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The Church of Scotland.

First Lecture.

When a clergyman of the Church of England comes among us to deliver to us his impressions of our Churches and of our Christianity, we owe him first of all a courteous reception. We are to presume that he came among us on a benevolent design to do us good, and we are to treat him accordingly. In that, I hope, we have not failed. And we thank him for all that was friendly, either in his criticism or in his praise. Next, however, we owe him, and we owe it to ourselves, to sift the statements which he makes and the conclusions which he implies. In the present case this duty is the more incumbent, because Dean Stanley has given us, not a version of our history only, but a version with a moral. No one, I suppose, is so blind as not to see that it is the moral rather than the story which interests the Dean. He did not come among us merely to reform our notions about our past history. He came to influence, if possible, the history of the years that are before us. Every one of these lectures, like Æsop's Fables, looks towards a practical application. The Dean, one may complain, does not state his moral quite so plainly as Æsop did. But we shall have no great difficulty in gathering what it is as we proceed.

The element of the lectures now referred to is that which page 4 gives them a claim to attention, and this alone has induced me to ask you to hear me to-night on the other side. I should count it an idle thing to ask you to take so much trouble merely for the purpose of showing that an Englishman has fallen into some mistakes about our antiquities or about our controversies. So ordinary and natural a circumstance could discompose no one. Still less have I come here to try to defend through thick and thin the Scots in general or my own ecclesiastical progenitors in particular. They were men, and therefore fallible and failing; they were Scotsmen, and therefore when they went wrong they did it energetically, blowing a trumpet before them, and defying all the world to refute them. Yes, and being Scotsmen they had like ourselves the moral and intellectual physiognomy which the world, favoured with many a wandering specimen, knows so well; an ungainly people, shall I say, wearing our principles in a serious pedantic way, angular, lumbering, roundabout in our motions, argumentative, inflexible. Why, the very birds of the air, passing us on easy wing, could they see our inner man as they see our outer, would judge us, from the point of view of their consciousness, much as the Dean does. Defence here is useless; let us not attempt it. The Dean, coming among us, discerns this family likeness in us all. He only discerns in us all what we have all discerned in one another. To enjoy a joke and a laugh at one another is a privilege that has been claimed and exercised by religious parties in Scotland ever since the days of John Knox. Long may it be ere so wholesome a practice shall be proscribed. We have been able to combine it with reverence, with earnestness, with a strength of conviction and of purpose not easily shaken either by laughter or tears.

It is no untried "strategical operation" which the Dean has employed, in making our history the means of raising doubts in our mind about our principles and our prejudices. Every page 5 reader of his works knows this method well. I remember a passage somewhere in which he dwelt with delight on the idea, that theological principles, carefully built up and fenced by argument, often simply vanish into air when they are brought into contact with great and good men, whose greatness and goodness is not of the regulation pattern of the theologians. Such men, he said—Socrates, for instance, Spinoza, William Penn—simply walk through the fences the theologians have set up. And the method has an opposite application. The representative of a principle makes himself and it ridiculous on the Dean's page, and so principle and representative are turned about their business together. Just so we have seen, of late, a long procession of Scotsmen, headed by Lord Pitsligo, and Bishop Jolly, and closing with Robert Burns and Walter Scott, marched up and down through our Scottish principles and practices, upsetting all our fences, obliterating all our demarcations, driving us from our fixed points, tearing off our theological garments, until we are left nearly as naked as we were born. It cannot be wondered at, surely, if we drop some natural tears at finding ourselves so maltreated by kindly Scots of our own flesh and blood. Yet we need not wonder, perhaps, that these well-tried tactics should have been applied by the Dean to the case of Scotland and to the minds of Scotsmen. The Scottish vote has once or twice come heavily into the scale in decisive moments of the history of these islands. Two hundred and thirty years ago, when the liberties of England were in question, the Scottish vote determined the issue. Two years ago, when the maintenance of the Irish Establishment—always questionable on other grounds—had begun to threaten us with the endowment of Romanism (and no man advocated the maintenance of the one and the adoption of the other more ably than Dean Stanley), it was the Scottish vote that, right or wrong, determined its overthrow. There are other questions rising on which the Scottish vote may again tell heavily. If the Dean thought he page 6 could either win us, or bewilder us, he surely had a perfect right to try; and he has shown no lack of courage in the effort he has made.

