by Rev. Donald MacLean, Glasgow
(Continued from page 175)
The desire for Church Union did not at first meet with much enthusiasm from other churches although, in 1852, a section of the Original Secession Church did join the Free Church. A platform, however, was provided outside the churches to promote the spirit of union and co-operation. A conference was called to meet in Liverpool on 1st October, 1845, which led to the organisation in the summer of 1846 of the Evangelical Alliance in which ministers of all churches joined. Free Church ministers took a prominent part in this Alliance and none were more enthusiastic than Dr Chalmers, although he did not live to take much active part in it. It was stressed that all the Free Church ministers in the Alliance were to maintain the Church’s testimony uncompromisingly, and that the Alliance was an alliance of individuals only and not of Churches.
There were a few in the Free Church who were not very happy about this movement, and the position of Free Church ministers in the Alliance was discussed in the Assembly in 1846. Dr Candlish, as would be expected, supported the actions of the ministers and was seconded in this by Dr Begg. Dr Cunningham and others lent their support to Dr Candlish. Dr Gibson opposed the Evangelical Alliance and Free Church ministers taking part in it. He mentioned that the Church is the scriptural instrument for promoting unity, and not individuals. The Evangelical Alliance had representatives of 20 denominations, some of them who held dangerous errors. Union, maintained Dr Gibson, must be founded on the Word of God through which the Holy Spirit sanctifies the people of God. Rev. H. MacGillivray seconded Dr Gibson in an able speech, in which he stressed the importance of ordination vows. The tide towards co-operation with other Churches was too strong, however, and Dr Gibson’s motion was overwhelmingly defeated, the voting being 311 to 7.
The foregoing events have been briefly sketched to show how the Free Church was being led along a certain path. There can be little doubt but that the “fellowship” of ministers of different denominations in the Evangelical Alliance gradually led to a spirit of compromise. The desire to be considered broadminded and charitable easily led to the stage of not seeing the errors held by “Christian brethren” in the light of Divine Truth, and a consequent minimising of these divergencies from the Word of God. The men who had now become the acknowledged leaders of the Free Church were Dr Buchanan and Dr Candlish. Both these men were ministers at the time of the Disruption and Dr Buchanan had written a standard work called The Ten Years’ Conflict. Dr Candlish was the real leader of the Free Church Assembly. He lacked the impressive presence of Dr Chalmers and the theological acumen of Dr Cunningham, but he had a real flair for leadership. His mind was both acute and astute and he had the boldness which makes it easy for men of more pedestrian qualities to follow his lead. There was no reason outwardly either to doubt his whole-hearted attachment to the Free Church testimony. As late as 1855, he delivered a speech in Glasgow in which he expressed the following sentiments: “The date of the existence of the present Established Church of Scotland is 1843. The date of our existence is 1560 . . . I am prepared to maintain that these views are entirely consistent with the purest and widest exercise of Christian charity; but be that as it may, they are views which in consistence the Free Church must hold, maintain and avow in the face of all the world. They may be branded as fanatical, called sectarian, abused as uncharitable. I cannot help that; it is the truth as I hold it and as the Free Church holds it . . . But important as our position is, especially as viewed historically and in a national or Scottish point of view, the principles which our Church is called upon to maintain, and for which she is called to testify, are tenfold more important still. . . . And if we shall ever be tempted, in the exercise of any spurious charity, or to gain any temporary end, to do anything that implies the relinquishment of that principle, we shall be false to ourselves, stultifying all that we said and did in Disruption times — false to the great and sainted men who led us on at the Disruption and are now passed into glory . . . We shall be false not only to them, but false to our Great Head.” It may be remarked in passing that the position outlined by Dr Candlish here in respect to the Free Church, is the same position as taken by the Free Presbyterian Church and, consequently, the latter body is in danger of suffering the same abuse.
Despite these fine sentiments, Dr Candlish, in the next decade, was to spearhead a movement for unity with the United Presbyterian Church, which involved an abandonment of certain Free Church principles. The U.P.s were voluntaries and did not hold to the principle that the Civil Ruler was to support the Cause of Christ. To them, all religions were equal before the law and Christianity should not be favoured more than other religions. This view is shot through with infidelistic ideas and is a denial of Christ’s Headship over the Nations. It is consequently abhorrent to the Church of Christ. The sad state of religious education in our schools today is an outworking of this spirit, while the success of an atheistical woman in preventing the Lord’s prayer being said in schools in the U.S.A. shows what happens when the same error is written into that Nation’s Constitution. The U.P. Church also held what is called the Double Reference Theory of the atonement. This teaches that Christ died for all men but that the benefits of the atonement are only applied to the elect. This is a half-way house to Arminianism and expresses one aspect of the very fear mentioned by Dr Duncan, as referred to earlier in this article. The U.P. Church also allowed hymns of human composition as well as the use of instrumental music in some, at least, of its congregations.
