Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844

In the years 1824-5, Parliament had passed acts "for building additional places of worship in the highlands and islands of Scotland." These acts may be looked upon as one section in that general extension of religious machinery which the British people, by their government and their legislature, have for many years been promoting. Not, as is ordinarily said, that the weight of this duty had grown upon them simply through their own treacherous neglect of it during the latter half of the eighteenth century; but that no reasonable attention to that duty could have kept pace with the scale upon which the claims of a new manufacturing population had increased. In mere equity we must admit—not that the British nation had fallen behind its duties, (though naturally it might have done so under the religious torpor prevalent at the original era of manufacturing extension,) but that the duties had outstripped all human power of overtaking them. The efforts, however, have been prodigious in this direction for many years. Amongst those applied to Scotland, it had been settled by parliament that forty-two new churches should be raised in the highlands, with an endowment from the Government of L.120 annually for each incumbent. There were besides more than two hundred chapels of ease to be founded; and towards this scheme the Scottish public subscribed largely. The money was entrusted to the clergy. That was right. But mark what followed. It had been expressly provided by Parliament—that any district or circumjacent territory, allotted to such parliamentary churches as the range within which the incumbent was to exercise his spiritual ministrations, should not be separate parishes for any civil or legal effects. Here surely the intentions and directions of the legislature were plain enough, and decisive enough.

How did the Scottish clergy obey them? They erected all these jurisdictions into bona fide "parishes," enjoying the plenary rights (as to church government) of the other parishes, and distinguished from them in a merely nominal way as parishes quoad sacra. There were added at once to the presbyteries, which are the organs of the church power, 203 clerical persons for the chapels of ease, and 42 for the highland churches—making a total of 245 new members. By the constitution of the Scottish church, an equal number of lay elders (called ruling elders) accompany the clerical elders. Consequently 490 new members were introduced at once into that particular class of courts (presbyteries) which form the electoral bodies in relation to the highest court of General Assembly. The effect of this change, made in the very teeth of the law, was twofold. First, it threw into many separate presbyteries a considerable accession of voters—all owing their appointments to the General Assembly. This would at once give a large bias favourable to their party views in every election for members to serve in the Assembly. Even upon an Assembly numerically limited, this innovation would have told most abusively. But the Assembly was not limited; and therefore the whole effect was, at the same moment, greatly to extend the electors and the elected.

Here, then, was the machinery by which the faction worked. They drew that power from Scotland rekindled into a temper of religious anxiety, which they never could have drawn from Scotland lying torpid, as she had lain through the 18th century. The new machinery, (created by Parliament in order to meet the wishes of the Scottish nation,) the money of that nation, the awakened zeal of that nation; all these were employed, honourably in one sense, that is, not turned aside into private channels for purposes of individuals, but factiously in the result, as being for the benefit of a faction; honourably as regarded the open mode of applying such influence—a mode which did not shrink from exposure; but most dishonourably, in so far as privileges, which had been conceded altogether for a spiritual object, were abusively transferred to the furtherance of a temporal intrigue. Such were the methods by which the new-born ambition of the clergy moved; and that ambition had become active, simply because it had suddenly seemed to become practicable. The presbyteries, as being the effectual electoral bodies, are really the main springs of the ecclesiastical administration. To govern them, was in effect to govern the church. A new scheme for extending religion, had opened a new avenue to this control over the presbyteries. That opening was notoriously unlawful. But not the less, the church faction precipitated themselves ardently upon it; and but for the faithfulness of the civil courts, they would never have been dislodged from what they had so suddenly acquired. Such was the extraordinary leap taken by the Scottish clergy, into a power of which, hitherto, they had never enjoyed a fraction. It was a movement per saltum, beyond all that history has recorded. At cock-crow, they had no power at all; when the sun went down, they had gained (if they could have held) a papal supremacy. And a thing not less memorably strange is, that even yet the ambitious leaders were not disturbed; what they had gained was viewed by the public as a collateral gain, indirectly adhering to a higher object, but forming no part at all of what the clergy had sought. It required the scrutiny of law courts to unmask and decompose their true object. The obstinacy of the defence betrayed the real animus of the attempt. It was an attempt which, in connexion with the Veto Act, (supposing that to have prospered,) would have laid the whole power of the church at their feet. What the law had distributed amongst three powers, patron, parish, and presbytery, would have been concentred in themselves. The quoad sacra parishes would have riveted their majorities in the presbyteries; and the presbyteries, under the real action of the Veto, would have appointed nearly every incumbent in Scotland. And this is the answer to the question, when treated merely in outline—How were these things done? The religion of the times had created new machineries for propagating a new religious influence. These fell into the hands of the clergy; and the temptation to abuse these advantages led them into revolution.

