledge. 
 
 Nearer the time of Evangelical ascendancy in the 
 Church, the leader of the phalanx was Dr Andrew 
 Thomson of St George's, Edinburgh. An ac- 
 knowledged prince among preachers and platform 
 speakers, a man of refined taste and musical cul- 
 ture, genial, mirthful, frank, fearless, Dr Thomson 
 did more than any of his predecessors to organise 
 the Evangelicals into a party, and to turn a struggling 
 minority into an invincible majority. Before his 
 sudden removal in 1831 prominent ministers up 
 and down the country were known and spoken of 
 as " Tamson's men." One of these "men" was 
 Thomas Chalmers, under whose magnificent lead 
 the cause of Evangelical truth and life was ere very 
 long to be carried to glorious success. 
 
 But the ascendancy of the old evangel was not 
 instantaneous, neither was it free from the action of 
 tidal ebb and flow. For in 1833, when the resolu- 
 tion had been taken to fight the battle of the people's 
 rights on the plan of the Veto^ a motion in that 
 direction was defeated in the Assembly by 149 votes 
 to 137, although introduced by Chalmers and sup- 
 ported by Lord Moncreiff, son of the former 
 leader, and at that time the acknowledged head of the 
 Scottish Bar. But a majority of 12 was no victory 
 to the prevaiUng party ; defeat to the minority was 
 simply a postponing of triumph. And that was only 
 
67 
 
 for a year. For, in 1834, substantially the same 
 motion was brought forward (when the Assembly 
 met in the Tron Church, Edinburgh,) and carried 
 by a majority of 46. 
 
 § 10. THE VETO ACT OF 1834.— The motion 
 made by Lord Moncreiff became the Veto Law, 
 of which these are the ruling affirmations : it is a 
 fundamental law of this Church that no pastor shall 
 be intruded on a congregation contrary to the will 
 of the people ; if, at the moderating in a call to a 
 vacant charge, the majority of the male heads of 
 families — members of the congregation — shall dis- 
 approve of the person in whose favour the call is 
 proposed, such disapproval shall be deemed suffici- 
 ent ground for the Presbytery rejecting him ; no 
 person shall be held to be entitled to disapprove 
 who shall refuse solemnly to declare that he is actu- 
 ated by no factious or malicious motive, but solely 
 by a conscientious regard to the spiritual interests 
 of himself or the congregation. There is nothing 
 revolutionary in this piece of carefully-worded legis- 
 lation. If any charge is to be brought against the 
 measure, it is one that attaches to half, and not 
 to extreme measures. In the judgment of the 
 biographer of Knox and Melville, who wrote with 
 the impartiality of an outsider, the General Assem- 
 bly ought not to have stopped short of a petition 
 to Parliament for the immediate and total abolition 
 of patronage as a thing inconsistent with the in- 
 herent freedom of any Church. But the time for 
 that was not yet. For the present, the Church of 
 Scotland contented herself with asserting the birth- 
 right privilege of the Christian people in the calling 
 
68 
 
 and settling of their pastors, leaving untouched the 
 right of the patron to present, and of the presentee 
 to accept, the benefice, apart from the spiritual 
 cure. 
 
 § II. THE AUCHTERARDER CASE. — The 
 Church might have reasonably expected this would 
 commend itself to the judgment of all Scotsmen. 
 Unhappily it failed to do so in the case of two Scots 
 — one a nobleman and patron, the other a licentiate 
 and presentee. At a meeting of the Presbytery of 
 the bounds on October 14, 1834, a presentation to 
 the vacant parish of Auchterarder, in the south part 
 of Perthshire, was produced in favour of Mr Robert 
 Young, residing at Dundee, and issued by the Right 
 Honourable Thomas Robert Drummond Hay, Earl 
 of Kinnoull. After the probationer had officiated 
 on two successive Sundays in the pulpit, vacant 
 through death, the Presbytery met to " moderate in 
 the call," to give, that is to say, the people an oppor- 
 tunity of expressing their concurrence in, or disap- 
 proval of, the proposed settlement. When, in a full 
 church, the form of call was read and presented 
 for the signatures of the heritors, elders, heads of 
 famihes, and parishioners, of a parish containing at 
 that time 3000 souls, there stepped forward three 
 individuals and attached their signatures to the 
 document. Of these only two were bond-fide mem- 
 bers. This abstention might, however, be nothing 
 more than the acquiescence of silence, or an indica- 
 tion of neutrality. To ascertain how the matter 
 stood, the Presbytery proceeded, in accordance with 
 the requirements of the Veto Law, to lay a third 
 document on the table alongside the presentation 
 
69 
 
 and the call, by signing which the male heads ot 
 families might express disapproval of the person 
 named in the other two papers. To that document, 
 out of an attested communion roll of 330 male 
 names, signatures to the number of 287 were 
 attached. After some delay, caused by appeals, 
 taken first to the Synod and then to the Assembly, 
 the Presbytery having met once more in the vacant 
 church on the 7th July 1835, "did now reject Mr 
 Young so far as regards the particular presentation 
 on this table." This ecclesiastical action was made 
 the ground of a purely civil one. The rejected 
 presentee, in conjunction with the patron, raised an 
 action against the Presbytery before the Court of 
 Session, the Supreme Civil Court in Scotland. 
 
 In itself there was nothing alarming and nothing 
 unprecedented in this procedure. Involving matters 
 both spiritual and civil, it had occurred before now 
 that a case which had been before the Church 
 judicatories required to be brought before the civil 
 tribunal. 
 
 As finally adjusted, however, the action in the 
 Auchterarder case went further than a demand for 
 a review of the proceedings of the Presbytery in 
 order simply to determine the destination of the 
 benefice and the stipend. The amended summons 
 contained a clause in which the Court of Session 
 was asked to declare that the rejection of Mr Young 
 by the Presbytery, on the ground of a veto, without 
 making trial of his qualifications and without 
 demanding a statement of objections, was uncon- 
 stitutional and illegal ; and that the ecclesiastical 
 court was bound to take him upon trials and to 
 
70 
 
 ordain him, if found qualified for the office and 
 work of the ministry. The pleadings were before 
 the whole court ; the judges gave their individual 
 opinions at great length ; and the decision of a 
 majority (8 to 5), was, that in rejecting Mr 
 Young on the sole ground that a majority 
 of the male heads of families had dissented, with- 
 out any reasons assigned, from his admission as 
 Minister, the Presbytery had acted to the hurt and 
 prejudice of the pursuer, illegally and in violation of 
 their duty and contrary to certain statutes, in 
 particular to the statute of Queen Anne restoring 
 patrons to their ancient rights. This sentence, 
 while it undertook to describe what the Presbytery 
 had done and declared that to be illegal, stopped 
 short of prescribing what they should now do. 
 
 And so, the General Assembly of 1838, when 
 instructing their law officers to take the decision to 
 the House of Lords, carefully restricted the case to 
 the question of civil rights and emoluments. 
 
 By that Court of final judgment in matters 
 secular, the appeal was dismissed and the sound- 
 ness of the Court of Session finding was affirmed. 
 This took place on the 2nd of May 1839, o'^ which 
 day Lord Cotterham and Lord Brougham delivered 
 judicial opinions adverse to Spiritual Independence 
 and the rights of the people. 
 
 § 12. THE BATTLE OF THE STANDARDS; 
 CANDLISH, MILLER, CUNNINGHAM. — The 
 story of the Auchterarder case has been given 
 with some detail, because with it the campaign 
 of "The Ten Years' Conflict" was opened. On 
 that bare ridge in Perthshire there were first heard 
 
71 
 
 the sounds of crossing weapons and clashing arms, 
 for on its rising ground the old banner was again 
 broadly displayed on which was inscribed Christ's 
 Crown and the Liberties of His people. As usual, 
 the area of conflict widened as the campaign went 
 on. Before the Auchterarder case had left the 
 Court of Session other cases had sprung up in 
 other quarters of the land, leading to new dis- 
 turbances of the Church's peace, fresh divisions in 
 her courts, and renewed collisions with the civil 
 power. The columns of newspapers and the pages 
 of innumerable pamphlets were thickly strewn with 
 the words Lethendy, Marnoch, Strathbogie, Cul- 
 salmond, and Stewarton. The names of three 
 champions, too, became prominent, and have ever 
 since been familiar as " household words." One of 
 these was Robert Smith Candlish. It was in 
 1839 that the successor of Andrew Thomson in St 
 George's pulpit first gave evidence of his fitness 
 to be a standard-bearer of the first rank. The 
 Assembly of that year was called to take up and 
 make known her position with reference to the de- 
 cision of the Lords in the Auchterarder case. For 
 the Evangelical party that position was formulated 
 by Dr Chalmers in a deliverance, which intimated to 
 the State that, if she was to continue to be Estab- 
 lished, the Church of Scotland must have for her 
 avowed and acknowledged duty obedience to Christ. 
 Two counter motions had been made and spoken to 
 — one, that of the Moderates surrendering the Veto 
 Act to the civil tribunals ; the other, that of the 
 Trimmers, who sought to evade a decisive finding 
 on either side. It was growing late, and, exhausted 
 
72 
 
 with a protracted debate, members began to call for 
 the vote. In these unfavourable circumstances 
 Candlish began to address an impatient house, and 
 was found to be grappling with the m.otion of com- 
 promise. With a wonderful lucid flow of sinewy 
 language the speaker disposed of mystifications and 
 confusions that lurked in the terms of the motion, 
 and then quickly made his way into the heart of the 
 question as one in which were involved both the 
 prerogatives of the office-bearers and the liberties of 
 the Christian people. On that 22nd May 1839, o^® 
 who had till then been little known took his place as 
 a debater of transcendent ability and a leader among 
 leaders. In the Dr Candlish of after years there was 
 found " the man who, more expressly than any other, 
 took the torch from the hand of Chalmers when the 
 old leader fell." Lord Brougham's speech on the 
 Auchterarder case was the occasion that revealed to 
 the Church what a tower of strength she possessed 
 in the brilliant Edinburgh preacher. It also brought 
 to the front our second standard-bearer — HUGH 
 Miller. When the report of the speech reached 
 remote Cromarty it fell into the hands of one who 
 had started in life as a mason, but was then a bank 
 official, cultivating literature and geology in spare 
 hours. After reading it Miller tossed wakefully 
 through a long night, and in the morning sat down 
 to state his views to the people of Scotland in the 
 form of an open letter addressed to Lord Brougham. 
 The manuscript was forwarded to Edinburgh, and 
 there brought under the notice of influential laymen 
 and ministers, with the result that in the end of De- 
 cember Hugh Miller arrived at the metropolis to 
 
