APPENDIX.
STATE OF THE PRESBYTERIAN KIRK OF SCOTLAND FROM 1649 TO 1654.
The Acts and proceedings of the General Assemblies, which we have now presented in an accessible form to the notice and study of our countrymen, constitute the entire body of its statutes that are recognised by the Church as in any degree legitimate, during the long period which intervened betwixt the years 1602 and 1690.
During the years which immediately followed the Assembly of 1649, the dissensions, civil and ecclesiastical, which arose in an aggravated form, rendered all the proceedings of the Church courts of a very questionable character, insomuch so, that no authorized register of these proceedings is known to exist; nor has the Presbyterian Church, ever since the re-establishment of that form of polity at the Revolution, given the stamp of its sanction to any of the edicts which emanated from the few Assemblies that were permitted to be held subsequently to that of 1649. Indeed, after that time, and even before that time, the judicatories of the Presbyterian Church—divided into two furious antagonist parties, mutually excommunicating and excommunicated, persecuted and persecuting each other—had assumed such a position in relation to the supreme national authority, as virtually to dissolve its connection with the State, and practically to abrogate that constitution which it derived from the State in 1592—a constitution which had been again restored to it, with all the legal force of an Act of the Legislature, in 1641. It had ceased to be that Church which the law of the land thus sanctioned; and, by usurping civil and political powers not conferred upon it as a national establishment, and not legitimately belonging to any ecclesiastical body, it spontaneously broke asunder the ties by which it was connected with the State, and perpetrated its own self-destruction. It assumed temporal and political power, whereas only spiritual jurisdiction had ever been conferred upon it. The whole frame of its constitution, as settled by deliberate compact—in the first instance, in 1567, subsequently confirmed by the charter of 1592, and restored by the Act 1641—was entirely subverted; the subordination of its ministers and inferior judicatories to those of higher jurisdiction was repudiated; and the steps by which it gradually sunk and declined, were consummated by its final extinction as a National Establishment in the schisms which arose among its office-bearers, and the forcible dispersion and prohibition of its General Assemblies, under the mandates of a foreign conqueror.
“A General Assembly had met, July 1650, against the lawfulness of which there was no objection. Tho’ it met at Edinburgh, the second Wednesday of July, 1650, according to the appointment of the preceding Assembly, yet none of the Acts of it have been printed.
“Another General Assembly met at St Andrew’s, June 1651, and adjourned to Dundee, where it sat for some time in the month of July, 1651. Also another Assembly met at Edinburgh, the second Wednesday of July, 1652: against the Lawfulness of these last two General Assemblies the anti-Resolutioners protested.
“Another General Assembly met at Edinburgh, July 20, 1653; but after the Moderator, Mr David Dickson, had prayed, a party of armed men surrounded the Assembly House, and the Commander entering, dissolved the Assembly for not sitting by the authority of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England. He led the Ministers under a guard a mile from the Town, and forbid them again to Assemble.