It

European Revolution has held the American or voluntary church theory, had qualified its subscription in more ways than one. asked subscription to the Westminster creed and catechism on the understanding that the church "did not approve of anything in these documents which teaches compulsory and intolerant principles in religion." The intolerant passages referred to are those which the American Presbyterians cut out in revising the same confession in 1788, and they are now universally condemned. Even the Free Church, when it left the state in 1843, felt the pressure of them so far as to pass an act to disclaim "intolerant or persecuting principles." But it still maintained subscription to the unchanged confession. And the form of subscription in it and in the Established Church alike was still the very strict one dating from 1711: "I do sincerely own and believe the whole doctrine contained in the confession to be the truths of God, and I do own the same as the confession of my faith." The United Presbyterians had already adopted a more reasonable formula, subscribing the confession generally "as an exhibition of the sense in which I understand the Holy Scriptures."

In 1866 the two

But already the waters had been stirred. general assemblies, claiming to represent the Church of Scotland historically, met as usual on the topmost ridge, on either side of which Edinburgh is "piled, close and massy, steep and high." Each elected its moderator, and the moderator took for his subject the question of creed. In the Free Church Assembly its chairman, Doctor Wilson, took the lead by the statement that "no confession of faith can ever be regarded by the church as a final and permanent document. She must always vindicate her right to revise, to purge, to add to it. We lie open always to the teaching of the Divine Spirit; nay, we believe in the progressive advancement of the church into a more perfect knowledge of the truth." Ten days later Doctor Cook, the moderator of the Church of Scotland, closed his assembly in the presence of the Queen's Commissioner by a statement that the Scottish Dissenting churches were no doubt free to change or modify the creed. “But it is not so with the Established Church. Our confession, submitted to the estates of Parliament, was accepted as the truth of God; and the church was endowed and established, not free at any time to modify, alter, or depart from it, nor to hold the truth of any of its doctrines an open question." This utterance, listened to at the moment with submission, became three days later the occa sion of a weighty protest by some seventy ministers led by Prin

cipal Tulloch. They did not question the alleged constitutional position of the church. But they urged that, as Dr. Tulloch had said in his pamphlet two years before, "the old relation of our church to the confession cannot continue." For even if, and all the more if, the creed and subscription remained unchanged, the administration of doctrine in such a church should be most liberal and tolerant. And from that day to this the individual latitude of opinion to be found within this church, even when its subscription and creed were nominally of the narrowest, has been supposed to be undoubtedly greater than in any other in Scotland.

But the converse of the case stated by the moderator- that of a church becoming bound to the state-was now about to happen in Ireland, and Scotchmen eagerly watched the experiment. Mr. Gladstone was not yet prime minister, and I found him in May, 1868, full of interest in the subject which I had been studying, the legal "limits of deviation" competent to a church in matters of doctrine. In truth, of all the lawyers and of all the clerics with whom I had conversed upon it in Scotland and in England alike, not one had half the knowledge of a question so appropriate to their professions, or showed half so much interest in it, as did this statesman, who, while neither cleric nor lawyer, was filled with the enthusiasms of both. Long ago he had followed through the courts the rights and claims of non-established English churches in the famous case of Lady Hewley's Charities, and, now that he was on the point of being a second time prime minister, he was called upon to make use of his early studies for the benefit of the church about to be disestablished. What constitution and doctrine was Parliament under his advice to give the Irish Church? Every man in London was asking this question. That very forenoon I had found Dean Stanley full of it. But Dean Stanley, like all the men whom I met, assumed that Parliament would retain the right of regulating the creed of the Disestablished Church. I had a strong view against it, and I resolved to put the question to the one man on whose undisclosed plan all were now speculating. His answer was instantaneous and explo sive. "So long as I have any influence with Parliament, Parlia ment shall not lay a finger on the constitution of the Irish Church -or of any church!" The church, in his view, if disestablished, should be at least free. But how was this to be effected so as not to interfere with the identity and private revenues of the church, which was now to have power to modify her own creed and constitution? A skillful solution of this problem I now found

as the whole country a few weeks afterwards found with admiration that Mr. Gladstone had already discovered. He discovered it, not as we had hoped in Scotland, but in America! For I may here mention that the precedent for the free constitution of the Episcopal Church of Ireland is to be found in the very moderate Episcopacy of the American revolution, recorded (from a modern and High Church point of view) in the book of Murray Hoffman, published as long ago as 1850.1