73 
 
 become the editor of the Witness, an office he con- 
 tinued to hold till his death on Christmas Eve, 1856. 
 A geologist and literary artist of first rank, a man of 
 massive intellect and deep religious convictions, he 
 had a patriotism which burned like a live coal in 
 his breast, and threw a glow over all his journal- 
 istic writing. So when, with a mind steeped in the 
 best traditions of Scottish story, he flung his whole 
 soul into the fray and stood in the thickest of the 
 fight from 1839 to 1843, it was as a champion of the 
 rights and liberties of his countrymen that he 
 rendered yeoman service. " Liberty of rejection, 
 without statement of reasons," was the device 
 blazoned on his shield ; writing, not as a minister 
 nor as an office-bearer, but as one of the people, his 
 contention was, " it matters not that we should have 
 no grounds on which to condemn : we are justified 
 in our rejection if we cannot approve." What 
 Chalmers was in the pulpit and Candlish was on the 
 floor of the Assembly, Hugh Miller proved himself 
 to be in the columns of the IVifjiess, the exponent in 
 strong Saxon speech of laymen's convictions and 
 claims — truly a standard-bearer for the people in their 
 thousands to rally round. The third name was that 
 of William Cunningham, who dealt his first blow 
 in the strife when the battle of the call and of non-in- 
 trusion began in the Assembly of 1 833. Dr Chalmers 
 had introduced, and Lord Moncreiff had supported, 
 the plan of the Veto. The debate had lasted from 
 early morning, and was in that languishing stage 
 when it seems impossible to say anything fresh or to 
 restrain the impatience of the house for a division. 
 A tall young man, large-limbed, broad-shouldered, 
 
74 
 
 deep-chested, with very large head covered by dark 
 curly hair, arose under the gallery beside a pillar 
 and began to speak. The attention of wearied 
 members was soon roused ; and before the speech 
 was concluded a member had whispered to Dr 
 Cook, leader of the Moderate battalion, "That's 
 Andrew come back." It was one of "Tamson's 
 men" who stepped into the arena in which he made 
 himself a name as the most powerful logician, the 
 most formidable debater, and the most luminous 
 expounder of the constitution and history of the 
 Church of Scotland in all the ten years' conflict. 
 Cunningham figured grandly in the Marnoch case 
 and in the Strathbogie difficulties. A majority of the 
 northern Presbytery (seven clerical members out o 
 twelve) had been suspended from the functions of the 
 ministry by the Commission of Assembly. This was 
 done because of efforts made by them to intrude 
 upon the parish of Marnoch a presentee, Mr 
 Edwards by name, against the convictions of an 
 overwhelming majority of the people, and in de- 
 fiance of the instructions of their ecclesiastical 
 superiors not to proceed to ordination. Undeterred 
 by this sentence the suspended seven assembled as 
 if in presbytery, took Mr Edwards upon trials, de- 
 clared him duly qualified, procured interdicts from 
 the Court of Session to prevent ministers coming 
 into their parishes to discharge any ministerial 
 functions, and then accepted an order from the 
 Court of Session to "receive and admit" Mr Ed- 
 wards as minister of Marnoch. This mandate from 
 the civil power they met to carry into effect on the 
 2 1st January 1841. A heavy snow gale had visited 
 
75 
 
 the north, and covered the ground to the depth of 
 two feet. But although the land lay shrouded in 
 snow, and on high-way and by-way alike there were 
 gathered large and wellnigh impassable wreaths, 
 yet when the clerical and legal actors arrived on 
 the scene in carriages drawn by four horses each, 
 they found two thousand persons standing on the 
 slushy ground before the church door waiting for 
 admittance. 
 
 In a church densely filled with parishioners, who 
 occupied the area, and with strangers who filled the 
 galleries and clustered in dense masses outside the 
 windows and doors, it was demanded by an elder 
 of the congregation in what name and by what 
 authority the suspended ministers had met there. 
 " By the authority of the National Church, and in 
 the name of the Lord Jesus Christ," was the answer, 
 which caused a shudder to pass through the audi- 
 ence. When further asked whether their appearance 
 was sanctioned by the General Assembly, or was 
 made in direct opposition thereto, the only answer 
 that could be extracted was, " We are sent here as 
 the Presbytery of Strathbogie, and under the pro- 
 tection of the law of the land." There was then 
 read by the spokesman of the congregation two 
 protests, the one signed by all the elders and the 
 other by 450 communicants, after which the people 
 of Marnoch rose from their seats, gathered up their 
 Bibles, and, without tumult or outcry, moved out of 
 the church. They went out with bowed heads, all 
 \n grief, many in tears. "Will they a/l leave?" 
 someone was overheard whispering in the solitary 
 pew that contained the intrusionists. Yes, they all 
 
76 
 
 left, never to return. No sooner was the area cleared 
 than a mixed multitude from the galleries and out- 
 side rushed in with tumult and flinging about of 
 snowballs. When quietness had been restored by 
 the intervention of a magistrate of Evangelical sym- 
 pathies, the form or farce of ordination was pro- 
 ceeded with ; " an ordination," writes Dr Hanna, 
 "altogether unparalleled in the history of the 
 Church, performed by a presbytery of suspended 
 clergymen, on a call by a single communicant, 
 against the desire of the patron, in face of the 
 strenuous opposition of a united Christian congre- 
 gation, in opposition to the express injunction of the 
 General Assembly, at the sole bidding and under 
 the sole authority of the Court of Session." For 
 the seven rebel ministers the hour of retribution 
 came upon the 27th May 1841, when they stood at 
 the bar of the Assembly. Chalmers himself made 
 the motion that they should now receive the severest 
 sentence the Church can inflict, that of deposition 
 from the holy ministry. In support of this motion 
 William Cunningham deHvered an argumentative 
 speech, the links of which were of hammered iron, 
 the logic of which was as cogent as it was merciless 
 in sweep and force. He brought three charges 
 against the offenders at the bar. They had broken 
 the laws of the Church : they had violated their 
 ordination vows : they had been guilty of a sin 
 against the Lord Jesus Christ. Each of these 
 charges he drove home up to the hilt, and then 
 called upon the Assembly to pronounce the only 
 sentence that would be ratified in heaven — a 
 sentence of deposition. By 222 against 125 the 
 
77 
 
 Assembly responded to his call, and in the early 
 hour of next morning the deposition was solemnly 
 pronounced by Dr Chalmers. 
 
 § 13. NEGOTIATIONS. — From an early stage of 
 the conflict efforts were put forth to heal the breach 
 which was ever widening, and to avert the rupture 
 that grew more and more imminent. 
 
 Large and influential deputations were sent from 
 Scotland to London and interviewed statesmen and 
 politicians ; lengthened correspondence was engaged 
 in by cabinet ministers and church leaders ; bills 
 were drafted by noblemen and presented to parlia- 
 ment for the settlement of the Scottish Church 
 question ; and unofficial negotiations were set on 
 foot by an estimable and disinterested baronet in 
 Scotland — SiR George Sinclair, with the view of 
 finding a way out of the difficulty. This state of 
 matters lasted from the summer of 1839 till the 
 winter of 1841 ; but it resulted in little. As they 
 looked back upon what had been attempted, all 
 parties discovered they had been endeavouring to 
 make their way through what Dr Robert Candlish 
 fitly described as " shoal and quicksands of doubtful 
 negotiations, depending on doubtful constructions 
 and interpretations of doubtful clauses." 
 
 § 14. THE CLAIM OF RIGHT: ALEXANDER 
 DUN LOP. — When the evangelical majority in the 
 Church of Scotland found themselves within mea- 
 surable distance of the Assembly of 1842, they 
 realised that the crisis was near, and set themselves 
 to prepare a manifesto to be laid before the Queen, 
 before the Christian people of her realm, and before 
 the Churches of the Reformation throughout the 
 
78 
 
 world. This manifesto was to state the truths for 
 vhich the Church of Scotland had always con- 
 fended, the rights she regarded as imperilled by the 
 encroachments of the Court of Session, and the 
 hardship to which she had been subjected in con- 
 sequence of civil intrusion and interference. The 
 task of preparing this document was entrusted to Mr 
 Alexander Murray Dunlop, afterwards Legal 
 Adviser of the Free Church, and for sixteen years 
 Member of Parliament for Greenock. Deemed 
 of highest authority in Scottish ecclesiastical law, 
 Mr Dunlop was esteemed and beloved for the 
 manliness of his spirit, his nobleness of aspira- 
 tion after the good, the just, the fair, the honour- 
 able. 
 
