THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.* OWING mainly to the attitude which
Mr. Gladstone, followed by the official section of the Opposition, has taken up towards Disestablishment, the Church of Scotland is at the present moment on its defence, and the important work, the first volume of which is now before the public, is a conscious—or perhaps unconscious—throwing up of entrenchments. Th editor of the various treatises, historical and politico-legal, which collectively constitute The Church of Scotland, Past and Present, is the Rev. Dr. Story, who, as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Glasgow and one of the Clerks of Assembly—he figures also as one of its foremost and most vigorous debaters—is closely associated officially with the Church. In a preface, which is a good deal more than the formality which generally goes by that name, Professor Story indicates with sufficient clearness that the publication of this work is not unconnected with Vie agitation for the Disestablishment of the Church of Scotian 1, which has received, if not additional stimulus, certainly addi- tional interest from Mr. Gladstone's declaration in its favour at St. Austell. He traces, indeed, the urgency of the subje :t of Disestablishment and Disendowment to four chief causes, which he describes as,—"First, the general advance of demo- cratic sentiment towards the assertion of what is called `Religions Equality '; second, the exigencies of a political party which hopes to rivet an alliance with Scottish dissent by adopting Disestablishment as one of its leading principles; third, the jealousy with which the position of the Church is viewed by some of the Nonconformists ; and, fourth, a some- what vague aspiration after a General Presbyterian Union to which Disestablishment is supposed to be a necessary pre- liminary." Dr. Story is also candid enough to recognise in the combination of these motives "an aggregate of undoubted weight capable of acquiring formidable momentum under the guidance of skilful statisticians." The Church having had the glove thrown down to it, and having taken it up, as was shown by the debate on " Church interests " at the latest meeting of the General Assembly, Professor Story is amply justified in indicating what it has done, since the great schism of 1843, to justify its existence as an Establishment. The record of this work is certainly very remarkable. On May 18th, 1843, the Church had 970 parishes, 289 of which were left vacant by the secession of their ministers. It bas now 1,373 parishes, having added 403 to the " Disruption " number by its own voluntary efforts. In addition to these, it main- tains 144 unendowed mission chapels or stations. The number on the communion-rolls was, at the last report, 581,568, " exceeding," says Dr. Story, " by not less than 100,000 the combined membership of the Presbyterian Dissenters." Dr. Story is one of the leading members of the Broad Church party, which has been wont to hold the " No Popery " cry in contempt ; yet he indicates a danger to Scotland that would,
• The Church of Scotland, Past and Present : its History, its Relation to the Law and the State, its Doctrine, Ritual, Discipline, and Patrimony. Edited by Robert Herbert Story, D.D. (Edin.), F.S.A., Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Glasgow, and one of her Majesty's Chaplains. London : William Mackenzie. 1890.
in his opinion, result from Disestablishment, in a passage which we quote, owing to the novelty, though not in our opinion the force, of the argumentation in it :-
" As long as that sturdy Church, which was reformed from Popery by Presbyters,' stands firm on its national basis, estab- lished by the people's will, and maintaining the reformed doctrine and Presbyterian government, the Church of Rome cannot pretend to have reoccupied her place and reasserted her authority in Scotland. But let that reformed Church cease to exist as a national institution upheld by the popular will; let her property be secularised; let her courts cease to be courts of the realm; her creed cease to be part of the constitution of the State ; her terri- torial divisions cease to mark jurisdictions recognised by the law of the land; and the Roman Church will, in the judgment of the world at large, and in the view of history, regain the status quo ante bellum. She will resume the position vacated by the clis- endowed and discredited Establishment. The pretensions of Scottish Episcopacy will not stand in comparison with hers, on any ground of historical validity. If the reformed Church be dis- placed, the unreformed will, uninvited, take the place left vacant. Recent secessions to Rome among the territorial magnates, as well as the undoubted spread of Romanism in certain classes of the 'lower orders,' as they are (not always justly) called, indicate that were this place resumed by the Roman Church, the resump- tion would, in some quarters, enlist no small measure of enthu- siastic sympathy and liberal support. Nor would the Church of Rome's confidence, in again taking up the style and title of the Church of Scotland, be lessened by her knowledge of the fact that unestablished Churches show a frequent tendency to organic disintegration and doctrinal instability."
Dr. Story forgets that, in the opinion of so great an authority as Dr. Newman while still an Anglican, it is Established, and not Unestablished Churches, which tend to doctrinal instability.
Besides Dr. Story's manifesto on behalf of the Church of Scotland as an Establishment, this volume contains a history of the Scottish Church from its foundation to the reign of Malcolm Canmore. The Scotland whose ecclesiastical history is dealt with in this volume is the Scotland of the Scots and the Picts—the Picts within whose territory in Galloway is included the earliest Christian settlement in Scotland, the Candida Casa of Ninian at Whithorn—the Scotland of the Angles of Bernicia, and of the Britons of Strathclyde ; above all, the Scotland of Columba and the missionaries of Iona, whose " religious places " were scattered all over the country, from Apercrossan, in the distant north-west, to Murthlach and Deer, in Mar and Buchan ; from Dunkeld, by the Tay, to Mailros, beside the Tweed; from Dull, under the shadow of the Grampians, to Kilrymont, on the North Sea.