III. Having now stated WHAT was done, as well as HOW it was done, let us estimate the CONSEQUENCES of these acts; under this present, or third section, reviewing the immediate consequences which have taken effect already, and under the next section, anticipating the more remote consequences yet to be expected.

In the spring of 1834, as we have sufficiently explained, the General Assembly ventured on the fatal attempt to revolutionize the church, and (as a preliminary towards that) on the attempt to revolutionize the property of patronage. There lay the extravagance of the attempt; its short-sightedness, if they did not see its civil tendencies; its audacity, if they did. It was one revolution marching to its object through another; it was a vote, which, if at all sustained, must entail a long inheritance of contests with the whole civil polity of Scotland.

"Heu quantum fati parva tabella vehit!"

It might seem to strangers a trivial thing, that an obscure court, like the presbytery, should proceed in the business of induction by one routine rather than by another; but was it a trivial thing that the power of appointing clergymen should lapse into this perilous dilemma—either that it should be intercepted by the Scottish clerical order, and thus, that a lordly hierarchy should be suddenly created, disposing of incomes which, in the aggregate, approach to half a million annually; or, on the other hand, that this dangerous power, if defeated as a clerical power, should settle into a tenure exquisitely democratic? Was that trivial? Doubtless, the Scottish ecclesiastical revenues are not equal, nor nearly equal, to the English; still, it is true, that Scotland, supposing all her benefices equalized, gives a larger average to each incumbent than England, of the year 1830. England, in that year, gave an average of £299 to each beneficiary; Scotland gave an average of £303. That body, therefore, which wields patronage in Scotland, wields a greater relative power than the corresponding body in England. Now this body, in Scotland, must finally have been the clerus; but supposing the patronage to have settled nominally where the Veto Act had placed it, then it would have settled into the keeping of a fierce democracy. Mr Forsyth has justly remarked, that in such a case the hired ploughmen of a parish, mercenary hands that quit their engagements at Martinmas, and can have no filial interest in the parish, would generally succeed in electing the clergyman. That man would be elected generally, who had canvassed the parish with the arts and means of an electioneering candidate; or else, the struggle would lie between the property and the Jacobinism of the district.

In respect to Jacobinism, the condition of Scotland is much altered from what it was; pauperism and great towns have worked "strange defeatures" in Scottish society. A vast capital has arisen in the west, on a level with the first-rate capitals of the Continent—with Vienna or with Naples; far superior in size to Madrid, to Lisbon, to Berlin; more than equal to Rome and Milan; or again to Munich and Dresden, taken by couples: and in this point, beyond comparison with any one of these capitals, that whilst they are connected by slight ties with the circumjacent country, Glasgow keeps open a communication with the whole land. Vast laboratories of encouragement to manual skill, too often dissociated from consideration of character; armies of mechanics, gloomy and restless, having no interfusion amongst their endless files of any gradations corresponding to a system of controlling officers; these spectacles, which are permanently offered by the castra stativa of combined mechanics in Glasgow and its dependencies, (Paisley, Greenock, &c.,) supported by similar districts, and by turbulent collieries in other parts of that kingdom, make Scotland, when now developing her strength, no longer the safe and docile arena for popular movements which once she was, with a people that were scattered, and habits that were pastoral. And at this moment, so fearfully increased is the overbalance of democratic impulses in Scotland, that perhaps in no European nation—hardly excepting France—has it become more important to hang weights and retarding forces upon popular movements amongst the labouring classes.

