CHAP. VII.]

513

CHAPTER VII.

D

URING the political changes and struggles of the period under review, few may have perceived the close connection, which is now clear to us, between the disturbed state of the Church and the transitional character of the state. The difficulties that successive governments had in dealing with the religious bodies of the empire, appeared to many a mere coincidence with the death-struggles of parties, and not, as they truly were, another aspect of the same conflict. The ecclesiastical disturbance visible at once in England, Ireland, and Scotland, was as inevitable a sign of the times as the passage of the Reform Bill, or municipal renovation. It was a misfortune to all parties concerned, that the rulers of the state-too ill-prepared for action on the subjects most prominent in their own eyes-were absolutely incapable of intelligent government on ecclesiastical affairs. Their want of knowledge, their inability to comprehend or apply the principles concerned in the ecclesiastical disturbances of the time, were clear enough in the cases which have been already before us; but the complete exhibition of their incapacity took place in reference to the Church of Scotland.

As a preparation for the great scene of the disruption of the Church of Scotland, which will come before us in the final period of this history, we must look into the transactions of Lord Melbourne's government with that Church. We shall see how unaware the ministers were of what they had to do, and what they were doing; how little they understood the true importance and real bearings of the case. They took no warning by the refusal of the English Tractarians to acknowledge the control of the government in church matters; they took no warning from the united cry of the High Churchmen and Dissenters for a dissolution of the union between Church and State. As Lord Grey had stared with amazement at the Nottingham deputation, so now Lord Melbourne scarcely took pains to observe whether it was the Church or the Dissenters in Scotland who wanted more accommodation and instruction; and neither of these ministers, and no one of the coadjutors of either, seems to have had the remotest idea of its being his business to understand, and decide, and act on a question as important as any that had risen up since the Reformation. And the English public knew and felt no more than their rulers. They did not recognise the struggle that now set in, north of the Tweed, as one which will be conspicuous in all future histories of the progress of opinion-which now means nothing less than the history of human liberties. Even now the greater number of readers and listeners turn away at the first mention of the Scotch Church, in hopelessness of understanding the controversy, or caring about the parties engaged in it. Those who have, from any cause, been interested in the case,

believe that its principal features may be clearly and rapidly sketched. At all events, the attempt must be made in a history of the period.

The Scotch Church appears to be the best in which to contemplate the rise and progress of the conflict between the principles of the connection or disconnection of religion with the state, because it has ever been peculiarly hard to Scotch Churchmen to admit the idea of dissent, and to undergo the process of severance from the Establishment. The Scotch Church was designed to be a spiritual republic, whose four judicatories, rising one above the other in gradations of power and authority, were still all elective. The session, the presbytery, the synod, the General Assembly, were all of a representative character, and were assumed to be chosen by the popular voice. This popular election was for a very short time, if ever, a truth; and the same may be said of the unity of faith presumed to be secured by the Establishment. While the elders and landed proprietors were in fact managing the appointments to office in the Church, many pastors were preaching doctrines which would not bear a comparison with the standards of the Establishment. The General Assembly wished for quiet-dealt gently with heresies-and would have been pleased to hear nothing of that great question of patronage which was, in little more than a hundred years, to explode the Church as a national Establishment. But the people found themselves under a despotism, from the unresisted nomination of the clergy by the patrons. The clergy nominated the elders; and the flocks had really no part whatever in the spiritual republic, where all were declared to be members of one body. The Assembly would not hear of a word of discontent, even from their own members; so the natural consequence followed-the discontented took other measures to make themselves heard. One of them, the courageous Erskine, preached out the state of things from the pulpit-was censured, first by the local synod, and then by the General Assembly-offered a remonstrance, and was expelled from his pulpit, as were three other clergymen, who had supported his remonstrance. In a century after, these four ministers had become four hundred. they and their flocks were not Dissenters. They were compelled to separate from the organisation of the Establishment; but they held all its principlesclaimed the honour of being the real Church-party in the case, and imitated the proceedings of the Establishment wherever they possibly could, without falling into its corruptions. In our own time, these claims have been allowed; and the Secession has been declared eminently conservative of the veritable Church of Scotland.

