Country ministers had for some time been urging dogmatic revision, Mr. Macrae, of Gourock, chiefly in the interest of eschatology; and Mr. Fergus Ferguson, who fell into a process for heresy on the matter of the atonement, but on offering explanations was restored to his work to the satisfaction of all. This history made it easier for his church to pass an act in May, 1879, by which it declared, as vital and important doctrines, three which the Westminster confession fails to emphasize,-"the love of God to all mankind, his gift of his Son to be the propitiation for the sins of the whole world, and the free offer of salvation to men without distinction on the ground of Christ's perfect sacrifice." It added that the doctrine of the divine decrees and election is to be taken along with the truth that God is not willing that any should perish. It added, that man's depravity and inability does not prevent his responsibility, his power to perform actions in some sense good, or his experiencing the strivings of God's Spirit; and lastly, that "it is not required to be held that any who die in infancy are lost, or that God may not extend his grace to any who are without the pale of ordinary means, as it may seem good in his sight." To these important alleviations of the older Calvinism on this central subject, a few changes on other points were added. The previous abjuration of the anti-toleration principles of our forefathers of Westminster was retained; and instead of the old duty of the state to support and to suppress religions, a positive obligation was affirmed, as laid upon the church by Christ, to maintain her own ordinances by free-will offerings. And generally, in addition to these points, in which Scripture teaching was merely alleged to be set forth "more fully and clearly" than in the old standards, the act declared that "liberty of opinion is allowed on such points in the standards, not entering into the substance of the faith, as the interpretation of the six days in the Mosaic account of the creation, the church guarding against the abuse of this liberty to the injury of its unity and peace." All this "Declaratory Act" proceeds on a preamble that the standards, "being of human composition, are necessarily imperfect," and wound up with the provision that the formula, acknowledging the confession and catechisms as an exhibition of the sense in which Scripture is understood, should have the words added, "this acknowledgment being made in view of the explanations contained in the Declaratory Act of Synod thereanent.”

The whole proceeding was a valuable step, not only in substance and on the side of doctrine, but in the matter of form. A mere

declaration by the church would have only expressed the animus imponentis, a change in whose animus does not necessarily or satisfactorily relieve the conscience of the subscriber. But the corresponding alteration in the formula carried over the change into the utterance of him who accepts it; and the whole doctrinal movement was carried out, in the usual Scottish fashion, by open and keen debating for and against, so fairly and frankly that, at the ultimate vote, none of its conservative opponents thought it necessary to record their dissent. The only protest, indeed, was from the other side, Mr. Macrae, now of Dundee, refusing to accept as adequate the modicum of revision which had now passed into the legislation of the church.

While one church was thus definitely advancing, another was struggling amid much confusion with principles which necessitated change. Professor Robertson Smith, a young but distinguished scholar of the Free Church, had been appointed her teacher of Hebrew and Exegesis at Aberdeen. He was soon also made subeditor (and afterwards editor-in-chief) of the new "Encyclopædia Britannica," and in it naturally wrote some of the more important Biblical articles. As early as 1876 some of these, and especially one on Deuteronomy, had raised strong feeling; for in it Mr. Smith had represented that the last book of the Pentateuch was written many ages after Moses, and that its apparent historicity was merely a dramatic form into which the sacred author chose to throw his great brochure. The committee of the Free Church on its colleges at once met, and, while finding that there was no ground of process for heresy, yet left the matter to Mr. Smith's own Presbytery to investigate. The Presbytery might also have taken an intermediate course, but the professor, to the general surprise, rather challenged a prosecution under the Westminster Confession of Faith, which he alleged favored his general doctrine of Scripture. The matter was carried on through the years 1878 and 1879, the assembly of the latter year finding, by a majority, only one out of eight charges valid. But that charge, also, the assembly of the following year, by a small majority the other way, dismissed, and so quashed the whole case. The result, narrow as it was, was very remarkable. For Professor Smith's formal answer to the accusation in his Presbytery had broadened the question largely. He deliberately maintained that Scripture is only divine, and is only infallible, where it reveals to us "that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary to salvation." To that element in it, and to that alone, there is the witness of the

Spirit. In other respects as a credible account, for example, of the origin of our religion it is to be proved, where it can be proved, by the ordinary modes of historical evidence. In short, Scripture is only infallible, and only divine, in what relates to faith and life. These positions were already largely accepted in the two other Presbyterian churches, and were not strange to the younger ministry and scholarship of the Free Church, - something like them having been about this time set forth in separate publications by Professor Candlish and Dr. Marcus Dods, two of the most influential of its younger leaders; while another equally distinguished, Dr. A. B. Bruce, of Glasgow, has familiarized the American public with their liberal principles of interpretation. But what was strange and unexpected was the discovery that the Westminster Confession should be so expressed on this point as, in the judg ment of the most orthodox of the Scottish communions, to leave room for this root position, or at least for a whole series of applications avowedly founded upon it. Undoubtedly to some extent the whole thing was, in popular language, a fluke, -a "happy inconsequence," as a theologian called it. Professor Smith himself acknowledged that there is one sense that may fairly be ascribed to the confession in which you must acknowledge infallibility, not only in Scripture, but in every word and letter of the present Greek and Hebrew texts. And the latitude which the final judgment of the Free Church Assembly seemed to give to the chapter of its creed which deals with this subject was probably due, not so much to the undoubtedly simple and large views of the Reformers, as to the fact that the modern question, raised by modern criticism, had not come to the front when that creed was framed two

