for the rights of the Church of God in connection with the kingdoms of the earth. Defending the citadel which, as a Protestant Establishment, we possess, we afford a rallying point to the Christian world, and through it the Churches of Christ may yet establish themselves in the fortress of the world's power, and obtain universally a national recognition of the free and rightful dominion of our great Head and King."

The motion of Dr. Chalmers was adopted, and that of Dr. Cook rejected, by a majority of 241 to 110.

Apart from all question either as to the Christian tenderness or the worldly discretion of the majority in their dealings with the minority, the position taken up by the Church in the Claim of Rights was impregnably strong. As Dunlop simply and calmly said, the Church of Scotland had always claimed to be constitutionally established and yet free. If any man disputes this, he cannot be admitted into the arena of conference or debate upon the subject. She had based her claim to Establishment on her being a true, i.e. a free and spiritually independent, Church, always putting Establishment in the second place, not the first. Her distinctive doctrine had from time immemorial been the Headship of Christ over His Church, implying her right to exercise, in Christ's name, all the powers necessary to her life, growth, efficiency, prosperity. On this all authorities, from Oliver Cromwell and Walter Scott to Principal Hill, Dr. M'Crie, Andrew Thomson, Thomas Chalmers, and William Cunningham, are at one.

When had the Church of Scotland relinquished her right and power to make laws for herself, in accord

If

ance with the law of Christ, as contained in Scripture, and with the principles and traditions of the Church? When had she scrupled to declare herself a free Church, enjoying, in connection with the State, all the immunities and advantages of freedom? Had she not, from a hundred platforms, hurled back to Voluntaries who questioned her liberty the reply, "I am as free as you"? Could it be alleged of any non-established Presbyterian Church in Scotland or elsewhere that she was impotent to forbid Presbyteries to force ministers upon reclaiming congregations? Could it be alleged of the smallest community of non-established Christians in England or America, Congregationalists, Baptists Wesleyans, that they were not free to declare their ministers equal to each other in power and honour? it really was no lie, but the simple, unadorned truth that the Church of Scotland had not bartered her freedom for Establishment, how could it be pretended that she had overstepped her powers in passing the Veto Act and the Chapel Ministers Act? Be it remembered, that in neither of these did the Church ask a shilling of property. Could she have hauled down the Veto Act and the Chapels Act at the bidding of the Civil Power, without acknowledging before God and man that she had blotted out the traditions in which she gloried, and that, from bearing aloft the banner of Catholic and Christian unity in the van of the Reformed Churches, she had slunk into the rear, and come to heel to the Court of Session, the most crouching and craven of them all?

CHAPTER XXX.

Forecastings of the Convocation.

CCLESIASTICAL chaos reigned in Scotland. The

Court of Session, confident of support from the Government, and tacitly but resolutely guided by the Dean of Faculty, shrank from no extreme in the assertion of its power to coerce the Evangelical majority. The country was convulsed by the dissension between those who put the State first and the Church second, and those who put the Church first and the State second.

We saw how, while the wintry wind moaned over a waste of snow, the parishioners of Marnoch had left their beloved church rather than see a pastor sacrilegiously forced on them by the tools of the Court of Session. At Culsalmond the parishioners had reclaimed almost as strongly as at Marnoch, and when the attempt was made by the Court of Session's ministers to thrust in a minister against their will, they had themselves abstained from violence as had the men of Marnoch; but the general democratic feeling of the country had been roused, and a noisy crowd from the adjacent districts,

rushing into the church, interrupted the proceedings, shouted, mocked, and, in fact, compelled the enslavers of the people to beat a retreat to the manse and accomplish their purpose in secret. Lamentable this was, no doubt, but the surgings of sympathetic mobs have been among the accompaniments and indirect effects of many noble revolutions, and Scotchmen who are not ashamed of the doings of Jenny Geddes and her friends in the seventeenth century will not be oppressed with shame for the riotous interruption, in the nineteenth, of the forced settlement of Culsalmond.

In the August following the Assembly of 1842, the House of Lords pronounced judgment in what is known as the second Auchterarder case. The patron and presentee obtained a verdict in their favour, requiring the Presbytery to proceed to the ordination of the presentee, and awarding damages, which the pursuers estimated at £10,000. The actual amount levied might be altered by assessment before a jury, but it was now plain that Presbyters could be heavily fined for declining to obey the Court of Session, and for persisting in obeying the Church, in the settlement of ministers. Imprisonment had been threatened. Fines were imposed. The atmosphere of Scotland, becoming electric, vibrated with an excitement stronger than any she had known since the Union with England.

The dual system of the Church of Scotland, vaunted to be an example to the universe, had broken down. What was to be done? "Is one violent settlement after another," asks Dr. Candlish, "to be perpetrated in spite of the authority of the Church? Are men to rebel

and set the Church at defiance? Is this to go on year after year?" With that penetrating keenness of intellectual glance which the simple have called prophecy and second sight, he has now discerned that the claims of the Church will not be conceded. We saw with what luminous precision he defined the power of the Civil Magistrate, not only in temporal things, but, circa sacra, in the external and mechanical matters connected with things spiritual. He was ready to yield anything that did not touch the life. He declared himself, however, no idolater of Establishment. Even in the mind of Chalmers there seemed to be at moments something like a superstitious horror as to what was called the Voluntary system. The vague notion appears to have been that this was some dogmatic and determinate scheme, tyrannically requiring Christians to pronounce it sinful in the Church to receive any aid from the State, and in the State to receive any aid from the Church. Candlish dismissed these spectral fancies. A Voluntary Church he saw to be merely a Church conducted, in relation to the maintenance of pastors, on the principles prevalent in the apostolic age, and indisputably sanctioned by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. It might or it might not be that, when circumstances altered, those who preached the gospel should "live of the gospel," as they did in Corinth and Galatia in Paul's time; but Presbyterians of all people, with their habit of insistence on the letter of biblical prescription, ought to have been the last to be shocked at the survival or revival of Paul's Church economics.

So early, also, as the autumn of 1841, Dr. Candlish