DR. ROBERTSON SMITH AND THE FREE-CHURCH COMMISSION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.")
Sit,—A newspaper writer must have his liberty, but if—as you ask—Dr. R. Smith were to speak of Peter describing " Paul's style as crabbed, and his drift as obscure," Dr. Wilson, and probably others, would reply that Dr. R. Smith's scholar- ship had got strangely rusty over the word BussOnres, and the construction is 071 (II. Peter, iii. 16) ; that he was curiously out of sympathy with Peter's accompanying words, " ' 0 stvalrnr4; caExpOc 11a.Ditoc sctrci ri s aura Rot soar govay," and that even when a man has an idea to convey, it is a pity to do it offensively. Having thus answered your question, I may per- haps correct a misapprehension or two in your notice of Pro- fessor Smith's case, as dealt with by the Commission of the Free-Church General Assembly. That " weak " kennel of "hounds," as you so charmingly describe them, is afflicted with somewhat of a Quixotic, but slightly Christian, grace,— viz., "brotherly kindness ;" and hearing from several sources that " brethren " were distressed by statements of Professor R. Smith, the Commission appointed a Committee to inquire into the causes of that distress. If a brother tells you he is suffering, it is, we feel, too free a handling tokickbim downstairs. The Com- mittee, then, were instructed not to consider Professor Smith's- new article in general, but taking as a patent fact the distress caused by it, to examine and report what there was in the article " fitted to produce " this distress. The Committee are probably many of them " disturbed" but they do not say so, as you assert. They kept to their function, and reported—not that opinions as to the literary merits, mode of publication, style of imagery, lyric composition, and parabolic application of Scripture are forbidden, nobody doubts our freedom on these points—but that flippant impertinence of expression on these "is fitted to- produce " distress. That is their view,—not an indefensible view, I think, even though I do not agree with the majority of the Commission that the case needed further check and reproof, but voted as ONE OF THE MINORITY FOR PROF. R. SMITH.
P.S.—I have said nothing of your theory of Inspiration, ex- pressed in your article of October 30th. We agree with you that there are in Scripture revelation two factors,—the divine and the human. You so subordinate the first to the second, that with you the result is faulty. We hold it to combine in such a manner all that is human as to be " perfect for that whereto God has sent it." That view is dependent on no theory of the- mode of inspiration—verbal, mechanical, or any other—but on Scripture and common-sense.
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