hundred years ago. Even a giant of Puritanism cannot answer a question till it has been put. But one result of this state of matters was, that all through the Robertson Smith controversy in Scotland there was a curious feeling of perplexity and paradox. The young men and the innovators took their stand upon the old paths, and professed the highest regard for the existing standards. The old and the conservative declined to be strictly bound by them, and made their appeal rather to popular and traditional feeling. And all this came to a head when, in the year 1880, the question suddenly reëmerged. The assembly of that year had dismissed the existing charge against their professor, "declaring that the Free Church, in declining to decide on these critical views by way of discipline, expresses no view in favor of their truth or probability, but leaves the ultimate decision to future

enquiry, in the spirit of patience, humility, and brotherly charity." But before the year was out, this suggested truce was broken by the appearance in the "Encyclopædia" of other articles written by Professor Smith at an earlier date, and containing views which it was contended were to be tolerated under the recent decision. The explosion was sudden and strong, but its bearing on the question of the creed was specially interesting. The regular course would have been, either to leave the "decision to future enquiry" extrajudicially, or to commence a new judicial process. That might, like the previous one, have taken four years; but it would be by no means too long for the interests involved. And that, as before, was the course demanded by Professor Smith and his friends. But the lovers of orthodoxy with one voice declined to stand upon the creed: they refused to try their professor by it, or to inquire whether he stood within it; and by a large majority, in the assembly of 1881, they summarily declared that it was "no longer safe or advantageous for the church that Professor Smith should continue to teach."

This violent procedure was chiefly prompted by indisposition to enter at once and publicly upon the field of prolonged “enquiry" which the assembly had the year before invited; for such an enquiry would plainly have involved the question, not merely whether such views were within the creed, but whether the creed itself was adequate for the time. Dr. Norman Walker, the vigorous editor of the official magazine of the body, publicly avowed that it was not, and that, in the interests of sound doctrine, the time had come for parting from the Westminster Confession in its capacity of modern standard. There were fifty points, he maintained, within the confession whose denial he should be sorry to pronounce heresy; while there were many others outside it, the denial of which neither the church in the present day, nor the individual member of it, should tolerate even for a single meeting of assembly. It was plain that the "future enquiry,” which the final decision in Doctor Smith's matter cut short, was thereby only postponed; and that, when it again came to the surface, this, like so many other important questions, would lay as a duty on the conscience of the Free Church the revision of an obsolescent creed.

It did not come to the surface again for years. But the "unconscious cerebration" of the Christian mind was working below, and in this church (the others in the mean time being passive) it at last took effect in an enactment in 1884 as to deacons. These

office-bearers, comprising a great army of the younger men of the Free Church, had since 1843 signed the same doctrinal formula with ministers and elders. They were bound to the "whole doctrine" of the Confession of Faith. But it was now decided, not without strong protests, that this preposterous uniformity should no longer continue. Henceforth the deacon, called "to administer the temporal affairs of a congregation," was released from the Confession of Faith, and bound only to "own and receive, as in accordance with Holy Scripture, the system of evangelical truth taught in this church, and set forth in the Westminster Shorter Catechism.”

But the liberation of the younger laymen made more difficult the position of those students and young preachers, to whom (as well as to the ruling elders) the more elaborate document was tendered. In the south, also, the English Presbyterian Church, under the able guidance of Dr. Oswald Dykes, the successor of Edward Irving and Hamilton in Regent Square, had proposed, not only a revised formula, but a new Compendium of Doctrine. By the year 1887 the Scotch movement, originating very much with the younger men in the colleges, had become irrepressible. Its representative had been Dr. James Candlish, whose wise and cautious suggestions had pointed rather to a declaratory statement, like that of the United Presbyterians. The more general question was now taken up elsewhere, among others by Professor Blaikie of Edinburgh, who had acquired great authority with the Presbyterian churches as, more than any other man, the founder of their Alliance begun in 1877. Doctor Blaikie's first utterance on it had been ten years before, and in view of the coming assembly he now restated his views as follows:

"My late colleague, Professor John Duncan, used to say that he liked to have a long creed for himself, and a short one for other people. For himself, he felt the obligation to try to have a definite opinion on every point touched in Scripture; in other words, a definite conception of what God taught upon it. But it was not necessary for him to impose all that he thus believed on others as the necessary basis of Christian fellowship with them. If he found in them the broad lineaments of the common faith, that was enough for fellowship. With some modification, the same is true of what a church should believe for itself and what it should impose as a term of fellowship on all its ministers. No doubt a larger amount of agreement is needed of men who are to teach than of those with whom, in a private capacity, Christian fellowship is to be maintained. But the church should recognize the distinction between the longer creed that she should endeavor to hold and the shorter creed that she imposes.