It seems almost incredible that two “Disruption worthies” would take part in seeking union with such a body and would be prepared to compromise on such serious matters. The tremendous change in the views of Dr Candlish is one of the saddest aspects of the whole affair. As he was the leading man in the Free Church Assembly, the effect on the Church was catastrophic. Those who were most keenly aware of this change were his own contemporaries and one of them, writing in the Watchword in November 1867, says: “There is something deeply painful and humiliating in the present, as contrasted with the former, position of Dr Candlish. His change of mind is so great, sweeping and, we may say, unprecedented that one is almost forced to think that he is determined to make the second part of his life a complete answer to the first.” Even on the question of hymns in public worship, Dr Candlish wrote to Dr Buchanan to the following effect: “I very much agree with you as to the psalmody movement. It must not be allowed to bulk too much. I want some hymns; but not so much as to distract the Church.” He later said, “I thoroughly out and out deny that the Book of Psalms is a directory for praise, more than it is a directory for prayer. There is as much prayer as praise in the Psalms. I can see no room whatever for saying that the Book of Psalms is a psalmodical book . . . And I cannot understand how we should be more hampered and fettered as regards the use of our words in the one part of Divine worship than the other.” Here was this Disruption father belying one of the principles of the purity of worship for which he professed to stand in 1843.
This movement for union with the U.P. Church was powerfully resisted by men such as Dr Begg, Dr Nixon, Dr Gibson and Dr Kennedy, with the result that it became obvious that it would need to be abandoned for the present. In 1873, the attempt was given up. In October of that year, Dr Buchanan gives an account of a visit he paid to his old friend and colleague, Dr Candlish, who was now drawing near the end of life’s journey. The dying man spoke of his approaching end “which he did with the most perfect calmness, but with deep and solemn feelings. He would fain have had a more vivid and realising sense of eternal things — of sin and salvation — and of the great coming change; but he was resting on the Word, which was sure and unfailing — resting wholly on Christ and on His finished work.” When Dr Candlish alluded to Church affairs, he made it quite plain that, although their work was done, he had great hopes that it would be carried on by another. There was no question as to whom this new leader was to be, as far as Dr Candlish was concerned: “In connection with that future, Dr Rainy seemed to come up before his mind, and of him he proceeded to speak with the warmest affection and highest esteem. His voice trembled with emotion as he gave utterance to the feelings of love and admiration with which he regarded him; and he fervently blessed God that He had given such a man at such a time to the Church.”
Dr Buchanan’s biographer was Rev. N. L. Walker. In this book, he refers to various explanations for the failure of the union negotiations. The first one he gives throws a flood of light upon the whole matter and is really the key to the decline of the Free Church. Walker says that from the beginning there were really two parties in the Free Church. One, which he favours, and to which both Candlish and Buchanan belonged, he designated “generously evangelical.” He sums up Dr Buchanan’s ecclesiastical position as “a Modern Evangelical Churchman — a Churchman to the core but an evangelical — an evangelical of the most pronounced cast, but one whose mind was open to the best influences of his age.” The other party he calls “the ecclesiastico-traditional.” These were the ones who held to the Church position and were just as evangelical, in the proper sense of the term, as their opponents — a fact which Walker does not deny. They certainly were not so open to the influences of the age, just because they were open to the influence of the Word of God above all things. Drs Gibson, Begg, Kennedy and others belonged to this party and they were successful in resisting, in their day, the proposed union with the U.P. Church. “One can feel no surprise,” says Walker, “that against a drift so distinctly liberal (as the Union movement) the instincts of a hard conservatism rebelled.”
Dr Rainy, as Dr Candlish wished, did in fact become the leader of the Liberal Evangelicals and with the death of solid, serious men like Gibson, Begg and others, this party became increasingly strong. Like Rainy, himself, they were keen on making matters “an open question” or “a subject not confessionally settled.” It was under the cloke of the Liberal Evangelicals that Higher Criticism came into the Free Church and was not dealt with by disciplinary action of a decisive kind, which would cut out the cancer. Note how Robertson Smith calls himself evangelical at the very time he is advocating infidelistic views. To meet with the scruples of these Liberal Evangelicals, who could not abide either the doctrine of the inspiration and consequent infallibility of the Scripture or the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Declaratory Act was prepared and passed by the Free Church Assembly in 1892 as a binding law in that Church. The Free Church was now in ruins and bore no resemblance to the Church of the Disruption in its testimony. The way was now opened up for union with the U.P. Church which, in fact, took place in 1900. The blame for this disaster must be laid four-square at the door of the Liberal Evangelical party, formerly led by Drs. Candlish and Buchanan and latterly by Dr Rainy, Dr Gibson and his few supporters had been heavily defeated in 1846, but 1892 proved that they had the proper view of the only safe and salutary course for the Free Church to follow.
