the throne; and the Assembly's minutes are greatly occupied with annual congratulations upon the birth of the annual prince or princess. The American war, moreover, had begun, and there were addresses about the clemency of his Majesty, the wisdom of his Ministers, and the indomitable valour of his fleets and armies. But all was in vain. The colonists cut their cables, and drifted away from under the lee of the mother-country; and now they form the greatest Republic in the world.

But while all was quiet in synod and General Assembly, there was an exciting controversy going on in the press regarding the propriety and obligatoriness of creeds. It was no new question; it was at least as old as the Reformation. There had always been many to say that the Word of God was the only rule of faith and manners; and that it was impiety in man to attempt to supplement it. The Bible, they argued, is either the most perfect compilation of Christian doctrine possible, or it is not: if it is, what need of others? if it is not, its authority ceases. But Confessions of Faith, it was further maintained, not only do damage to the paramount authority of Scripture; they destroy every man's right of interpreting the Scriptures for himself. The right of private interpretation was one of the great principles earnestly contended for at the Reformation. Why give the people this right only to take it away again? Are not creeds authoritative interpretations of the Word of God? Is there any room for private interpretation under the shadow of this authoritative interpretation ? If a minister interpret the Scriptures for himself, will he not be deposed? If a layman do so, will he not be excommunicated? What severer penalties could be imposed? Within the pale of Protestantism, as of Popery, must not every man believe just as the Church believes?

These had long been favourite maxims with the Independents; but now sentiments of a similar kind began to creep into the Church. The objections to symbols evidently arose from the difficulty which some clergymen felt fully to believe all the thousand independent propositions of which the Westminster Confession consists. So far back as the days of Wodrow, some argumentative ministers had let it escape them that they would gladly be rid of the Confession, as they felt it a hindrance to the free exercise of their logic.1

1 See Wodrow's Correspondence, vol. iii.

But this feeling had now gained much greater force, and speculative men complained of their being so hampered and hedged in by the conclusions of the Westminster Divines, that all liberty of thought was taken away from them, and they were required to subscribe a mass of doctrines, some of which appeared to them to be hardly compatible with Scripture. The reason, thus pent in by walls too strong to be broken down, began to seek for corners in which it might skulk, or for an outlet by which it might escape to the free air of heaven. In what sense are subscriptions to Confessions to be understood? how far are such subscriptions binding? were questions which began to be debated.

No Church, it was argued, has a right to impose upon its members a subscription to a creed, except in so far as that creed is agreeable to the Word of God. The creed cannot be put above the Scriptures; it cannot even be put upon a level with them. The creed may teach, but the Bible must prove, for this is all that even the Romanists pretend; and therefore an appeal must always be from the creed to the Bible. As the Church must be understood to impose the test with this restriction, so with this restriction every subscriber must be understood to take it. The Confession of Faith is subscribed not as absolutely true, but only in so far as it is agreeable to the Word of God. By subscribing it no man debars himself from studying and interpreting the Word of God for himself, for this is the birthright of every Christian, and especially of every Protestant. No man can divest himself of this inalienable privilege; no Church can decently punish him for exercising it. Even the Westminster Assembly itself confesses that all councils and synods since the days of the Apostles may err; and therefore it could not design to claim infallibility for itself, or that any should subscribe its dogmas, except in so far as they are agreeable to the divine standard of religion and morality. Nor could the parliament of 1690 mean that all the ministers and people of Scotland should believe exactly as the Westminster doctors believed, for God has not made all men's minds alike. The parliament enacted the Confession of Faith only that it might serve as a test of conformity to the Presbyterian establishment. In that sense was it im

posed; in that sense may it be taken.1

Such sentiments were not allowed to pass unopposed. It was remarked that they who held such opinions, and attempted by 1 See Scots Magazine, vol. xxix. p. 175.

means of them to justify their subscribing a creed, and yet not believing every individual proposition of it, confounded two things which were essentially distinct. The one was, how far any Church or society of Christians is authorized to require from those of its communion a subscription to Confessions or Formularies of Faith of human composition; and the other was, how far any person can, in consistence with honesty, subscribe such Confessions, and yet not believe every proposition in them to be truth. The first of these questions, it was argued, was totally distinct from the second. Although it were wrong for a Church to impose human creeds upon its members, that did not make it right for a man to subscribe these while he did not believe them. The Church of Scotland, it was said, may have derogated from the dignity of Scripture, may have interfered with the right of private judgment, in imposing a creed; but this is no reason why any man should play a dishonest part by subscribing as true what he believed to be false. Nor will it do for any one to say that he subscribed the formularies only in so far as they were agreeable to Scripture. Might not a man with such a reservation put his name to the canons of the Council of Trent, or even to the Koran? The proposition amounted simply to this, that he believed the Confession so far as he believed it. The creed did not limit his faith his faith limited the creed. Did the men who took the test under such a restriction mention it? If not, they were guilty of mental reservation worthy of Jesuits.1