But if profitable lessons are to be drawn from our history, our mentor must first understand it and us. For I hope it is not Scottish arrogance to assume that with all our faults we have done enough in the world to have a claim to be understood. Perhaps Dr. Stanley does thoroughly understand us. But if so, I shall take leave to say that it is his first great success in this department. Through all his works—works written always so charmingly—works that bear token of an eye which nothing picturesque escapes, either in the physical or the moral world—this is precisely what one misses—a sympathetic appreciation of the deeper and the stronger currents of religious life and of doctrinal controversy. In Dr. Stanley's pages movements dependent on these have their outside wonderfully depicted, but their inner meaning scantily realised. And the reason is plain. Dr. Stanley's mind turns ever to the limitations, the compensations, the counterpoises which balance and qualify all assertions, which take away the sharpness of the definition, which temper and assuage the confidence with which it is propounded. That habit of the understanding may or may not be desirable in itself; but let this be remembered, that Church history has been mainly made, certainly in all its worthier passages, by men of intense convictions; and hardly without the experience of intense conviction shall it be understood or represented.

I am anxious to be done with these preliminaries. But I must yet further say that in any estimate the standard by which we are to be measured, and the point of view from which it is applied, is the main point. One way of applying a standard was not, I think, intended by the Dean. But it might, I fear, be impressed on the audience, and how to deal with it I don't know. In many a smiling allusion and many a quip-courteous, as events and page 7 characters pass in review, I seem to hear a gracious gentleman saying—I am an Episcopalian; surely you could not have any objection, or let us say, any strong objection, to Episcopacy. And I am an Erastian; now, is it not absurd of you to pretend to me that there is any great harm in State supremacy? And I am a Moderate; why in the world should you cherish any objection to the Moderates? And I am a Broad Churchman; I don't believe in or don't care for many doctrines you believe in or care for; surely you won't pretend to justify yourselves in making any great fuss about these points? To all this what can a man answer,—at least a well-bred man; especially when one has been reminded that we owe all our civilisation to England?

Now I leave introductory observations. And I pass the sketch which Dr. Stanley has given us of the early Christianity of Scotland. Those fragments of our buried past, which he pieced so gracefully together, he treated with a cordiality of appreciation which we in turn appreciate. I will not be tempted to say one word of the changes introduced by Margaret and her sons. Nor will I meddle much with the history of the Scottish Episcopal Communion in its separate state. One point must be touched upon, perhaps, before I end. But for the present it is enough to say that while I have the very worst opinion of the system of Scottish Episcopacy as it existed in the days of its supremacy, I admit most willingly that all along men memorably good were found among its adherents; and adversity brings out the best points of all Churches. I do not know a pleasanter experience than when, in travelling through the strifes of ecclesiastical parties, one stumbles on a clear instance of unequivocal religious and holy life associated with that very thing which one is for the present called to fight with. In so far as the Dean held up truly devout and good men in any of the Scottish Churches to the admiration of the page 8 rest, he was performing a good office for all of us, and we are all grateful to him.

But I must he allowed to say a few words about the relations of our Scottish Presbyterianism to the Prelacy which was introduced among us, and pressed upon us at different periods. And to-night, so far as I touch on Prelacy, I shall confine myself within strict limits. Practically, and as a matter of fact, Prelacy and the royal supremacy were mixed up together. That ought never to be forgotten; each supported the other, and each made the other worse. But I reserve to next night whatever concerns the liberty of the Church; and on next Wednesday I intend to speak of the Moderate party, and of the views of the gospel and of Christian religion which ought to be applied to our Scottish history. To-night, after saying what I think requisite regarding the topic of Episcopacy, as I have just now limited it, I will take up some other matters which must be touched on, and which do not fall naturally under either of the other heads. Tonight's topics, therefore, are of subordinate importance intrinsically, and a little miscellaneous as well, defects for which I apologise beforehand.

