By REV. JOHN COLQUHOUN, Glendale.
XVI.—Union of Free and United Presbyterian Churches.
We have seen that the early Union movements in the Church in Scotland showed a purpose to drop one or other of the principles which our forefathers held dear, and fought many a bitter conflict, in order to preserve these principles for coming generations. This was also a characteristic of later Union movements. It has already been shown how the United Presbyterian Church, not only renounced the Establishment Principle and embraced Voluntaryism, but also relegated the Presbyterian system of Church government to a place where other systems of Church Government had an equal claim to being founded in the Word of God. This by one stroke, as far as the United Presbyterian Church was concerned, took away any reason why there should not be one great union of all the Churches in Christendom, whatever be the system of Church government peculiar to them. Before such a Union could be effected many obstacles required to be removed, and it is most interesting to watch how those who wanted Union at any price set about accomplishing their darling object. Many like Bishop Wordsworth in 1866, advocated a “united church for a united kingdom,” and, of course, like a true Episcopalian, the object of his Treatise on that subject was to induce Scotsmen to become Episcopalians.
During the latter half of the 19th century we have the long drawn out negotiations between the United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church of Scotland which began in 1857 by a document containing a series of Resolutions signed by about seventy lay members drawn from each of the two churches that were to negotiate for Union. In these Resolutions, which afterwards became the basis of the negotiations for Union, it is claimed that the Churches concerned were one in their views of the doctrines of grace, in worship, and discipline. A bad beginning, however, was made by agreeing that the matters on which they differed were to be treated as “open questions.” As the matters on which they differed were, by no means, unimportant, they ought to claim our attention at the outset. We have already seen that the United Presbyterian Church was a Voluntary Church, and that the Free Church publicly professed that they were not Voluntaries but held by the Establishment Principle. This brings us to the position that the difference between the negotiating Churches, in this matter, was irreconcilable, for there was no hope that the United Presbyterians would abandon their Voluntaryism and the Free Church could not accept the United Presbyterian position without ceasing to be what she claimed to be at the Disruption, the Church of Scotland Free. Arising out of the Union negotiations we find the crusade for the dis-establishment of the Church of Scotland, the chief exponents of which were Dr. Rainy and Dr. Hutton of Paisley. To dis-establish the Church of Scotland would, to a great extent, put the Establishment Principle in the background, and thus remove an outstanding barrier to union, between the two Churches which were presently negotiating for Union. The first time that the subject was taken up in the Courts of the Free Church was at a meeting of the Edinburgh Presbytery in March, 1873, when Dr. Rainy proposed an Overture to the Assembly on Dis-establishment. At that Presbytery Dr. Begg, the leader of the Constitutionalists in the Free Church, “took up the ground which he maintained to the last, that the State had done wrong in imposing, and the Church in accepting, wrong conditions of establishment; but to tell the State to right that wrong by the perpetration of another wrong, of ignoring altogether their duty to God and His truth and His Church, would be to commit a greater wrong than either of the two.” (Memoirs of Dr. Begg, vol. ii. 491.) Voluntaryism had proved the greatest obstacle to Union in these negotiations, as a writer in the Watchword for 1st April, 1870, puts it after showing that the Fathers of the United Presbyterian Church held by the Establishment Principle and that their successors had changed, he says, of the latter: “They are therefore the undoubted schismatics in Scotland. So long as they retain their present novel and sectarian position, multitudes in Scotland cannot unite with them. Beyond all doubt, therefore, they are the true anti-Unionists, whatever they may pretend, and they may make any union on ‘the standards’ impossible which is not obviously fictitious. They set up a recently invented arbitrary and unscriptural barrier in the way of Union, in consequence of which the Presbyterians of Scotland cannot come harmoniously together or unite in such a way as to serve themselves heirs to all the spiritual heroes and contendings of the past. Voluntaryism, therefore, and not the principles of the Free Church, which are simply those of all previous periods of Reformation in our land, is the real barrier to Union amongst the Presbyterians of Scotland.”
