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ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY,

" Presbytery Examined": an Essay, Critical and Historical, on the Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, since the Reformation. By the Duke of Argyll slfoxon. TRAVELS.

Travels in Ceylon and Continental India; Including Nepal and other parts of the Himalayas, to the Borders of Thibet, with some Notices of the Overland Route. With Appendices, By Dr. W. Hoffmeister, Travelling Physician to his Royal Highness Prince Waldemar of Prussia. Translated from the German.

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THE DUKE OF ARGYLL'S ESSAY ON THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF SCOTLAND

Is a defence of Scottish Presbyterianism, in the form of a critical disqui- sition, very ably carried out both in a religious and a controversial point of view. As stories are told of clients who did not know how shamefully they had been used until they heard their wrongs exhibited by the elo- quence of their advocate, so, we suspect, there are liberal views in the Duke of Argyll's historical survey which to stanch Presbyterians will be quite as new. This apology distinctly renounces all claim for Scotch Presbyterianism to be peculiarly considered as the true form of Christ's Church ; it does not even quarrel with " the rose in the hat," or repu- diate Episcopacy as a form of government ; it considers that it was social and political circumstances that induced the rejection of Bishops from the Kirk of Scotland ; and it explains away, or frankly though mildly censures, that stern fanatic dogmatism, not to call it overweening self-opinion, which compelled Milton to declare that " Presbytery is but old Priest writ large," and which has reminded calm observers of the intolerance of Popery without its grandeur or its graces. But there is something more in the Essay than what many Presbyterians may consider a needless apology. Penetrating through the husk to the kernel, the Duke of Argyll not only sees truth and appropriateness to national circumstances in Anglican Episcopacy, but admits and appre- ciates the deep devotional spirit that may exist in the Romish Church. He even goes further, and suggests some approximation to the devotional helps by which the great Episcopal Churches appeal to the feelings and taste of mankind. A liturgical form of prayer, the observance of saints' days, and some sober assistance from the arts, are, if we rightly under- stand him, matters that would improve the Church of Scotland ; as would the disuse of a formal fanaticism in terms no longer applicable (if they ever were) to the circumstances of the times, and which impart a " pro- vincial " tone to the Scottish service. In short, the Essay on the Eccle- siastical History of Scotland is an exposition of what the author conceives to be the true distinctive principles of Presbyterianism, apart from the conduct or professions of its ministers and followers, done in a more liberal or rather a more philosophic spirit than is often exhibited by churchmen 'arguing on church questions. It also contains suggestions for improvements in the practice of the Church, made in the spirit of a man of the world, who attaches no value to forms that have outlived both use and fashion.

The fundamental position of the Duke of Argyll is this. Among all the Reformed Churches, the Presbyterian Church the most dis- tinctly rejected domination by Priesthood; embracing the whole body of worshipers in its idea of the Church, and basing the whole of its discipline upon this principle. In practice often' in words oftener, this fundamental principle might be lost sight of still it was ever influential even when unseen, and opposed a more powerful barrier to the most mischievous error of Rome than even the right of private judgment, which the Scottish Church held in common with all other Protestant Churches.

"The first great fundamental idea which we observe 'fifth° system of the Scotch Reformers, is to be found in their understanding of that much-abused term, the Church. It seems to have appeared to them as if it had been from heresy on this point that all other heresies had sprung: and of such paramount importance did they deem it that just views should be entertained in regard to this, that we find their explanations of it, not in the Book of Polity, but among the Con- fessions of their Faith. Under a series of heads= Of the Church'.' 'Of the notes by which the true Church is discerned from the false'; 'Of the authority of the Scriptures'. Of General Councils, their power and authority '—we fimi a number of affirmative and negative positions; the former stating what fate be believed, the latter what is not. The latter are, perhaps, the more important of the two. Affirmatively, two meanings are given to the Church; negatively, seve- ral meanings are condemned. First, there IS the Church in the largest sense— denoting that innumerable company out of all nations, and tribes, and ages, who, whether under the old dispensation or the new, have been chosen of God as his true worshipers in Christ, in spirit and in truth; to whom belong one Faith, one Lord, one Baptism—the Communion of Saints. Secondly, there is the Church, in the sense of the whole body of professing believers in the truth in each division of the earth—such as was the Church of Corinth, of Ephesus, or as that then es- tablished in Scotland. We have next, what we might expect from men who had before their eyes the incredible corruptions taught and practised by a priesthood who were in full possession of Apostolical succession '—the denial of all such positions as place the signs or notes of the true Church either in antiquity; title usurped, lineal descent, place appointed, or multitude of men approving. The true 'notes' are again affirmed to be, conformity with the revealed Word in doctrine, a right administration of the sacraments, and the enforcement of a godly moral discipline. If controversy should arise touching the interpretation of any passage in the Scriptures, no higher tribunal is allowed than the same

