necessities that cannot lodge any well-founded appeal with authority, and be for ever unanswered. The detestable maxims of Erastus touch not in one point that can be proven, or will be conceded, the liberties of the Church Established in Scotland. Her discipline has never been interfered with, where her encroachment beyond known limits did not create the fiction of an offence. The orders of the Church have been left at her own disposal, except where the civil law has first been violated to afford the sole pretext for withholding them. If these be not exceptions of strictly civil quality, at least the magistrate has had the decency, in every instance, to found his interference on their being so. We should like to know where Erastian power has ever qualified its pretensions so modestly. We should be unwilling to suspect the Free Church leaders of utter unacquaintance with that system; but we must leave them their choice, either of not knowing it, or of grossly misapplying their knowledge of it. The design of Erastus was to supplant the Pope by the Magistrate, to whose custody all the keys were to be transferred, and the use of them lent to Church-officers at his will. The relation of the Church of Scotland and her ministry to the magistrate is exactly the reverse; the keys of doctrine, discipline, and regimen, are theirs absolutely; and the magistrate's duty is only to take order that they use them for their appointed spiritual purpose, and within the spiritual limit, and no other. This is for substance the definition of his duty in the Confession of Faith, and all the contendings of the Westminster Divines with the Parliament were confined to this single issue. The imputation of Erastianism to the present Established Church is disgraceful, chiefly to the effrontery, or want of research, of its broachers. How thankful the Westminster Divines would have been for the liberty which our brethren have so contemptuously spurned, may appear, inter alia, from this little clause in one of the latest of their "humble advices" to the Houses: "That no man shall be ordained a minister of a particular congregation, if they can shew any just cause of exception against him."

The decision of the Auchterarder case, by the House of Lords, preceded by about two weeks the sitting of the General Assembly in May 1839. The Church was prepared, as Dr. Buchanan calls it, for this emergency, that is, as a nation may be said to be prepared for war, that has left itself no alternative but to fight, or to eat its own words of defiance. It had, indeed, not rested in words, for the first collision had been struck during the pendency of the Appeal, by certain proceedings of the Presbytery of Dunkeld, which were consummated about this time, and exposed that reverend body to the penalties of a contempt of the Court of Session, though their conduct received the full countenance of the Ecclesiastical Authorities. It was at this memorable Assembly that a shade of distinction began to discriminate parties within the Church, that had till now formed two general divisions, separated apparently by a very bold and obvious line. Dr. Muir was the first to give a distinct expression to a view of the controversy which appeared to indicate a power in the Church, by simply resuming its rights of collation, to give substantial effect to the popular will. This was by taking into account

the presentee's fitness for the particnlar charge, and bringing the people's feelings to bear on that fitness, on expression being given to them. There was some degree of refinement in this view of the matter; but as it of course implied a formal surrender of the popular veto, it in the meantime proposed to save the courtesies of deference to statute. How long the substitution of a veto by the Church, for the veto by the people, would have kept parties out of the civil courts and spared a new collision, might be a question; but the form of non-resistance or of obedience to the now indubitable law of the land was something, and might be expected to conciliate favour for a declaratory act of the Legislature in terms of the mover's views. But anything between his own magisterium of the veto, and the obnoxious judgment of the Lords, was indignantly suppressed into silence by the fulminating voice of Chalmers, who rent the very heavens with his cry of oppression, and his commination against the troublers of Israel. It was under the stun of this peal of recusant thunder, that the astonished young nobleman, who came with the olive branch of certain pacific purposes, fled bodily from the house, with the memorable sentence which intimated "the ringing out of the Church of Scotland's knell." The Church stood fully and inextricably committed by the vote of that day to the carrying out, in act, of all her pretensions; with the single exception of the title to the benefice, which she affected to regard as the only question that the law had disposed of.

The same remarkable occasion which drew out Dr. Muir from his reticency in the business of church-courts, unsealed the lips of another still more renowned mover of ecclesiastical measures. It happened, singularly enough, that the gentleman who became the organ of the views which ultimately prevailed with the Government, in its intercourse with the Establishment, should have been singled out immediately by the future Gracchus of the movement for his especial match in the conflict. New elements were infused into the politics of both sides by the coincident emergence of Dr. Muir and Dr. Candlish from the comparative retirement of their position. It is quite certain, that the leavening process, which made the Church what it became, and the secession what it is, was introduced at this time by these men, who modified the influence, hitherto paramount, of Dr. Cook on the one hand, and of Dr. Chalmers on the other.