On the topic of Episcopacy, as now limited, I should wish to be as short as possible. Dean Stanley appeared to imply that our Scottish history, rightly read, proved us mistaken in supposing that there was any difficulty in combining the two systems in the most friendly relations. Difficulties, as it would appear, were manufactured or imagined; that was all. To illustrate this we were directed to 1572, the last year of John Knox's life. Episcopacy was introduced then, and John Knox made no stir against it.

Now in that year the Church, along with the State, was entering into a very curious experiment. The object was to get some arrangement effected in virtue of which the patrimony of the Kirk, or some of it, might be applied to page 9 religious uses. The distribution of it in moderate incomes to the various labourers throughout the country was desired by the Church, but resisted by the State. The great benefices must be kept up—ostensibly on legal and constitutional grounds, really in order that there might be good fat geese for the nobles to pluck. A compromise was effected, and part of this compromise was that nominal bishops, abbots, and priors should be appointed. As to the bishops, they were to have the name of bishops in Church and State both. But in the State and in law they were to have the legal character and incidents of bishops; while it could be maintained plausibly that in the Church they were not to have the ecclesiastical character of bishops, for they were to have the powers only of superintendents, according to the well-known order then established, and were to be subject in that character to the General Assembly. It was an experiment, whether the Church could not effect an adjustment regarding the property by consenting to names and titles, without introducing thereby any serious change into her preexisting constitution. It was not a safe experiment, for a variety of reasons, and the Church very soon came to see that, and withdrew from it again in a very few years, rather unceremoniously. But that was the nature of the experiment. John Knox did not like it. He gave it no countenance. He was in his "decrepit age," as he pathetically calls it, and within a twelvemonth of his death. His brethren thought the experiment might be tried. And he did not publicly oppose it. But that which he did not oppose was the giving of the name and legal incidents of a bishop to a man who in the most important respects was not to be a bishop. For those bishops were not clothed with personal jurisdiction over their brethren as members of a superior order, and they had not committed to them the administration of any ordinance to which their brethren were not competent.

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But at a later period, we are told, the two systems flourished together—that is, in the latter days of James I., and in those of Charles I. Episcopacy was set up again by the Crown. Bishops, presbyteries, curates, and kirk-sessions were all welded into one system, and need never have quarrelled if men had been wise. The inference drawn from this statement for our Scottish Episcopal neighbours does not concern me. But the inference implied as to the subsequent unreasonableness of Scottish Presbyterians is plain enough. Why did they divorce what was so happily joined? Now, this is an essential misrepresentation. And it draws all its plausibility from circumstances very easily explained.

With all possible goodwill to the work, it was not possible of a sudden to banish Presbyterianism and introduce Anglican Episcopacy. The thing could not be done; and therefore a large though a diminishing amount of Presbyterianism was spared for the time. The policy was to make head step by step, to keep up a steady pressure in the hope of ultimately tempering the Church to the intended result. With this view, during the reigns of James and Charles every device was exhausted to outwit, deceive, and concuss the Presbyterians, yet in such a way as to avoid any general collision. Leading and resolute men were banished. Pliable tools were placed in great positions. Promises were made and broken. Innovations were introduced with the assurance that nothing more was intended, while yet those innovations were made the stepping-stones to new changes. Nonconformity was treated with that judicious sot of repression which discouraged it without driving it mad. The names and forms of Church Courts were allowed to remain, vhile yet power was steadily though gradually concentrated in the hands of the bishops. It was a very well managed scheme, and it had a kind of success. Men were gradually bought to accommodate themselves to each successive stage at the process. At last, however, an attempt to ac- page 11 celerate it led to the explosion of 1637 and 1638, which swept away the incubus as if it had been a mere nightmare. That warning was remembered; and even when Episcopacy was revived in the darker days of Charles II., those who managed for the Crown determined to mingle some method with their zeal. And the method now, as before, was to leave some Presbyterianism, both in government and worship, in those inferior strata of the system which touched most nearly the common life and experience of the people generally, until the sterner Presbyterianism could be worn out of the country, and things made ready for a safe move in advance. That was what the Dean describes by saying that "the two systems flourished in the closest contact." There is a great deal in a phrase. So Popery and Protestantism flourished in Oxford when James VI. forced Popish Fellows into Protestant colleges. So, also, we may say that Germany and France flourished in the closest contact, after the siege of Paris ended last year. France could not fight; yet her national life was not gone, her institutions were not annihilated. Better off than the Presbyterians, she even had her Assembly. Germany, meanwhile, drawing her inspiration from quite other sources, sat upon France, exchanged polite proposals with M. Thiers, and dictated conditions as seemed to her good. The two systems "flourished in the closest contact."