i Word n other parts. The Spirit of God, it is affirmed, cannot be contradictory to Himself: so that if the interpretation, determination, or sentence of any doctor, church, or council, be repugnant to the plain words of God, written in other parts of Scripture, it is most certain there is not the true understanding and meamng of' the Divine will—' though councils, realms, and nations, have approved or re- ceived the same.' •

"We have yet to state one other fundamental idea proceeded on by the Scotch Re- formers, which, though almost entirely lost sight of in practice, under the previous system, and hardly less so by many in the present day, seems to have been with them so elementary and essential, that we know not any one passage of the times in which it was ever formally expressed. Yet on this, we think, more than on any other, depend all the great peculiarities of their system, and of the ecclesi- astical history of Scotland, from that time to the present hour. We allude to the

total and entire absence of anything like a priestly elevation of the clergy; and especially to the full association of the laity with all their notions of the powers and duties of the Church. The minister was, indeed, regarded as an officer of the Christian community indispensable for the due and orderly performance of such

public acts as are of perpetual obligation in the services of religion, and for the Instruction and exhortation of the faithful; but as possessing no authority over his brethren in doctrine, unless supported by the written Word, nor in rule or dis- cipline except as the representative of the Church. And by this term was denoted, not the clergy, as is the corrupted sense, but the mass of the believing people.

• • "Indeed, the very root—the essential principle—on which the priestly idea of

the Christian ministry depends, was wholly wanting in their system. They re- cognized no invariable rite of institution—no law, therefore, of perpetual suc- cession, no principle which could constitute the clergy an order or a caste. The minister was merely the expression of an authority, which ultimately lay, not in him, but around him, and above him—in the body of the Church. Popular elec- tion was the authority on which his position rested; not on the mere naked au- thority of a plurality of votes given by an uninstructed people, but on the fact of his having received public and formal commission to exercise the office of the ministry, first from his own congregation, and then from the representative au- thorities of the whole Church. And the special forms under which this com- mission was conveyed were not suffered to include anything approaching to a ritual ceremony. The first Reformers rejected ordination. The miraculous out- pouring of the Holy Spirit, which had followed the imposition of Apostles' hands, they believed had ceased, and therefore they judged the form not necessary."

It was this popular element, this feeling of universal or national cha-

racter, when the high officers of state ought to have formed a part of the General Assembly, and when representatives of the people did, that ex- plains the dogmatic and assuming tone of the Scottish Kirk in its earlier struggles, afterwards continued from habit and imitation. In theory, the General Assembly always was, and in practice sometimes, an amalgamation of Church and" State. Hence its clerical members especially when acting as a body, fell into a style of speech and advanced which (abstract- ing tone and taste) had a reality in theory. The Kirk had the power in practice too, when the Scottish Government, in order to man- age the clergy and the people, was reduced to promise, to cajole, or to play the hypocrite, not having the means of resistance

at hand. No doubt, in the claims advanced by the ministers there was much of fanatical misconception, error, and wrong. But Presbytery has some right to allowance for the general character of the age, and still more for the peculiar circumstances of Scotland. At the outset the Church of the People had to contend with an avaricious and grasping nobility, bent upon seizing the property of the expelled Ro- manists. To attempt this by legislative means, was risking popular and clerical resistance; but they could manage it by form of law. Bishoprics were not abolished; the right to the profits of their estates was still vested in the occupants of the sees. Men therefore were appointed, under the Re- gencies of Lennox, Mar, and Morton, who would consent to hand over to their patrons the greater portion of their incomes and, of course, such men were always unscrupulous persons, and often of the worst character. This evil was increased under James the Sixth and his son, by their ty- rannical interferences with the religious freedom of the Assemblies, by the manner in which they endeavoured to force a half Papistical ritual upon Presbyterians, and by the offensive modes adopted in setting up their Pre- lates,—points about which the Regents did not trouble their heads. Hence, Episcopacy and forms of prayer were associated in the minds of Presbyterians with base instruments, violent means, and tyrannical rulers; creating a tone of hatred against the institutions which is not essential to Presbytery, and was not prominent in its drat founders. The same circumstances explain, and go far to excuse, the fierce and violent lan- guage and conduct of the early Presbyterians, contending for upwards of a century (1560-1688) against civil and religious oppression; the men they were called upon to take as their pastors and spiritual over- lookers being always tools of tyranny, and frequently men of impure lives, as well as delators of their flocks.