 Originally in the form of an " Overture," this 
 paper, when adopted by the Assembly on the motion 
 of Dr Chalmers, and carried by a majority of 131, 
 became the " Claim, Declaration, and Protest, anent 
 the encroachments of the Court of Session," a title 
 which in its abbreviated form of " The Claim of 
 Right," takes us back to the era of the Revolution. 
 After a preamble containing eighteen paragraphs, 
 dealing with historical and legal details, the mani- 
 festo formulates the Church's Claim to possess 
 and exercise her liberties, government, discipline, 
 rights and privileges according to law ; her DE- 
 CLARATION that it is impossible for her to intrude 
 ministers on reclaiming congregations, or carry on 
 the government of Christ's Church subject to the 
 coercion attempted by the Court of Session ; and 
 her Protest that all acts of the Parliament of 
 Great Britain passed without the consent of this 
 
79 
 
 Church and nation, in alteration of, or derogation 
 to, the government, discipline, rights and privileges 
 of this Church, as also all sentences of Courts in 
 contravention of the same are, and shall be, in 
 themselves void and null, and of no legal force or 
 effect. The document concludes with an invitation 
 to all the office-bearers and members of this Church, 
 who are willing to suffer for their allegiance to their 
 adorable King and Head, to stand by the Church 
 and by each other, in defence of the great doctrine 
 of the sole Headship of the Lord Jesus over His 
 Church, and of the liberties and privileges, whether 
 of office-bearers or people, which rest upon it ; and 
 to unite in supplications to Almighty God that He 
 would be pleased to turn the hearts of the rulers of 
 this kingdom to keep unbroken the faith pledged 
 to this Church in former days, and the obligations, 
 come under to God Himself, to preserve and main- 
 tain the government and discipline of this Church 
 in accordance with His Word ; or otherwise, that 
 He would give strength to this Church to endure 
 resignedly the loss of the temporal benefits of an 
 Establishment, and the personal sufferings and 
 sacrifices to which they may be called ; and that, 
 in His own good time, He would restore to them 
 these benefits, the fruits of the struggles and suffer- 
 ings of their fathers in times past in the same cause ; 
 and thereafter give them grace to employ them 
 more effectually than hitherto they have done for 
 the manifestation of His glory. 
 
 § 15. THE CONVOCATION.— Before any notice 
 was taken of the Claim by Her Majesty's Ministers, 
 another document had been transmitted from Edin- 
 
8o 
 
 burgh to London. It emanated from a gathering 
 of evangehcal ministers which took place in No- 
 vember 1842, and which is known as the Con- 
 vocation^ at the opening of which Dr Chalmers 
 preached a remarkable sermon from the words 
 " Unto the upright there ariseth light in the dark- 
 ness," and in the course of which Robert Murray 
 M'Cheyne, who did not Hve to see the Disruption, 
 poured forth a memorable prayer. The deliberations 
 and discussions of this Convocation, attended by 
 465 ministers who came from every county in Scot- 
 land in the dreary and wintry month of November, 
 were characterised by a remarkable elevation of 
 spiritual tone, by a spirit of deep prayerfulness, 
 and by the calm earnestness of men who knew the 
 issues at stake, who had counted the cost, and were 
 prepared to sacrifice their earthly all rather than 
 prove recreant to their Lord and the rights of His, 
 and, under Him, their people. 
 
 Two series of resolutions were adopted by the 
 clerical convocation, and the substance of them 
 was embodied in a memorial addressed to Sir 
 Robert Peel and the other members of the Cabinet. 
 In the course of this weighty, calmly-worded docu- 
 ment, the question about to be submitted to the 
 decision of Parliament and the verdict of the nation 
 is stated to be nothing less than the question 
 whether the Church, unalterably established in 
 Scotland, is to be preserved inviolate, according to 
 the faith of treaties, or whether this great kingdom 
 is to commit the heinous offence of not only break- 
 ing the national faith, but disowning the authority of 
 Christ in His own house, and refusing to recognise 
 
8i 
 
 His Church as a free spiritual society, instituted by 
 Him, and governed by His laws alone. 
 
 § i6. THE ANSWER TO CLAIM AND ME- 
 MORIAL. — To these two representations the final 
 answer was received on January 4, 1843. ^^ came 
 in the form of a letter from Sir James Graham, 
 then Home Secretary. In the course of a long and 
 elaborate communication to Dr Welsh, as Modera- 
 tor in 1842, the claim was pronounced to be "un- 
 reasonable," and the writer intimated that the 
 government "could not advise Her Majesty to 
 acquiesce in these demands." 
 
 § 17. THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND'S LAST 
 EFFORT TO AVERT SEPARATION FROM THE 
 STATE. — A special meeting of the Commission of 
 Assembly was summoned to receive the decision of 
 the Queen's Ministers, at which the resolution was 
 formed to present petitions to both Houses of Par- 
 liament, praying for redress and protection from the 
 legislature as the supreme power in the State. On 
 the evening of the 17th March 1843, the petition 
 was brought under the consideration of the House 
 of Commons by Mr Fox Maule, afterwards Lord 
 Panmure, and thereafter Earl of Dalhousie, 
 who was supported in his pleadings for a committee 
 of enquiry and, if need be, a declaratory act, by Sir 
 George Grey, Mr Campbell of Monzie, Mr P. M. 
 Stewart, and Mr Rutherfurd. The motion was op- 
 posed by the Government, and the grounds of the 
 opposition were stated by Sir James Graham, Lord 
 John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, and Sir William 
 Follett. After a debate which extended over two 
 nights, the motion was rejected by a majority of 135. 
 
82 
 
 The only morsel of comfort the people of Scotland 
 could extract from a study of the division lists was 
 the discovery that, while twelve Scottish representa- 
 tives voted with the majority, no fewer than twenty- 
 five went with the minority. 
 
 It was hard that in a matter so dear to Scotland 
 the voice of Scotland was thus overborne ; it was an 
 outrage of all equity that a question affecting the 
 constitution of the ancient Scottish Church was in 
 Parliament decided by those who were for the most 
 part members of the Erastian Anglican Establish- 
 ment and by English politicians who refused to 
 believe in such a thing as concurrent or co-ordinate 
 jurisdiction, and who could not be made to under- 
 stand what is meant by spiritual independence. 
 
 Now that the demands of the Church of Scotland 
 established and endowed by the State had been met 
 with a clear, unqualified No, the only thing there 
 remained for her to do was to set her house in order 
 and face what all who could read the signs of the 
 times discerned to be now inevitable — separation 
 from the encroaching State and the vitiated 
 Establishment. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 A.D. 1843-1893. 
 
 THE FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND AND HER 
 FIFTY YEARS. 
 
 [For information regarding the matters treated of in the Sections 
 from I to 8 inclusive, books mentioned at the head of the pre- 
 vious chapter ought to be consulted. In addition to these the 
 
83 
 
 following are of special value : - "Annals of the Disruption," by 
 Dr Thomas Brown ; "Disruption Worthies," with Introduction 
 by Lord Ardmillan, and Historical Sketch of the Free Church, 
 by Dr Wylie ; "Journals" of Lord Cockburn ; Dr W. Garden 
 Blaikie's "After Fifty Years"; "Why are we Free Church- 
 men?" by J. M. M'Candlish; Dr Peter Bayne's "The Free 
 Church of Scotland: Her Origin, Founders, and Testimony," 
 Second Edition, 1894 Under " Thomas Chalmers," in addition 
 to the classic work of Dr Hanna, there are Dr Donald Fraser's 
 "Thomas Chalmers," published in 1881, and Mrs Oliphant's 
 "Thomas Chalmers: Preacher, Philosopher, and Statesman," 
 1893. For complete and well-arranged information regarding the 
 life and work of the Free Church from 1843 to the present day 
 the work is Dr N. L. Walker's " Chapters from the History of 
 the Free Church of Scotland," being the Chalmers Lectures for 
 1895. For the legal aspects and bearings of the Cardross Case 
 the student will do well to consult " The Law of Creeds in 
 Scotland," by A. T. Innes, pp. 254-264, 284-303. The general 
 reader will find a luminous statement of The Case from the Free 
 Church view-point in a speech by Dr Candlish, delivered in the 
 November Commission of i860, and appended by Dr Bayne to 
 Hugh Miller's volume, "The Headship of Christ, and the 
 Rights of the Christian People," first published in that year. The 
 account of the Jubilee Assembly is taken from the Blue Book for 
 1893. The testimony of Lord Macaulay to the historical suc- 
 cession of the Free Church given in Section 17 will be found in 
 full in "Speeches of Lord Macaulay, corrected by Himself," 
 1867. The particular Speech was delivered in the House of 
 Commons on 9th July 1845, on the subject of Theological Tests 
 in the Scottish Universities.] 
 
 § I. THE 18TH OF MAY 1843. — From a 
 very early hour in that day there was an unusual 
 thronging of the streets in Edinburgh, old and 
 new. As the morning wore on towards noon 
 the flocking was in the direction of Holyrood Palace, 
 where, according to ancient usage, the Lord High 
 Commissioner held his levee. Then, through 
 densely crowded streets, with sound of trumpet and 
 drum, the sunlight flashing on the swords and 
 
84 
 
 helmets of the cavalry that lined the route, the 
 Commissioner's procession moved up to the Church 
 of St Giles, famous in Scottish story. There it fell 
 to Dr David Welsh, Professor of Church History 
 in the University of Edinburgh and Moderator of the 
 Assembly in the previous year, to open the ecclesias- 
 tical proceedings of the day by preaching to the 
 assembled fathers and brethren, in presence of the 
 Queen's representative. This he did, with an 
 appropriateness that thrilled his audience, from the 
 Scripture precept, "Let every man be fully persuaded 
 in his own mind." 
 