This being so, we have never been able to understand the apparent apathy with which the landed body met the first promulgation of the Veto Act in May 1834. Of this apathy, two insufficient explanations suggest themselves:—1st, It seemed a matter of delicacy to confront the General Assembly, upon a field which they had clamorously challenged for their own. The question at issue was tempestuously published to Scotland as a question exclusively spiritual. And by whom was it thus published? The Southern reader must here not be careless of dates. At present, viz. in 1844, those who fulminate such views of spiritual jurisdiction, are simply dissenters; and those who vehemently withstand them are the church, armed with the powers of the church. Such are the relations between the parties in 1844. But in 1834, the revolutionary party were not only in the church, but (being the majority) they came forward as the church. The new doctrines presented themselves at first, not as those of a faction, but of the Scottish kirk assembled in her highest court. The prestige of that advantage, has vanished since then; for this faction, after first of all falling into a minority, afterwards ceased to be any part or section of the church; but in that year 1834, such a prestige did really operate; and this must be received as one of the reasons which partially explain the torpor of the landed body. No one liked to move first, even amongst those who meant to move. But another reason we find in the conscientious scruples of many landholders, who hesitated to move at all upon a question then insufficiently discussed, and in which their own interest was by so many degrees the largest.

These reasons, however, though sufficient for suspense, seem hardly sufficient for not having solemnly protested against the Veto Act immediately upon its passing the Assembly. Whatever doubts a few persons might harbour upon the expediency of such an act, evidently it was contrary to the law of the land. The General Assembly could have no power to abrogate a law passed by the three estates of the realm. But probably it was the deep sense of that truth, which reined up the national resistance. Sure of a speedy collision between some patron and the infringers of his right, other parties stood back for the present, to watch the form which such a collision might assume.

In that same year of 1834, not many months after the passing of the Assembly's Act, came on the first case of collision; and some time subsequently a second. These two cases, Auchterarder and Marnoch, commenced in the very same steps, but immediately afterwards diverged as widely as was possible. In both cases, the rights of the patron and of the presentee were challenged peremptorily; that is to say, in both cases, parishioners objected to the presentee without reason shown. The conduct of the people was the same in one case as in the other; that of the two presbyteries travelled upon lines diametrically opposite. The first case was that of Auchterarder. The parish and the presbytery concerned, both belonged to Auchterarder; and there the presbytery obeyed the new law of the Assembly: they rejected the presentee, refusing to take him on trial of his qualifications; And why? we cannot too often repeat—simply because a majority of a rustic congregation had rejected him, without attempting to show reason for his rejection. The Auchterarder presbytery, for their part in the affair, were prosecuted in the Court of Session by the injured parties—Lord Kinnoul, the patron, and Mr Young, the presentee. Twice, upon a different form of action, the Court of Session gave judgment against the presbytery; twice the case went up by appeal to the Lords; twice the Lords affirmed the judgment of the court below. In the other case of Marnoch, the presbytery of Strathbogie took precisely the opposite course. So far from abetting the unjust congregation of rustics, they rebelled against the new law of the Assembly, and declared, by seven of their number against three, that they were ready to proceed with the trial of the presentee, and to induct him (if found qualified) into the benefice. Upon this, the General Assembly suspended the seven members of presbytery. By that mode of proceeding, the Assembly fancied that they should be able to elude the intentions of the presbytery: it being supposed that, whilst suspended, the presbytery had no power to ordain; and that, without ordination, there was no possibility of giving induction. But here the Assembly had miscalculated. Suspension would indeed have had the effects ascribed to it; but in the mean time, the suspension, as being originally illegal, was found to be void: and the presentee, on that ground, obtained a decree from the Court of Session, ordaining the presbytery of Strathbogie to proceed with the settlement. Three of the ten members composing this presbytery, resisted; and they were found liable in expenses. The other seven completed the settlement in the usual form. Here was plain rebellion; and rebellion triumphant. If this were allowed, all was gone. What should the Assembly do for the vindication of their authority? Upon deliberation, they deposed the contumacious presbytery from their functions as clergymen, and declared their churches vacant. But this sentence was found to be a brutum fulmen; the crime was no crime, the punishment turned out no punishment: and a minority, even in this very Assembly, declared publicly that they would not consent to regard this sentence as any sentence at all, but would act in all respects as if no such sentence had been carried by vote. Within their own high Court of Assembly, it is, however, difficult to see how this refusal to recognise a sentence voted by a majority could be valid. Outside, the civil courts came into play; but within the Assembly, surely its own laws and votes prevailed. However, this distinction could bring little comfort to the Assembly at present; for the illegality of the deposal was now past all dispute; and the attempt to punish, or even ruin, a number of professional brethren for not enforcing a by-law, when the by-law itself had been found irreconcilable to the law of the land, greatly displease the public, as vindictive, oppressive, and useless to the purposes of the Assembly.