The facts on which these conclusions are founded are exhibited with

sufficient fulness from the foundation of the Presbyterian Church under Knox, until the &volution gave it peace and freedom. The commentary upon the facts is distinguished by acumen and fairness ; and the illustra- tions, drawn from the religious history of other countries, are apt and comprehensive. The Duke of Argyll's Puny on the Ecclesiastical History of Scotland throws a good deal of light on the theory of Presbyterianism explains points that seem obscure or contradictory to a person only generally read in the history of the time, places the merits of that form of Christianity in the brightest light, and offers the best apology we have met with for its numerous faults. We have already intimated a doubt as to whether that apology will be altogether palatable to those of the straitest sect.

The Essay was originally intended as a contribution to one of the perio- dical reviews; the book ostensibly reviewed being a reprint by the Spot- tiswoode Society—a Scottish Episcopalian club for the publication of works that favour their own opinions. "The great difficulty of dealing fairly with the subject in so confined a space" led the Duke to adopt a different mode of publication ; though, "for convenience," he has retained the form in which it was originally cast. Thus the Essay basin some parts an air of individual controversy, as if the matter in hand were less the history and character of Presbyterianism, than the refutation, rebuke, or quiet expo- sure of a party, which, after using various evasions of the word "church," has hit upon the periphrasis of "that form of schism which is esta- blished in Scotland.' This constant presence of an opponent has pro- bably caused the addition of a second part, after the historical survey was concluded. The controversy in the second part is more direct, and deeper ; going in fact to the root of the question between Rome and the Reformation. The Spottiswoode reprint thus serves as a peg on which to raise the question of the Apostolical Succession, and the other claims of the High Churchmen, as opposed to the individual Christian rights upheld by the purer Protestants. In this, as in the first part, the origi- nal design is occasionally visible in the style, which partakes of the "article," with a recurrence of the form of "we-we." These blemishes, however, are local and slight. The second, like the first part, is a very able and interesting disquisition. The Duke of Argyll goes at once to the root of the argument ; paying little attention to mere dogmas, or even to doctrines or corruptions, compared with the source from which they flow —the superstitious notions of a church, and the superstitious idea of the supernal character of the priesthood. The following is from a long and able argument in covert contempt of the importance attached by some ecclesiastical antiquarians to the national origin of churches,—a question to which so much learning and labour has been devoted ; as if unity were in itself a mischief, or some geographical boundary a merit. " It is impossible not to see, that wherever a mere question as to the geogra- phical extent of a particular priest's authority enters principally, or even in any degree, into men's idea of the Reformation, the whole system of Protestant opinion is based on sand. We have said that the denial of the Bishop of Rome's spiritual sovereignty was a bit of truth: bat the fact is, that in itself it can hardly be said even to amount to this. The mere fact of a universal bishopric expressed no lie; and therefore the denial of it expressed no truth, except when viewed in con- nexion with certain principles which lay behind it. In as far as the power of the Italian priest claimed to rest on Divine authority, and thereby involved the prin- ciple of constructive interpretations of God's will through the medium of tradi- tion, in so far those claims did express a lie, and the denial of them did express a truth. If churchmen' regarded it in this point of view, we should have no ob- jection to their condemning a principle which certainly was one of those against which the Reformation entered its protest- But when it appears that the only principle which makes the denial of the Romish claims valuable is directly in- volved in other claims which those churchmen' themselves advance, it becomes evident that their idea of the revolt from Rome forms no part whatever of the truth or the value of the Reformation.