But

Another body of seceders, who were driven out also by tyranny, were equally far from being Dissenters. When a patron nominated for minister a man unacceptable to the great body of the congregation, the presbytery refused to ordain him. This happened so often as to be embarrassing to the General Assembly. The Assembly appointed the celebrated Galloping Committees,' as they were nicknamed; committees who went about doing the work which the presbyteries refused. Fired by the ridicule cast

upon these committees, and by the taunt that the highest power could not control the presbyteries, the Assembly determined to try its hand at coercion. The Assembly enjoined obedience; a member of a presbytery, Mr Gillespie, evaded it: he was deposed; and he gathered together, outside the walls of the church from which he was driven, a body of men opposed to the existing despotism in the appointment of ministers, and, after 100 years, was recorded as the founder of 120 congregations, constituting the Relief body, as it was called-a body claiming relief from the despotism of patronage. These men also were thus not Dissenters. They had no fault to find with the Church, but only with the perversion of one of her arrangements. At the end of a century, however, from the secession of 1734, the two bodies were called by others, and called themselves, Dissenters; their ministers having, for the most part, adopted the voluntary principle. The Establishment at this time had between 1100 and 1200 churches; a clergy of whom the moderator of the Assembly at that date said that the whole were of Tory politics, except about six; and for supporters, it had the great body of the affluent and powerful throughout Scotland. The Dissenters had 700 churches, a clergy of liberal political opinions, and for supporters a great body of the labouring and some of the middle classes of society in Scotland. When Scotch borough reform removed the oppressions under which this great body had lain, and opened to them a career of civil equality with the Church and Tory party, they bestirred themselves to extend their principles and increase their numbers; and the newspapers of the time tell of the formation of many associations for the promotion and support of voluntaryism in religion.

Thus was the ground of controversy wholly changed. The Secession and Relief bodies had complained of tyranny within the pale of the Church. Now, become Dissenters, they pronounced against the union of the Church and the State. The Church had once ejected discontented members from her own household. Now she felt called upon to wage war with a vast body of Dissenters; and the time was coming when she must sustain such another secession as must reduce her to a state of forlorn inferiority which she could not at present conceive of.

What did she do while the Dissenters were associating for the promotion of the voluntary principle? There was no time to lose; for a petition was sent up to parliament, in 1837, in favour of a total separation of Church and State, signed in Glasgow by 41,000 people. The Church resolved on church extension, and that as much of the plan as bore on its opposition to the Dissenters should be kept in its own hands. It was necessary to request and obtain the assistance of the state, or a troublesome reference might hereafter be made to the sufficiency of voluntary effort on the present occasion; yet, if the matter were left to government, new churches would be built in far-away places, in country districts yet unprovided, and last of all, or never, in streets of towns where Dissenters' chapels existed already; whereas, it was the very thing wanted to plant a church beside every chapel, in order to put down

dissent. Dr Chalmers avowed that his demand should not stop short of a church for every 1000 inhabitants, sooner or later; and he did not promise to stop short of a church for every 700. On this estimate, and by virtue of ignoring dissenting chapels altogether, and reckoning the Dissenters among the inhabitants destitute of religious guidance, a strong case of spiritual destitution was made out, while nothing more was asked of government than to endow the churches which the Establishment was willing to build. The consequence of the demand was that the government was at first favourable, partly from ignorance of the state of the case, and partly through dread of the evident extension of the doctrine of voluntaryism; the Dissenters quitted that question for a time, to unite their forces against the imposition of burdens for a church which they disapproved; and the Church grew prouder than ever in the prospect of success. Her own subscriptions for new churches, subscriptions paid in by all manner of members-from the purely benevolent who desired the spiritual benefit of the poor and forsaken, to the haughtiest who could not tolerate the Dissenters-in two years amounted to upwards of £200,000.

The successive ministries of Sir R. Peel and Lord Melbourne saw nothing in the application, till the excitement they caused all over Scotland told them to the contrary, but a proposal to provide religious guidance for the destitute; an object which naturally appeared to them unquestionable. In the king's speech prepared by the Peel cabinet, in February 1835, we find this paragraph: 'I feel it also incumbent upon me to call your earnest attention to the condition of the Church of Scotland, and to the means by which it may be enabled to increase the opportunities of religious worship for the poorer classes of society in that part of the United Kingdom.' For two years before this, Lords Melbourne and Brougham, then lord chancellor, had given deputations from Scotland to understand that they were favourable to the object of the Church-no question had been raised in the debate on the address in answer to the royal speech-and the Dissenters found it necessary to bestir themselves to make known the opinion of a vast proportion of Scotchmen that such a grant was needless and dangerous. By the month of May, the Melbourne ministry had learned that the question involved more than people in London had supposed; the lord advocate of Scotland moved for a commission of inquiry into the need; and on the 1st of July, Lord J. Russell appended a proposal to inquire what funds might exist in connection with the Church of Scotland which might be rendered available, so as to obviate a donation from the public purse for objects which a large body of the contributors to the public purse conscientiously disapproved. In the proposal of a commission Sir R. Peel acquiesced, on the ground that the session was too far advanced for a parliamentary committee to effect anything that

year.

