One hundred years ago this month the Declaratory Act was passed in the Assembly of the Disruption Free Church. Fifty years had not fully elapsed from the time when the Free Church had come forth from a vitiated Establishment to maintain a witness for the crown rights of the Divine Redeemer, until this infamous Declaratory Act destroyed the foundation on which that Church had been laid. Much had taken place between 1843 and 1892 which clearly revealed that the Disruption Free Church was on a backsliding course. A latitudinarian spirit had entered that noble Church. Evils in doctrine and practice were tolerated which foretold greater evils to come. The attraction of wider Church unity took possession of men’s minds to such an extent that they were ready to sacrifice Scriptural principles to achieve their end. The result for Scotland was disastrous. The present ills from which the nation suffers can be directly traced to the failure of the Free Church in the last century to hold fast to the whole counsel of God. The true gospel of Jesus Christ soon ceased to be proclaimed from the pulpits of the land and another gospel took its place. This led inevitably to the forsaking of the house of God by the people of the land. Consequently the vast majority in Scotland are unchurched and the children of today are growing up as ignorant of the gospel of Jesus Christ as the proverbial Hottentots. As with Israel of old, the nation has forsaken the Fountain of living waters, and is hewing out for itself broken cisterns which can hold no water.
The Declaratory Act played no mean part in bringing about this result. The Act constituted an insidious attack on the doctrines of the Confession of Faith and on the Bible on which these doctrines were based. An exposure of the subtle way in which the Declaratory Act undermined so many of the doctrines of the Confession of Faith is given in the early issues of the Free Presbyterian Magazine. Its passing by an overwhelming majority indicated the lamentable state into which the Disruption Free Church had fallen. The doctrine of the inspiration, infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures had been undermined by an unbelieving and rationalistic higher criticism, so that the Free Church was left without chart or rudder.
Men who had fallen out of sympathy with many of the doctrines of God’s Word — if they had ever been truly in sympathy with them — now pleaded, under the guise of liberty of conscience, for a relaxation of the Scriptural standards to which the Church had been sworn. The Declaratory Act proved a most suitable vehicle for relieving their supposed conscientious scruples, not by declaring that the standards were false but by falsely declaring that they meant something other than they were ever intended to mean. If this removed the scruples of conscience of these men, it did not, and never could, relieve them of the guilt under which they lay as violators of Scripture teaching and of the vows which they had voluntarily come under at their ordination. Such men have long since gone to their account to answer for their perfidiousness.
The Constitutional Party entered a dissent and protest when the infamous Act was passed, and an appeal was made to the Assembly of 1893 to repeal the Act. However, when in 1893 the Assembly refused that appeal only one man, Rev. Donald MacFarlane, Raasay, tabled his Protest and left that Church, which had parted from its moorings, to form a Church which would raise again the standard which had fallen and maintain a testimony for the Word of God in its entirety.