THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.—RETURNS OF COMMUNICANTS.
(TO THE EDITOR OF TEE SPECTATOR.")
SIR,-I observe in your interesting and otherwise fair article on "The Scottish Churches and their Assemblies," the following sentence, on the subject of the recent return of communicants in the Church of Scotland,—" The return, it is clear, is stuffed full of exaggerations." It was only to be expected that the more extreme and violent Dissenters would make such a charge, when it was found that the return proved so inconsistent with the statements which they have been so long making with regard to the strength of the Established Church ; but I regret that a paper so fair in its spirit and so broad in its sympathies as the Spectator, should have lent the sanction of its name and great influence to such a statement. Here and there, there may pos- sibly be a slight, unintentional exaggeration, but when it is remembered that these returns were made by the parish ministers of Scotland, men whose truth and honour are surely above suspicion, on the authority of the official roll of commu- nicants which the "Kirk Session" of each parish is required to keep, and carefully to revise and correct annually, I think they may be held as giving, on the whole, a correct statement of the proportion of the population that is in connection with the National Church. I am certain that most fair-minded and moderate Dissenters accept them as such. There is a letter from a Dissenter, in one of the Edinburgh newspapers of yester- day, in which the writer says that he is pretty well acquainted with most of the parishes in East Lothian, and that after a careful examination of the figures, he has come to the con- clusion that the returns are as near as possible in accordance with fact. I have grounds for saying that, in not a few cases, owing to the time of year at which the returns were made, they are rather under than over the mark. In many counties of Scotland, the farm-servants, the great bulk of whom belong to the Established Church, change their situations at the term of Martinmas ; many of them had thus received their certificates of Church membership from the parish they were leaving, as is the rule and practice in the Scottish Church, and had not presented them in the parish to which they had gone, the consequence being that their names were not included in the Communion roll of either parish, and that the returns are thus in many cases smaller than they would have been a few months earlier or later.
I hope that the result of the discussion as to these returns will be that an impartial official inquiry into the strength not only of the Established Church, but also of the Dissenting denominations, will be made, at the approaching census. From such an inquiry the Church of Scotland does not shrink,—on the contrary, she courts all honest investigation ; but it is one to which the Dissenters, for reasons best known to themselves, vehemently object.—I am, Sir, dm, W. T.
Previous page