 Again the masses of spectators were in motion, 
 and the interest now converged upon St Andrew's 
 Church, George Street, in which the Assembly had 
 been appointed to meet. The doors of the building 
 had been opened between four and five in the 
 morning to admit ticket-holders content to sit for nine 
 weary hours, if only they could secure a position 
 favourable for seeing and hearing. By the time the 
 Moderator took the chair and his Grace entered the 
 church, every inch of sitting and standing room was 
 occupied, and the galleries, the area, and the 
 passages were completely blocked. The retiring 
 Moderator opened the proceedings with prayer, 
 ministers and elders standing around and in front of 
 him. When all had resumed their seats, Dr Welsh 
 rose, and, amid hushed silence, made the announce- 
 ment that, although the time had come for mak- 
 ing up the roll, in ordinary circumstances, yet, in 
 consequence of proceedings sanctioned by Her 
 Majesty's Government and the Legislature, and of 
 an infringement of the liberties of the Church, they 
 
85 
 
 could not constitute the Court without a violation of 
 the terms of the union between Church and State in 
 this land. He then read a document which contained 
 in summary The Claim of Right in the form of 
 A Protest of Commissioners to the General 
 Assembly. The reading ended, Dr Welsh laid the 
 document on the table, bowed respectfully to the 
 Commissioner, left the chair, and moved along the 
 aisle to the main door of the church. As he did so 
 he was followed by Dr Chalmers, who, with dreamy 
 countenance, had been standing beside him, by Dr 
 Gordon, by Dr Macdonald of Ferintosh, by Dr 
 Macfarlan of Greenock^ and by Mr Campbell of 
 Monzie. After these there filed out the younger 
 champions in the well-fought fight — Cunningham, 
 Guthrie, Candlish, Dunlop, Buchanan, and 
 many others. As the leaders of the column reached 
 the open air and were recognised by the multitude 
 standing in front of the fast-emptying building, intim- 
 ation of what was taking place passed like wildfire 
 through the vast masses beyond, evoking the ringing 
 shout of satisfaction and of thankfulness, "They come 
 they come ! Thank God they come ! " Dense as was 
 the crowd, a way was made through the heart of it 
 to admit of the withdrawing commissioners falling 
 into line and walking three abreast ; in which fashion 
 the column moved slowly down the long slope that 
 leads in the direction of the Firth of Forth, and 
 made its way towards a northern suburb of the city, 
 Canonmills by name, where Tanfield Hall, a 
 structure capable of holding upwards of three 
 thousand people, had been fitted up for the occasion. 
 Once more the interest of the day shifted, and it 
 
86 
 
 culminated in what was done and said in the Free 
 Assembly of 1843. Long before the procession 
 reached Canonmills, the Hall had been densely 
 crowded in every part accessible to the public, and 
 by the time members had taken their places in the 
 space allotted to them, an immense assemblage 
 overflowed the accommodation of the structure. 
 From the Moderator's chair Dr Welsh again en- 
 gaged in prayer, and thereafter, in a few well- 
 chosen sentences, nominated Dr Chalmers as his 
 successor, a proposal which drew forth a burst of 
 rapturous applause from the audience. 
 
 § 2. THOMAS CHALMERS.— This "intrinsically 
 chief Scottish man of his time," as Carlyle styles 
 him, had three birth-places. He was born into this 
 world at Anstruther in the East Neuk of Fife on 
 the 17th March 1780. The city of St Andrews, 
 where he was student, lecturer, and, at a later stage 
 of his career, professor, was his intellectual birth- 
 place. And the parish of Kilmany, in the northern 
 corner of his native county, where he began his 
 ministry in 1803, was the place where he was born 
 again, and experienced the great change of conver- 
 sion. When he left his rural charge in 181 5 and 
 became a Glasgow minister, he entered upon that 
 marvellous popularity as preacher, lecturer, and 
 platform speaker, which remained undiminished 
 and unwaning to the close of his life. But the 
 plaudits of the dense crowds that thronged to hear 
 him were of no concern to him. That on which his 
 large heart was set, and on which he flung his 
 vast resources, was the social and spiritual elevation 
 of the people living in darkest Glasgow. 
 
87 
 
 A wider field for his giant energies opened up 
 when, after being for eight years a Glasgow minister, 
 and for other fiv^e Professor of Moral Philosophy in 
 St Andrews, he was appointed, in 1828, to the chair of 
 Theology in the Metropolitan University. By that 
 time the Church of Scotland had roused herself from 
 the long sleep of Moderatism, and the line of battle 
 was being formed for the ten years' conflict. With 
 his splendid record of work in behalf of his country- 
 men it was easy to foretell in which camp he would 
 be found. He believed, indeed, with all his heart in 
 an Established Church as the expression of the 
 nation's recognition of God ; and he delivered in 
 London a series of lectures, each lecture being a 
 brilliant oration, in defence of State Establishments 
 of religion. But he did not hesitate to tell the 
 dukes, marquises, earls, baronets, bishops, and 
 members of parliament who crowded Hanover 
 Square Rooms that, whatever might be the case in 
 the larger and richer Church of the South, which 
 owned the Sovereign of the realm as its earthly head 
 and could not so much as nominate a bishop with- 
 out the royal leave, it was otherwise with the 
 Church across the Border. " In things ecclesias- 
 tical," was the Scotsman's boast, " the highest power 
 of our Church is amenable to no higher power on 
 earth for its decisions. It can exclude, it can de- 
 prive, it can depose at pleasure. There is not one 
 thing which the State can do to our independent and 
 indestructible Church but strip her of her tempor- 
 alities. The magistrate might withdraw his pro- 
 tection, and she cease to be an Establishment ; but 
 in all the high matters of sacred and spiritual juris- 
 
diction she would be the same as before. With or 
 without an Establishment she, in these, is the un- 
 fettered mistress of her doings. The king by him- 
 self, or by his representative, may be the spectator 
 of our proceedings, but what Lord Chatham said of 
 the poor man's house is true in all its parts of the 
 Church to which I have the honour to belong. ' In 
 England every man's house is his castle ; not that it 
 is surrounded with walls and battlements ; it may be 
 a straw-built shed, every wind of heaven may whistle 
 round it, every element of heaven may enter it — but 
 the king cannot, the king dare not.' " And so, where 
 the interdicts of the Courts of Session and the 
 decisions of Parliament made it manifest that the 
 State claimed the right to do more than adjust 
 endowments and allocate benefices, that it even 
 dared to intrude itself into the region of the spiritual, 
 Chalmers at once ranked himself among Scottish 
 Non-intrusionists, and soon became the champion of 
 the Church of Scotland Free. From the position 
 he took up in the first shock of the collision he never 
 resiled. In his opening address on that memorable 
 1 8th May 1843 he asserted that, by refusing to grant 
 the claim of the Church, the Legislature had pro- 
 claimed subjection to the Civil Power, even in 
 spiritual things, to be a condition of Establishment ; 
 and that was a condition the acceptance of which 
 neither the constitution of the Church nor the con- 
 sciences of her enlightened people could tolerate. 
 " We are compelled," added the Moderator, " though 
 with great reluctance and deep sorrow of heart, to 
 quit the advantages of the British Establishment, 
 because she has fallen from her original principles, 
 
89 
 
 in the hope that we shall be suffered to prosecute our 
 labours in peace on the ground of British toleration." 
 And all through the three years of life that re- 
 mained to him after his last great public function 
 as the first Moderator of the Free Church never did 
 a doubt cross his mind as to the right of the side he 
 had taken, never did a shadow of regret disturb the 
 satisfaction with which he looked back upon his 
 separation from the State Church. With unfalter- 
 ing adherence to the principles and policy of the 
 Church of '43, he gave himself to the duties of the 
 Divinity Chair in the New College, of which he was 
 appointed Principal ; while true to the passion of 
 his earlier years for church extension and Christian 
 endeavour, he founded and fostered with loving 
 assiduity a Territorial Mission in the West Port of 
 Edinburgh, at that time a haunt of crime and a hot- 
 bed of vice. 
 
 The end of that remarkable career was sublimely 
 peaceful. On the morning of the 31st May 1847 he 
 was found in bed, half erect, his head reclining 
 gently on the pillow ; the expression of his counten- 
 ance that of fixed and majestic repose. He had 
 been dead for hours. When the grave in Grange 
 Cemetery closed upon all that was mortal of Thomas 
 Chalmers, "it was," as Hugh Miller fitly said, "the 
 dust of a Presbyterian minister which the coffin 
 contained, and yet they were burying him amid 
 the tears of a nation and with more than kingly 
 honours." 
 
 § 3. THE DEED OF DEMISSION.— On Tues- 
 day, the 23rd of May 1843, the separation of the 
 Disruption day was formally completed by the 
 
90 
 
 signing- of a document, called the "^^/ of Separatioti 
 mid Deed of Detnission by Ministers^'' The signing 
 of that legal instrument, by which 474 ministers did 
 separate from and abandon the present Ecclesi- 
 astical Establishment in Scotland, and did abdicate 
 and renounce the status and privileges of parochial 
 ministers with all rights and emoluments pertaining 
 to them by virtue thereof, went on from noon till 
 late evening, and by the time the last signature was 
 adhibited, more than ^100,000 a year had been 
 signed away. The scene of the signing of the Deed 
 was witnessed by a vast gathering of spectators, who 
 maintained respectful silence as one after another 
 answered to the roll-call, advanced to the table, and 
 affixed his name to a paper by which he disestab- 
 lished and disendowed himself. It is this scene 
 which forms the central incident in Mr D. O. Hill's 
 picture of the Disruption, the original of which now 
 adorns the walls of the Free Presbytery Hall in 
 Edinburgh. The venerable divine represented on 
 the canvas as giving his adhesion to the deed of 
 renunciation is Dr Patrick Macfarlan of Greenock, 
 whose living was at that time the richest in Scotland. 
 §4. WORSHIP IN STRANGE PLACES.— After 
 this came the parting with the parish churches and 
 manses. In the case of Free Church congregations in 
 cities and towns temporary accommodation was found 
 in halls, disused places of worship, and in churches 
 of other denominations, the use of which, at separate 
 hours, was readily granted. But in rural districts, 
 where no such arrangement was possible. Disruption 
 congregations were forced to meet in strange struc- 
 tures and amid very humble surroundings. Barns 
 
91 
 
 and stables, old mills and grain lofts, wool-stores, 
 distilleries and malt-barns, coal-sheds, cart-sheds 
 and saw-pits, turf cottages and canvas tents were 
 all resorted to, and, when everything else failed, the 
 services were conducted in the open air, among 
 green fields and wooded glens, on the mountain 
 side, or along the sea-shore. The ministers of 
 those days had stirring fire-side stories for the young 
 folk. One could recall preaching on the margin of 
 Loch Rannoch on an October Sabbath, the most 
 inclement day of all the season, when the spray 
 was now and again drenching his hearers, and the 
 wind reached such a height that at times he could 
 not hear his own voice. Another could describe 
 the scene at Durness, in Sutherlandshire, on a 
 memorable Sabbath in February 1844. The people 
 worshipped in a canvas tent pitched in a gravel-pit. 
 There had been a heavy snow-fall in the north, 
 and about the middle of the sermon there came a 
 storm accompanied by a fierce blast. The cloth of 
 the tent was split from top to bottom. The people 
 sat still ; some of the young men, expert at the 
 furling of sails, secured the fluttering mass to the 
 poles ; the minister turned his back to the blast, 
 covered his head with a handkerchief, and finished 
 his discourse ; the Highlanders crouched a little 
 closer to each other, drew their plaids and cloaks 
 tighter round them, and then fixed their attention 
 on the sermon as if nothing had happened. In 
 spite of such inconveniences and discomforts the 
 summer, autumn, and winter of the Disruption year 
 were a singular time of blessing in broad Scotland. 
 It was a season of refreshing and of spiritual revival. 
 
