CHAP. IX. pamphlet, in which light-if I had seen them at the Dr. Chalmers time-I should have modified or rather repressed alto withdraws the compli nent he had gether certain anterior passages of my own." paid to the states his reasons for His indignant remonstrance with the Dean. After Dean, and refuting, one after another, the injurious and groundless charges which the Dean's bulky volume had crowded together into one vast, confused and hideous libel upon the doings of the church of Scotland,-"my last, my concluding remonstrance with the Dean of Faculty," said the illustrious author of the "remarks," "is on the score of his unpatriotic, his truly un-Scottish attempt to bring down the established church of his own land in the estimation of our sister kingdom, and to excite against us all that he thinks is most sorely and sensitively repugnant, whether in the nationality or in the episcopacy of England. He has ransacked the whole field of contemplation within our own borders; and seizing on all the hostile arguments, or semblances of arguments, which he could lay his hand upon, he has composed them into a numerous band of stragglers, having certainly more the appearance of a rabble than of a regiment, on the side and for the maintenance of his own cause. But his deadliest attempt by far to obtain for himself, in this our strictly internal quarrel, the vengeance and the victory, is when he calls in foreign auxiliaries to his aid; and with the obvious design of at length superseding all argument by the overwhelming parliamentary influence wherewith he hopes to overbear us. He tells Lords Brougham and Cottenham (p. 123) of a matter far too insignificant for them to hear, that I had branded in the general assembly their reckless disregard for the dearest feelings of my countrymen. They know he the in stir up the and antipaEnglishmen prejudices thies of against his opponents how to make a generous allowance for what is said in CHAP. IX. the impetuosity of debate, and they also know that there is generosity enough in the hearts of Scotchmen to acquit them-as strangers to all our partialities and habits of any malignant or hostile feeling towards our nation; but there can be no such apology and no such extenuation for the Dean of Faculty. By the prosecution of Auchterarder, whether instigated or only encouraged by himself or not, a weapon has been put into his hand-which he now wields with all his might for the destruction of the liberties of the church of Scotland. So long as he addressed Unfairness of himself to the understandings of Scotchmen who do know, it was a legitimate weapon; but now that addresses himself to the prejudices and antipathies of Englishmen who do not and cannot know, it becomes the act of one who-distrustful of his reasons, yet bent on the extermination of his adversaries-throws aside the armour of persuasion, and would now bring strength of another kind,-the enforcements and the edicts of irresistible power to bear upon us. The church of Scotland will know how to appreciate the fitness of that man to be the ruler of her ecclesiastical councils who thus would substitute physical for moral force, who brandishes his threats of imprisonment (p. The conse 77) over the heads of her ministers, and telling his party in parliament that what firmness has done before it can do again (p. 285), would re-establish in the midst of us that old policy of absolutism and violence which, if he indeed effectuate, will unpeople the church of her best clergymen, and alienate all the and their cause. quences that would flow sels being from the Dean's coun followed. CHAP. IX. best and worthiest of our families from her taber The prediction of Dr. Chalmers has been literally fulfilled. nacle."* It was the voice of a prophet that uttered this solemn warning; and the sequel will show, that however much. it was despised by the Dean, and by those who suffered themselves to be guided by his counsels, the prediction was strictly and literally true. It will be well if another warning, pronounced upon the same occasion, have not an equally exact fulfilment. If it fail,—and God grant that it may fail-it will be due to other causes than to the success of the Dean's efforts to hinder the recognition of the church of Scotland's claims. He, and the high legal and political authorities to whom he addressed his appeal, seemed to care The Dean and for nothing and to consider nothing but the upholding, in all its offensiveness of an obnoxious statute,-a upholding a statute brought in at the first by an act of the basest his friends seemed to care for no thing but law that was its authors. a disgrace to treachery, and now interpreted with a rigidity and a sternness unknown before. In comparison with this, the sacrifice that must be made of the moral and spiritual interests of the people, in deference to an act whose history was equally a disgrace to the state and a reproach to the church, seems to have been treated by these men as a matter of inferior concern. And it was in reference to these men, and to the fatal career they were pursuing, that near the close of his pamphlet, Dr. Chalmers broke out in this overwhelming burst of mingled indignation and grief,-" We have only to say to such and to all who have never very * Remarks, &c., pp. 95-97. Dr. Chalmers the Peers what mis chiefs they ing for the are prepar country. once grappled with the realities of this great question, CHAP. IX. -whether he be a peer in his lordly hall, or a lawyer in his writing chamber,—that if they will not step forth into the living world and thus engage with the ipsa corpora of the subject, then from that world there is a reaction awaiting them, which, deaf though they have hitherto been to a coming, will give them, and that full soon, the sense and the experience of a present danger. A people abandoned to irreligion will not remain inactive; but with the restraints of conscience and the fear of God unfelt, the restraints of human authority will soon be cast away. There is thus at the bottom of our social and political edifice a smouldering fire, which, if not met by the emollients of care, and kindness, and christian instruction, will break forth with the weight of a volcano, and upheave into fragments the whole system and structure of society. Men have broken loose from all those ancient holds which kept the community together; and there is now a waywardness in almost all spirits, which nothing, nothing but the education of principle can stem. elements of a sweeping anarchy are busily at work; and at the bidding of a God of judgment is it ready to go In destroying the Church with th hazarding its influence people, and overthrow, they are ciety to leaving sobreak loose The religious forth on its errand of desolation. And should the revolutionary torrent once set in, the parties to whom we have now referred, immovable in the obstinacy of their own prejudices, will yet be driven like chaff before the wind, in the moral hurricane then abroad over the land,-the grandee unseated from his now towering pre-eminence; and the lawyer finding his munition of points and precedents to be frail as cobwebs in the breath of the popular indignation. It is now in from all moral and restraints. CHAP. IX. our power to disarm, and to pacify and to quell this labouring fermentation. The people are accessible, most hopefully accessible, through the medium of both their gratitude and their conscience. Examples of this are multiplying every day, and in sufficient number too, to warrant the conclusion, that if churches were enough multiplied, and parishes were enough subA different divided, and ministers enough active and conscientious, -the breath of a new spirit would be infused into the hearts of men, and the fierce and fiery elements which are now at work would soften and give way before the omnipotence of christian charity." and a wiser policy might yet avert the storm. The Dean was meanwhile preparing new con flicts for the Church. While Dr. Chalmers was thus nobly, though in vain, striving to find a way for his cause to the understandings and consciences of men in power, by the eloquent and powerful pleadings of christian patriotism, his antagonist, the Dean, had meanwhile, by means altogether different, been doing his best to embroil in fresh conflicts the courts of the church. One of his earliest experiments in this field was the case of Lethendy. That parish, situated in the presbytery of Dunkeld, happened, in 1835, to have for its incumbent an infirm old man of the name of Butters. The case of The crown, as patron of the parish, appointed, in the course of that year, a certain Mr. Clark to be the old minister's assistant and successor. This Mr. Clark was in due course, and as the poor creature's subsequent career abundantly proved, most heartily and justly vetoed by the congregation.* Rejected in consequence by the presbytery, he appealed to the Lethendy. * Mr. Clark, subsequently to the disruption, was libelled, and deprived of his license for drunkenness ! |