But to return to the state of matters at the rising of the Assembly in 1839. It was now ruled, that the Church should give up that part of her contest which regarded the temporalities, and keep the ground she had taken in every other respect. There was, we think, some affectation, as we hinted before, in this conduct. The giving of her endowments to the winds (a phrase of much currency at the time and since,) might have seemed a brave and self-denying renouncement, but it was part of the magistrate's duty not to let them "go" where it was never intended they should. They were not meant to go to the winds. They were not meant to go to presentees denuded of their licence; to ministers stripped of their ordination; to excommunicated outcasts; to the forisfamiliated from Christ's house.

It might suit the views of some men to put patrons and presentees into

the odious position of mere devourers of the substance of the Church; while the actual cure was served by the meek and much-enduring substitute who should be separated to his work on the call of the people. Such scandals of misrule could not long be tolerated; and the hope apparently was, that the authorities might soon find themselves shut up to all the Church demanded, in order to put an end to them. The magistrate took, however, another and a very distinct view of his duty.

It was, "to take order" that Parishes should neither remain unsettled in virtue of the Church's claim of independence, nor be abandoned to the precarious labours of a portionless ministry. He held in trust two things, the Church's temporal portion for her use, and the charge of taking order, in connection with that provision, that all her ordinances should be "settled, administered, and observed." Over her spiritual functions he had indeed no authority; but it fell as expressly within his province as any of his duties, to take care that those functions were not declined on pretences that did not apply to her own jurisdiction. The magistrate within whose department it fell to order the sacred Ark to its appointed place in Zion, claimed no share in the peculiar duties of the Priesthood that carried the solemnities of the occasion into effect. But what would be said of the forth-putting of spiritual independence on the part of that Priesthood, for declining the exercise of their functions in such a case? We come now to the application of the principles on which the Church had taken her ground.

The presentee to the parish of Lethendy (a poor creature, no doubt, as he is called in one of the histories,) had put himself into the courts of law; while, in the meantime, the Church judicatories were consummating the settlement of a rival or substitute presentee. Mr Clark, "triumphing" (like another Hugh Peters,) in the times that had opened to the persecuted, retaliated the pains and penalties with which he was threatened by the Ecclesiastical authorities, for daring to appeal to the Civil Court for his rights, in the face of a clause in the famous declaration of Independence, by serving the Presbytery of Dunkeld with an interdict on the ordination of his rival. That interdict was disobeyed, and the Presbytery, who resisted it, were rebuked at the bar of the Court of Session. What other or milder visitation the legal offence could have received, if it were noticed at all, does not occur to us. Clark's conduct was petulant enough; but a scavenger, when his rights are declared, comes out (as this man claimed to do,) in the full-blown privileges of a British subject; and if he hurries to his remedy with a precipitate indecency, it cannot be helped. The majority of the Presbytery behaved, no doubt, with great dignity and great spirit; but it was as men whose motives are pure, and whose cause is legally infirm, are often called upon to shew spirit and resolution. We observe, by the way, that the minority, some years thereafter, shewed their spirit and their resolution, no less, though more wisely; for they readily undertook the trials of the presentee, which soon merged in a trial for immorality and total unfitness for the holy ministry, thus rendering him, at all points, the justice due to a "British subject." It must be observed, before we dismiss this first case of actual collision, (for it was on occasion of the

interdict which the Presbytery saw fit to violate in this instance, that the authorities came to hostilities,) that the discipline proposed to be administered to presentees, who should press their claims in the Civil Courts, assumed a principle of the most debateable description; to-wit, that obedience was due to Church Courts by their licentiates, though the very grounds of refusing it might be that these courts had travelled out of their own legitimate bounds. If the civil courts could be charged with begging one question, the spiritual courts might be equally charged with begging another; and the unlucky preacher was in the very dilemma of the tragic heroine,

"My noble father,

I do perceive here a divided duty;

My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you."

But filial duty had come into collision with another, in which character, and right, and feeling, were too deeply concerned, to admit of implicit deference to the authority which, long undivided, had, as such, claimed unqualified acknowledgment.