Another obstacle to Union was the view held by the United Presbyterians on the Atonement. They held that the death of Christ “is sufficient for all, suited to all, and free to all, irrespective of any distinction between elect and non-elect.” This is contrary to the Word of God and the Confession of Faith, chapter iii. which says: “Wherefore they who are elected, being fallen in Adam, are redeemed by Christ, are effectually called into faith in Christ by His Spirit working in due season; are justified, adopted, sanctified, and kept by His power unto salvation. Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only.” The view of the Atonement, held by the United Presbyterians, gave rise to what is known to theologians as the “double reference of the atonement,” that is, that there was a special atonement securing a certainty of salvation to some, and a universal atonement securing a possibility of salvation to all. Those who held it maintained that without this view of the Atonement they could not preach Christ to all. To such, the late Dr. Kennedy of Dingwall gives the following striking reply: “Verily, if men cannot preach the gospel without this, it is difficult to see how this can help them. There is some carnal sense in the Arminian view, but this lacks even that. If Christ died to redeem all men, there seems something like a basis for a call to believe in Him to the saving of the soul. But this reference, outside of that which election is held to have defined, and which connects the chosen exclusively with redemption, is a palpably unsatisfactory thing. Does it even avail to secure an offer of salvation to all? No one can say it does, when millions have perished, and there are millions still on earth who never heard the gospel. To what effect then does it avail? To secure the extension to all of God’s providential goodness. And on what avails only to that extent the offer of salvation is based! What to me, an immortal and sinful soul, on the brink of Eternity, is a message telling me that ‘bread which perisheth’ was procured to me by the death of Christ! It is salvation I require—it is for that I agonise. I care not for vague references. Give me a living Saviour, to whom I may commit my soul; give me a ‘sure word of prophecy’ regarding Him; give me a divine command to believe in His name. Then and thus, and only then and thus, can my wearied soul find aught to lean on; and I shall count it both my privilege and my duty, to yield my homage to divine authority, my faith to divine testimony, and my trust to a divine Redeemer.” (Man’s Relation to God, p. 115, 116.)
In 1869, when the question of Union was discussed in the Assembly of the Free Church, Dr. Nixon of Montrose, in a masterly speech, showed that the Articles of Agreement between the two Churches were based on the principle of compromise, “terms being employed which may be understood by different parties in somewhat different senses.” At the same Assembly Dr. Horatius Bonar gave the first distinct intimation that Union on the terms proposed could only be accomplished at the cost of disruption. “Sir,” he said, in addressing the Moderator, “if these Articles are accepted, if a new Church is based upon them, I for one can be neither a minister nor a member of such a Church. They exclude me—and I speak, I daresay, for others; but they exclude myself certainly. If I am a Free Churchman—if I maintain Free Church principles, as I have done all along—I would on no consideration be a minister of a Church based on such Articles as these.” Though the motion for Union was carried by a very large majority there is no doubt but that the strong speeches made by members of the minority, and especially the hints at a possible disruption, caused the Union leaders to go warily for, at the Assembly of 1871, there was a virtual abandonment of the Union proposals, and in 1873 a Mutual Eligibility Act was passed by the Assembly in which it was agreed, under certain conditions, that ministers in either Church could be called by congregations in the other Church. It did not, however, give satisfaction either to Unionists or anti-Unionists. The anti-Union party had previous to this decision taken legal advice as to the disposal of the property of the Free Church in the event of the Unionists carrying their plans into execution. In 1874 this advice was published in book form under the title, Free Church Principles.
