The permission to use this collection of Biblical paraphrases was never recalled by the Assembly, but it has also never been made a permanent act. It appears to have been given reluctantly, and only as a measure of policy, in concession to popular feeling in favour of the collection; for it appears to have been previously used in several churches. “Use and wont,” says Dr Edgar, in his “Old Church Life in Scotland,” “have now given as valid an authority for the singing of the paraphrases in church as a special Act of Assembly could do. The paraphrases have, on the strength of their own merits, established a secure place in the psalmody of all the Presbyterian churches in Scotland.”
Instrumental music had, in the meantime, continued to be banished from public worship. The psalm to be sung was announced by the minister, and the precentor, who occupied a smaller pulpit below him, placed in a slit in a lyre-shaped brass frame in front of him a card bearing the name of the tune in large letters, so as to be visible to all the congregation. The minister then repeated the first two lines of the verses to be sung, and the precentor struck his tuning-fork on the desk. It was a custom of long standing, probably dating from a time when few of the congregation could read, for the precentor to read and sing a line alternately, which must, to persons unaccustomed to it, have sounded strange, and certainly have destroyed what little harmony there might have been if the psalm had been sung differently.
It was not until the first decade of the present century that the organ was called to the aid of the volume of praise in the Scottish Church. To Dr Ritchie, minister of St. Andrew’s Church, Glasgow, belongs the honour of this innovation. With the approval of the congregation, he introduced an organ, which was played for the first time on the 23rd of August, 1807, not without producing a sensation and a protest. The Presbytery was convened, and the Lord Provost appeared before that grave body, at the head of a deputation of influential citizens, to protest against the minister’s innovation on long established custom. The Presbytery ruled, “that the use of organs in the public worship of God is contrary to the law of the land, and to the law and constitution of our Established Church.” The organ was summarily silenced, therefore, and the grand tones of that instrument were not again heard in accompaniment of sacred song in the Presbyterian churches of Scotland for more than twenty years.
The ineffective character of unaccompanied congregational singing was very slowly recognised. In 1829, however, the congregation of the Relief Church,[11] at Roxburgh Place, Edinburgh, with the approval of their minister, had an organ erected in their place of worship. The act was clamorously opposed outside his own following, and the Relief Presbytery called upon the minister, John Johnston, to remove the offending instrument, under pain of deprivation. The response of minister and congregation to this command was the severance of their connection with the Synod. In 1845, a Congregational Church in Edinburgh set up an organ in their place of worship, and as each congregation in that denomination is an independent body, no outside opposition or interference was in that case possible.
The progress of the movement continued, however, to be very slow. A large proportion of the older men in the ministry still regarded instrumental music in churches as associated with Romanism, and when Dr Lee, the minister of the Old Greyfriars’ Church, in Edinburgh, ventured, in 1863, to introduce a harmonium there, it was rumoured that he was a disguised Jesuit, seeking to Romanise the Reformed Church. He was well able to defend himself, however, and he did so with such ability and power that, in the following year, the General Assembly ruled that “such innovations should be put down only when they interfered with the peace of the Church and the harmony of congregations.” The cause was won. The Old Greyfriars’ congregation subscribed four hundred and fifty pounds for an organ, which replaced the harmonium in 1865.
The Free Church lingered long in the rear of the movement, mainly owing to the opposition of Dr Begg, but in 1883 the General Assembly recorded a resolution similar to that adopted by the Assembly of the Established Church of Scotland in 1864, and opposition to instrumental music is now practically at an end. The prejudice against it still lingers, however, in some districts remote from the life and light of the larger towns. A story is told of a lady of the old school of religious thought, that, having been induced by some friends to attend an Episcopalian service, and being asked on her return how she liked the music, she replied, “It was verra fine, but waes me! yon’s an awfu’ way of spending the Sawbath.”
Discipline in the Kirk.
By the Rev. Geo. S. Tyack, B.A.