I was a little amazed, I confess, at the Dean's statement that the Assemblies of Andrew Melville sat side by side with the hierarchy of Charles I., remembering, as I did, that the want of Assemblies was a notorious and outstanding grievance of that reign. But I perceive that the Dean must have intended to convey that the hierarchy were haunted by the ghost of the murdered Assembly, which I believe to be quite true. The Assembly came to life indeed in 1638, which was in the reign of Charles I. But I do not think the hierarchy would have described the action of the Glasgow Assembly by the polite euphemism of saying that it "sat by their side."

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Nay, so shadowy was the distinction, as we may gather, that actually Prelacy was called "black," because the prelatic ministers wore black gowns; whereas we are to take it that those of the other side wore blue cloaks and broad bonnets. Let the Dean be assured that no Presbyterian minister ever troubled his head whether the cloak he preached in was black or blue. Disputes about the colour of vestments in which the gospel is to be preached do not belong to our parish. We have never been civilised enough to understand them. And we had other reasons, tolerably strong, for calling Prelacy black.

In the resistance which our fathers made to Episcopacy, and also to various institutions and ceremonies which usually go with it, they sometimes exaggerated the intrinsic importance of the point in debate. That happens in all debates, and it is peculiarly apt to happen when men are maintaining their sincerity under oppression, and are like to be ruined for so doing. But not to speak at present of the royal supremacy, which I have reserved, I wish to call up to your minds what Scotsmen looked back upon in 1638. What may be made of Episcopacy in Churches that heartily approve of it I do not inquire. But what Episcopacy proved to be, as forced on a community that in various degrees disliked it, doubted or denied its authority, and feared its tendency, was this—it meant the worst kind of humiliation; it meant the expulsion and silencing of venerated men; it meant the promotion of forward and fawning and lax men to positions in the Church of which they were unworthy; it meant an unhappy, dubious, perplexed state of mind on the part of many worthy and able men, anxious to make no needless disturbances, yet doubtful, and more than doubtful, whether they were not betraying a noble and scriptural constitution; it meant persistent deception, and manoeuvring, and falsehood on the part of leading Churchmen; it meant a state of things in which every influence that is ecclesiastically demoralising was in full play, in which temptation to page 13 fawn and cringe was a great ecclesiastical force. Men looked back on it all the more indignant because they felt personally ashamed and humiliated. And their resolution was that they would be finally done with it. Henceforth, by God's help, they were resolved that no institution should be accepted or sanctioned unless it could be made good to the Church's conscience out of God's Word, and set up on that ground, cordially, heartily, and resolvedly. If they said strong things about Episcopacy, and the Dean can produce many such sayings if he pleases, they only, in the language of their own proverb, "roosed the ford as they found it." It had been a very bad ford for them.

Nor let it be said that the recoil connected with those temporary circumstances betrayed men so far into a narrow and petty position, unfit to be permanently maintained. It is always to be maintained. All that might tempt us to look askance on Christians who are persuaded in favour of Episcopacy has long passed away. We have the best reasons for honouring and loving many of them; and some of them are among the foremost in upholding those very views of Protestant truth and of evangelical religion which we count to be unspeakably more important than any form of government. All that might tempt us to look askance on such men is past. But all remains that should dispose us to enduring and enthusiastic thankfulness that our fathers upheld Presbyterianism and shut Prelacy out.

