itself; and the chiefest part of that power consisteth in the authority of making laws." 1

The Church of Hooker has from first to last been the Church of aristocrats. One of the express grounds on which he pleads her claims is that she makes religion acceptable to the rulers of this world, the mighty men of wealth and title. Yet he asserts her authority to make laws. The Church of Scotland, as Guthrie saw her in the past, had been a Church of the people; the Veto law was made by her for the restoration and safeguarding of the sacred rights of the people; and he would rather have gone to prison or to death than beheld the Veto rescinded, the call reduced avowedly to a mockery, and Christ's crown and covenant confessed to be no more than theatrical properties, or mere rhetorical phrases, with which turbulent, ignorant, and vulgar preachers had set off their ecclesiastical histrionism.

1 1 Hooker, Book vii. chap. xiv.

WE

CHAPTER XXVII.

Candfish in Shoals and Quicksands.

E have been viewing the conflict mainly in the Assembly; but all Scotland was now a battlefield between the parties. And the man who was signalled out by the popular instinct as the Achilles of the fray was Candlish. Cunningham was more learned, Guthrie more pictorial and emotional, but no one seemed to appreciate with such piercing lucency as Candlish the interlacing of the people's cause with the Church's cause, the specialty of an Established Church guarding with the spiritual sword of Christ's Kingship the liberties of rustic parishioners.

Much of the enthusiasm with which he was regarded arose, we cannot doubt, from the fact of his glance being on the future. At a great public meeting, held in one of the largest churches in Edinburgh, in the August of 1841, when the Erastian schism of Strathbogie had fairly begun, he boldly contemplated, while earnestly deprecating, Disestablishment. He still hoped

that the rulers of the nation would not commit "the great sin of which they would be guilty if they thrust

out of the Establishment those who had committed no crime, unless it be a crime to sustain the honour of the great King and Head of the Church." But, if the worst came to the worst, if the inexorable alternative were an Erastian Establishment or none, he would relinquish Establishment and face Disruption. “I am not a worshipper of the principle of an Establishment." He repels the base idea that Establishment alone can lend cohesiveness to the Church, or prevent it from splitting up into sects. "As if that which united us together were our stipends, our manses, and our glebes!" He will not so "dishonour the Church of Christ, which in the beginning had no countenance from the State, and which needs none, and which can go on against the State." Valuing the principle of Establishment when, as in the history and constitution of the Church of Scotland, the freedom of the Church was deemed to be inviolable, he positively disapproved of, and was prepared to denounce, a Church enslaved by the State. "I hold an Erastian Establishment to be worse than none at all.” "It is our bounden duty to bear this testimony, that the Church ought to be established on the principles which we are contending for, or that there should be no Establishment in the land at all."

A memorable saying. Perhaps if Candlish were still on earth, and surveyed the history of the Established Church and of the Free Church of Scotland in the light of fifty years, he might recall it, and express satisfaction at his not having addressed himself, as he certainly did not, in the years of his activity as a Free

Church minister, to the subversion of the Establishment. The vision that rose before him, when he spoke those words, was that of a Church of Scotland completely Erastianised,—reduced to an official machinery for enabling the Court of Session to thrust pastors upon unwilling parishes. It was not possible that he should realise that one part of the effect of the heroic exertions of himself and his associates was to be the sweeping away of all restrictions on the will of the people in choosing their own ministers in the Scottish Establishment, and that this was to be accompanied by ostentatious obsequiousness towards the Church by the conciliated Court of Session. We may, however, be quite sure that, with whatever comment on his original saying Candlish might have contemplated the result, he would not have regretted the stand he made for the principle of Christ's Headship over the Church, or his impassioned ardour in affirming that this principle is bound up with the rights of the Christian people. Equally confident may we be in affirming that he would not have been conscientiously content with spiritual independence by mere sufferance of the Court of Session, out of regard, not for the Church, but the Establishment.

As a platform speaker, Candlish probably never was surpassed for the precision and lucidity with which he distinguished between things constantly mixed up by confused and stupid persons. To the vague charge of refusing to let the Court of Session draw the line between things civil and things spiritual, he replies, "Do we ask them to take our definition of what is civil? Do we say, as the Church of Rome says, We pronounce

a case of murder by an ecclesiastical person to be a spiritual matter, and we prohibit you from meddling with it ? Do we exempt our persons or properties from their jurisdiction? No, we allow them the same liberty which we claim for ourselves. We do not presume to prescribe to them what is the law, or to describe what is civil; neither do we allow them to prescribe to us, and decide what is ecclesiastical." If the Civil Court gave force to its sentences in temporal effects, in assigning stipends, glebes, and church buildings, and if the Church were allowed to give force to her sentences in spiritual effects, deciding who should minister in the word and the sacraments, who should ordain and be ordained, there would be no collision. If, on the other hand, the Court of Session, directly or indirectly, commanded Presbyteries to ordain ministers, although the Church had commanded them not to do so, then the Court of Session was taking the place of the Church, and the Presbyteries obeying it and defying the Church were rebellious. If the Legislature sanctioned the Court of Session, then an Erastian schism would obviously proceed within the Church, and, in order to preserve her Divine life and liberty, she would be compelled to relinquish Establishment. Candlish's speeches wrote these distinctions in lightning for the pious intelligence of Scotland.

The spectacle of conflict in the headquarters of Presbyterianism attracted attention throughout the whole Christian world, and was viewed with keenest interest by the Presbyterian community in Great Britain and America. Among the champions of the Church, Candlish