THE FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. [To THE EDITOR OF THE
" SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I do not know from whom your contributor received his
information aboift the Free Church of Scotland, but what he says regarding it in the sentence quoted by your correspondent of last week is simply and literally correct. What you affirm is that " the Free Church raises money enough to keep a charge in every parish of Scotland ;" and that that is true can be shown by a very elementary arithmetical calculation. The income of the Free Church last year was 370,000/.,—the number of parishes in Scot- land is (say) 1,250,—and if you divide the one sum by the other you will find it gives 2151. to each cure.
You do not say that the Free Church has a charge in each parish, and when I tell you that there are parishes with a popula- tion of not more than 150 souls in all in them, you will easily understand why it has sought to make one church do for several.
As to the Census of 1861, I do not recollect that the Scottish Dissenters made much ado about the Government proposal to take up the ecclesiastical statistics of the country, but I do remember very well the ground on which Mr. E. Baines and the English Dissenters objected to it. It was not the thing itself that they disliked, but the way in which it was proposed to be done. Each person was to be asked to fill up a blank in the Census schedule by stating to what religious denomination he belonged. It was argued—and I think with some reason—that few would care to state the literal truth about themselves, if they were attached to no church, and that the great mass of outlying heathen in the country would in all probability be credited to the Established Church. That Church would then be asserted to have a hold on the people which it really had not, and its political consequence would be unduly exalted. These were the reasons why the Census was not taken in 1861; but there was an Ecclesiastical Census taken in 1851, by counting the worshippers in the different churches, a much fairer way of estimating the strength of the denominations, and the result was very much what you state it to be.—I am, Sir, &c., A MINISTER OF THE FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.
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