The commission was sent forth to its work without delay; and great was the clamour about its constitution. All its members but one were Churchmen;

Establishments, to be put upon such work as this, as he was pretty sure of growing wiser, and learning to take more moderate views; and then, the vigorous talents which such men ordinarily possess would come into action for the public service. The deepest offence to the Church was-after the proposal to inquire at all-the direction to the commissioners to inquire into the amount of 'unexhausted teinds;' that is, of tithes possessed by landowners, over and above the amount actually expended in their respective neighbourhoods for the support of the Church. In 1707, it had been settled, after much controversy, that the officials who administered church affairs might enlarge stipends, but not erect or endow any new parish without the consent of three-fourths, in value, of the landowners. This arrangement was seen at the time to be so far questionable as to cause a provision to be made that parliament might alter it at pleasure. It was now reasonable to inquire into the working of this arrangement, if there really was a deficiency of church accommodation throughout the country. But a cry about the intended spoliation of private property was made; a cry so loud as to induce Lord J. Russell to publish, in a letter to the head-commissioner, Lord Minto, a disclaimer, in the form of an instruction, not to give occasion for any charge of meddling with private property. Still, the unexhausted teinds had been regarded since 1707, and longer, as private property guaranteed by an express law: the holders foresaw

the proposal to repeal the act of 1707, and exclaimed against the devouring rapacity of the Church: the Dissenters protested loudly against any further endowments from the state, under any pretence whatever; and denied, in this case, any pretence of necessity at all: the Churchmen were offended that parliament had not made them a grant at once, without dispute; and they protested against all inquiry into the workings of their church organisation, and the amount of their funds. There was yet another cause of offence. The class of tithes called bishops' teinds must be dealt with separately. They were appropriated by the crown at the Reformationbestowed on the bishops while Episcopacy existed in Scotland-and resumed by the crown on its abolition. When stipends fell short, from the parochial teinds being exhausted, the deficiency was made up from the bishops' teinds; but in no other way had the Church of Scotland any claim upon that fund. It had now become the property of parliament, together with the other patrimonial property of the crown surrendered by William IV.; and the general public, as well as the Scotch Dissenters, protested against any appropriation of this national fund to purposes of church extension in Scotland-even before it was ascertained whether such extension was needed. Thus, the commission was as unpopular on every hand as any commission could well be.

In his official letter, Lord John Russell expressed a hope that the greater part of the business would be

completed within six months—that is, in readiness for the session of 1836; but this was not possible. In 1837 and 1838, three reports were before the government-on the religious instruction provided for Edinburgh, and for Glasgow, and on teinds. They relate that Dissenters were more numerous than Church members in Edinburgh and Glasgowand especially the most earnest and steadfast class, the communicants; that the less-opulent Dissenters had provided much larger accommodation than the more opulent Establishment; that the church accommodation in Edinburgh exceeded the legal standard; that it fell short of that standard in Glasgow, but still went far beyond the existing need, as there were, as in Edinburgh, 20,000 unlet seats-for the most part of the cheapest order. As for the teinds, some of the unexhausted ones were held by landowners who were Dissenters; and it must require great consideration before these could be taken from the holders for purposes of church extension. As for the amount, it fell but little below the sum of the actual stipends; and it was evidently a very serious matter to think of nearly doubling the revenues of the Church by taking funds out of the hands of private holders, some being Dissenters, to whom they had descended as property guaranteed by law for more than a century.

When the excitement caused by this inquiry was at the height, the elections of 1837 occurred. The Church party, animated by the clergy, strained every nerve to drive out the ministerial candidates, in hope of giving a finishing blow to the weak and unpopular Whig government, and bringing in men who would give them church extension and a triumph over the Dissenters. The Dissenters strove as earnestly on the other side; not from any call of trust and gratitude for what the Whig government had done, but in the hope that their timely aid now, in conjunction with the information of the report-so strongly in their favour-would procure serious attention to their case. But for the Dissenters, the Whig candidates would have been excluded from all the principal places in Scotland. It was hoped now that the prodigious excitement manifested during the elections would give the ministers some hint of the importance of the next move they might make. The evidence was before their eyes that the Scotch Church was a failure in its character of a missionary church, and therefore not entitled on that ground to aid from the community generally, or at the expense of the Dissenters, who were doing her missionary work without aid from any quarter. The worst district in Edinburgh had, at that date, six times as many ministers as the average of Scotch towns; and yet, out of a population of 25,000, only 1070 churchseats were let to the inhabitants of the district. The report of the city mission also disclosed appalling facts of the vice and wretchedness of whole districts where the Church was a mere name, and the whole work was left to the zeal and charity of voluntaries. Yet, in the face of these facts-in full view of the extraordinary excitement which pervaded all Scotland-the vast public meetings, the gatherings of synods and societies

