THE SCOTTISH FREE CHURCH AFTER FIFTY YEARS.* THESE volumes, which,
although written from different stand- points, are complementary to each other, come as very useful supplements to the recent official celebrations of the Jubilee of the Free Church of Scotland. Mr. Peter Bayne deals mainly with the personal incidents of that great historical event which, rightly no doubt, Mr. Gladstone prefers to describe as the Disruption rather than as the Secession. The work prepared by Mr. Ryley and Mr. MoCandlish is, on the other hand, of interest chiefly because of the prominence they give to the pre-Disruption history, and the post-Disruption progress and present-day finance of their Church, It is at
once the weakness and the strength of Mr. Bayne's volume that he can write of the events in which he has taken so deep
an interest in what, looking to it' fashion of the day, may be termed the " Reminiscences " spirit. To him Chalmers and Candlish, Guthrie and Hugti Miller, are not names or memories, but living personages. They are something more ; they are positively objects of worship. The weakness of Mr. Bayne's book is undoubtedly its want of proportion where the men who figured in the Disruption are concerned. Here is a personal sketch, which shows Mr. Bayne at his worst, and yet also at his best :- " A very short man, but with a frame suggestive of groat strength, arms long as Rob Roy's, hair shaggy and unkempt, the facial expression sad and lowering, the features almost ugly, the mouth large, with sensitive lips, something in them of the sensi- tive child or the pouting woman. The whole face redeemed into nobleness by the towering forehead and the dominant expression of elevation and intellectuality. Not a good-looking man by any means, but as if bathed in a light of spiritual beauty. He is in the very prime of physical and mental strength,—thirty-three years of age ; having taken long to ripen, more ambitious to excel than to shine ; an observer, a thinker, a student, a super- lative preacher, he now comes to the front because his Church and • 1,) Ths Froo Church of Scotland : her Origin, Founders, and MiliMOTZ7). By Peter Bayne, LL.D. ittlinburgh t T. and T. Clark. 1893.—(9,) Scotland's Free Church; a Historical Retrospect and Momarial of the Disruption. By George Buchanan Riley. With a Summary of Free Church Progress and Finance, 1843-1693, by John ht. Modandlish, F.R.B.B., late Presideut of the Faculty of Actuaries, London; Archibald Constable and Co, 1893,
his country call him, and because the few who have the secret of his Herculean powers toll him that his hour has come. This is Robert Smith Candlish, the Newman of the Scottish Church movement ; the man who more expressly than any other took the torch from the hand of Chalmers when the old leader fell ; the most sincerely loved, the most intensely hated, the most con- spicuous, and the most representative of the founders of the Free Church."
One can conceive Mr. Bayne, as a champion of the Free Church, being full of enthusiasm for its founders, and believing of Chalmers and his colleagues during their lifetime, at all events, that there never had been, or could be, such men. But after the lapse of fifty years, is there not a note of provinciality in this naming of Newman and Candlish to- gether P And is there not something worse than pro- vinciality in the following, which occurs in the descrip- tion given of the debate in the House of Commons on the Scottish Church :—" Fox Maule, afterwards Earl of Dalhousie, a nobly patriotic, devout, and capable man, beautiful in person and character, .intrepidly loyal to his native land and his ancestral Church, deserved the immor- tality of fame, which his speech and his conduct of the debate secured him.." A writer of Mr. Bayne's experience and taste ought surely to have seen that to talk seriously of " beautiful in person and character," is but playing into the hands -of the Philistines. On the other hand, it is only fair to say that as a narrative of the events which led up to, constituted, and succeeded the Disruption, Mr. Bayne's volume surpasses in merely personal interest all the various other historical works which have been evoked by the celebration of the Free Church Jubilee. As a gallery of "Disruption worthies," too, as these appeared to their ad- miring contemporaries, it is well worth something more than a mere look round. To Mr. Bayne, as indeed to most Scotch- men, Chalmers was not so much a flesh-and-blood reality as a great force, an embodiment of certain ecclesiastical, scientific, and economical ideas. But in his pages the secondary, but only secondary, Free Church heroes such as Candlish and Cunningham, Guthrie and Begg, undoubtedly live again. Nor has Mr. Bayne omitted to do justice to the missionaries and scholars who have done so much to add to the usefulness and consolidate the reputation of the Free Church, It is amusing to read of the eminent Neo-Hebraist who became known, and not in Scotland alone, as " Rabbi Duncan," that " in his wild days, teste one of his college friends, he fell, like Burns and many another gifted Scot, into intemperance ; but in his most eccen- tric moments, the fire of public spirit never died within him ; and one night, when his boon companions were bearing him homewards on a shutter, and there arose an alarm of fire, he shouted lustily from the elevation : " Water for the fire, citizens,—water for the fire " The volume entitled Scotland's Free Church is emphatically the book de twee of the Disruption, It is a triumph of paper, type, and illustrations. We have never seen a better portrait of Chalmers—Chalmers of the Ten Years' Conflict, that is to say, and somewhat embittered by it—than the etching given here, after a calotype taken in 1843. Nor could there be any- thing more truly representative of Scottish Presbyterianism at its best and homeliest than the photogravure of Mr. J. H. Lorimer's truly admirable picture of an ordination of elders in a Scottish Kirk. The historical portion of the work, written by Mr. George Buchanan Ryley, is, as we have already said, complementary to Mr. Bayne's. It gives clearly and succinctly not only a narrative of the events which imme- diately preceded and produced the Disruption, but a general history of Scottish Churches and ecclesiasticism from the very earliest times. In spite of occasional eccentricities in style, Mr. Ryley's narrative up, at all events, to the epoch which immediately preceded the foundation of the Free Church, is remarkably fair. Thus, it is not common to find a Presbyterian writer willing to describe the murder of Cardinal Beaton as "shameful," and allowing that "unless there were two Wisharts in the struggle of the time, there is reason to fear that George Wishart, the martyr, was privy to it." It is only when Mr. Ryley comes near the time of " that great act of conscientiousness and sacrifice in 1843, that made eminent Scotchmen proud of their country,' and added fresh nobility to the Christian world by the new impulseit gave to allegiance to Jesus Christ," that he indicates much in the way of bias. He is not, however, quite so severe upon the much-abused Moderates and their chilling worldliness as arc most Free Church apolo- gists. He is, however, like most writers of his school, inclined to be slightly unjust to men who, like Mr. Hope, Dean of Faculty, were keenly opposed to Chalmers and the Evangelical Party in the pre-Disruption Church. It appears almost impossible for admirers of the Free Church to believe that some at least of the Moderates who did not "come out" in 1843 were honest enthusiasts. Mr. Ryley's narrative is supplemented by a series of businesslike papers on " The Progress and Finance of the Free Church," by Mr. John McCandlish. Mr. McCandlish writes cordially and hopefully, as was to be expected, but with no offensive partisanship, even although he proclaims that "the Free Church of Scotland claimed from the first, and still claims, to be the Church of Scotland Free."
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