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was strongest in Edinburgh, the high seat of law and learning; among counties, it was strongest in Sutherland and Ross, where law and learning are alike unknown.

So great a revolution could not take place and so many sacrifices be made without much bitterness and heartburning. In many cases families were divided, and the result was violent family feuds. In some places, where the current ran strong, social intercourse was broken up, and even trade disturbed. Church membership decided the custom of a shop and the invitations to a dinner-party. The ministers who had left their parishes felt a natural though unreasonable animosity against those who succeeded them, and the peasantry were taught to love one another by seeing two ministers of the gospel daily meeting, but refusing to recognise one another except by mutual scowls. The Church was denounced by the more hotheaded Seceders as a moral nullity and nuisance, which must be swept away, and its ministers were described as mere hirelings and stipend-lifters. The Witness newspaper, which had for some years been the organ of the Non-intrusion party, poured out all its phials of wormwood and gall on the unhappy Erastians, who in some districts were rabbled and insulted by the excited people.

Before the Assembly met, Sir William Hamilton, the Professor of Logic in the University of Edinburgh, sat down to his desk to try if he could not, by force of facts, stave off the threatened Secession. He was one of the most learned men of his day-equally well read in theology as in philosophy; as much at home with Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin, as with Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Reid. He set himself to prove from the writings of Calvin and Beza, that Non-intrusion, as now understood, never was a principle of the Calvinistic Presbyterian Church. He, moreover, showed how theologians when left to themselves, were prone to fall into the most monstrous mistakes, and that it was well for religion that there were civil magistrates with worldly wisdom to check the spiritual aberrations of speculative divines. Unfortunately, events moved faster than the learned professor's pen, and before his pamphlet, "Be not Schismatics, be not Martyrs by mistake," was published, the Secession had taken place. Neither logic nor learning could now make the stream flow backwards.

In every respect the Secession was to be lamented, and all the more so that it might have been averted. When the

Government was prepared to concede the liberum arbitrium, it might as well have conceded the veto.1 When the Nonintrusionists would have been content with the veto they might as well have accepted the liberum arbitrium, for there was little practical difference between them. Had the Government granted the veto it would have preserved patronagewhereas patronage is now destroyed; had it yielded a little more to the majority which then ruled the Assembly, it would have saved the Church, and prevented the addition to the ranks of dissent and radicalism which it so much dreaded. No government could have conceded the Church's claim of independent jurisdiction, but that was not formally asked, and had the veto been legalised a collision upon this point could not easily have taken place, and the clergy might have continued to cherish their favourite theory upon this subject without hurt to themselves or any one else, as the remnant of the Reformed Presbyterians cherish their notion that Queen, Lords, and Commons are unlawful, because uncovenanted, and are yet loyal subjects, in spite of their rebellious theory.

By the Secession the Church was left miserably weak-like a man bled within an ace of his death. But the vacant churches were in a wonderfully short period supplied with ministers, and the machinery which for a moment had stood still began to move as before. The spirit of party brought many to the Church who had not hitherto gone there for the love of the gospel, and congregations which had been decimated thus closed up their broken ranks.

During the summer Lord Aberdeen's bill-now known as the Scottish Benefices Act-was reintroduced in parliament, and having received the approbation of the August meeting of the Commission, speedily passed both Houses and became law. The act as thus passed did not contain Sir George Sinclair's clause, but it provided that the presbytery might look not merely to the objections which were tendered, but "to the character and number of the objectors ;' " which was thought by many to be nearly as much as was implied in the liberum arbitrium.

Within a year from the passing of the Benefices Act, Sir James Graham carried through parliament a measure for

1 It is said that Sir James Graham often did regret that he had not yielded more; but he did not believe that the Secession would be so large, and had even contemptuously said that it was not for him to build a bridge of gold for the threatening Seceders to pass over. See his Life by Torrens, vol. ii. pp. 230-33.

facilitating the erection of quoad sacra parishes. This wise law gave a parliamentary sanction to what had previously been done upon the sole authority of the General Assembly; and under its provisions more than 300 parishes quoad sacra have been added to the ancient parishes of the Church, and their ministers admitted to all the Church's Courts. Thus little more than a year after the Secession, the British parliament gave the weight of law to what the Scotch Church had hitherto illegally done. The Church had been right as to what she did, but wrong in her manner of doing it; and by the action of the legislature she was now at once justified and condemned.

