By REV. J. P. MACQUEEN.
In the opening editorial article of the June, 1957, issue of the Free Church Monthly Record, there appeared the following statement, though not for the first time: “Seldom, perhaps, were all so conscious that we belonged to the Mother Church, and that though a wide and deepening gulf separated us, we were vitally interested in the future of the Church of Scotland, the mother of us all.” There is a strange and significant resemblance between the foregoing statement and similar statements that appeared, with increasing frequency and emphasis over a period of years, from the pens of ministers and laymen of the late Original Secession Church in their denominational magazine, till finally it took the disastrous plunge into the maelstrom of Modernistic Apostacy, ending up in the bosom of the wrongly-designated Church of Scotland—one of the most disgraceful betrayals of professed evangelical religion in the ecclesiastical history of our native land.
One would like to know very much in what sense the present modernist so-called Church of Scotland is the mother, of a professedly orthodox evangelical church. If this is meant historically, relative to descent, then the papal system has a better and more consistent claim to the title. For instance, certain ardent supporters and prominent leaders of the Scottish Nationalist Movement declare, unequivocally and unmistakably, that if their campaign for an independent Scottish Republic proves finally successful “the auld Kirk” (the papal system) must be re-established as the National Church of Scotland. If, therefore, national ecclesiastical history is all that really matters, and not infallible Scriptural truth, than the claim of the Scottish Nationalists for the Romanist Church (“the auld Kirk”), as “the mother of us all” is a more consistent one than that of the editorial writer of the Free Church Monthly Record. As regards returning to that “auld Kirk,” one has only to read the twopenny booklet entitled The Church from which the Reformation Delivered Scotland, by the godly and scholarly Scottish historian, Dr. D. Hay Fleming, to realise what iniquity and immorality our native land was under by the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of “the auld Kirk.”
He, or she, would be a strange type of professing Christian who would not be grieved for the denominational divisions in Scotland and elsewhere, but a nondescript ecclesiastical union, in the name of union, unity, and peace, without any regard to eternal truth, is surely the most blatant caricature of Christian Church union ever devised by the ingenuity of perverted human nature and satanic subtlety. That is exactly what is transpiring in our day in the ecclesiastical negotiations proceeding between the Episcopal Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Church of England is busily engaged forging new so-called revised canons, with the object of Romanising that Church, while the Church of Scotland is preparing for diocesan and prelatic bishoprics, against which the Scottish Covenants fought to the death. The World Council of Churches is organising on a world scale, with the same end in view, with the Pope of Rome meantime a detached but interested spectator. Behind the whole movement is, as the present writer sincerely believes, Satan, as an angel of light (II. Cor. xi. 13-15), seeking to forestall the Holy Spirit, when He shall appear in His glory to build again Zion. Satan first, through human instrumentality, divided the churches by the introduction of false faiths and soul-ruining errors and heresies in the name of Christianity, and now, through similar instrumentality, he is ardently employed, in the name of the union, unity, and peace (the union, unity, and peace, of the graveyard) in building up what he, and his human instruments, call “a re-united Christendom.” with the Pope of Rome, the anti-Christ, as its ecclesiastical head.
This is a severely testing time, and it will become increasingly so, but instead of the Free Church of Scotland giving an unequivocal and definite leading, we find vacillating hesitation, and non-committal indecision, when firm uncompromising Christian manliness is called for. Whether we will be given credit for it, or not, we have no feeling of bitterness or prejudice against the Free Church in thus writing, but rather that that Church would return from the error of its ways. We should all resolve like the Rev. Joseph Hart, when he vowed: “I determined to keep my pulpit as chaste as my bed.” The Free Church, therefore, should cease its indiscriminate exchange of pulpits, its trained choir practices, its public congregational singing of uninspired hymns and paraphrases, as all such practices constitute a violation of ordination vows, while the vague indefinite preaching “that would not offend an Arminian, while it would not please a Calvinist” must be repented of, if grieving the Holy Spirit is to be avoided. Instead of thus “moving with the times,” there must be a genuine penitent returning to Apostolic, Reformed, Scriptural teaching, doctrine, discipline, government, and worship, in Scotland and elsewhere, before we can expect the blessing of Heaven. May the time be hastened when the Holy Spirit shall be poured out on a world-wide scale, and when thus “the nations of the world shall become the nations of our Lord and His Christ.”