I need scarcely apologize for this digression; for the Irish Church incident produced a great effect in Scotland as elsewhere, in the direction, not only of the American theory of church and state, but of that free and open expression of church conviction which the American political system sanctions because it relieves it from statutory fetters. Dean Stanley, to whom I have alluded, expressed to me his idea that in Ireland the state should have endowed both religions, instead of liberating one; and he regarded with great distrust the movement for the abolition of patronage, already begun in the Established Church of Scotland. Accordingly he came down to Edinburgh in the spring of 1873, and, in four lectures read there, passed with swift and graceful but occasionally inaccurate finger over the whole history of the Church of Scotland as a body changing with the nation in the past. The defense of that church as a body, through its career independent even of the friendly state, was taken up in the answering lectures of Principal Rainy; and both volumes, very different from each other in their respective and undoubted merits, remain as monuments of that memorable tournament. But Stanley's lectures raised also the question of the expediency of subscription by churchmen to a statutory creed which they do not believe; and in the discussion which ensued,2 Dr. Tulloch, who had won honor as the consistent promoter of liberalism of thought, went much too near to the defense of this unfortunate kind of freedom. The abolition of patronage was, however, a popular movement, and, the risk of its going the whole length of disestablishment being obviated by the return of a Conservative Parliament and ministry in 1874, it was at once resumed. Those who had brought it forward made an attempt to have the Presbyterians outside, who had always opposed patronage, or had left state support in connection with it, included in the movement, or

1 A Treatise on the Law of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, by Murray Hoffman, Esq. New York, 1850.

2 See Contemporary Review for March and November of 1872.

at least consulted; but this was opposed in the assembly's committee. The result was that the measure which was passed in the Parliament of 1874 failed as a means of immediate union between the churches; but it was a step in the direction of freedom from the feudal past and of congregational independence. It brought the Church Established, too, on one great and important point, to the level of practice and principle already attained by the two chief Presbyterian churches outside. And these two churches had, during the ten years preceding, been carrying on negotiations, which failed likewise on the point of formal union, but, on the matter in which we are at present interested, resulted in an agreement that "in principle," and as to their doctrines, there was no bar to their becoming one. Of the two, the United Presbyterian Church, as we have seen, was in advance of the Free Church; and it was clear that, in the years to come, the conjunction would be by the other following its lead; while the day when that, the new position, was attained by a body so strong in the old prestige of 1843, and in the elements of present national life, as the Free Church, would be a decisive day for Scotland.

In the first instance, however, discussion was chiefly carried on in the Established Church, and it came almost to deserve to be described as a "religious upheaval." Dr. Tulloch and Dr. Cunningham, of Crieff, both published able pamphlets, the latter maintaining that the confession should be neither abolished nor revised, but maintained as a "historical monument." But an attempt to anticipate the change, afterwards effected, of subscription by elders, was negatived by a large majority; and Dr. Phin, who happened to be in the moderator's chair in 1877, made a strong speech, not only pointing out that the "church would have to go to the state" before it could change its confession, but denying that there was in any part of the body any serious tendency to change. Only one formal step was this year taken by Scotland, and it was a step outward rather than forward, putting itself again in touch with America and the church universal.

Presbyterianism is a much narrower thing than the church universal. But if we take the Christian congregation as the unit, Presbyterianism does represent the striving— perhaps the exaggerated striving - after the great idea of church unity; and that not in the despotic and monarchical, but in the representative and constitutional form. Like most other great systems, it has during the last hundred years become a world-wide thing. And when the first ecumenical council of Presbyterianism met in Edin

burgh in July, 1877, it might have been supposed that the first result would be a sense of the mass, firmness, and solidity of the system. But the assembly was one merely consultative, not one exercising authority; and one of the first and most wholesome feelings aroused in it was the sense of diversity, variety, and multiplicity of administration to be found within the one Presbyterian name. In some things this came to us as a revelation. In nothing was it more important to bring out this combination of unity in the substance with variety in the detail, than in the matter of creed. Accordingly, at the very first public sitting of the council, the present writer proposed a committee which should gather together and tabulate all the creeds and confessions of the fifty churches from all parts of the world which were represented in the room, with the formulæ of subscription or other adherence demanded from church officials or members. The proposal was unanimously agreed to, but it took three years to carry it out. And the result (presented by Dr. Schaff to the Second or Philadelphia Council in 1880) was very interesting. It showed that this large Christian body, divided by the Atlantic into two not unequal parts, and now no longer connected with any particular state or nation, was still resting historically on the new Puritan creed of 1647. All the free churches had more or less revised their connection with that creed: some, in America, only tied themselves to the "system of doctrine" contained in it; others, in Scotland, held it "an exhibition" of their understanding of Scripture; others, like the Welsh Calvinists in 1827, had exchanged it for a creed wholly different in form, but alike in substance; and others, including almost all the smaller Protestant bodies scattered over Europe, had in this century adopted, instead of it, short utterances of central and saving truth. The platform, the whole extent of which was thus disclosed, became a most encouraging one for revision. It was plain that the body as a whole was already in a course of progress to be accomplished by separate action in its independent parts.

In Scotland the United Presbyterian Church, as had been expected, at once took the lead in legislation. The controversy in which, a generation earlier, the names of Dr. Balmer and Dr. John Brown had appeared, had resulted in this church enlarging its doctrine of the atonement so as to acknowledge its original "general reference" to all sinners of mankind (being the body to which it is offered), as well as a "particular reference" to those who accept and embrace it when so offered to all. Two West