" Except as involving the vicious principle above referred to, the spiritual ju- risdiction of a central government over the visible Church was in itself no evil thing. If there is one glorious characteristic of the Christianity of the middle age, it was in that feature of wide conformity which symbolized the unity of the spiritual church. And this feature of conformity stood in immediate connexion with the centralization of ecclesiastical authority. It was a glorious thing to go from one end of Western Europe to another, from the harbour of Valetta to the Fiords of Norway, from the Danube to the clustered Hebrides, and find throughout every country which lay between, one priesthood, one creed, one ritual. It was a good thing to have even that faint shadow in the world of one Lord, one faith, one baptism " No mere question as to the original size of the Roman diocese could for a mo- ment have justified any member of this vast brotherhood in breaking its con- formity. As furnishing an excuse for such a course, it was of no importance whatever whether that diocese originally comprehended the world, or only Ea- rope, or only Italy, or only Rome, or only the gardens of the Vatican. Nothing short of a belief that the existing conformity was a conformity in error—nothing short of an independent conviction that what was so uniformly believed was false and wrong—could have justified any man or any country, in disturbing the re- pose of the visible Church. The size of the diocese of Rome is wholly beside the question. There is no religious truth expressed in the lines of geography, in the boundaries of nations, or in the walls of towns. June Divino, of course, there was as little authority for one priest extending his authority beyond the walls of Rome as for another stretching it beyond the streets of Canterbury. But the re- verence, the affection, the opinions, and the habits of a large part of the Christian Church, had gradually consecrated for both those priests a power and a position for which these were the only and the sufficient title; sufficient, we mean, not against those higher rights of the Christian people, for which and from which alone those priests held their respective places, not Against the right of any jot or tittle of Christian truth to make itself heard in the family or in the Church, but against any frivolous or schismatic disturbance of existing order. "It would be a tiresome and useless task to specify the numerous forms in which such childish views of the Reformation abound in the writings of the Scottish Prelatic school."

A similar freedom of spirit, not to say largeness of catholicity, is visible in the Duke of Argyll's judgment on a widely different subject— that Independency which stopped Presbyterian ambition at the sword's point, and then—remarkable illustration of religions tolerance—per- mitted the vanquished that freedom of opinion which the conquerors claimed for themselves.

"The fanaticism of the Puritans had arisen under a very different impulse. They did not cluster round any definite system, which they loved as embodying their principles, and on the integrity of which the safety of those principles de- pended. Theirs was the enthusiasm not of defence, but of attack; and to this attack they approached from all sides of the citadel of priesthood. Some chose one, some another, as the point of their assault: they acted, indeed, under a com- mon sense of danger, but with no definite community of purpose after that danger should be overcome. The impulse under which their minds had shot off from the continually narrowing circle of Anglican divinity did not stop them at any given line: it did not land them on any other system as definite, and which, therefore, would have been as likely to tempt to spiritual despotism: on the contrary, it propelled them to various and unequal distances into the trackless regions of dis- sent. Thus, when that work of overthrow was done in the success of which they were all alike concerned, the Puritans were no longer a united party. Some had been persuaded to pin their faith to the Presbyterian system, and believed that in the establishment of that their ultimate object would be gained; many, however when they approached the point at which this object was within their reach, found they had misinterpreted their own desires. These had been deeper in their origin, truer in their end, than to be satisfied with such result. Thus the more powerful section, fearing the dictation of Presbytery as much as that of priests, refused to submit to its authority, maintained their right to freedom of opinion, and announced to the world, sword in hand, the golden principle of the independ- ence of private conscience. "This great truth, of which Puritanism was the chosen herald, and the means by which it was strengthened to maintain it, are well represented in the_position and in the words of him who was the most remarkoble man in Puritan England, when, after the siege of Bristol, and standing on the ramparts he had stormed, Cromwell wrote these quiet but determined words, 'For, brethren, hi things of the mind, we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason.' "In this announcement was fulfilled one great, perhaps the greatest, purpose which the excesses of Puritanism were overruled to serve. Irregularity, variety of opinion, was essential to the conception of a principle which, strange to say, was yet almost new in Christendom. '1 bus the very waywardness and im_petuosity of Puritanism was that which sped it on its mission in the world. It was to champion the rights of individual conscience—the ultimate right to independence of each single mind. It was to defend this principle against the pretensions of priests like Land, and of assemblies like those of Presbytery."

As Presbyterianism in Scotland exists under a variety of names, it may be proper to observe that the Duke of Argyll belongs to the Established Church, but with a strong leaning to the religious right of that late section of it which separated from the Establishment under the title of the Free Church ; although he considers the separation as having been unnecessary at the time.