THE SCOTTISH CHURCH, 1560-1843—'THE WITNESS'

When Andrew Melville said to King James VI., 'Sir, as divers times before have I told you, so now again must I tell you, there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland; there is King James, the head of the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the King of the Church, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member,' he expressed what, from its foundation as an Establishment in 1560 till now, has been in every one of its constituent parts the belief and practice of the indomitable Kirk of Scotland.

These were words which the British Solomon was to remember. Over the border, where the obedient English clergy, who looked from the humblest curate to the highest dignitary to the throne alone for their support, professed to find in the pedantic pupil of the great Buchanan the wisdom of a present deity and regarded his slobbering utterances as 'the counsels of a god,' James found himself in more congenial society for the promulgation of his views on kingcraft which were to embroil the nation and drive his descendants from the throne. The preface to the Authorised Version of the Bible by the translators of 1611 shews the depth to which the Anglican clergy could sink. No wonder that James found such men ready tools to his hand. In their company he could complacently vapour about 'No bishop, no king,' or express his joy in finding himself for the first time in the company of 'holy and learned men.' When Melville, as professor of divinity at Sedan, was dying an exile in 1622 James was dismissing the two English houses of Parliament for what he was pleased to call an invasion of his prerogative; the rumours of the Spanish marriage were in the air, the first instalment of the royal legacy of kingcraft. 'No bishop, no king': The nation was to take him at his word, and to demonstrate pretty effectively that kingdoms can do without either—and both.

'Not a king—but a member;' 'in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil head supreme'—the whole history of Scotland was to run for three hundred years in these grooves. This is the doctrine which, from 1560 till now, has in Scotland been known as the Headship of Christ. Without a correct understanding of this question, not as a mere metaphysical or theological figment, but as a reality most vitally 'within practical politics' carrying effects direct and visible into every corner of the national life, the history of Scotland must of necessity be a sealed book—the play of Hamlet without the royal Dane. To the English reader this has been largely obscured, from the fact that the chief sources of information open to him are not such as present a rational or connected story. George Borrow found that Scott's caricature of Old Mortality was what Englishmen had in their minds, and that some thin romanticism about Prince Charles Edward was the end and substance of their knowledge. Yet such a presentation would be no less absurd than Hudibras would be for the men of the Long Parliament. Scott was too much occupied with the external and material conditions of the country, too much engrossed by obvious necessity of materials in the romantic element of Scottish history, and too little in sympathy with the spiritual and moral forces at work to present anything like a complete narrative, while his feudal sentiments were nourished by the almost entire lack of the political instinct. The ecclesiastical chapters in John Hill Burton's History are not equal to the main body of his work; and, if the Lectures of Dean Stanley are the characteristically thin production of one confessing to but a superficial knowledge of the vast literature of the field,' the Ecclesiastical History of Grub is only the work of a mere Episcopalian antiquary, and the lack of judgment and political insight appears on every page. 'It seems to me,' says Carlyle, 'hard measure that this Scottish man Knox, now after three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world, intrinsically for having been, in such way as was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen'—harder still, say we, that the subject of Milton's great eulogy should be judged by minds of the notes-and-queries order, or by those of the class of Hume and Robertson, who have such a gentlemanly horror at everything that savours of enthusiasm as to miss the central point, the coincidence of civil and religious liberty.

'In every sense a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of men's.' Yet we find Hume writing to Robertson that if the divine were willing to give up his Mary, the philosopher was willing to give up his Charles, and there would at least be the joint pleasure of seeing John Knox made completely ridiculous. 'Who,' writes Robertson to Gibbon, 'is Mr. Hayley? His Whiggism is so bigoted, and his Christianity so fierce, that he almost disgusts one with two very good things!' Christianity was then only a good thing when it had good things to offer to pluralists of the Warburtonian order. Yet these two garbled and distorted narratives are still the most widely known versions in England. Little wonder, therefore, is it that Carlyle should ask, 'I would fain know the history of Scotland; who can tell it me? Robertson, say innumerable voices; Robertson, against the world. I open Robertson; and find there, through long ages too confused for narrative, a cunning answer and hypothesis—a scandalous chronicle (as for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons: Mary Stuart, a Beauty, but over light-headed; and Henry Darnley, a Booby who had fine legs. Thus is History written.'

