[TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR:"]
Sin,—Allow me to express my hearty agreement with the views expressed by you in your article on "The Conflict in the Scotch Churches" (Spectator, August 13th), and my hope that you will keep persistently before the minds of your readers the enormous injustice done to a great and noble organisation by the action of English Judges and the inaction of the English Parliament. I am afraid that most of my countrymen are taking this matter too lightly. For my part, I feel the injustice and the cruelty of the decision of the House of Lords so keenly that it robs me of sleep. I cannot bear to think of those eleven hundred ministers of the 'United Free Church whose whole career is suddenly marred, and whose future livelihood is placed at the mercy of twenty-eight exultant rivals. The noble colleges threatened with intellectual death ; the foreign missions arrested in their beneficent work; the contributions of thousands of men now living, under some highly refined doctrine of the inviolability of trusts, wrested from them and applied to purposes of which they utterly disapprove,—these are the results of a Scottish appeal to English justice. I have said : "the action of English Judges and the inaction of the English Parliamont." The Judges who decided the case acted, we are all persuaded, from a conscientious conviction of their duty ; but they must surely have felt, what every Englishman to whom I have spoken feels, that it was a case of summuni summa injuria. They are, after all, not only lawyers, but also statesmen, and their chief is a member of the Ministry. I suggest that, when they found themselves on the verge of a decision so contrary to men's natural feelings of justice, and so tending to bring the law itself into contempt, it was their bounden duty not to allow Parliament to separate till at least an attempt had been made, by a abort Suspensory Act, to give time for reasonable discussion, and so avert the most disastrous consequences of their judgment. I am myself a member of the Society of Friends, and have no personal interest in the question ; but I am concerned for the honour of English justice. Moreover, as a theological student I know something of the debt which we owe to A. B. Davidson, G. A. Smith, Henry Drummond, James Stalker, and other teachers of what is now the United Free Church. On the other hand, I have read the report of the proceedings of the new "Free Church" and the prayer of its Moderator, and do not see in them much of the spirit of Christianity.—I am, Sir, &c., THOMAS HODGKIN.
Barmoor Castle.
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