The

Meantime the Free Seceders were busily building churches over all the land. But in some cases they could not obtain sites for their sacred edifices. Perhaps the whole parish belonged to one or two proprietors, and they were unwilling to do anything which might look like approval of the Secession. They could not in conscience grant ground for propagating dissent where all had hitherto been peace and amity. antagonism was increased by the Seceders insisting in many cases on setting up their new church within a few yards of the old parish church-perhaps directly facing it, on the opposite side of the road. The Seceders, on the other hand, maintained that the refusal of a place of worship was a scandalous abuse of the rights of property, and amounted to religious persecution. The matter was brought before parliament in 1849, and a Commission was appointed to inquire into it. It did not lead to any legislative action, but it tended to make both parties more reasonable, and, in the end, sites were everywhere obtained, but not always where they had been desired. In the course of the inquiry, a curious light was thrown upon the state of religion in many of the northern and Hebridean parishes. In parishes containing 2000 or 3000 people, not more than twenty or thirty were communicants, so high were the barriers with which fanatacism had fenced the Communion table. A class of zealots called "The Men" domineered over the ministers, and regulated the religion of the people. Morality was driven from the pulpit and the pew as "legal" and "unevangelical;" to dance or play at cards was a most deadly sin; to drive in a gig" or use an umbrella was almost as bad; to believe in witches, in the devil, in the power of charms, in the evil eye, to walk twenty miles to a sacramental gathering, to groan or sob during the sermon, and

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make a ludicrous show of mingled humility and audacity, was the very highest piety.1

In 1845 the Poor Law Act was passed, and it had a considerable influence upon the Church. Up to this time the ministers and kirk-session had taken upon themselves the care of the poor in almost every parish. With the church-door collections, supplemented, in some cases, by a voluntary assessment on the heritors, they had managed to keep the aged and infirm from being pauperised. But the change which was coming over society made a change in the poor law necessary, and the Secession from the Church hurried it on. The new law relieved ministers and elders, generally against their will, from much heavy and often very disagreeable work; but in most parishes the sum now required for the support of the poor is from five to ten times greater than it was under the Church's regime, and in some cases the cost of mere management amounts to more than half the stipend of the ministers. Over all Scotland the expense of management exceeds £140,000 a year, which is half the stipends of all the parochial clergy together.

At this period Dr James Robertson, formerly minister of Ellon, now Professor of Church History in the University of Edinburgh, began his career of Endowment. He had hitherto been known chiefly as one of the hardest-headed debaters in the General Assembly, the not unworthy opponent of the hard-headed Dr William Cunningham, but he now exhibited himself in a new and nobler light. The Church Extension scheme, which Dr Chalmers had worked so energetically, was converted into the Endowment Scheme, and Dr Robertson was made convener of the committee appointed to work it. Year after year he advocated its claims not only in the Assembly, but in every Court of the Church; he held meetings over all the country ; he buttoned-holed every peer, every landed proprietor, every great city merchant he could get hold of, and urged his plans upon them with such earnestness, thas at the end of twelve years he had collected £400,000, and seen sixty churches endowed, and forty others in progress.1 He was in every way a remarkable man. His appearance and his oratory were alike peculiar. Now beyond middle age, his round head was covered with closely-cropped grey hair; his body was short

1 Report of the Parliamentary Commission on Sites. The Church and her Accuser in the far North.

1 Charteris' Life of Robertson, pp. 372-73.

and rotund; his face was heavy when in repose, but capable of animation in every muscle when excited. When he wished to address the Assembly, he generally advanced to the middle of the open floor, and as he waxed warm, he made curious gyrations. His voice was harsh and Aberdonian in its accents, but such was his infectious fervour as he rolled out his long and heavily-weighted sentences, that he kept the House completely entranced. Altogether, he was a grand, though somewhat rugged character; and he wore out his life by the very energy with which he lived and worked.

Up to this time the ecclesiastical history of Scotland had been almost entirely of debate and division. In 1820, however, as we have already recorded, the Burghers and Antiburghers had united under the name of the United Secession; and the Voluntary controversy, by ranging the Relievers and Seceders in the same ranks, had created among them also a desire for union. In 1847, before the ashes of the Free Church eruption were yet cold, the Secession and Relief Churches became one under the appellation of the United Presbyterian Church. It was plain a reaction had already set in, and that many were beginning to see that religious division had been carried too far.

For several years after 1843 the General Assembly was not agitated by any very violent controversy. The discussions on the University Test Bill only ruffled the surface and did not stir the depths of the sea. It was not till 1857, when Dr Robert Lee had begun to use a liturgical form of worship in Old Greyfriars Church, that the polemical spirit was awakened.

With the growth of refinement in social life there had for some time been growing up a general desire for a more cultivated worship. Southern influences-the pressure which twenty millions of men will always exercise upon three millions -had something to do with it. To some extent it was a ripple from the great wave of ritualism which had then begun to wash over England. The Duke of Argyll gave expression to the feeling in his "Essay on the Ecclesiastical History of Scotland." Under its influence more attention was paid to the cultivation of sacred music; choirs were employed, chants and doxologies were sung. Many of the younger clergy began to model their prayers after the Book of Common Prayer, and the solemn invocations of the Litany might often be heard in Scottish pulpits. In the cities and towns, and even in

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