Nothing was gained except the putting on record an implacability that was confessedly impotent. This was the very lunacy of malice. Mortifying it might certainly seem for the members of a supreme court, like the General Assembly, to be baffled by those of a subordinate court: but still, since each party must be regarded as representing far larger interests than any personal to themselves, trying on either side, not the energies of their separate wits, but the available resources of law in one of its obscurer chapters, there really seemed no more room for humiliation to the one party, or for triumph to the other, than there is amongst reasonable men in the result from a game, where the game is one exclusively of chance.

From this period it is probably that the faction of Non-intrusionists resolved upon abandoning the church. It was the one sole resource left for sustaining their own importance to men who were now sinking fast in public estimation. At the latter end of 1842, they summoned a convocation in Edinburgh. The discussions were private; but it was generally understood that at this time they concerted a plan for going out from the church, in the event of their failing to alarm the Government by the notification of this design. We do not pretend to any knowledge of secrets. What is known to every body is—that on the annual meeting of the General Assembly, in May 1843, the great body of the Non-intrusionists moved out in procession. The sort of theatrical interest which gathered round the Seceders for a few hurried days in May, was of a kind which should naturally have made wise men both ashamed and disgusted. It was the merest effervescence from that state of excitement which is nursed by novelty, by expectation, by the vague anticipation of a "scene," possibly of a quarrel, together with the natural interest in seeing men whose names had been long before the public in books and periodical journals.

The first measure of the Seceders was to form themselves into a pseudo-General Assembly. When there are two suns visible, or two moons, the real one and its duplicate, we call the mock sun a parhelios, and the mock moon a paraselene. On that principle, we must call this mock Assembly a para-synodos. Rarely, indeed, can we applaud the Seceders in the fabrication of names. They distinguish as quoad sacra parishes those which were peculiarly quoad politica parishes; for in that view only they had been interesting to the Non-intrusionists. Again, they style themselves The Free Church, by way of taunting the other side with being a servile church. But how are they any church at all? By the courtesies of Europe, and according to usage, a church means a religious incorporation, protected and privileged by the State. Those who are not so privileged are usually content with the title of Separatists, Dissenters, or Nonconformists. No wise man will see either good sense or dignity in assuming titles not appropriate. The very position and aspect towards the church (legally so called) which has been assumed by the Non-intrusionists—viz. the position of protestors against that body, not merely as bearing, amongst other features, a certain relation to the State, but specifically because they bear that relation, makes it incongruous, and even absurd, for these Dissenters to denominate themselves a "church." But there is another objection to this denomination—the "Free Church" have no peculiar and separate Confession of Faith. Nobody knows what are their credenda—what they hold indispensable for fellow-membership, either as to faith in mysteries or in moral doctrines. Now, if they reply—"Oh! as to that, we adopt for our faith all that ever we did profess when members of the Scottish kirk"—then in effect they are hardly so much as a dissenting body, except in some elliptic sense. There is a grievous hiatus in their own title-deeds and archives; they supply it by referring people to the muniment chest of the kirk. Would it not be a scandal to a Protestant church if she should say to communicants—"We have no sacramental vessels, or even ritual; but you may borrow both from Papal Rome." Not only, however, is the Kirk to lend her Confession, &c.; but even then a plain rustic will not be able to guess how many parts in his Confession are or may be affected by the "reformation" of the Non-intrusionists. Surely, he will think, if this reformation were so vast that it drove them out of the national church, absolutely exploded them, then it follows that it must have interveined and indirectly modified innumerable questions: a difference that was punctually limited to this one or these two clauses, could not be such a difference as justified a rupture. Besides, if they have altered this one or these two clauses, or have altered their interpretation, how is any man to know (except from a distinct Confession of Faith) that they have not even directly altered much more? Notoriety through newspapers is surely no ground to stand upon in religion. And now it appears that the unlettered rustic needs two guides—one to show him exactly how much they have altered, whether two points or two hundred, as well as which two or two hundred; another to teach him how far these original changes may have carried with them secondary changes as consequences into other parts of the Christian system. One of the known changes, viz. the doctrine of popular election as the proper qualification for parish clergymen, possibility is not fitted to expand itself or ramify, except by analogy. But the other change, the infinity which has been suddenly turned off like a jet of gas, or like the rushing of wind through the tubes of an organ, upon the doctrine and application of spirituality, seems fitted for derivative effects that are innumerable. Consequently, we say of the Non-intrusionists—not only that they are no church; but that they are not even any separate body of Dissenters, until they have published a "Confession" or a revised edition of the Scottish Confession.