For the earnestness with which Presbyterianism was maintained was due to something else besides the confidence men had in their theoretical conclusions about Church government. Everything that is theoretically good and true has its practical witness in itself, from which it receives daily confirmation. So it was with Presbyterianism. Presbyterianism meant organised life, regulated distribution of forces, graduated recognition of gifts, freedom to discuss, authority to page 14 control, agency to administer. Presbyterianism meant a system by which the convictions and conscience of the Church could constantly be applied by appropriate organs to her affairs. Presbyterianism meant a system by which quickening influence anywhere experienced in the Church could be turned into effective force and transmitted to fortify the whole society. Presbyterianism meant a system in which every one, first of all the common man, had his recognised place, his defined position, his ascertained and guarded privileges, his responsibilities inculcated and enforced, felt himself a part of the great unity, with a right to care for its welfare, and to guard its integrity. From the broad base of the believing people the sap rose through Sessions, Presbyteries, Synods, to the Assembly, and thence descending diffused knowledge, influence, organic unity through the whole system. Yes, Prebyterianism is a system for a free people that love a regulated, a self-regulating freedom; a people independent, yet patient, considerate, trusting much to the processes of discussion and consultation, and more to the promised aid of a much-forgiving and a watchful Lord. It is a system for strong Churches—Churches that are not afraid to let their matters see the light of day—to let their weakest parts and their worst defects be canvassed before all men that they may be mended. It is a system for believing Churches, that are not ashamed or afraid to cherish a high ideal, and to speak of lofty aims, and to work for long and far results, amid all the discouragements arising from sin and folly in their own ranks and around them. It is a system for catholic Christians, who wish not merely to cherish private idiosyncrasies, but to feel themselves identified with the common cause, while they cleave directly to Him whose cause it is. Our fathers felt instinctively that the changes thrust upon them threatened to suppress great elements of good—not mere forms alone, but the life which those forms nourished and expressed. When Episcopacy shall have trained page 15 the common people to care, as those of Scotland have cared, for the public interest of Christ's Church, and to connect that care with their own religious life as a part and a fruit of it, then it may afford to smile at the zealous self-defence of Scottish Presbyterianism.

But, besides all that, there was, and there is, another reason for the strength of the objection to prelatic Episcopacy cherished by Scottish Presbyterians. In itself the difference might be regarded as implying merely a diverse judgment from ours as to the number and relation of office-bearers by whom the Church is to be governed—surely a very small affair, the existence of which need not hinder the warmest recognition and co-operation. But Episcopacy is fated, I fear, to bring other things in its train. From the circumstances of its long history; from the fact of its being established, where it is established, rather on grounds of tradition than of Scripture; from its being associated with festivals, and ceremonies, and like inventions, methods of Church life which rest on the same traditionary ground; from its being the link on which hangs suspended a whole system of salvation by Church and sacraments, which depends on Episcopal succession; it follows that wherever Episcopacy comes, the rest presses in behind. Episcopacy led up to Popery, though many a bishop fretted and fought against that result. So, though many a sincere and honest Episcopalian Protestant detests the system I am speaking of, he can never get rid of it. It comes, and it comes not merely as an element or fact, but as a singularly arrogant and imperious force, demanding for itself and its principles a complete ascendancy, and forcing on the Churches where it exists the alternative of submission or of perpetual strife about the very first principles of Protestant truth. It was the perception of this, growing clear to the Scottish mind, that lent more than half its intensity to the revolt of 1638. And the same reason holds still. To keep those superstitions clean out of our Churches, page 16 to disembarrass ourselves of a world of foolish, mischievous, and misleading practice and sentiment, by the very simple process of holding fast to Presbyterianism, is to gain a greater good by adhering to a lesser good. We value them both; and we know that in the day we resign the one we shall lose the other. We have no temptation to resign Presbyterianism in our day; but most devoutly do we thank and praise God Almighty, who gave grace to our fathers to maintain it amid the temptations of theirs. And I repeat that in 1637, when our Church resolved that it would be tampered with by Episcopacy no more, not the system itself only, but the train of accompaniments and tendencies that cleave to it, determined their resolution.

