THE SCOTCH PATRONAGE BILL.
'THE Church of Scotland has lost a grand opportunity of making herself unassailable as an Establishment, and when such a chance is allowed to pass, it seldom or never • comes back again. The Bill for the abolition of patronage gives the power of electing Ministers to the Communicants of each Congregation, and thus makes the ecclesiastical franchise as narrow as Dr. Pusey himself could wish. In truth, the Bill might seem to have been framed by the highest of High Churchmen. Vigorous protests against the attempt to degrade an Establishment to the level of a sect were made in the General Assembly by Broad theologians like Dr. Wallace, and old-fashioned Erastians like Dr. Cook ; but they were scarcely 'listened to, and their proposals were rejected by majorities which showed that the arguments had been little better than an empty form. The speeches on both sides, it is true, were remarkably able ; but they might as well have been un- spoken, for all the effect that they had on the issue. The details of the Bill had been carefully settled by Dr. Pirie and the great majority of the clergy. The chief land- lords had set their seal on the compact. Lord Advocate Gordon had bespoken for it the favour of the Tory party. "The Duke of Richmond—one of the greatest holders of Patron- age in Scotland—had passed his word that the bargain should be struck by Parliament, and it had been whispered through the General Assembly that no objection must be made to any of the main details, lest the very existence of the Bill should be put in peril. So the divines and laymen proposed but one amendment, and that was to give a vote to female as well as to male communicants. Having done that solitary act of Liberalism, they almost unanimously resolved to petition Parliament that the Church of Scotland should be formed into a sect.
If there is any member of the House of Lords who might have been expected to rebuke such short-sighted bigotry, it is the Duke of Argyll. He is the head of a family which has done immortal services to the Scotch Church, and therefore to the Scotch nation. In the great house of Campbell, the Presbyterians more than once found a leader, at a time when the other nobles were going to the side of Episcopacy, and when the work begun by Laud was finding fit instruments in the troopers of Claverhouse and the thumbscrews of Lauder- dale. A Duke of Argyll perished on the scaffold for linking himself with the national cause ; and the present MacCallum More showed, when he was still a young man, that he took an interest worthy of his ancestry in the Church with which the fame of his own house is inseparably linked. His knowledge of Scotch ecclesiastical history is also large, and he brings to the study an intellect trained in the unsectarian atmosphere of England. He, of all men, therefore, might have been expected to broaden the Church of Scot- land ; and yet he could scarcely have proposed to make it more narrow if he had been the Highest of Churchmen. In one of the ablest speeches, perhaps the very ablest, that he ever delivered, he has pleaded against any attempt to broaden the basis of the Church, in a strain that will delight the heart of Dr. Pusey.
So powerful and eloquent was the Duke's declama- tion as to make the Peers forget the dryness of the subject, and they crowded into the House to hear his im- passioned protest against any attempt to reduce the Church to the level of the world. We had proposed that the ministers of the Scotch Church should be elected, not by the Communi- cants, but by the ratepayers of the parish. Substantially the same scheme was advocated in the General Assembly by Dr. Wallace,—the only difference between his plan and ours being, that he would have limited the franchise to Protestant ratepayers, for the practical purpose, doubtless, of disarming the dread of Roman Catholic voters, in a country which hates Popery with the strength of frenzy. But the Duke of Argyll regards such a proposal as an attack on the innermost sancti- ties of the Church. How, he asks, can her highest functions be exercised " by those who not only do not belong to it, but who say that they will never belong to it, and that they desire its destruction"? He means that all the United Presbyterians are hostile to the establishment of religion by the State, that many of the Free Churchmen share the antipathy, and that both would unite to do the work of the Liberation Society. But does he fancy that these rigid zealots would so far outrage their own principles as to take part in the election of ministers who are engaged in a work which they think is either un- Scriptural or injurious to the Gospel If they would, and if they form a majority of the people, the days of the Establish- ment must indeed be numbered ; nor will the Duke of Rich- mond's Bill avail to lengthen them out. But the idea is so preposterous, that the Duke of Argyll can scarcely have been measuring his words when he propounded it. No man knows better that stern United Presbyterians would never dream of casting a vote for the minister of a congre- gation bound in the chains of Erastianism. There is still something of the old Covenanting temper about the sect which is stirred by the memory of Ebenezer Erskine, and its members would be apt to hold aloof from the election of an Established Church minister with as much scorn as a follower of Richard Cameron would have disdained to hold communion with a "Malignant." Many Free Churchmen would, on the other hand, freely give their suffrages ; but it is absurd to argue that they would do