THIS is the term used by Dr Wotherspoon in his recently issued Life of “James Cooper, Presbyterian in the Church of God, M.A., D.D., Litt. D., D.C.L., LL.D., Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Glasgow,” to describe that movement in the Church of Scotland engineered and fostered by the Scottish Church Society and to the advancement of whose ideals Dr Cooper gave his whole-hearted support. The biography is a revelation of the gathering strength of this movement in the Church of Scotland. Dr Cooper was a strange mixture. He did not like the Calvinism of the Westminster Standards, as might be expected, for while he valued the Confession as a formal link to what he called the Catholic faith, he disliked its Calvinism as an obstacle to reunion with Episcopalians (p. 234). As to Puritanism he writes:—”Puritan I never was: I think they deprived the Church’s worship of that glory and beauty for which God provided at the erection of the Tabernacle, and which He has impressed on every whit of His great temple of the Universe” (p. 23). He was strongly opposed to certain innovations, such as the General Assembly’s decision to permit the Individual Communion Cup in 1908, which, notwithstanding the Procurator’s legal advice that the law of the Church forbade it, was carried on Dr Norman Maclean’s motion. When discussion of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act of 1907 came before the General Assembly, a Committee was appointed to look into the matter of the Church’s relation to the new law. The Committee reported to the 1909 Assembly that the majority of them were of the opinion that such marriages were not contrary to Scripture, and recommended that ministers celebrating and parties contracting such marriages should be relieved from ecclesiastical censures. Dr Cooper desired that the Church should reaffirm its law and enjoin obedience to it, insisting that there is a Christian law of marriage delivered to us by our Lord—which excludes the marriage of persons in near affinity. The Committee’s recommendation was, however, carried by a large majority, and on being sent down to Presbyteries as an overture received their almost unanimous approval. When the overture came back to the Assembly of 1910, Dr Cooper opposed it as an evasion of the Confession. The overture was passed into an Act by a large majority, so that it is now the law of the Established Church that “ministers celebrating and parties contracting such marriages [as a man with his deceased wife’s sister] are relieved from ecclesiastical censures.” Some of his criticisms were not lacking in a shrewd estimate of men, as witness the following, though we cannot go in with all he says of “our past history”:—”How very sad the conduct of the U.F. leaders! They are doing enormous injury to religion in Scotland: I had hoped they would have borne the stroke with meekness and bravery. But they have always praised the violent in our past history and seem bent on bettering that example. I hoped we might have addressed them, but plainly the time for speech is not yet. They are too sore, and too proud. I have not seen one word of penitence or confession even of mistake” (p. 226). He is here referring to the commotion produced in the ministerial ranks of the United Free Church after the House of Lords’ decision in 1904.
Throughout the biography the main topic is Dr Cooper’s obsession for unity—not so much with Presbyterians, Congregationalists, or Baptists in Scotland—but with Scottish Episcopalians, and then with the great Anglican Church in England, and finally with the Eastern Churches, when they would be in a position to negotiate with Rome. This he admitted was looking a long way ahead—we trust a great deal longer ahead than Dr Cooper would be willing to contemplate. “The idea of union,” says his biographer, “almost the name—was in itself sacred to him.” The whole biography is very “churchy,” and one with sound Presbyterian sympathies cannot but feel a kind of ecclesiastical nausea at the feast of matters about holy days, liturgical forms, beautiful crucifixes, etc., served for consumption by Dr Cooper and his biographer. In the opening autobiographical chapter he says:—”I was never opposed to such Episcopacy as we had in Scotland, when the Bishops were subject in spiritual things to the General Assembly, and acted in their several dioceses in conjunction with our Scottish gradation of Church Courts” (p. 23), and on next page he says:—”For myself, I confess that I should have gone heartily with the majority of the General Assembly at Perth in 1618 and voted in favour of the Five Articles.” These were the Articles which were swept away by the famous Glasgow Assembly of 1638. It is no wonder, therefore, to read:—”Nor was I ever called to be a Covenanter. I could not have signed either the National Covenant of 1637 or the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643″ (p. 26). In a sermon preached at Aberdeen on the bi-centenary of the Revolution of 1688, he described the Solemn League as a “dreadful compact” (p. 27). While he justifies himself for remaining in the Church of Scotland and promising “to concur with the Presbyterian government thereof, and never to endeavour the prejudice or subversion of the same,” yet he adds—”I am profoundly convinced that without an acceptance of the Historical Episcopate that visible unity for which our Divine Master prays can never be achieved.” How the two things can be reconciled is to us a mystery. Dr Cooper did not believe in a merely local union, as he called the projected union of the Established and United Free Churches, he had his eye on the Church of England. “If we have agreed to go so far for a merely partial and local union, how much more should we be ready to ask [from Parliament] the same sanction for a change which would benefit, instead of hurting, ourselves; enable us to go hand-in-hand in the first place with our brethren of England in the work of the Lord Jesus” (p. 30). His biographer says at one time he dreaded a merely Presbyterian Union (p. 298), but he changed from this and became a strong advocate for union of the Established and United Free Churches. His view on the matter at an earlier period is quoted in one of our notes under “Notes and Comments.” Prof. William Fulton, Aberdeen, offers the following explanation of the change:—”Why did Dr Cooper appear reluctant at first to support the cause of Presbyterian reunion in Scotland? For two reasons. One was, lest by a reunion which should not include the Episcopal Church, not to say the Free Church, the realisation of the principal of nationalism should be unduly postponed, or even frustrated; and the other reason was, lest in the new United Church of Scotland the differences between Scottish and Catholic Christianity should be accentuated in the course of years. But he was apparently reassured on both grounds by the terms of the final draft of the ‘Articles Declaratory of the Constitution of the Church of Scotland,’ in which the subject of the national recognition of the Church appeared to receive unambiguous statement, and in which also there was included a doctrinal affirmation bearing ‘the very hallmarks of Catholic orthodoxy.’ “—(Aberdeen University Review, March 1923). In 1918, in a letter to a friend, he says:—”I have found all my life that the providences which most distressed me at the time were really helpful to the fulfilment of the ends which I most earnestly desired. Here, for example, our union with the U.F.’s, so far from hindering the progress of Catholic worship and doctrine and a reunion with the Anglicans, is positively opening new doors for effort in both these directions, and the desires I have tried all my life to fan into a flame among a few are kindling in quarters where I never expected to see them” (298). But one of the most illuminative statements in this connection is contained in a letter of 25th June 1919: “The union, I am clear,” he writes, “must go through. . . . It will give a free field for more Catholic usages, which are rapidly coming in among the U.F. clergy here: it will give us a number of excellent men; and it will remove the obstacles, as well as predispose us all to the wider union that can alone reunite high and low in Scotland, and give Christ a United Church for the marvellous Empire He has given to our race. That will be a body able to speak even to the Pope, and take a proper part in the union of all believers” (p. 306). If Dr Cooper’s dream had been realised in his own time it is evident from his biography that it is not among the Low Church party he would be in the Church of England, but among the Ritualists, who have a like pious dream of union. He says in a letter written during his Broughty-Ferry ministry—”I am by no means inclined to Romanise, but I am more and more opposed to popular Protestantism and the philosophic liberalism” (p. 107). About the same time he says “the Reformation age has always rather repelled me than attracted me.” This was written a short time after he had sent a letter to Dr Sprott, in which he expresses his deep concern whether he should remain in the Church of Scotland or not. If a man is known by the company he keeps, Dr Cooper’s visits to the Mirfield Community, and his statement that Dr Orchard’s views in many ways commend themselves plainly indicate where his sympathies lay.
But there were other objectionable matters in Dr Cooper’s teaching, such as his views of Christ’s “descent into hell” (a phrase which the Westminster Divines interpreted in the so-called Apostle’s Creed as “continued in the state of the dead and under the power of death till the third day”) and prayers for the blessed dead. In regard to the former, he says in a letter dated 11th June 1915:—”Among the many things that the war is teaching us is a deeper understanding of the Article in the Creed, ‘He descended into Hell’: it was St Peter, who, for so many years knew of the martyrdom in front of him, who gave us the Scripture sanction for this blessed assurance that Christ Himself found activities of mercy between His death and Resurrection” (p. 275). Dr Cooper evidently is referring to the passage in I. Peter iii. 19, but his statement is in direct opposition to the correct interpretation of Peter’s statement of Christ preaching to “the spirits in prison.” As early as 1894, when he was minister of the East Church of St Nicholas in Aberdeen, he published a sermon under the title “The Blessed Dead and Their Remembrance in Prayer by the Church on Earth,” which was ably reviewed by Dr Hay Fleming in the “British Weekly” (19th April 1894). Near his end he records that a minister called on him who held services on All Souls’ Day, and read the names of members of his flock who died during the year. “I suggested to him,” he says, “that after reading them he should read II. Tim. i. 16-18, showing that St Paul thought and prayed at the remembrance of loved ones gone.” This is pure imaginary interpretation. We have no proof that Onesiphorus was gone.
The state of the Church of Scotland revealed by this book is discouraging. Dr Cooper, it is true, got into trouble with his Presbytery over some of his ritualistic teaching, but his own testimony is that the views he advocated were spreading not only in the Established, but in the U.F. Church, and he ought to know. That such views would be permitted in the Church of Scotland only shows the laxity prevailing, and if this movement grew in spite of a stricter subscription than now prevails, what will happen now that wider liberty has been given by Parliament. The Scottish Church Society is working along the lines of the larger union so dear to Dr Cooper’s heart, and its influence is growing year by year. Dr Cooper was not a man who would keep his cherished ideas to himself; he certainly had courage, some would say that the right word was daring, and alike in the Assembly or the class-room he shunned not to declare his views of men and movements that so vitally affected the history of Scotland. His sympathies were with the men who brought sorrow and tears to Scotland during the reigns of Charles I., Charles II., and James VII., and one can never tell how many students were influenced by him in the wrong direction. His biographer, Dr Wother-spoon, in summing up his work, says:—”He believed that any real reconstruction of the National Church must include that element of it which was deliberately excluded and driven into separation by the Settlement of 1693-4″ (p. 338). Such a viewpoint can only be compared to Archbishop Sharpe’s when he betrayed the Church of Scotland after the Restoration, but who nevertheless had the effrontery to say—”I have done more for the Presbyterian Government in Scotland than any minister who can accuse me.”