92 
 
 Never was there greater power in preaching, never 
 greater relish and earnestness in hearing, and so 
 never were there brighter or happier Sabbaths. 
 Jehovah Shammah — the Lord was there. 
 
 § 5. SITE-REFUSING.— In course of time the 
 majority of Free Church congregations were occu- 
 pants of ecclesiastical structures of stone and lime, 
 which, if not so ornate or imposing as those of the 
 present day, were at least weather-proof. But there 
 were some districts of the country in which church 
 building was prohibited, and every attempt even to 
 pitch a tent was sternly interdicted. This was the 
 case where there were landed proprietors who, out 
 of bitter hostility to the Free Church, and with the 
 hope of leading the people back again to the de- 
 serted parish churches by a timely display of firm- 
 ness, or, failing that, of driving them back by sheer 
 stress of weather, took up the attitude of persistent 
 site-refusers. So scandalous was the bigoted in- 
 tolerance thus displayed, so cruel was the outrage 
 thus inflicted on God-fearing, law-abiding subjects, 
 that the attention of Government was directed to it, 
 with the result that, in 1847, a Select Parhamentary 
 Committee was appointed to inquire if it was the 
 case that large numbers of Her Majesty's subjects 
 were deprived of the means of Religious Worship 
 by the refusal of certain proprietors to grant them 
 sites for the erection of churches. The condition of 
 things brought before this body and recorded by 
 them in their official reports was such as drew forth 
 alike the pity and the indignation of all Christendom. 
 The minutes of evidence teem with cases of large 
 congregations that had only the open air in which 
 
93 
 
 to worship, meeting in the depth of winter, under 
 drenching rains and bHnding snow-storms, in the pine 
 forests of Strathspey, some 700 feet above the sea 
 level, or on the storm-swept coast of the Atlantic, or 
 in gravel-pits which in spring tides were under high- 
 water mark, or, as at Strontian, going out to sea in 
 boats to worship in a floating church moored some 1 50 
 yards from the shore. In the south of Scotland two 
 cases of site-refusing attained unenviable notoriety. 
 There was that of Canonbie, a rural parish in Dum- 
 friesshire, the land of which formed part of the 
 broad acres of the Duke of Buccleuch, and the 
 cultivators of which were, for the most part, his 
 tenants at will. Here, when the winter of 1843 was 
 approaching, a canvas tent was placed upon a moor 
 from which a few stalks of heather might be gathered, 
 but where no kind of vegetation fit for pasturage 
 could be found. But from that waste land the tent 
 was speedily dislodged by a Sheriff's interdict at 
 the instance of the ducal proprietor. The only 
 piece of earth not included in the far-reaching lands 
 of Buccleuch was the public highway under the 
 charge of the road-trustees, and thither, when 
 ejected from the barren moss, the Free Church men, 
 women, and children of Canonbie parish were forced 
 to betake themselves. There, on the open grassy 
 side of the public road, all through the winter months, 
 often in swirling, drifting snow, did that outcast con- 
 gregation meet to worship God, to hear the Gospel, 
 and to have the Sacraments of Baptism and the 
 Lord's Supper dispensed. 
 
 Then in the northern division of the same county, 
 1500 feet above the sea, stands Wanlockhead, one 
 
94 
 
 of the most remarkable villages in Scotland. Its 
 thatched cottages are inhabited by workers in the 
 lead mines of the district. Of the 800 villagers three- 
 fourths identified themselves with the Church of the 
 exodus, as did also their minister. Petitions for a 
 site being either not acknowledged or refused, and 
 permission to meet in an empty school-room being 
 declined, the Sabbath services were conducted 
 sometimes on the bare hill -side, at other times in 
 such hollows as gave some shelter from the fury of 
 the blast in a region where even in summer the 
 wind blows chill and keen, while in winter it has 
 occasionally been found impossible for a human 
 being to stand for an hour in the open air. One 
 winter a tent was tried ; but the fierce winds proved 
 too much for canvas, and the structure was in two 
 months' time levelled to the ground. Eventually, 
 when the sixth winter was at hand, permission was 
 craved to erect a wooden shed. No notice was 
 taken of the application, but silence being con- 
 strued to indicate toleration, the erection was pro- 
 ceeded with. So soon as the sides were finished 
 minister and people gladly availed themselves of 
 the roofless shelter, and two months later they 
 joined in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, 
 thankful to be protected from the inclemency of the 
 climate and the season, though it was only by a 
 wooden shed. 
 
 § 6. BUILDING MANSES FOR HOMELESS 
 MINISTERS: THOMAS GUTHRIE.— Of the 474 
 ministers who signed the " Act of Separation," by 
 far the greater number left the Assembly, not only 
 to preach their last sermon in the parish church, but 
 
95 
 
 also to dismantle the rooms, extinguish the fire 
 upon the hearth, and turn the key in the door of 
 the manse. The pain involved in this act of " De- 
 mission " was made all the more bitter by the unworthy 
 attempts of certain lairds and factors to prevent 
 parishioners giving even temporary accommodation 
 to the outed families, and by the miserably inade- 
 quate quarters with which, in many cases, ministers 
 were forced to content themselves. Frequently 
 wives and children were lodged in the nearest 
 town, while the head of the household was left to 
 shift for himself And truly the shift was often a 
 poor, and even a terrible, one. Thus the only place 
 the minister of Kilmalie, in Glenelg, could get for a 
 dwelling was a hut 12 feet square and 6 feet high, 
 so open that blankets and bedcovers were used for 
 protection against wind and rain. This shelter was 
 afterwards exchanged for a Highland ferry-house, 
 and even that he was compelled to surrender. 
 Then the Mackenzies of Tongue — the father, 
 seventy-two years of age, and afflicted with asthma, 
 and the son his colleague — left a fine commodious 
 manse, which had been a family dwelHng for well- 
 nigh a hundred years, to live and die in a room and 
 bed-closet, at a rent of four shillings a week. 
 
 The only place that was opened to receive the 
 minister of Cockburnspath, near Dunbar, consisted 
 of a but and a ben, with a damp closet below, in 
 which no fire could be put, and a garret above, 
 where, if one attempted to sleep in winter, his 
 breath on the blankets was frozen as hard as the ice 
 outside. The outgoing minister of classic lona, 
 encountered a succession of hardships after leaving 
 
96 
 
 the parish manse. On the Mull coast he found an 
 old house, used for many years as a granary, from 
 which he was driven by sickness and death in his 
 family. The schoolmaster in lona let him his 
 house, but under ecclesiastical compulsion was 
 obliged to give his tenant notice to quit. The final 
 refuge was a miserable hut on the shore, the mere 
 sight of which brought tears to the eyes of the his- 
 torian. Merle D'Aubigne. 
 
 At Berriedale, in Caithness, the Free Church 
 minister and teacher Hved for seven years in the 
 ruin of an old cottage, so cold that they wore great- 
 coats at the fireside, and so damp that their feet 
 began to swell. Dr Duncan of Ruthwell, the 
 originator of savings banks, lived before the Dis- 
 ruption in one of the most beautiful manses in the 
 south of Scotland. During a forty years' incum- 
 bency he had laid out the garden and grounds with 
 rare taste, and enriched them with such objects of 
 interest as the far-famed Runic Cross and the 
 standard slabs from Corncockle Moor, the strange 
 foot-prints upon which startled geologists of that 
 day as much as those of Friday startled Robinson 
 Crusoe. All this the venerable divine and man 
 of science cheerfully abandoned for a labourer's 
 cottage on the side of the turnpike road from Dum- 
 fries to Carlisle, with a room, a bed-closet, and a 
 kitchen for accommodation, and for background a 
 great old quarry, with unsightly rubbish heaps and 
 deep pools of water. 
 
 When the existence of such a state of things, both in 
 the Highlands and Lowlands, came to be generally 
 known, the feelings of the country were roused, and at 
 
97 
 
 the Assembly of 1845 the Church addressed herself in 
 all earnestness to the raising of a fund for the build- 
 ing of manses. 
 
 For the advocacy of the scheme a man of unrival- 
 led qualifications was found in Thomas Guthrie. 
 In addition to the ordinary school and university 
 training of a Scottish licentiate, Guthrie had the 
 benefit of studying medicine in Paris, and of spend- 
 ing some two years in the bank office of his native 
 town, Brechin. His first charge was the rural one 
 of Arbirlot, near Arbroath, from which he was trans- 
 lated to Edinburgh in 1837. The Disruption found 
 him minister there of the parish of St John's, and 
 from that date till 1864, when he was disabled by 
 illness, there was no one more widely known or 
 sought after as preacher, platform-speaker, and 
 pleader of philanthropic causes than Dr Guthrie of 
 Free St John's, Edinburgh. When he set out upon 
 his manse fund enterprise, relying on the sureness of 
 God's promises and the goodness of his cause, with 
 a smile on his mobile features and a flower in his 
 button-hole, Guthrie had such a rare combination 
 of advantages as made success a foregone con- 
 clusion. Exhaustless in anecdote, with rich gifts 
 of pathos, humour, and dramatic action, there 
 was no corner of the land in which he could not 
 draw a mass of hearers who would listen to him for 
 any length of time, and no class of people who 
 could resist the spell of his appearance and the 
 force of his appeals. An entire year was given to 
 the advocacy of the scheme, and the sum ultimately 
 fixed upon as that to be aimed at was ^100,000. 
 When the Assembly of 1846 met, Dr Guthrie was in 
 
 G 
 
98 
 
 a position to report that he had raised ;!^i 16,370, 
 the givings of 6610 subscribers, in sums ranging 
 from the minimum of £s to the Marquis of Bread- 
 albane's benefaction of ^5000. Out of the fund 
 thus formed grants were made in sums of ^150 or 
 ;^200, leaving the rest, in the case of each manse 
 built, to be raised by local effort. The paying of sub- 
 scriptions could be spread over five years ; but before 
 the third year had closed, 409 manses were already 
 built, or in progress. By 1870 it was found that 719 
 manses had been completed, at a cost of £467,350. 
 
