The witness papers. The headship of Christ, and The rights of the Christian people, a collection of essays, historical and descriptive sketches, and personal portraitures

Front matter

THE WITNESS PAPERS.

THE

HEADSHIP OF CHRIST,

Preface

To enter into the spirit of this book we must distinctly apprehend the conception formed by its author of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

Throughout her entire history the Scottish Church has been distinguished by two leading characteristics, seldom found in combination.

First : She has assumed a high and commanding ecclesiastical position, claiming a jurisdiction in spiritual concerns independent of and coordinate with the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate. She has declared Christ the Head of the Church, not in any abstract and inconsequential sense, but to the clear practical effect of having given his Church upon earth a code of law, — the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, — and of empowering and requiring her to regulate her affairs by that code alone.

Secondly : She has been eminently a Church of the people.

"What she claimed, she claimed not as a hierarchy, not as a

clerical corporation, but as a congregation of Christians. The

minister had his place ; the member had his place. The

1*

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powers and rights of each were held equally from Christ the King.

By both these characteristics the Church of Scotland has been distinguished from the Church of England.

The southern Establishment was the work of kings and statesmen. The constitution of the Church grew gradually into shape and form as part of the civil constitution of the realm. Slight share in its construction was taken by divines ; — no share at all by the people. It was Henry, it was Burleigh, it was Elizabeth, who were the nursing fathers and nursing mothers of the Church of England. Ecclesiastical personages aspired to nothing higher than being their recognized and rewarded functionaries. From their position as divines they derived no commanding or regulating authority. The mechanism of the Church of Rome occupied the land, and they complacently lent their aid while it was adapted to the circumstances of a civil popedom. The question of the original Constitution of the Christian Church was not forced upon them by circumstances, and they were well content to evade it. The result was, that independent spiritual jurisdiction was conclusively withheld from the Church of England. The Act of Supremacy bound her to the state.

The part played by the people in the construction of the Church of England was still more insignificant than that played by divines. The Tudor sovereigns — able, energetic, imperious, proud by nature, proud in virtue of their prerogative — thought little of the feelings of the commonalty in promulgating their haughty decrees. The English — the most

PREFACE. VII

peaceable, long-suffering, and loyal of European nations — had not yet dreamed of asserting their dignity and rights against the majesty of monarchs. They did, indeed, at last awaken. When the sceptre was held by a race intellectually and morally inferior to the Tudors ; when loyalty and reverence had been sapped by contempt ; when nearly half a century of treacherous oppression had roused to irresistible fury the tremendous instincts of religion and natural justice, — the people of England showed themselves. The Puritans engaged in a struggle for two objects : civil liberty, and the reformation of religion. The civil constitution of England they vindicated in its ancient principles, and placed impregnably on its modern basis. But when the long and eventful conflict was at an end, the constitution of the Church of England remained essentially unchanged, and the Christian people were not recognized as one of its integral parts.

The history of Scotland presents an entirely different ecclesiastical prospect. The vehement and impetuous nation north of the Tweed embraced the Reformation with a decision and enthusiasm which brooked no half-measures. The Church of Eome was first of all overthrown from base to turret, and a platform found for a new construction. In rearing the new edifice, divines bore a chief, and statesmen a subordinate part. And these were divines who magnified their office ! They had learned in the school of Calvin to see the glitter of earthly crowns pale in the fight of the sanctuary, to exalt the Church as the city of God upon earth, to set small store by human authority against the voice which they