Why

Other clergymen, unable to answer such arguments, proposed a different solution of the difficulty. Unable to untie the knot, they would cut it. They proposed to abolish all tests whatever, or at least a test so minute in its dogmatism as the Confession of Faith. Surely, they said, it was not essential to salvation that a man should believe everything that was contained in a compilation so wide in its range, and yet so specific in its details, as the Westminster Confession. tax Faith so exorbitantly? Why give Reason so little room for exercise? Anonymous articles in magazines were the vehicles of much reasoning like this; but the terrors of ecclesiastical censure made the authors conceal themselves. No minister ever proposed in the Church Courts that Confessions should be dispensed with. Dr Robertson was known to be decidedly opposed to any such measure. The fulness of the time was not yet come.

1 See Scots Magazine, vols. xxix. xxx.

sooner

This

About this period, the country was seized with one of those Popish panics which have more than once disgraced it. Ever since the Reformation, sanguinary laws had existed against Roman Catholics. The Reformed religion was no established than death was denounced as the doom of the priest who should venture to say a mass. To this primary law other laws almost equally severe were afterwards added to meet what were conceived to be emergencies-the seductions of Jesuits, the apostasy of Protestants, the tendency of the people to practise Popish rites in spite of their nominal adherence to the Reformed faith. There is no more humiliating chapter in the country's legislation than those penal statutes against the down-trodden Romanists. But this spirit of intolerance was not confined to Scotland; similar laws existed both in England and Ireland. When William III. came to the throne, it was thought necessary to pass an act in which the anti-Romish legislation of the last hundred and forty years should be condensed and concentrated. statute, besides re-enacting the old severities, ordained that any one reputed to be a priest, and refusing to purge himself of Popery, should be banished the realm, and hanged if he returned; and that any one present at a meeting where there was an altar, an image, a mass-book, or a priestly vestment, should share the same fate. That the law might not lie dormant, a reward of five hundred merks was held out to every one who should apprehend a priest or any devoted Romanist who gave a night's lodging to a priest. No Papist was to be allowed to educate his own children; no Papist could purchase an acre of land or a house to shelter himself; no Papist could succeed to any property or money which his nearest relative might wish to leave him; no Papist could be employed as a domestic servant. They were to be a proscribed and outcast race, denied not only the rights of fellow-citizens, but the charity which is generally extended to the most worthless of our fellow-creatures. William of Orange, notwithstanding his tolerant principles, put his name to this act.

Gradually a milder spirit grew up. British statesmen began to be ashamed of such laws. In 1777 the penal statutes against the Irish Catholics were repealed. In 1778 the same tardy justice was given to the English Catholics. All parties in the legislature vied with each other in giving to the measure an almost triumphal progress. The Opposition joined with the Ministry; the old Whigs coalesced with the Tories; the

Bench of Bishops gave the weight of their learning, their gravity, and their known zeal for the Protestant religion; and the bill was carried through both Houses by overwhelming majorities. But Scotland beheld all this with alarm. It was known that, when the parliament again met, it was intended to extend the same principles of toleration to the north of the Tweed; and unfortunately an illiberal spirit was evoked.

When the General Assembly met in May 1778, the bill for repealing the penal laws in England had passed the House of Commons, and was certain to pass the House of Lords. As the measure might be extended to Scotland before the Assembly again met, it was moved that the Commission should be especially instructed to watch over the matter, and to oppose by every means in its power the extension of the toleration beyond the Tweed. The first trial of strength in this conflict resulted in the triumph of liberal principles. After a long debate, the motion was thrown out by a hundred and eighteen votes against twenty-four.1

This issue must be attributed in a great measure to the influence and eloquence of Principal Robertson. He sympathized with the Romanists, and wished them emancipated from civil penalties imposed because of their religious convictions. At first, however, he hesitated as to the course

he should pursue. He was afraid lest the promoters of the measure might grant too much; he was afraid the country was not yet ripe for the change. But the bill itself, and the perfect unanimity with which it was carried, removed all his apprehensions. No political power, he observed, was conferred upon the Papist. He did not acquire the privileges of a citizen: he was merely restored to the rights of a man. He could not be a member of the meanest corporation, he could not sit in parliament; but he might henceforward acquire property by purchase or inheritance, and transmit it to others; and, under certain restrictions, he might celebrate his own worship without molestation. This was the small measure of justice which the parliament had granted to the English Catholics; and small though it was, no Catholic could take advantage of it till he took the oath of allegiance, abjured the Pretender, and renounced as impious the principles that heretics may be murdered, that faith is not to be kept with them, that the Pope can dispense with the obligation of an oath, depose princes, or exercise temporal jurisdiction within. 1 Scots Magazine, vol. xl. pp. 269, 270.