 § 7. PROVIDING FOR A DISENDOWED MINIS- 
 TRY : CANDLISH, CHALMERS, BUCHANAN.— 
 Long before most people had realised that separation 
 from the State was inevitable, two master-minds 
 had been working at the problem of ministerial 
 support when separation did take place and State 
 subsidies were withdrawn. One of the workers on 
 the problem was the Minister of St George's, Edin- 
 burgh. By far the most important and influential 
 public meeting in the whole course of the conflict 
 was one held in the capital at the end of August 
 1 84 1. The place of meeting was the Church of St 
 Cuthbert's, the most spacious building available. 
 The lower part of the church was set apart for 
 office-bearers, of whom 1200 were present ; the 
 remaining accommodation was crowded to suffoca- 
 tion by the general public, while doors and windows 
 were besieged by crowds unable to gain admittance. 
 The chairman of this vast gathering was the saintly 
 Dr Robert Gordon, whose purity.'of spirit, loftiness 
 of tone, and kingly majesty of bearing commanded 
 the respect and admiration of his fellow-citizens. 
 
99 
 
 The chief speaker was Dr Candlish. In the 
 course of his speech he referred to the " Voluntary 
 Principle," as one that might require to be brought 
 into operation in the Church of Scotland in a way- 
 such as had not hitherto been tried in this country. 
 That principle he found in the apostolic rule, that 
 all things in this matter of support should be in 
 common, and in the Methodist system which unites 
 the contributions of the people, and out of a common 
 _/^;2^ supplies the wants of the ministers. If, said 
 the great city preacher, the beloved pastor of the 
 richest congregation in the land, speaking in the 
 name of his town brethren, if God give us grace to 
 be so faithful as to consent to the loss of benefices 
 rather than surrender our principles, then I cannot 
 doubt that He will give us wisdom to provide that 
 the ministry throughout the land shall share in 
 common from the free-will offerings of the whole 
 people. That was the Sustentation Fund fore- 
 shadowed. The other master-mind was that of 
 Chalmers. At the Convocation in November 1842, 
 he gave signal proof of his foresight, the fertility of 
 device and practical sagacity, when he laid before 
 his brethren a plan for organising and distributing 
 " a large central fund." That was the Suste?ttation 
 Fund foresketched. At that time there were not ten 
 out of his 400 clerical hearers who had faith in the 
 plan ; it was generally regarded as the visionary 
 anticipation of a too sanguine imagination. But 
 how did matters stand when the separation took 
 place, and the endowments of the State were all 
 signed away ? As Convener of the Financial Com- 
 mittee, Dr Chalmers reported to the Disruption 
 
lOO 
 
 Assembly that 687 Associations for the working of 
 his plan had been organised ; that of these 239 were 
 in full operation ; and that there had been forwarded 
 to the general treasury upwards of ;^i7,ooo. That 
 •was the Sustentation Fund floated. 
 
 In this connection along with the names of 
 Candlish and Chalmers there will always be asso- 
 ciated that of Robert Buchanan. By the Assem- 
 bly of 1847 I^r Buchanan was appointed Convener of 
 the Fund, an appointment which he held till his death 
 in 1875, his Convenership thus extending over the 
 long period of twenty-eight years. Robert Buchanan 
 entered the ranks of the ministry in 1827, and began 
 his Glasgow pastorate in 1833, at the outset of that 
 decade of conflict of which he has written the history. 
 Of that conflict he was more than an interested 
 spectator. At an early stage of it he was called 
 upon to take part in the deliberations and policy of 
 the evangelical party ; and ere long he occupied a 
 foremost place in that group of men whom the Free 
 Church affectionately regards as her Founders and 
 her Leaders. The stately appearance and splendid 
 courtesy of the man, his unrivalled capacity for 
 work and administration of affairs, his expertness 
 in marshalling, expounding, and applying the 
 details of business^these fitted him to render a 
 service to the Church which, if it lacked the passion 
 and brilliance displayed by some of his compeers, 
 was none the less admirable and valuable. The 
 growth of the Fund under Dr Buchanan's Convener- 
 ship is the finest tribute to his skill as a financier. 
 In the first year of his reign the number of ministers 
 participating in the Fund was 684 ; in the year 
 
lOI 
 
 of his death it was 972 ; and yet in the former year 
 the amount paid to each minister was £128, while 
 in the latter it was £157. What the Fund has 
 grown to " after fifty years " will appear at a latter 
 stage of this chapter. 
 
 § 8. LENGTHENING THE CORDS AND 
 STRENGTHENING THE STAKES.— While the 
 work of building churches and manses, and of or- 
 ganising the Sustentation Fund was thus vigorously 
 prosecuted, other departments of work were not 
 neglected. An Education Scheme for the whole of 
 Scotland was launched in the Assembly of 1843; 
 schools were built in the Lowlands and Highlands; 
 and three institutions for the technical training of 
 teachers, known as Normal Schools, were founded 
 and equipped in Glasgow, in Edinburgh, and in 
 Aberdeen successively. For the work of the Minis- 
 try, the New College^ Edinburgh^ was instituted in 
 November 1843 ; this was followed by the appoint- 
 ment of a professorship and tutorship at Aberdeen, 
 which ultimately developed into a fully equipped 
 Theological Hall ; and finally there was built and 
 largely endowed the Free Church College in Glas- 
 gow, which took place in 1856. While these new 
 enterprises were started with boundless enthusiasm 
 and crowned with marvellous success, the revived 
 Church was not forgetful of those missions which 
 she had prosecuted while yet the unbroken Church 
 of Scotland. And so iht Home and Foreign Mis- 
 sions^ the efforts for the Co7iversion of Israel^ the 
 fostering of Colonial and Continental Churches^ pro- 
 vision for the Welfare of Youth, and the providing 
 of ordinances for Gaelic speaking members and 
 
102 
 
 adherents — these all were not only continued, but 
 were prosecuted with a deepened sense of their 
 importance, and a more manifest outpouring of 
 blessing from on high. 
 
 § 9. POSSIBLE RENEWAL OF STATE EN- 
 CROACHMENTS. — It was fully recognised and 
 repeatedly stated by our Disruption fathers and 
 leaders that, even after they left the Establishment, 
 the claims of Cassar might follow them, and that 
 they had no security against Court of Session 
 usurpation outside the State-controlled Establish- 
 ment any more than when inside of it. During the 
 conflict the historical Church of Scotland declared 
 the encroachments to be unwarranted and uncon- 
 stitutional, while at the crisis she renounced con- 
 nection with the State rather than submit to the 
 conditions of that connection as laid down in the 
 interlocutors of the judges. Should the claim to 
 control her in her own sphere of the purely spiritual 
 be asserted and acted upon when the Church had 
 disestablished and disendowed herself, then she 
 would be prepared to take and bear all the conse- 
 quences of uncompromising refusal to acknowledge 
 the equity of such a claim, suffering persecution, 
 imprisonment, the spoiling of goods, and even the 
 taking of life for conscience sake. Just seventeen 
 years after the Disruption there seemed every 
 likelihood of the Church of Scotland, although free 
 from State connection and control, being called 
 upon to give practical illustration of this position. 
 The occasion presented itself in connection with 
 what is known as 
 
 § 10. THE CARDROSSCASE.— In i860 the Rev. 
 
103 
 
 Mr Macmillan, Free Church minister at Cardross, 
 in the Presbytery of Dumbarton, was charged with 
 several moral offences, and was ultimately sus- 
 pended from the functions of the holy ministry by 
 the Court of final appeal. He thereupon applied to 
 the Court of Session for a Note of Suspension and 
 Interdict, in order to prevent the Presbytery preach- 
 ing his church vacant. The Lord Ordinary refused 
 to grant what was craved. Meanwhile, a copy of 
 the Note of Suspension having been served upon 
 the Assembly in ordinary form, Mr Macmillan was 
 instantly summoned to the Bar, and so soon as he 
 gave an affirmative answer to the question whether 
 or not he had authorised the application to the civil 
 court, he was dealt with as one taken red-handed, 
 and, by a unanimous resolution of the House, de- 
 posed on the spot from the ministerial office. The 
 deposed minister then raised a fresh action in the 
 Court of Session for the reduction of the two sen- 
 tences of the Assembly, and for pecuniary damages. 
 This action also was dismissed by the Lord Or- 
 dinary, on the ground that it did not fall within the 
 province of civil tribunals to review ecclesiastical 
 judgments. An appeal was then taken to the Inner 
 House or First Division of the Court, and that 
 tribunal called upon the Free Church to lay before it 
 the sentence complained of, togetherwith the grounds 
 upon which it was based — in legal phraseology, " to 
 satisfy production." When the judges were put in 
 possession of what they asked, and had before them 
 the pleas of the Church in answer to Mr Macmillan's 
 appeal, they repelled all such pleas as were founded 
 on public privileges of churches as such, and which 
 
I04 
 
 thus involved a claim of independent jurisdiction ; 
 they reserved those pleas which, founding on con- 
 tract, were proper to the Free Church in particular ; 
 and they asserted their competency to reduce the 
 sentences complained of, but only in so far as they 
 formed a bar to civil redress for civil injury. Before 
 judgment was given on its merits the case assumed 
 a new phase by the Lord President announcing that 
 the whole action, as at present formulated, must be 
 thrown out, because no issue for damages could 
 competently be brought against such a body as the 
 General Assembly, which had by that time ceased to 
 exist, and that even against specified individual 
 members a claim for damages would only be com- 
 petent if founded on a charge of malice. For the 
 third time the quondam minister at Cardross ad- 
 justed his charge and his claim, calling at this stage 
 for reduction of the spiritual sentences, and also 
 demanding damages from seven individuals (includ- 
 ing the Moderator, the clerks, and the movers and 
 seconders of the motions), who, be alleged, were in 
 their procedure in his case actuated by malicious 
 motives. The Free Church was quite prepared to 
 meet this action, and sanctioned the accused brethren 
 going to a jury, because such procedure involved no 
 abandonment of her spiritual independence, and was 
 in no way a violation of her constitution. By the 
 Lord Ordinary this third action was dismissed in so 
 far as the reduction craved was concerned, and 
 everything was in readiness for the issue being sub- 
 mitted to a jury on the sole question of malice, 
 when the prosecution ignominiously collapsed by 
 Mr Macmillan declining to proceed any further, 
 
 i 
 
105 
 
 casting himself on the mercy of the Church, express- 
 ing the expectation that some provision would be 
 made for him, and suggesting that leading Free 
 Churchmen should countenance a subscription 
 being got up for him ! When the fiasco in which 
 the whole matter thus ended is considered, and 
 when it is borne in mind that the civil magistrates 
 carefully avoided the assertion of any right on their 
 part to interfere coercively with the spiritual 
 action of the church, the verdict of Sir Henry Mon- 
 creiff will be that of all impartial and competent 
 judges — "the spiritual independence of our Church 
 was vindicated by the Cardross case in place of 
 being overthrown." 
 