for the protection of religious liberty-in the full hearing of warnings from all England and from Ireland of the serious consequences of a government pledging itself to church extension at a period when the final struggle of our Established Churches for existence had manifestly begun-in the midst of circumstances as serious as these, Lord J. Russell confirmed the agitating rumour which had been abroad since the elections, that the government was going to pledge itself to church extension in Scotland. Subsequent events proved-what, indeed, few ever doubted-that the ministers did not know what they were doing. The universal excitement on ecclesiastical subjects was inexplicable to them. Their training and position did not enable them to enter into the importance of the question of Church Establishments to the great middle class in both England and Scotland, who understand the principle of it perhaps better than any other which ever comes before the government. The ministers did not see that a second Reformation might be the consequence of even a single ministerial act at such a juncture; and so they went intrepidly on, plunging into a matter which they did not understand-to the amazement of men on both sides in the quarrel. Such inability of statesmen to enter fully into religious questions, while not surprising, is a strong argument on the side of the opponents of the union of Church and State; and it was so used, at this date, by the Tractarians on the one hand and the Dissenters on the other; and there was nothing in the condition of any of the three Establishments to shame the plea. In the English Church, the prelates, the clergy generally, and the popular body in the Church, were parting asunder, with mutual reproaches of tendency to schism and unseemly disturbance. The dreadful position and reputation of the Protestant Church in Ireland was a subject so familiar as to have become wearisome; and now, the Scotch Church had challenged her adversaries to a conflict which was to end in her hopeless humiliation. Yet the ministers remained unconscious of the gravity of the occasion. Lord Melbourne and Lord J. Russell said irreconcilable things on the same night in the two Houses; and when they had compared notes, and come to an agreement what to state, it was that they proposed to extend the endowments of the Scotch Church. For this object, they intended to repeal the act of 1707, with regard to the unexhausted parochial teinds, permitting certain authorities to divide the parishes, and give the teinds to church purposes. At the same time, large parishes in the Highlands or elsewhere were to be endowed, from the bishops' teinds or some other dues of the crown. These teinds were now, as has been explained, national property, at the disposal of parliament. On the avowal of the ministerial intention of giving them to the Scotch Church, a general cry arose-a question of where government would stop. If such aid was given to a Church which had proved a failure wherever its work should have been most vigorous, and whose need of aid was denied by a great majority of its own countrymen, what should not be done for England, whose metropolis exhibited more spiritual

like the interest which existed on this subject, but he verily believed that never had any question of domestic policy so much agitated the people of Scotland since the union of the two kingdoms.' Lord Aberdeen did not see the meaning of the movement, any more than the ministers. The debate was a melancholy and humbling one-a natural consequence of the hesitating mind and tentative action which the ministry had manifested on this most serious subject. Lord Aberdeen's motion was for certain returns relative to the Church of Scotland. He stated the expensiveness of the commission, assumed the duty of the government to afford supplies, through Church Establishments, to spiritual destitution, wherever it was pointed out; protested against the appropriations announced by the government, and declared them to be spoliations; and, finally, taxed Lord Melbourne with breach of faith in first inducing the Church to build places of worship on a pledge that government would endow them, and then refusing such endowment. Lord Melbourne's reply was indignant: 'I deny, in the strongest manner, in the most decisive terms, and in the most explicit language in which one gentleman can speak to another, that I ever entered into such

an undertaking.' And Lord Melbourne was clearly right. The churches were built or intended before any commission was issued; and the commission was one of inquiry into facts. But it was also clear that the ministers had entered rashly upon a course which pledged them to the principles of church extension; and this, in a case of eminently dubious claims; and that Lord Melbourne's speech of this night shewed a considerable change and enlargement of view, which came too late.

This question here merged into the yet more essential one which, in a few years, determined the fate of the Scotch Church-the question of patronage. When we arrive at the date of that story, more will be seen of the disastrous effects of the unconsciousness of statesmen of the vital importance of church conflicts, when the principles of religious liberty are in question. If the case is intricate-as in this instance of the patronage question-it may be said that statesmen cannot be expected to enter into all its niceties. If so, it is a misfortune that the determination rests with them; for it is precisely upon the niceties of a question of principle that the decision ought to depend. Meantime, as early as June 1835, Lord J. Russell committed a grave