Now, when we take our stand against Episcopacy, and against the multitude of things that go with it, in worship and otherwise, it seems to be thought that we betray a small, scrupulous spirit. Why object to this one and this other beneficial and useful invention, graceful, poetic, fragrant with the associations of 1500 years? Our answer is, that if we once began we should have plenty of small scruples, such as agitate our friends across the Border. And the only remedy is either to swallow all that any one plausibly proposes, or else to sweep all these things away in a mass, on the ground that whenever we begin to introduce man's inventions into God's worship and service we deviate from the true path. Of these alternatives we adopt the second. There is nothing petty or small about it. Like every other principle, it may be taken up and applied in a small, anxious, casuistical spirit. In itself it is large, broad, and manly. We have nothing to say to that immense apparatus of human inventions, we refuse to have anything to do with them, we simply dismiss them all; and thereby we are rid of a thousand small questions and petty disputes.

Here I had intended to speak of the nature and influence of the covenanting movement: but I will reserve it to next lecture.

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But, before I close this lecture, I wish to advert to one of the things which struck the Dean about us, and that is the smallness of the points on which the Scottish Dissenting sects divided. I think he might have told us in the first place, but perhaps he did not know it, that beyond all question the moving influence which led the first Seceders to take up a marked position was no small point, but it was anxiety with respect to the chief matters of the way of salvation by Jesus Christ; neither did they secede even on that ground, but were deposed by the enlightened and liberal Moderates. It was after being deposed they made up their minds that from the position thus providentially assigned them they had no cause to return, all things considered. And as this influence had much to do with their beginning, so it continued to be the secret of their multiplying and the source of their influence, at the very least, as much as any peculiarity whatever. However, what strikes the Dean about all the Presbyterian sects is, first, that we are all conservative, which is true, resting on the old constitution, and protesting against corruptions; and, secondly, that we divide on small points. So that he can think of nothing like us but the Russian sects. Now, here the Dean did not openly declare all that was in his heart; but I am glad to be able to supply that lack. For, long ago, as it happened, the Dean described the Russian sectaries, coupling the description with an admonition to Free Churchmen and Established Churchmen alike to lay the facts to heart. As he still, after long years, dwells on the parallel with a more precise application, I feel it a privilege to hold the mirror up. Hear, therefore, Seceders, and Cameronians still more, what you are like. Here are some of the grounds of the Eastern nonconformity. It is a sin in the Established clergy that they give the benediction with three fingers instead of two. It is a sin to pronounce the name of Jesus with two syllables instead of three, or to repeat the hallelujah thrice instead of once. page 18 All processions ought to go from left to right, according to the sun, not from right to left. It was a most alarming innovation to use the service books, or the revision of the Authorised Version, in which mistakes arising from time and ignorance have been corrected. It is or was a mark of heresy to eat the new unheard-of food, the potato, for that accursed apple of the earth is the very apple with which the Devil tempted Eve. And you can imagine the delight with which the Dean wrote down this closing instance: —"It is a departure from every sound principle of Church and State to smoke tobacco." The ancient czars and patriarchs had forbidden it. "Peter the Great, for that very reason, and for commercial reasons also, tried to force the abhorred article on the now reluctant nation, and asked whether the smoking of tobacco was more wicked than the drinking of brandy. 'Yes,' was the answer, reaching perhaps the highest point of misquotation that the annals of theological perverseness presents, 'for it is said, not that which goeth into a man, but that which cometh out of a man, that defileth the man.'"

Not presuming to add anything to this instructive picture of our friends, I remark that it is perfectly true that Scottish religious bodies were, for a time, in the way of dividing on small points; it is quite true, and really if I had any means of throwing doubt upon it, I could not have the heart to do it. Who would deny or abridge the peculiarities of that phase of Scottish character and incident to which the Dean pointed? Who would forego the touches of Scottish life that cluster round those "testimonies?"