IV. Lastly, we have to sum and to appreciate the ultimate consequences of these things. Let us pursue them to the end of the vista.—First in order stands the dreadful shock to the National Church Establishment; and that is twofold: it is a shock from without, acting through opinion, and a shock from within, acting through the contagion of example. Each case is separately perfect. Through the opinion of men standing outside of the church, the church herself suffers wrong in her authority. Through the contagion of sympathy stealing over men inside of the church, peril arises of other shocks in a second series, which would so exhaust the church by reiterated convulsions, as to leave her virtually dismembered and shattered for all her great national functions.

As to that evil which acts through opinion, it works by a machinery, viz. the press and social centralization in great cities, which in these days is perfect. Right or wrong, justified or not justified by the acts of the majority, it is certain that every public body—how much more then, a body charged with the responsibility of upholding the truth in its standards!—suffers dreadfully in the world's opinion by any feud, schism, or shadow of change among its members. This is what the New Testament, a code of philosophy fertile in new ideas, first introduced under the name of scandal; that is, any occasion of serious offence ministered to the weak or to the sceptical by differences irreconcilable in the acts or the opinions of those whom they are bound to regard as spiritual authorities. Now here in Scotland, is a feud past all arbitration: here is a schism no longer theoretic, neither beginning nor ending in mere speculation: here is a change of doctrine, on one side or the other, which throws a sad umbrage of doubt and perplexity over the pastoral relation of the church to every parish in Scotland. Less confidence there must always be henceforward in great religious incorporations. Was there any such incorporation reputed to be more internally harmonious than the Scottish church? None has been so tempestuously agitated. Was any church more deeply pledged to the spirit of meekness? None has split asunder so irreconcilably. As to the grounds of quarrel, could any questions or speculations be found so little fitted for a popular intemperance? Yet no breach of unity has ever propagated itself by steps so sudden and irrevocable. One short decennium has comprehended within its circuit the beginning and the end of this unparalleled hurricane. In 1834, the first light augury of mischief skirted the horizon—a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. In 1843 the evil had "travelled on from birth to birth." Already it had failed in what may be called one conspiracy; already it had entered upon a second, viz. to rear up an Anti-Kirk, or spurious establishment, which should twist itself with snake-like folds about the legal establishment; surmount it as a Roman vinea surmounted the fortifications which it beleaguered; and which, under whatsoever practical issue for the contest, should at any rate overlook, molest, and insult the true church for ever. Even this brief period of development would have been briefer, had not the law courts interposed many delays. Demurs of law process imposed checks upon the uncharitable haste of the odium theologicum. And though in a question of schism it would be a petitio principii for a neutral censor to assume that either party had been originally in error, yet it is within our competence to say, that the Seceders it was whose bigotry carried the dispute to that sad issue of a final separation. The establishment would have been well content to stop short of that consummation: and temperaments might have been found, compromises both safe and honourable, had the minority built less of their reversionary hopes upon the policy of a fanciful martyrdom. Martyrs they insisted upon becoming: and that they might be martyrs, it was necessary for them to secede. That Europe thinks at present with less reverence of Protestant institutions than it did ten years ago, is due to one of these institutions in particular; viz. to the Scottish kirk, and specifically to the minority in that body. They it was who spurned all mutual toleration, all brotherly indulgence from either side to what it regarded as error in the other. Consequently upon their consciences lies the responsibility of having weakened the pillars of the Reformed churches throughout Christendom.