so in order to elect ministers who should plot the ruin of the Establishment. Such a stretch of Machiavel- lianism lies so far beyond the reach of Presbyterian farmers and shopkeepers, that the Duke of Argyll would be the first to laugh at the theory, if it had been propounded by anybody but himself. The truth is, that the Free Churchmen who should thus take part in the election of ministers would really prove that they had no ill-will to the State Church, and that they wished it well. The Duke of Argyll may plead that he fears a class which belongs to none of the Presby- terian bodies, which sneers at all theology whatever, and would gladly pull down the temple of Religion itself. But that argument is less valid even than the others. For where are such people ? Did the Duke ever see a hundred of them V Did he ever see twenty ? Did he ever see ten Did he ever see anybody who had seen five ? We defy him to produce the most wretched handful of those provincial Voltaires. They are only the chimaeras of a heated rhetorical fancy. That unbelief does exist in Scotland is quite true ; but that it is wide- spread, or that it seeks to compass the destruction of the Establishment, is an idle dream. The Duke may justly argue, no doubt, that a popular suffrage would give the Church one class of ministers, and that a communicant suffrage would give another. He may say that theological orthodoxy would count for much less under the one system than it would under the other. No doubt it would, but here we reach the fundamental error of the Duke. Why are the Com- municants alone to be made the judges of theological ortho- doxy or personal goodness ? Are they alone the worshippers, the parishioners, and the people I Do they alone help to maintain the National Church, or have they alone souls to be saved V What right have a handful of devotees to claim that they, and they alone, shall choose the minister of the parish ? It is a mere evasion of the difficulty to say that he is really not the minister of the parish, but only of the particular men who seek his ministrations ; for if that be so, they alone should support him, and it is unjust to cast the burden of his main- tenance on the nation. He must belong either to a sect or to the parish ; if he belongs to a sect, that sect should pay his stipend ; if he belongs to the nation, he should be chosen by a body in which the nation is really represented. The Duke of Argyll's theory of an Established Church befits a set of Particu- lar Baptists rather than a statesman ; and if the Church of England were to be ruled in accordance with it, she would not enjoy her connection with the State a single year. He can find his ideal of theological purity in those small and voluntary sects which permit none but their own members to sit down at the Communion Table ; and in truth, he has already gone far on the way to the same goal as the Liberation Society. The absurdity of the position has faintly dawned upon himself, and hence he would allow some of the habi- tual attendants at divine worship as well as the communicants to vote. But the device is too weak and trivial to excite even momentary attention.
Still more astonishing is it to find so able a man contend- ing that the Free Churchmen have no reason to complain because they are denied any share in the election of the Estab- lished ministers. And yet they left the Establishment because the State would not grant what it is now eager to give. No doubt, the dispute about Non-intrusion led to others, and the quarrel was complicated by the claims of the Law Courts to exercise such ajurisdiction over the spiritual affairs of the Church as Dr. Chalmers and his party deemed un-Scriptural. Still, it was Patronage that brought the pretensions of the Courts to light, and but for Patronage those tribunals might never have come into collision with the Church. Well, patronage is to be swept away. Many Free Churchmen, therefore, will no longer see any objection te the Establishment. They will say to themselves that the spiritual province is safe from the intrusion of lay judges, now that the cause of the old collisions is removed ; or they will reflect that if there may still be such a danger, it menaces even the Free Church, which learned from the Card- roes case that it might as well try to escape from its own shadow as from the doininion of the Civil power. If a Free Churchman argues thus, why should he not be allowed to vote with the members of the Establishment I His doctrine and his ritual are precisely the same as theirs, and Parliament is now to remove the one point of substantial difference between the two Churches. The Duke of Argyll did not even attempt to show any reason for excluding Free Church- men, now that the State is to grant the main demand which they made thirty years ago, and made in vain. Nor can there be any reason beyond the blind determination to make the Church of Scotland a sect at all hazards. That can easily be done, if its champions be ready to pay the price ; but the price is disestablishment. The Duke of Richmond's Bill may seem to give the institution new strength for a few years ; but the idea that in these days of democratic change; an Established Church can permanently rest on the narrow basis of a sacramental test, is one of the wildest delusions that ever entered the head of rational men. When more than half the Scotch people already worship beyond its pale, the disestablishment of such a Church is as certain to come as the morrow, and it is certain to come soon.
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