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believed they heard speaking direct from heaven. They invoked their Divine King to lay the foundation of His House. Ten centuries of prescription were less to them than one promise of Christ. They have been accused of narrowness, of fanaticism, of violence ; but all the world has recognized them as men of intrepid courage, of iron will, of high devotion, who quailed not in the presence of kings. Knox, Melville, Henderson, were very different personages from those politic and temporizing prelates who showed a courtierlike subservience to Henry, or trembled lest Elizabeth should unfrock them. As churchmen, they would have no king but Christ. They practically vindicated the doctrine of Christ's Headship, by securing that no Act of Supremacy was inscribed in the statute-book of Scotland. And they had a nation at their back, — an earnestly, ardently believing nation, — "a nation," says Carlyle, " of heroes." The circumstances of their position were such that they could not, and their character and the doctrines of their Church were such that, under any circumstances, they assuredly would not have overlooked the people. The consent of the congregation — laid down by Calvin in the Institutes as an essential element in the appointment of ministers — was given effect to in the ecclesiastical constitution by means of the Call. And thus the Church of Scotland became known to history and to fame as having reconciled the seeming contradictions of an intensely ecclesiastical and a broadly popular character.

Under these auspices the General Assembly of the Kirk came into existence. Implicitly confided in by the people,

PREFACE. IX

and representing even the laity to a far larger extent than the Scottish Parliament, it exercised throughout the seventeenth century a commanding influence in all the affairs of the kingdom. The objects for which it contended were the same as those of the early English Puritans ; but its victory was more complete than theirs. At the Revolution settlement, it appeared that both the civil and religious liberties of Scotland were vindicated. In the Treaty of Union, which speedily followed, the constitution of the Church of Scotland was carefully guarded. The Act of Supremacy was confined to the southern part of the island, and no provision was made for the introduction of patronage into Scotland. In possession of a spiritual independence never claimed by the sister Establishment, and with the rights of the Christian people intact, the Kirk of Knox and Melville, the Kirk of the Westminster Confession and the Solemn League and Covenant, — the old, indomitable Kirk of Scotland, — rested from her labors.

All this was to Hugh Miller a faith deliberately ratified by his intellect, and enshrined with dearest and most exalting associations in his heart of hearts. Patriotism and affectionate reverence — the feeling with which an Englishman regards the Long Parliament, and the feeling with which a Jew of old regarded the Temple on Mount Moriah — were combined in the emotions with which he contemplated his Church. To stand in spirit by the side of her great men ; to follow her with compassionate or exulting sympathy from reverse to reverse, from triumph to triumph ; to draw his breath deep in unutterable execration at thought of the apos-

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tate Lauderdale or the bloodhound Claverhouse ; to know her for his country's Church, when her canopy was the mist of the hill, and the trampling of the troopers broke in upon the lifted psalm, as well and as proudly as when she bearded monarchs, and set her foot on the necks of her enemies, — this seemed involved in the fact of his being a Scotchman. That a fundamental principle of her constitution, such as the right of the Christian people to have no minister intruded upon them, after being preserved through the storms and treacheries of a century, should be set aside by a Patronage Act smuggled by Tories through the British Parliament in contravention of the Treaty of Union, was to him an absurd idea. He looked upon the Patronage Act as a galling fetter, which her creed and her history pledged the Church to cast off. He sympathized with the Seceders of the last century in their refusal to wear it. He assented to the petition against it sent up year by year to Parliament from the General Assembly, until Moderate ascendency culminated under Robertson, and the Church, for the first time in her history, winked at her own humiliation. In the evangelical minority of the eighteenth century, headed by Erskine, he recognized his beloved Church as cordially and as confidently as in the homeless hill-men who clung to Peden and to Cameron in the seventeenth. When that minority swelled into a majority, — when the ancestral principles of the Church of Scotland shone out once more broad and clear, — there was no man better fitted to understand the position of the Establishment — no man more ready to support and defend her — than Hugh Miller.

PREFACE. XI

The struggle between the Church of Scotland and the civi] authority, which ended in the Disruption, was inaugurated by the passing of the Veto Act by the Church. The conflict took shape and character throughout from that celebrated enactment. In daring to put into the hands of the people a veto on any minister presented to a charge, but not accepted by the congregation, the Church vindicated both her ancient and distinctive principles. She proclaimed that the rights of the Christian people were inalienably secured to them ; and she asserted her power, in face of an existent act of Parliament, to give those rights effect. Non-intrusion and spiritual independence were thus linked together throughout the Ten Years' Conflict.