The Celtic period of the Scottish Church was that in which missionary enterprise in Scotland was most aggressive in Europe. "Everywhere, and generally where we expect it least," the late Bishop Ewing has written, " we come upon the traces of those early countrymen ; and few things are more touching than to find ourselves at home with them in a far-off land where no one knows so much of them as ourselves, and where their names are less familiar to the natives than to us. In Switzerland they still pray for the Scotch and Irish, not knowing why. We know; and it is pleasant to stand at St. Gall and to think that he who first brought Christianity hither was one of ourselves, one to whom perhaps Lochaber, Armagh, and certainly Iona, were familiar. The very names, although disguised, are Gaelic,—Cataldo, Macautius, and Muiredachus ; are they not Cothal, Mac-Ian, and Murdoch ?" The Rev. Dr. Campbell, of Balmerino, who writes the historical portion of this volume, and who has evidently benefited greatly by the work of recent investigators in Scotch history—such as Dr.
Skene, the Historiographer Royal for Scotland, and Dr. Reeves, the editor of Adamnan's Life of Columba—gives a remarkably lucid account—and one which, though not too rationalising, is not suggestive of credulity—of the early Scottish Church. He has not had much trouble in disposing of several of the prettiest of Northern ecclesiastical legends, and in particular of that which associates St. Regulus with the monastery and city of St. Andrews. To Hungus, King of the Picts, when about to engage in battle with Athelstane, King of the Saxons, St.
Andrew appeared in a dream—so the old story ran—and told him in the first place that he should be victorious, and in the second, that the place in which his own relics were deposited should be sacred for ever after. Hungus was victorious over his opponents, and Athelstane was killed. There was a diffi- culty, however, about the relics of St. Andrew ; they were not in Scotland. This trouble was got over, however, with the help of a miracle. An angel appeared to St. Regulus, and com- panded him and his companions to sail to Scotland with the
relics of St. Andrew and erect a church wherever his ship should be wrecked. They obeyed the order, and were wrecked on Pictish territory, at a place which bore the malodorous name of Muckros, or Swine's Wood. In the course of their wanderings, they met Hungus returning from an expedition into Argyll. He went back with Regulus and his associates to the place where they landed, gave up a large portion of it to God and St. Andrew for the erection of churches and oratories, while they themselves received a considerable portion of territory as a parochia. The element of truth in the story of this fabulous St. Regulus is the fact that among the followers of Columba in Ireland was a Regulus or Riagail of Muicinis- i.e., isle of swine—in Loch Derg. The probability is that this Riagail came to Scotland and founded a monastery at what is now St. Andrews but was then Mucros, or at least became con- nected with a monastery which had been founded by Columba. His name was easily transferred to the Regulus of legend and of Hungus. Dr. Campbell's theory is that this myth originated in the rivalry which prevailed between different ecclesiastical centres. "After St. Andrews became the head of the Scottish Church, which superseded the Pictish Church in the ninth century, its clergy evidently wished to establish for it an antiquity higher than than that of Candida, Casa, Glasgow, or Iona. With this view they elaborated the legend, and events which took place in the eighth century were assigned to Regulus, and transferred to the fourth century. At St. Andrews there still remains the tower of St. Regulus, or St. Rule, by which that saint is commemorated. This tower was long supposed to have been erected in the fourth century, the time of the fabulous Regulus. More recently it was assigned to the era of King Hungus, or to the seventh or eighth century. It is now agreed by competent judges that it formed the tower of the first cathedral, built between 1127 and 1144 by Bishop Robert, who also founded the Augustinian priory beside it." A much more genuinely historical saint than Regulus was Ninian, whose mission it was to establish— or, perhaps, rather to revive—Christianity among the Picts on the banks of the Solway Firth in the beginning of the fifth century. He created a religious settlement on a site which was styled Candida Casa, and has been Saxonised into Witerna, Whitherne, and ultimately Whithorn. There can hardly be any question that Ninian, who, in this respect, followed the example of Martin of Tours, introduced the practice of monasticism into Scotland.
What may be termed Dr. Campbell's reasonable historical rationalism is admirably shown in the view he takes of the great Culdee Controversy. It used to be fondly believed by devotees of Presbyterianism that the Culdees, or Keledei, were an order of religionists founded by Columba ; that their form of church government was characterised by the exclusion of bishops and adherence to Presbyterian parity; that they rejected transubstantiation and other " Romanist errors ;" and that they preserved the purity of their doctrine and worship till they were submerged by the advancing tide of Roman Catholicism. These views have been exploded. On the other hand, Dr. Skene goes too far in making out the Culdees—the original Irish form of the word was Ceile De, i.e., companion of God—to have been an order of anchorites, or solitaries, who lived in cells within enclosures of the kind to be still seen on the island of Ardoilean, on the west coast of Connemara. He wishes, in fact, to make out that as Christieola becomes in Irish Celechrist, so Deicola assumes the form of Ceile De. Dr. Campbell, however, argues that if Ceile De had been the Irish equivalent to Deicola, the Irish writers, when using Latin, would have taken the latter word, whereas they invariably use Keledeus or Colideus. There is no evidence, moreover, that Ceile De was of other than Irish origin. The probability, therefore, is that the Culdees were at first ascetics, and that their Order originated in a reaction from the decay of monastic observances. But there can be little doubt that they were genuine communities, not knots of anchorites from the beginning. They were a class distinct from the monks, and there may be some truth in the theory that they formed an inter- mediate fraternity between monks and secular priests. There seems to be no doubt, at all events, that the Culdees fell away from their original asceticism, and " after the introduction, in the twelfth century, of the more stringent Orders of the Church of Rome, the name Culdee came to be synonymous with laxity and worldliness." Dr. Campbell, all through his treatise on the Celtic Church, shows so much of the spirit both of the painstaking investigator and of the sensible com- mentator, that for all practical purposes and for all ordinary readers it may be regarded as the text-book on the subject.
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