The Church party, which took up the cudgels against the Declaratory Act movement, was called the Constitutional Party because they stood for the constitution of the Church. They were the heirs to the party of Drs. Gibson, Begg and Kennedy. At first, they fought well, and many able and illuminating speeches were made, demonstrating the dangerous course upon which the Free Church had embarked and the serious nature of the unscriptural errors of the Act. When it became clear that Dr Rainy and his party did not intend to give in as Dr Candlish had done nearly 20 years before, the leaders of the Constitutionalists, like Candlish and Buchanan of old, suddenly turned their back upon their former speeches. The Rev. M. MacAskill did not pronounce his funeral oration when the Declaratory Act became part of the Free Church constitution, in virtue of which the Church ceased to be what she was previously. In the 1893 Assembly, there was only one minister prepared to act according to his convictions. Rev. Donald MacFarlane protested and thereby left the Declaratory Act Free Church and conserved for himself and for all who followed him in his own generation and in generations to come, the testimony of the Church of the Reformation, unimpaired. In 1843, there had been the Church of Scotland Established and the Church of Scotland Free, with the testimony of the Church of the Reformation in the Free Church of Scotland. So, 50 years later, in 1893 there was the Declaratory Act Free Church and the Church of Scotland Free and Presbyterian, and the same noble testimony retained in the latter body. No amount of tinkering about with legal technicalities or any number of specious excuses can obscure this obvious and indisputable fact.
The record of the decline of the Disruption Free Church shows the wisdom of the fathers of the Free Presbyterian Church in setting their faces against union with any Church which does not clearly in her profession and practice hold the absolute infallibility of the Scriptures of the Old and the New Testaments and the whole doctrine of the Confession of Faith. In this ecumenical age, it is absolutely necessary that we hold this principle clearly and do not let our minds be dimmed by any outward attraction of Church Union. Only by holding a high view of the value both of the Word and of the Church of God can we escape this snare. This was one of the outstanding features of the Rev. Neil Cameron, of whom the Synod tribute to his memory says, “. . . in 1893 and onwards he whole-heartedly accepted the testimony raised at that time by the Free Presbyterian Church. Whoever would waver, our departed brother remained true through all the years to that testimony, maintaining it with a fidelity that arose from a deep conviction in his mind that it was a noble testimony to God’s truth. Nothing grieved or pained him more than to see some of his brethren, whom he loved, turning their backs on what was so dear to him. While his public utterances in denouncing their backslidings may have appeared to outsiders as those of a man who had no feelings, we, who knew him more intimately, knew what grief these defections caused him.”
Like Drs. Begg and Kennedy, Mr Cameron had a wonderfully enlightened grasp of the importance of the witness of the Church. The late Rev. F. MacLeod related to the present writer an experience through which Mr Cameron had passed and which he told to Mr MacLeod. During the time he was under conviction of sin, Mr Cameron passed through great darkness and grief of mind. But he said that the darkness and grief he felt between the Free Church Assembly of 1892 and that of 1893 exceeded all he had felt before. The reason for this was that during the year after the Declaratory Act had been passed until Rev. D. MacFarlane made his protest, there was no full and consistent witness for Christ in Scotland. We wonder how many there are alive today who know anything approaching such an experience or can even understand it. Some would look upon this as “denominationalism”, but we pity from the bottom of our hearts the sad victims of such anaemic piety. It was through soul experience that Mr Cameron came to love Christ, and it was through soul experience that he got the love to the Church of Christ which made him such a faithful witness.
It is now nearly 84 years since the Free Presbyterian Church took its separate stand on the side of Christ and His Cause in Scotland. In Rhodesia, Holland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, as well as in this land, there are those who rejoice that such a testimony still exists in a day of apostacy and spiritual darkness. The Church has met with many trials and buffetings, both from within and without, and we can be assured that, if we remain faithful to Christ, these will not get less. But let us not lose sight of His promise, “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.” (John. 16:33).
To render evil for evil is brutish; to render evil for good is devilish; to render good for evil is Christian.
Thos. Watson.