Leading Articles on Various Subjects

by Hugh Miller

Her aggrieved members never once forgot that they were Scotchmen and Britons as certainly as Presbyterians, and that they had a country as certainly as a Church to which they owed service, and which it was unequivocally their duty to defend.

They retreated from the Establishment, and gave up all its advantages when the post had become so untenable that these could be no longer retained with honour––or we should perhaps rather say, retained compatibly with right principle; but they did not in wholesale desperation give up other posts which could still be conscientiously maintained.

The educational establishment of the country, for instance, was not abandoned, though the ecclesiastical one was.

The Principal of the United College of Saint Salvador and Saint Leonard’s signed the Deed of Demission in his capacity as an elder of the Church, but in his capacity of Principal he returned to his College, and in that post fought what was virtually the battle of his country, and fought it so bravely and well that he is Principal of the College still. And the parish schoolmasters who adhered to the Free Church fought an exactly similar battle, though unfortunately with a less happy issue; but that issue gives at least prominence to the fact that they did not resign 284 their charges, but were thrust from them. The other functionaries of the Assembly, uninfluenced by any wild Cameronian notion, held by their various secular offices, civil and military. Soldiers retained their commissions––magistrates their seats on the bench––members of Parliament their representative status. Nor did a single member of the Protesting Church possessed of the franchise resign, in consequence of the Disruption, a single political right or privilege. The entire transaction bore, we repeat, the stamp of perfect sobriety. It was in all its details the act of men in their right minds.

Now the principles held by the Church at the Disruption, and none other, whether Voluntary or Cameronian, are the principles of the Free Church. A powerful majority in a Presbyterian body, or in a country possessed of a representative government, are vested in at least the power of making whatever laws they will to make, for not only themselves, but for the minority also. But power is not right; and we would at once question the right of even a preponderating majority in a Church such as ours to introduce new principles into her framework, and to impose them on the minority. We question, on this principle, the right of that act of discipline which was exercised in the present century by a preponderating majority of the Antiburgher body in Scotland, when they deposed and excommunicated the late Dr. M’Crie for the ecclesiastical offence of holding in every particular by the original tenets of the fathers of the Secession.

The overt act in the case manifested their power, but the various attempts made to manifest their right we regard as mere abortions. They had no right to do what they did. The questions on which the majority differed from their fathers ought in justice, instead of being made a subject of legislation, to be left an open question. And we hold, on a similar principle, that whatever questions of conduct or 285 polity may arise in the Free Church, which, though new to it, yet come to be adopted by a majority, should be left open questions also. Of course, of novelties in doctrine we do not speak,––we trust that within the Free Church none such will ever arise; we refer rather to those semi-metaphysical points of casuistry, and nice questions of conduct, in which the differences that perplex non-established Churches are most liable to originate,––matters in which one man sees after one way, and another man after another,––and which, until heaped up into importance, wave-like, as if by the wind, pertain not to the province of solid demonstrable truth, but to the province of loose fluctuating opinion. And be it remarked, that non-established Churches are very apt to be disturbed by such questions.

They are in circumstances in which the ripple passes into the wavelet, and the wavelet into the billow. On this head, as on all others, there is great value in the teachings of history; and the Free Church might be worse employed than in occasionally conning the lesson. Each fifty years of the last century and half has been marked by its own special questions of the kind among the non-established Churches of Scotland.

The question of the last fifty years has been that Voluntary one which virtually led to the striking off the roll of the Antiburgher Secession Church, those protesting ministers who formed the nucleus of the Original Secession, and to the excommunication and deposition of Dr. M’Crie. The question of the preceding fifty years was that connected with the burghal oath, which had the effect of splitting into two antagonist sections the religious body of which the Burgher Secession formed but one of the fragments,––a body fast rising at the time into a position of importance, which the split prevented it from ever fully realizing. The question of the fifty years with which the period began was 286 that which fixed the Cameronian body, not merely in a condition of unsocial seclusion in its relation with all other churches, but even detached it from its allegiance to the State, and placed it in circumstances of positive rebellion. Perhaps the history of this latter body, as embodied in its older testimony, and the controversial writings of its Fairlys and Thorburns, is that from the study of which the Free Church might derive most profit at the present time. We live in so late an age of the world, that we have little chance of finding much which is positively new in the writings or speeches of our casuists. When we detect, in consequence, some of our ministers or office-bearers sporting principles that do not distinctively belong to the Church of the Disruption, we may be pretty sure, if we but search well, of discovering these principles existing as the distinctive tenets of some other Church; and the present tendency of a most small but most respectable minority in our body is decidedly Cameronian.

The passages of Scripture on which the Cameronians chiefly dwelt in their testimony and controversial writings, were those discussed by the Free Presbytery of Edinburgh on Wednesday last. As condemnatory of what is designated the great national sin of the Union, for instance, the testimony adduces, among other texts, Isa. viii. 12, ‘Say ye not, A confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, A confederacy;’ Hos. vii. 8, 9, ‘Ephraim hath mixed himself among the people; Ephraim is a cake not turned. Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not; yea, grey hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not;’ and above all, 2 Cor. vi. 14, 15, ‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers; for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness, and what concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?’ And let the reader mark how logically these 287 Scriptures are applied. ‘All associations and confederacies with the enemies of true religion and godliness,’ says the Testimony, ‘are thus expressly condemned in Scripture, and represented as dangerous to the true Israel of God. And if simple confederacies with malignants and enemies to the cause of Christ are condemned, much more is an incorporation with them, which is an embodying of two into one, and therefore a straiter conjunction. And, taking the definition of malignants given by the declarations of both kingdoms, joined in arms anno 1643, to be just, which says, “Such as would not take the Covenant were to be declared to be public enemies to religion and their country, and that they are to be censured and punished as professed adversaries and malignants,” it cannot be refused but that the prelatic party in England now joined with are such. Further, by this incorporating union this nation is obliged to support the idolatrous Church of England.’ And thus the argument runs on irrefragable in its logic, if we but grant the premises. But to what, we ask, did it lead, assisted, of course, by other arguments of a similar character, in the body with whom it originated? To their withdrawal, from the times of the Revolution till now, from every national movement in the cause of Christ and His gospel; nay, most consistently, we must add––for we have ever failed to see the sense or logic of acting a public and political part in our own or our neighbour’s behalf, and declining on principle to act it in behalf of Christianity or its institutions––not only have they withdrawn themselves from all political exertion in behalf of religion, but in behalf of their country also. A Cameronian holding firm by his principles of non-incorporation with idolaters, cannot be a magistrate nor a member of Parliament; he cannot vote in an election, nor serve in the army.

It is one of the grand evils of questions of casuistry of this kind, that men, instead of looking at things and estimating 288 them as they really exist, are contented to play games at logic––chopping with but the imperfect signs of things––mere verbal counters, twisted from their original meanings by the influence of delusive metaphors and false associations.