That Hugh Miller viewed the contest in this manner, we know from his own words. " The contendings of the Secession in the last century," he wrote, shortly before the Disruption, " involved mainly the Non-intrusion principle. The contendings of our Presbyterian fathers in the century previous involved mainly the great doctrine that Christ is the only Head of the Church, and that, in the things which pertain to his kingdom, she owns no other Lord but Him. And in our present struggle, both these twin principles of strength are united."

The present volume consists of two celebrated pamphlets written by Hugh Miller in defence of the contending Church, and of a gleaning — a scanty and desultory gleaning — from his articles in the Witness newspaper on the Church question. These will assuredly convey no adequate idea of his part in

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the Disruption controversy. It was only here and there that an article could be selected. To have taken all that displayed high excellence, — all that were noble in eloquence, keen and brilliant in satire, powerful in invective, or masterly in argument, — would have been to fill many volumes. It is likely that articles which created a particularly wide and deep sensation at the time, and are still vividly remembered, will be missed. To revive the interest which made them effective, — to call from oblivion some speech, pamphlet, or party manoeuvre, agitating all minds at the time, and now everlastingly forgotten, ■ — was impossible. It has been carefully endeavored, also, to avoid inflicting pain upon any still alive who were engaged in the conflict, or upon the surviving relatives of those who have died. Controversy is controversy ; and Hugh Miller fought for his Church with the earnestness and vehemence of his covenanting fathers at Marston Moor or Drumclog. But when the dust of the fight is laid, and its din is over, — when the grave has closed over so many of the combatants, — it would be useless, and it would be ungracious, to reawaken its animosities.

Of the influence exerted upon the public mind of Scotland by Hugh Miller's articles in the Witness on the Church question, there are thousands still living who can speak. A year or two before the Disruption, I passed a winter in a Highland manse. I was too young to form a distinct idea of the merits of the dispute. But there was a sound then in the air which I could not help hearing. It seems as if it were in my ears still. Never have I witnessed so steady, intense, enthralling an excitement. And I have no difficulty, even at this distance,

PREFACE. XIII

in discriminating the name which rung loudest through the agitated land. It was that of Hugh Miller, — the people's friend, champion, hero. There are men, there are family circles, to whom certain of these articles will suggest pathetic recollections. A sentence, a word, will recall the olden time, with its hallowed, its tender, its stirring associations : the fireside of the manse, round which member after member of the familygrew up ; the garden, with its old fruit-trees and familiar walks ; the broad, bright, placid landscape, stretching from the mansedoor ; the unadorned church close at hand, with the household graves around it : — and then the eye will see to read no more.

With all its defects, this volume will illustrate with some comprehensiveness the manner in which Hugh Miller took part in the Disruption Controversy. It will show to what a marvellous point of perfection he was equipped for the work he had to do : how familiar to him was the whole range of Scottish history, ecclesiastical and literary ; how accurately he had appreciated Presbyterianism as an influence in all provinces of Scottish life ; how perfectly he understood the relations of parties in the Church and kingdom of Scotland, at every stage of the national history. He is seen assailing patronage from every point, — exposing its unconstitutional introduction, its disgraceful history, its pernicious practical effects. The volume contains also his deliberate and emphatic testimony to the doctrine of the Headship of Christ. Though dead, he may still be heard speaking to the people of Scotland on that sacred and momentous theme. The following sentences,

in which he described the impression made upon certain per-

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sons by attempts practically to insist upon the doctrine in question, read in the light of present occurrences and prevailing frames of mind, may seem almost prophetic: — "As a practical rule of conduct, that sets itself in opposition to secular interests, judicial interdicts, and the decisions of magistrates, they cannot and will not tolerate it. Their merely nominal belief in Christianity — held as so respectable and so praiseworthy at other times — always puts on, in such circumstances, its true character as simply no belief at all. Christ becomes to them a mere phantom King, unreal and invisible; and his kingly authority appears but as a mischievous and repulsive fiction, subversive of the principles of good government."