 § II. THE 18TH OF MAY 1893.— This survey 
 of the career, the claims, and the contendings of the 
 Church may fitly terminate at the close of the 
 fiftieth year of her existence as the Church of Scot- 
 land Free. The Assembly of 1893 had been 
 appointed to be held at Edinburgh, on Thursday 
 the \Zth of May ^ the very day of month and of week 
 upon which the Disruption Assembly of 1843 had 
 opened its proceedings full fifty years ago. 
 
 § 12. THE FREE ASSEMBLY HALL.— But the 
 place of meeting was very different. The Assembly 
 of 1843 was held, as we have seen, in Tanfield Hall. 
 That building was not originally intended for public 
 meetings, and required to be hastily fitted to serve 
 its temporary purpose. It was inconveniently distant 
 from the centre of the capital, and it was not the 
 property of the Church. Notwithstanding these 
 drawbacks, the meetings of the Supreme Court were 
 held in this plain structure from 1843 ^o ^^'SSt ^"^^ 
 
io6 
 
 many hallowed memories and historical associations 
 have gathered round the site. Although the pro- 
 ject for a Hall was started as early as 1844, and the 
 site ultimately fixed upon — one extending from the 
 New College quadrangle back to the Lawnmarket 
 of the High Street — was suggested in the year 
 following, it was not till 1859 that the Church had 
 the satisfaction of holding her General Assembly in 
 a building she could call her own, and which she 
 could regard with complacency as worthy of the 
 Church to which it belongs and of the fair city in 
 which it is built. The total cost, including site, was 
 ;^ 1 8,000, and of that sum upwards of £436$ was 
 gathered by a committee of Free Church ladies. 
 
 § 13. OPENING OF THE JUBILEE AS- 
 SEMBLY: DR. WALTER 0. SMITH. — The 
 crowds that besieged the entrances to the Hall 
 from an early hour in the morning of the i8th 
 May may have been equalled — they could hardly 
 have been exceeded — by those that gathered in front 
 of St Andrew's Church fifty years before. Long 
 before noon the galleries were packed to their 
 utmost capacity of sitting and standing accommo- 
 dation, and by the time Dr W. Garden Blaikie, 
 the retiring Moderator, took the chair, the body of 
 the Hall and the passages were also densely filled, 
 After devotional exercises and a discourse which had 
 for its subject the supremacy of Christ and the glory 
 of His Name which is above every other, Dr W. C. 
 Smith, Preacher and Poet of his Church and 
 country, having been proposed to, and accepted by, 
 the members as Moderator of the Jubilee Assembly, 
 was received by the audience with an enthusiastic 
 
I07 
 
 burst of cheering. The customary " opening 
 address " was full of that historical interest capable 
 of being infused into it by one who could recall the 
 hour, fifty years ago, when he " stood at the corner 
 of Hanover Street," as he told us, " and looked on 
 the vast throng waiting in anxious silence, and the 
 eager faces crowding at the windows and on the 
 balconies, and clustering even on the house-tops, and 
 felt the thrill that passed through them, rising in 
 some cases to the sob of a grand relief as the 
 fathers and founders of our Free Church came from 
 the scene of their old conflicts and triumphs, looking 
 very grave indeed, for they knew how much the step 
 involved, yet not very sad, for, after all, it is not a 
 sorrowful business to do a clear duty with a clear 
 heart." "As I recall that scene to-day," continued Dr 
 Smith, " and think of all the changeful years between 
 now and then, I venture to say we shall be poor 
 creatures indeed, unworthy to fill the places of those 
 brave and true men, if we do not feel that God has 
 remembered to us ' the word on which He caused 
 them to hope.' " The same inspiring and uplifting 
 enthusiasm, the same genial catholicity of spiri 
 and deftness of literary touch characterised the 
 Moderator's " closing address " on the 30th of May, 
 By these two and other addresses delivered dur- 
 ing the sittings of Assembly, Dr Smith amply 
 justified the expectations that had been formed as to 
 his fitness for the onerous duties laid upon him, and 
 gave good ground for the prediction of Principal 
 Rainy, that " long after this, when that memorable 
 Assembly was remembered as the Jubilee As- 
 sembly, it would be remembered not less affec- 
 
io8 
 
 tionately as the Assembly of Dr Walter Chalmers 
 Smith." 
 
 § 14. FIFTY YEARS' CONTRIBUTIONS TO 
 THE LORD'S TREASURY.— In the course of the 
 eleven days over which the sittings of Assembly 
 extended an immense amount of business was tran- 
 sacted, a large proportion of which cannot even be 
 mentioned in this rapid sketch. 
 
 On only a few of the outstanding interests of this 
 historical convocation will it be possible for us to 
 touch. In the department of general Finance more 
 than ordinary concern was excited when the report 
 of the Committee charged with that matter was 
 given in. It then appeared that the grand total of 
 contributions for the fifty years was Twenty-three 
 millions^ three hundred and fifty-two thousand^ eight 
 hundred a?id nine pounds. 
 
 Then the Siistentation Fund report showed a 
 splendid record of steady liberality and of continued 
 progress, only slightly and occasionally checked in 
 times of commercial depression and agricultural 
 distress. That in a crisis through which the mer- 
 cantile world was passing in 1892-93 the amount 
 contributed for the support of the Gospel ministry 
 (;^ 1 76,297, I2S. 4d) should be reported as with one 
 single exception the highest reached in the history 
 of the fund was proof sufficient that what Dr 
 Chalmers styled " the great home-mission enterprise, 
 sending the Gospel among the people of our land " 
 has a firm hold of the affections of the third 
 generation of Free Church members and adherents. 
 § 15. OVER FIFTY YEARS OF WORK IN MIS- 
 SION FIELDS.— When the report of the Committee 
 
109 
 
 on the Co7iversio7i of the Jews was called for and given 
 in, it came out that the Jubilee of that enterprise had 
 been celebrated in 1889. For it was out of an en- 
 quiry made by four of her members in 1839 that the 
 Mission of the Church of Scotland sprang, a Mission 
 which the Assembly of 1843 pledged the Church of 
 separation to maintain and carry forward. And the 
 Free Church could not have honourably done other- 
 wise, for at the Disruption the Jewish missionaries 
 without exception identified themselves with the 
 Church of Scotland Free. Although all the money 
 in the treasury of the Committee at home — just what 
 was required to meet the year's expenditure — went 
 another way, the first General Assembly collection 
 taken in the Free Church was for the Con- 
 version of Israel, and it yielded ^^3400, a sum 
 within a hundred pounds of the needed amount. 
 " Sixty-Third Report on Foreign Missions " was the 
 title of the document submitted by the convener, 
 Professor Lindsay. The explanation of that enumer- 
 ation is to be found in these two facts : that the 
 first mission of the historic Church of Scotland was 
 founded by Dr ALEXANDER Duff in 1830; and 
 that in 1843 ^^^ the missionaries in India and all the 
 converts identified themselves with the Church dis- 
 established and disendowed. As missionaries and 
 members of the Free Church, they continued to 
 carry out the commission given to Duff in 1829 for 
 Bengal ; toWlLSON and NiSBET in 1835 for Bombay ; 
 and to Anderson in 1837 for Madras. In this way 
 unbroken continuity has marked our mission history 
 for sixty-three years. While there has thus been 
 an uninterrupted succession, there has also been 
 
no 
 
 extension of field, enlargement of agency, and in- 
 crease of revenue. The extension of field is wit- 
 nessed to by the fact that, in addition to her five 
 mission centres in India, the Free Church has South 
 Kafir, North Kafir, Zulu, and Livingstonia Missions 
 in Afi'ica ; a New Hebrides Mission in Mela7tesia ; 
 a Lebanon Mission in Syria; and a Keith Falconer 
 one in South Arabia. Then, supplementary to the 
 work of the Foreign Missions Committee is that of 
 the Womaiis Foreign Missiofiary Society^ which is 
 entirely dependent on subscriptions obtained 
 separately from the contributions to the funds of the 
 Foreign Missions. In the fiftieth Report of this 
 Society laid before the Jubilee Assembly agencies 
 educational, medical, and domestic were reported 
 to be carried on at Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, 
 Poona, and Nagpur in India ; also in Kafraria, 
 Transkei and Natal in South Africa ; the income 
 was stated to have increased sixteen-fold since the 
 Disruption, and to have doubled within the past ten 
 years, amounting in 1892-3 to upwards of ^18,000. 
 In the matter of missionary agency, the staff of 
 missionaries in India at the time of separation was 
 thirteen ; in 1893 the whole force of Christian agents 
 actually at work in India, South Arabia and Syria, 
 in Cape Colony, Natal, and British Central Africa, 
 and in the New Hebrides Mission, founded in 1842 
 by the Reformed Presbyterian Church and united 
 with the Free Church in 1876, was reported to 
 number 975. The increase of revenue during the 
 fifty years from Disruption to Jubilee received 
 pleasing illustration from the following statistical 
 returns. The largest sum for Foreign Missions 
 
Ill 
 
 raised by the Church before separation from the 
 State was in the year immediately preceding the 
 Disruption, and it did not exceed ^8000 ; in 1843-4 
 the figures rose to ^13,433; and in 1892-3 they 
 were upwards of ^108,000. In addition to this of 
 annual income, the Missions possess sums amount- 
 ing to about ^^142,000 capitalised, according to the 
 instructions of donors, to endow certain stations 
 and meet the cost of repairs, &c., besides endow- 
 ments for the salaries of at least ten missionaries. 
 
