Let us just see, in reference not to mere words, but to things, what can be truly meant by the terms ‘apostate or apostatizing Government,’ as applied to the Government of Great Britain. The words can have of course no just application, in a personal bearing, to present members of Government, as distinguished from the members of previous Governments, seeing that the functionaries now in office are just as much, or rather as little religious, as any other functionaries in office since the times of the Revolution or before. In a personal sense, England’s last religious government was that of Cromwell. The term apostate, or apostatizing, can have only an official meaning. What, then, in its official meaning, does it in reality express? The government of the United Kingdom is representative; and it is one of the great blessings which we enjoy as citizens that it is so,––one of those blessings for which we may now, as when we were younger, express ourselves thankful in the words of honest Isaac Watts, ‘that we were born on British ground.’ At any rate, this fact of representation is a fact––a thing, not a mere word. There is another fact in the case equally solid and certain. This representation of the empire is based on a population of about twenty-six millions of people; twelve millions of whom are Episcopalian, eight millions Roman Catholic, three millions Presbyterian, and three millions more divided among the various other Protestant sects of the country. And this also is a fact––a thing, not a mere word.
In the good providence of God we were born the citizens of an empire thus representative in its government, and thus ecclesiastically constituted in its population.
And it would be a further fact consequent on the other 289 two, that the aggregate character of the Government would represent the aggregate moral and ecclesiastical character of the people, were every distinct portion into which the people are parcelled to exert itself in proportion to its share of political influence. But from the yet further fact, that the portions have not always exerted themselves in equal ratios, and from other causes, political and providential, the character of the Government has considerably fluctuated––now representing one portion more in proportion to its amount than its mere bulk warranted, anon another. Thus, in the days of the Commonwealth, what are now the six million Presbyterians and Independents, etc., had a British Government wholly representative of themselves; while what are now the twelve million Episcopalians and the eight million Papists had none.
England at the time produced one of those men, of a type surpassingly great, that the world fails to see once in centuries; and, like Brennus of old, he flung his sword into the lighter scale, and it straightway outweighed the other. There then ensued a period of twenty-eight years, in which Government represented only the Episcopalians and Papists: and then a period of a hundred and forty years more, in which it represented only the Episcopalians and Presbyterians. And now––for Popery, growing strong in the interval, had been using all appliances in its own behalf, and had not been met in the proper spiritual field––it represents Episcopacy, Roman Catholicism, and a minute, uninfluential portion of the Presbyterian and other evangelistic bodies. But how, it may be asked, has this result taken place?
How is it only a moiety of these bodies that is represented? Mainly, we unhesitatingly reply, through the influence exerted by certain crotchets entertained by the bodies themselves on their political standing. When Government at the Revolution, instead of being as formerly representative 290 of Episcopacy and Popery, became representative of Episcopacy and Presbytery, Cameronianism broke off, on the plea that the governing power ought to be representative of Presbytery only, and that it was apostate because it was not; and the political influence of the body has been ever since lost to the Protestant cause. Voluntaryism, on the other hand, neutralized its influence, by holding that, though quite at freedom to exert itself in the political walk in attaining secular objects, religious objects are in that walk unattainable, or at least not to be attained; and so it also has been virtually lost to the Protestant cause. And now a cloud like a man’s hand arises in our own Church, to threaten a further secession from the ranks of the remaining class, who strive to stamp upon the Government, through the operation of the representative principle, at least a modicum of the evangelistic character. And all this is taking place in an age in which the battle for the integrity of the Sabbath as a national institute, and other similar battles, shall soon have to be decided on political ground. If ‘apostate’ or ‘apostatizing’ be at all proper words in reference to the things which we have here described, what, we ask, save the want either of weight or of exertion on the part of the represented bodies who complain of it, can be properly regarded as the cause of that apostasy? A representative Government, if the represented be Episcopalian, will itself be officially Episcopalian; if the represented be Papist, it will itself be officially Papist; if the represented be Presbyterian, it will itself be officially Presbyterian; if composed of all three together, the Government will bear an aggregate average character; but if, on some crotchet, the Presbyterians withdraw from the political field, while the others exert themselves in that field to the utmost, it will be Popish and Episcopalian exclusively. But for a result so undesirable––a result which, if Presbytery had been formerly in the ascendant, might of course be called official 291 apostasy––it would be the Presbyterian constituency that would be to blame, not the Government.
It will be seen that this view of the real state of things was that of Knox and Chalmers, and that they acted in due accordance with it. We are told by the younger M’Crie, in his admirable Sketches of Scottish Church History, ‘that Knox and his brethren, perceiving that the whole ecclesiastical property of the kingdom bade fair to be soon swallowed up by the rapacity of the nobles, insisted that a considerable portion of it should be reserved for the support of the poor, the founding of universities and schools, and the maintenance of an efficient ministry throughout the country. At last,’ continues the historian, ‘after great difficulty, the Privy Council came to the determination that the ecclesiastical revenues should be divided into three parts,––that two of them should be given to the ejected prelates during their lives, which afterwards reverted to the nobility, and that the third part should be divided between the Court and the Protestant ministry.’
‘Well,’ exclaimed Knox on hearing of this arrangement, ‘if the end of this order be happy, my judgment fails me. I see two parts freely given to the devil, and the third must be divided between God and the devil.’ Strong words these. Here is a Government, according to Knox’s own statement of the case, giving five-sixths to the devil, and but a remaining sixth to God. But does Knox on that account refuse God’s moiety? Does he set himself to reason metaphysically regarding his degree of responsibility for either what the devil got, or what the Government gave the devil. Not he. He received God’s part, and in applying it wisely and honestly to God’s service, wished it more; but as for the rest, like a man of broad strong sense as he assuredly was, he left the devil and the Privy Council to divide the responsibility between them. And the large-minded Chalmers entertained exactly the same views,––views 292 which, if not in thorough harmony with the idle fictions which dialecticians employ when they treat of Governments, at least entirely accord with the real condition of things. The official character of a representative Legislature must, as we have shown, resemble that of the constituency which it represents. In order to alter it permanently for the better, it is essentially necessary, as a first step in the process, that the worse parts of the constituencies on which it rests be so altered.
Now, for altering constituencies for the better, schools and churches were the machinery of Knox and of Chalmers; and if the funds for the support of either came honestly to them, unclogged with conditions unworthy of the object, they at once received them as given on God’s behalf, however idolatrously the givers––whether individuals or Governments––might be employing money drawn from the same purse in other directions. ‘Ought I,’ said Chalmers in reference to the Educational question, ‘ought I not to use, on teetotal principles, the water of the public pump, because another man mixes it with his toddy?’ It was not because Popery was established in the colonies, or seemed in danger of being established in Ireland, that the Free Church resigned its hold of the temporalities of the Scottish Establishment. Such endowment, instead of forming an argument for resignation, would form, on the contrary, an argument for keeping faster hold, in behalf of Protestantism, of the fortalice of the Establishment; just as if an invading army had possessed itself of the Castle of Dumbarton, with the strongholds of Fort-Augustus and Fort-William, the argument would be all the stronger for the national forces defending with renewed determination the Castles of Stirling and of Edinburgh, and the magnificent defences of Fort-George.
February 9, 1848.