And are these questions of spiritual independence and of non-intrusion, after all, but lingering phantoms, paling gradually, and sure to pass away in the light of progress ? Many think so, — many able, and not a few devout men. I think they err. That, in face of all the coercion which can possibly be brought to bear upon the subject, the genuine Presbyterians of Scotland will maintain both, need not be doubted. But may not England awake to a new interest in the rights of the Christian people, and in the independence of the Church? May not the liberal and thinking part of the community, scandalized and distressed by such scenes as have recently occurred in a London church, ask whether the just and rational remedy for such a state of things is not to give congregations a voice in choosing their own ministers? And may not those in the Church of England who hold most closely by the principles of the Puritans bethink themselves whether they have not un-

PREFACE. XV

wisely lost sight of one doctrine professed by Cart-wright in England, and by all the reformers in the northern part of the island, — the doctrine that Christ is King and Head of his Church, and that it is in the prince's province " to exercise no spiritual jurisdiction " ?

It is hardly necessary to add a single word to the preceding, in order to render this volume intelligible to American readers. Stated in the simplest form, and apart from technical phraseology, the principles for which the Church of Scotland contended in the years preceding the Disruption of 1843 were these : — the right of congregations to choose their pastors, and the competence of a Church of Christ to manage her spiritual and distinctive concerns in her own courts. In 1834 the Church of Scotland decreed that the will of congregations should form an essential element in the settlement of pastors. In the same year Lord Kinnoul, patron of the parish of Auchterarder, in Perthshire, presented that living to Mr. Eobert Young, preacher of the Gospel. The Call, or document signifying the assent of the congregation to the appointment of Mr. Young, was signed by three persons, only two of whom belonged to the parish. Dissatisfaction with the appointment was expressed by two hundred and eighty-seven out of three hundred and thirty, who, as being in full communion with the Church, were entitled to exercise the privilege. To install

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Mr. Young, therefore, as minister of Auchterarder, would have been a clear case of intrusion, — exactly such a case as the Church had guarded against by her act of 1834. The Presbytery, in obedience to the law of the Church, refused to ordain him. Lord Kinnoul and Mr. Young had recourse to the Court of Session, to compel the Presbytery to proceed with the ordination. The court granted their request by a decision pronounced in 1838. The House of Lords confirmed this judgment in the following year. Between the decision of their Lordships and the occurrence of the Disruption no new principle emerged. A civil court had undertaken to force the Church of Scotland to ordain a minister, and to ordain him against the will of the people. Rather than submit, the Church cut her state moorings, and became free. To recount the incidents of the conflict would be neither interesting nor useful. For several years State and Church in Scotland were continually in collision. Many attempts at reconciliation were made. But to understand the position taken up by each we need only to understand the Auchterarder case.

PETER BAYNE.

London, October 2, 1863.

CONTEXTS.

THE HEADSHIP OF CHRIST.

Letter to Lord Brougham (June, 1839) ...... 19

The Whiggism of the Old School (August, 1839) ... 40

The Literary Character of Knox (Mar. 4, 1840) ... 81

Dr. Thomas M'Crie (June, 1840) 93

The Debate on Missions (October, 1841) ...... 144

THE RIGHTS OF THE CHRISTIAN PEOPLE.

The Two Parties in the Church of Scotland (Jan. 15, 1840) . 200

The Twin Presbyteries of Strathbogie (Feb. 5, 1840) . . 204

The Two Students (Feb. 8, 1810) .209

The Presentation to Daviot (Feb. 12, 1810) 215

The Communicants of the North Country (Feb. 22, 1810) . 220 Spiritual Independence the Distinctive Privilege of the

Church of Scotland (March 7, 1810) 228

The "Grasping Ambition" of the Non-Intrusionists (Mar. 25,

1810) 230

Popular Estimate of the Two Parties (April 25, 1840) . . 235

The Earl of Aberdeen's Bill (May 9, 1840) 241

The Scotch People and the Presbyterian Church (May 20,

1840) 248

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