I knew of a couple who lived many years ago in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire. They were eminently worthy people, and deeply attached to one another. The man was a typical Scottish patriarch—his name is not unknown to Scottish literature—his mind overflowed with a sweet reflective piety, as elevated as it was sincere. Of this couple the one was a Burgher, and the other an Anti-Burgher. Cherish- page 19 ing the deepest confidence in one another, they had never dreamt of drawing one another into any unfaithful compromises by "occasional hearing" that might confuse the clearness of their respective "testimonies." Every Sabbath-day they set off, the wife riding behind her husband; and after depositing her at her own place of worship, he proceeded to his, calling for her on his return. So the years passed. At length the reunion of the denominations was accomplished over the grave of the buried Burgher oath. Both husband and wife were agreed in seeing no difficulty in principle, and they acquiesced readily in the ecclesiastical proceedings. But the difficulty followed. The union of the bodies took away the reason, and indeed the seemliness, of the two going to diverse churches. To go to church together followed, of course; and it was an utterly discomfiting and bewildering experience. Many a time they had mingled fervent prayers together; but to get down at the same door, to sit in the same seat, to look on at the same Bible, and to go home together, after having heard the same sermon—it was like beginning a new education in their old age. Their very love had realised itself as extending across the dividing line; and now when the dividing line was taken out of the way, they did not know what to make of it. Neither of them disguised the feeling that they would have gone to the grave in which they were to lie side by side with more content by the old road than by the new one. That union was one of the last providential trials which came to chasten two Christian lives full of love and of good works.

Well, of those divisions it is enough to say that the parties concerned can well afford not to be very careful either to excuse or account for them, can well afford to join in the laugh over any Scottish idiosyncrasies that appeared in them. They stand as a warning of dangers to which our Scottish Churches are exposed. I think the line of things along which they came admits of explanation in a way that is instructive, but I cannot trespass on your page 20 time. I may say this, that the Seceders, when they resolved to keep their separate position, and to state a separate cause, very naturally fell back on the old lines of the Covenants from which battle had been delivered so often. But they took them up not merely in their general spirit, but with a renewal of the old modes of applying them, so as to pledge their members precisely to those documents and to the testimonies which embodied their present application. Hence came a sort of mutual responsibility among them for the view taken by each member of new events as they emerged, which was sure to run them into difficulties on the point of personal uprightness. In those difficulties they were entangled for a time; and so came that succession of splits crosswise, which has furnished such a fund of hard Scottish names to lecturers disposed to moralise on Scottish divisions. Those who care to do so may make of them what they can.

But was it not due to those bodies to remark, that instead of giving themselves up to the dividing tendencies, they still clung to the catholic conception of the Church—they still realised the duty which the Church owes not merely to truth, but to love, and to the just liberties of their members; and that under these influences they did what Churches have not very often done,—they worked themselves out of the complications from which the dividing influence sprang? Was it not worth noticing that a reuniting movement, thoroughly Scottish in its whole principles and working, set in and prevailed? Look across the Border, and see whether anything like this earnest application of mind and heart to realise a worthy Church life exists there. You have there in the Establishment a loose system of Churches, held together by the external bond, which notoriously would fly in pieces if that bond were removed; and you have a system of Nonconformist Churches, which, with distinguished excellences, yet escapes all difficulty on this subject by declining to carry Church life, organised upon definite principles and responsi- page 21 bilities, beyond the limits of the individual congregation. There was nothing to hinder our Dissenters splitting up indefinitely, had they been so disposed. Their history has taken a very different turn.

Now, though I have been touching mainly minor points, I think it has partly appeared that he who will draw lessons from our history ought to appreciate and investigate one question. What is the meaning and source of that grave enthusiasm about the Church as a divine institution which has so remarkably appeared among our Scottish people? It is an enthusiasm connected not with a hierarchical or sacerdotal, but with a Christian popular view of the Church. Has Dean Stanley appreciated it? Not at all, but only noted points in which the working of it appeared to him, looking from his point of view, odd or unaccountable. To try to get a little nearer to the heart of this business must occupy us in the remaining lectures.