The opposition of the anti-Unionists held up the Union for a considerable time until, one by one, the doughty champions of those principles which were dear to Free Churchmen, were called home to their rest, and others filled their places who had not their gifts, their grace, or their faithfulness, and so the Union became an accomplished fact in 1900. In the interval the Unionists in the Free Church were not idle. As we have seen, the Mutual Eligibility Act was passed in order to be a bridge between the two denominations, and it proved a subtle invention by which the people of the Free Church were to be inoculated by United Presbyterian doctrines and practices. It was of this Act that Dr. Kennedy said: “The boa constrictor does not swallow the rabbit at one gulp; it first licks it all over and then begins the swallowing at one of the extremities. But it was with the view of incorporating the whole carcase that the licking process began.” When the Union movement was dropped young men in the ministry of the Free Church began to discover that they had “difficulties and scruples” about the Westminster Confession of Faith and the result was that in 1892 a Declaratory Act was passed in the light of which the Confession of Faith was to be understood in a very different manner from that in which it was formerly understood. Judging by the large majority which accepted this Act the boa constrictor had done its work very effectively. By this Act the majority which accepted it had drifted from the moorings of the Free Church, but the minority, who did not accept the Act, in 1893 set up the Free Church, though numerically smaller, as the Free Church of the Disruption, adhering to its Constitution in its entirety, which it does to the present day as the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, refusing, in any way, to countenance man-made unions. In 1900 the Union took place, and was hailed by its sponsors as if it were the advent of the millennium, but judging by the speed with which this body, which has since united with the Established Church, travels on the down-grade ever since 1900, every right-minded person will earnestly hope that the era which it brought in will not last a thousand years. A small remnant in the Free Church of the Declaratory Act refused to enter this Union, but as a witness to the position of the Disruption Church it might as well have gone in with the Union, except that it makes a show where the Free Presbyterian Church had reared up the banner of Christ before it had a separate existence. The allocation of the property by the civil courts to the minority kept them apart for years, but now that bitter memories connected with that struggle are practically forgotten, there is a free exchange of pulpits between the two bodies, the result of which can best be illustrated by the impact on a small body by a body fifty times its size.
It is unquestionable but that the Unions which took place in the Church in Scotland were paving the way for Union with the Episcopal Church of England. Notice has been taken already of the fact that the United Presbyterian Church put Presbyterianism and other forms of Church government on the same level, thus showing themselves quite ready to accept any form of Church government which it would be convenient for them to adopt. As the United Presbyterian Church did not drop this view in 1900 when it united with the Free Church it must be part and parcel of the Constitution of the united body, which Constitution was carried into the Church of Scotland in 1929. This larger Union, and much more, seems to have been before the minds of the Union leaders in 1900, as the following extract will show. “When we look, not so much at our own short history—however brilliant to our own eyes that history may be; nor so much at our own peculiar attainments and possessions as Protestants and as evangelical believers—however precious and inalienable those attainments and possessions may be; but when we look at the antiquity, and the nobility, and the grandeur, and the stateliness of those other Churches (i.e. Greek and Latin), as over against the too great provincialism and rusticity and indecorum of speech and action that have often far too much characterised ourselves; when we have humbled ourselves to admit that some other Churches have things of no small moment to teach us and to share with us, and things it will greatly enrich us to receive and to assimilate; when we are of a Christian mind enough to admit and even to welcome thoughts and views and feelings like these, then the day of a reconstructed Christendom will have begun to dawn, at least for ourselves.” (A Sermon on the Re-union of Christendom, by Dr. Alexander Whyte of St. George’s United Free Church, Edinburgh.) This contemplates a Union, not only with the Church of England, but also with the Roman and Greek Churches.
The dis-establishment agitation, when carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to the same result. This can be inferred from the preamble to the Overture sent by the Free Church Presbytery of Edinburgh to the General Assembly in 1873, in which it was proposed that “the Assembly should take the premises into their most serious consideration, and do therein as to their wisdom may seem fit, with a view to the interests of truth and the wellbeing of the cause of Christ within these realms.” (italics mine.) Dr. Rainy and those who supported him made it sufficiently clear that their mind was that the Assembly ought to press for the dis-establishment of both the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. The view was evidently held that when both Churches were separated from the State each could alter its government, mode of worship, and what it believed, as it found convenient. This would make it much easier for both Churches to unite. Probably if Dr. Rainy’s dis-establishment agitation had met with more success than it did, the Report on Relations between Anglican and Presbyterian Churches would have fallen to the consideration of a generation earlier than ours.