THOUGH no admirers of the “Scotsman” in its general religious attitude, we cannot refrain from expressing our admiration at the remarkably able manner in which it has defended the position of the Free Church as against the United Free in the present case. It has taken the side of law and justice, and has exposed in masterly, and oftentimes withering, terms the unrighteous claims, arrogant pretensions, and hollow arguments of the United Frees. The following is a sample quotation from a leading article of October 5th:—
“There is one thing that ought to be remembered about this widespread sympathy in England and abroad with the United Free Church. Public opinion outside of Scotland has been swayed by copious presentations of the United Free Church view of the case in the Press, especially in the religious papers, and has had little or no means of seeing the other side. The Free Church has been pictured to the imagination as “a handful of Conservative Highlanders,” and little better in fact than an execrable pack of thieves. The English Baptists, for example, yesterday passed a resolution, in which it is declared that the United Free Church has been “stripped of almost all its property for action well within its constitutional right.” The strippers are this handful of Highlanders. These English Baptists do not consider—because, in all probability, they do not know—that it was the big Church that began by stripping the little one. It carried out the act of spoliation with the high hand. The Free Church, if it now strips the United Free, has the highest legal sanction. When the United Free Church sent the Free Church remnant naked to its mountains, it had no authority but Rob Roy’s simple rule that they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can. That is the simple, naked truth. It was one of the hardest, cruelest acts ever done under the sun. The United Free Church stripped the Free Church of everything, though everything legally belonged to it. The good Moravians who have, it seems, not got very full information from the Mound, say in their letter that they ‘unreservedly acknowledge the right of those, comparatively so few, ministers and congregations disagreeing with the Union to dissent, and to such property as is adequate to their needs in doing the work of a Christian Church.’ It could not have occurred to these pious simple folks that the big wealthy United Free Church refused to acknowledge that those who dissented from the Union had any right to any property at all. And the world saw the poor little remnant stripped of its all with almost complete indifference. But when a big Church parades its nakedness and its sores, the world and the Christian Churches overflow with sympathy. It is the fact that a big property is being taken from a big Church and given to a little one that has stirred up so much uninformed sympathy on the side of the United Free Church. That is natural; but it is carrying sympathy too far to weep over the great original robber when the weak wee victim gets back its own from him by the help of the law.”