But in its intensest and most exclusive forms, this enthusiasm of ours always maintained a wide catholicity of view with respect to the visible Catholic Church of Christ. This may be best illustrated by a contrast.

What would have been said if in any of these Dissenting Churches it had been held forth by leading ministers that the salvation of the soul turns on the belief of a point of Church government? In point of fact, although they were occasionally run into difficulties and divisions, they all held wide and catholic principles respecting the fellowship of salvation, and unchurched no Christian body on the mere ground of not holding with them. But if they had held forth any such doctrine as I have indicated, how would Dean Stanley most justly have pointed his moral and adorned his tale! But some one says, Why put such a case? The thing is out of the question—salvation depend on a point of Church government! I beg such an one's pardon. There are those among us who page 22 hold so. There are those who hold that a man who errs on a point of Church government escapes the loss of his soul only if he can present the plea of invincible ignorance. We all hold, I suppose, that deliberate, conscious defiance of God's will, known to be His will, is rebellion, and is incompatible with His favour, whether the point be great or small. But this is quite a different matter. There are those who hold that there is a point of Church government so momentous that error about it excludes from the fellowship of salvation, and leaves a man to God's uncovenanted mercies; only, if his ignorance be invincible ignorance (not by his own fault), it may be hoped that those unrevealed mercies will overtake his case. Bishop Jolly, the same whom Dean Stanley described, wrote thus::—"Every Christian is bound to maintain communion with his proper bishop, and to join with none but such as are in communion with him, . . . that being the only way to be in communion with Jesus Christ, the Invisible Bishop and Head of the catholic Church. . . . As the one bishop is the principle of unity to a particular Church, by our union with whom we are united to the one Invisible Bishop, Jesus Christ, so schism in any diocese consists in a causeless separation from the communion of the one Bishop, whereby the schismatics are separated from the communion of the Invisible Bishop, and so from the whole catholic Church in heaven or earth." And afterwards, dwelling on the greatness of the sin, and protesting against those who hold these views being thought uncharitable, he says:—"At the same time, they make great allowance, as they trust our compassionate Saviour does also, for the case of those whose invincible ignorance or prejudice will not let them see the truths of these principles." In like manner, in a work by Rev. John Com per, of Aberdeen, published in 1854,^* the author dwells on the necessity, or at least the assured safety, of attending the ministrations of those who have Christ's commission page 23 derived to them through a regular successive transmission from the apostles; and after describing at large the inefficacy of ministrations not in the line of apostolical succession, he proceeds:—"I anticipate the inquiry, Do you therefore deny salvation to all who are not happy enough to live under an apostolically derived and regularly ordained ministry? . . . I can safely reply we do not assert that salvation cannot be had by any out of the apostles' fellowship. There is such a thing as involuntary, invincible ignorance. . . . He who knows well how far error is the result of the force of early instructions, associations, and other circumstances which unconsciously to ourselves give a bias to the mind, and how far it is the fruit of wilful prejudice, intellectual pride, or indocility of heart, will award to each according to his deserts; saving, as we trust and do not doubt, in His own inscrutable ways, those whose errors are their misfortune and not their fault, being involuntary and invincible; and as surely—for His Word has affirmed it—consigning the wilful deniers of His one truth to the fate of those who make or believe a lie, which, in the awful words of Holy Scripture, is 'to be damned.' Of individuals, indeed, we judge no man. To his own Master each standeth or falleth." That is, he will not judge who is or is not invincibly ignorant. Other materials I have from quarters nearer home, but I forbear to use them.

Do I say that all this is uncharitable? Not at all. I make no doubt Bishop Jolly would have gladly rendered any charitable office to the soul or body of any of us. I impute no want of charity. But I say, What a gigantic superstition, and, be it remembered, one by no means peculiarly Scottish—a superstition certainly involving far stranger views of God and of Christ, and of the administration of salvation in the world, than can be charged on the Church principles of the Cameronians or the Seceders, or even the Free Church itself.