Seriously, it was altogether too harsh to prosecute as for crime this species of treason, as Dr. Buchanan scruples not to call it, surely by a very new application of the term. "To be killed a little," is no one's choice; yet what sworn arbiters found to be wrongs, requiring damages and indemnification, were expected by dominant churchmen to be submitted to with indefinite patience, on pain of deprival of license, or excommunication itself. We freely admit that irritation could not but be at work, both on one side and the other, in this most unhappy juncture of affairs; and that its effect was to meet the pitching of authority too high, by pushing opposition too fast. Much perplexity of church affairs no doubt followed; and we regret, with all our hearts, without venturing to pronounce which party did best, or whether either did well, to be so angry, that they should between them have driven matters to such dire extremity, that very soon no peacemaker, not even propitious legislation itself, could strike in with any hope of avail. If the Church had but had a moiety of the patience that she sought to exact from poor presentees, or from Presbyteries that she placed in a strait between two, her distress might have been very temporary, and that of her congregations very limited; and we should probably have been spared the narration of a melancholy tale. If she had stood uncommitted to hostilities before a declaration of war was called for, she might have stood—not as Troy-but as Mount Ida. As it was, she was on the broad highway of resistance, as we have seen, before the umpire had yet done with balancing her claims.

The decision of the Lords forced on the Church that application of her own principles which she was so reluctant to foresee. She found herself shut up to the assertion of her independence with the relinquishment of her temporalities. And she found herself thrust off her vantageground as an establishment. When she awoke to this conviction, it was with a very painful rubbing of the eyes; and her warfare became such a conflict between the shame of qualifying her pretensions, and the im

possibility of reconciling them with her actual circumstances, as led to perplexities more whimsical, if not more serious, than can be easily paralleled in all church history.

A more important emergency succeeded the insignificant case of Lethendy, if that can be called insignificant, on which hostile parties actually broke ground in "conflict."

The Presbytery of Strathbogie, within whose bounds a presentee of respectable character had incurred the veto, was also a suitor for justice about this time to the civil jurisdiction. The events to which we have been referring, happened, be it remembered, in this order :-the Lords had decided on appeal, May 2d; the Assembly sat on the 16th; the Presbytery of Dunkeld appeared at the bar of the Court of Session, June 14th; and in the same month of June, of the same memorable year (1839,) the presentee to Marnoch obtained a decree, holding the Presbytery of Strathbogie still bound, all decisions of church courts to the contrary not withstanding, to take him on trials.

In this significant concatenation of events, a majority of the Presbytery found a call to resolve that points of law, on which there was no longer any pretence of doubt, fell to be acted upon. What they began they carried out with resolute and unflinching determination. They submitted to, or rather incurred, (for submit they did not to,) suspension, deposition, and menaced excommunication; certainly without yielding a hair's-breadth of their position. The conduct of these men has been subjected to a great variety of criticism. There can now be little doubt, we think, saving our respect for Dr. Bryce, and his positive opinion to the contrary, that they transgressed, as they trode their doubtful way, certain ecclesiastical forms; that they treated with less than ceremonious respect the ecclesiastical authority to which they ought to have deferred to the very outrance of permissible obeisance, and that they were somewhat precipitate, to borrow the facetious imagery of the gallant Captain Christie, in withdrawing themselves from the risks incident to picquets in front of the main body-a position which (much against their will no doubt,) circumstances had assigned them in this Church and State warfare.

But to what avail are these minutiae of criticism? After all forms had been exhausted, and all patience worn out, to the same complexion matters must have come at last. The Strathbogie majority occupied a firm constitutional footing; so it appeared to them, and so it has proved; and their petty irregularities (for which an easy remedy might have been found in the ordinary rules of ecclesiastical procedure,) were moonshine in water, to the substantial rectitude and consistent magnanimity of their conduct.

The negotiations of the Church with successive statesmen and governments, were prosecuted under some disadvantages, of which the chief, no doubt, arose from her going red-hand and flagrant from her own intemperate discipline, to seek relief from her embarrassments. At the very outset of her diplomacy, the luckless contretemps of the Lethendy collision had occurred-the Marnoch case was in progress-and while one limed twig after another was set to catch such members of her