 § 16. JUBILEE MEMORIAL PROCEEDINGS: 
 MACLAREN, GLADSTONE, GODET, KRUGER. 
 — The procedure of outstanding interest in the 
 Assembly of 1893 was the receiving of congratula- 
 tions from individuals and from churches upon the 
 completion of fifty years of life and work. These con- 
 gratulations found expression in various ways, and 
 were conveyed at different stages of the Assembly's 
 sittings. Thus, Dr Alexander Maclaren o 
 Manchester, one of the most widely known and most 
 highly honoured of English Nonconformists, when 
 addressing a crowded house in connection with the 
 Report on the State of Religion and Morals, paid a 
 glowing tribute to the "400 good men and true, 
 martyrs for the truth and the Lord Jesus Christ," 
 who signed the Act of Separation and Deed of 
 Demission, while he also accurately discriminated 
 the two elements in the Disruption controversy — the 
 special ecclesiastical form which it assumed, and 
 the personal loyalty to Jesus Christ which underlay 
 that form, so that it was no mere accident that upon 
 the blue banner of the Free Church there was 
 blazoned the legend, The Crown Rights of the Re- 
 
112 
 
 deemer, for in the fact that He was the Redeemer 
 lay the impulse that bound all these men to Him, 
 and that made them feel that loyalty to Him called 
 for that sacrifice which loyalty to Him enabled 
 them to make so gladly. Then there were letters 
 from individuals addressed to officials or private 
 members, but read, wholly or in part, to the house. 
 One of these was from the Honourable William 
 EwART Gladstone, written to the Moderator, in 
 which the veteran statesman expressed the historical 
 conviction that "the distinguished leaders of the Free 
 Church movement were, in the course they followed 
 half a century ago, the genuine representatives of 
 the spirit of the Scottish Reformation." Another 
 was from the pen of Professor Fr]&deric Godet 
 of Neuchatel. In a few glowing sentences the vener- 
 able divine expressed " gratitude and admiration on 
 the occasion of a glorious anniversary," and then 
 signed himself " an old brother, friend, and admirer 
 of the Free Church of Scotland from the day of its 
 foundation." 
 
 In addition to letters there was a large number of 
 congratulatory addresses from bodies of Christians 
 in all parts of the world, met in Presbyteries, Synods, 
 Assemblies, Unions, and Directorates. Two of 
 these were taken special note of, coming from 
 ecclesiastical courts at that time in session, and 
 representing the opposite camps of Church and 
 Dissent in Scotland — one was from the General 
 Assembly of the Established Church, the other from 
 the Synod of the United Original Seceders. But 
 by far the greater part of the time devoted to 
 Jubilee memorial proceedings was taken up with 
 
"3 
 
 hearing addresses by delegates from sister churches. 
 The entire day on the 23rd of May, and the whole 
 of the evening sederunt on the 24th were given to 
 these representatives of evangelical Christendom. 
 Even to enumerate the names of those who spoke 
 and to specify the ecclesiastical bodies they repre- 
 sented in Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales^ 
 on the Continent of Europe, scattered over the 
 Colonies, America, and Africa, would be impossible. 
 The burden of all the spoken felicitations, expressed 
 with so much earnestness, such manifest admiration 
 touched with a sentiment of veneration, was fitly 
 voiced in the wish of Professor Kruger, deputy 
 from the evangelical churches of France, when he 
 prayed that the Lord would abide with the Church 
 of Scotland, which fifty years before recovered the 
 freedom claimed and fought for by her founders 333 
 years ago. That recognition of the Free Church of 
 Scotland as the rightful representative in the present 
 day of the old historic Church of the land was not 
 made by an outsider for the first time in the Jubilee 
 Assembly. It had been accorded only two years 
 after the Disruption by an English historian and 
 statesman speaking on the floor of the British House 
 of Commons. 
 
 § 17. LORD MACAULAY ON THE IDENTITY 
 OF THE FREE CHURCH WITH THE CHURCH 
 OF REVOLUTION AND OF UNION. — In a 
 masterly speech advocating the abolition of theo- 
 logical tests from Scottish Universities, THOMAS 
 Babington Macaulay dealt with the plea which 
 had been put forth for their retention even in the case 
 of non-theological chairs, that their removal would in- 
 
 H 
 
114 
 
 volve a violation of the Treaty of Union and Act of 
 Security. That argument he effectually disposed 
 of by affirming and proving that the Church of 
 Scotland so called was not the Church established 
 in 1707, when the Union took place. In making 
 good his contention, the brilliant orator showed that 
 the ecclesiastical polity of Scotland recognised in 
 the Union Treaty was that of the Revolution Settle- 
 ment in 1690, when presentations were transferred 
 from patrons to elders and protestant landowners, 
 but that when Tory statesmen were in power and 
 Jacobite sentiment was in the air, public faith was 
 disregarded and patronage was restored. To that 
 breach of the Treaty of Union the speaker ascribed 
 all the troubles that had come upon the unhappy 
 Scottish Establishment. With perfect mastery of 
 the details he set before his English hearers the 
 several secessions that had taken place in Scotland, 
 bringing his survey of the field down to the crisis of 
 1843, when, as he tersely put it, the Church of the 
 State ceased to be the Church of the People. This 
 part of a cogent argument and impassioned appeal 
 to justice and historical fairness the British 
 man of letters brought to a close with a striking 
 supposition, a question, ^nd a reply. " Suppose," he 
 said, " that we could call up from their graves the 
 Presbyterian divines who sat in the General As- 
 sembly when the compact between England and 
 Scotland was made ; suppose that we could call up 
 Carstares ; that we could call up Boston, the author 
 of The Fourfold State; that we could relate to them 
 the history of the ecclesiastical revolutions which 
 have, since their time, taken place in Scotland ; and 
 
115 
 
 that we could then ask them, * Is the Established 
 Church or the Free Church identical with the 
 Church which existed at the time of the Union?' 
 is it not quite certain what their answer would be ? 
 They would say, ' Our Church, the Church which 
 you promised to maintain unalterable, was not the 
 Church which' you protect, but the Church which 
 you oppress. Our Church was the Church of 
 Chalmers and Brewster, not the Church of Bryce 
 and Muir.'" 
 
 § i8. AN OXFORD PRINCIPAL IN THE 
 JUBILEE ASSEMBLY.— To return to the Jubilee 
 Memorial Proceedings of 1893, the address of 
 Principal Fairbairn, Mansfield College, Oxford, 
 may, without partiality and without disparage- 
 ment, be taken as the high-water mark to which 
 the speaking of the occasion attained. It thrilled 
 the immense gathering when this foremost man in 
 University thought and erudition, after exclaiming, 
 "What a noble name is Free Church ! It is, I 
 think, the noblest word ever chosen to denote a 
 Church," went on to give his conception of the 
 freedom claimed by the Scottish Church of that 
 name as not freedom from care or exemption from 
 burdens, but liberty to bear responsibility and to 
 fulfil duty. And not less telling was the peroration 
 of this noble address, in which the English Puritan 
 of the nineteenth century scornfully repudiated the 
 opprobrious titles of Schismatics and Dissenters 
 applied by Anglican churchmen to all outside their 
 ])ale, and affirmed " there is only one schism — being 
 separated in soul from the great Head of the Church; 
 there is only one dissent — the dissent that departs 
 
ii6 
 
 from Him to whom we ought to live, and dares to 
 speak of Churches He has owned as if they were 
 Churches men were ashamed to recognise." "We 
 are free," exclaimed the great Oxford scholar ; "you 
 are free. Your service to the faith is a service to 
 us ; our service to Christ is service to you. Let this 
 year of jubilee, which has brought your souls nearer 
 to each other by bringing them nearer to your great 
 Creative Principle, bring them also nearer to the 
 brethren that have come from afar, and the Churches 
 that have spoken by them. In the midst of a hard 
 and inflexible and narrow and proud aristocratic 
 polity that calls itself a Church, the community of 
 the living, faithful people of God in all lands may 
 stand together a unity and a real brotherhood." 
 
 § 19. CLOSE OF THE ASSEMBLY OF 1893. 
 — With such sentiments as these fresh in their 
 memories, the fathers and brethren of this ever- 
 memorable Assembly sang, with even deeper solem- 
 nity than usual, the familiar portion of the Hebrew 
 Psalter, which, by immemorial usage, finds a place 
 in the proceedings of successive years : — 
 
 ■' Pray that Jerusalem may have 
 Peace and feUcity ; 
 Let them that love thee and thy peace 
 Have still prosperity. 
 
 " Now, for my friends' and brethren's sakes, 
 Peace be in thee, I'll say ; 
 And for the house of God our Lord, 
 I'll seek thy good alway." 
 
 § 20. THE ABIDING STRENGTH OF THE 
 CHURCH. — The impulse arising from the jubilee 
 
117 
 
 celebration of 1893 has not passed away in platform 
 demonstrations and public enthusiasm. It is with 
 the Church still, and will doubtless quicken her 
 energies and stimulate her endeavours for years to 
 come. It is well, however, for the Church of the 
 Reformation and the Revolution Settlement, of 
 more than ten years' conflict, and of fifty years of 
 separation from the State, ever to bear in mind that 
 her sustaining inspiration, ahke for suffering and for 
 service, must come from above, that it can only 
 come from Him who is " the Head over all things 
 to the Church, which is His body, the fulness of 
 Him that filleth all in all" 
 
 ILRNBULL AND SPEARS. PRINTERS, EDINBURGIJ 
 
15737YB^ 25; 
 
 25-01-03 32180 MS 
 
Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 
 
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