In England, the Reformation took place in a way quite different from that in which it was effected in Scotland. The strong hand of Henry VIII. piloted the nation for a time through a crisis, and for a space at least it would appear that the nation was content to surrender its religious conscience into the hands of the king. He attempted, says Macaulay with perfect truth, to constitute an Anglican church differing from the Roman Catholic on the point of the Supremacy, and on that alone. There can be little doubt that to the court of Henry the king was the head of both church and state, and that the power of the keys temporal as well as ecclesiastical resided in the Crown. So far did Cranmer carry out this idea that, regarding his own spiritual functions as having ceased with the death of Henry, he renewed his commission under Edward VI., and for mere denial of the Act of Supremacy More and Fisher were sent to the block. It is true that Elizabeth was induced to part with a good deal of this exaggerated prerogative, yet she still exercised such a domineering and inquisitorial power as threatened to unfrock any refractory creature of her creation. It was natural, therefore, that the church created almost exclusively by the will of the Crown should for her rights and privileges rest entirely upon the Crown. The people had never been consulted in her creation, and it was to the Crown alone that the clergy could look. Her constitution, her traditions, and her government were all monarchical; and if, at first, she was moderate in her tone of adulation, it was easy to see that, led largely by interest, she would begin to assert the divine origin of the powers of the king, with the deduction of 'no bishop, no king' and of passive obedience, which made itself heard from the pulpits of Laud, Montagu, and Mainwaring, and in the treatise of Filmer.

Passing from the more servile ranks of the clergy to those of the laity it appeared as the party cry of a class. To many it has often appeared strange how such an absurd and illogical doctrine could become even the shibboleth of a political party. Yet at bottom the doctrine of the divine right of the king was not very unfavourable to the divine right of squires, and king and cavaliers were bound together by obvious ties of interest in the maintenance of the royal prerogative against the rising tide of political opposition. Holy Alliances in recent times have not found this doctrine strange to them, and a high elevation of the prerogative and the mitre was the very breath of existence to a church whose being depended on the stability of the throne. Passive obedience was a convenient cry for those who never dreamed that the breath of the king could unmake them as a breath had made. Never till James VII. began to oppress the clergy did they begin to see what was logically involved in their abject protestations of loyalty, and in their professions of turning the right cheek to the royal smiter. Only when the seven bishops were sent to the Tower, not for any loyalty to the country or to the constitution, but through a selfish maintenance of their own interests as a class, did the Anglican body bethink themselves of resistance, and of texts that reminded them of the hammer of Jael and the dagger of Ehud no less than of the balm of the anointed of the Lord. History has repeated itself. The landed and clerical classes associated their triumph with the triumph of Episcopacy, and their humiliation with the triumph of the Independents. The exaltation of the prerogative, therefore, again made its appearance at the Restoration, to be shaken by the high-handed measures of James, and pass to extinction at the Revolution. The same thing has practically been seen in Spain. Spain, remarks Borrow, is not naturally a fanatical country. It was by humouring her pride only that she was induced to launch the Armada and waste her treasures in the wars of the Low Countries. But to the Spaniard, Catholicism was the mark of his own ascendency; it was the typification of his elevation over the Moor. The Most Catholic King was therefore flattered to exalt the claims of the Holy See no less than the English clergy had exalted the prerogative of the king. Far different the condition of affairs in Scotland. When Knox landed at Leith, in May 1559, he found the whole people ripe for a change, so that by August of next year the Scottish Parliament could pass a resolution to abolish the Papacy with the entire consent of the nation, and in December 1560 the First General Assembly met. Its laic element was strong and was emphasised from the beginning. To six ministers there were thirty-four elders, and it met by no sanction of the Crown, but by its own authority. At its second meeting, Maitland of Lethington could craftily raise the question as to the legality of such conventions without the consent of the Queen. It was retorted that, if they were dependent merely upon the Queen for their liberty of meeting, they would be deprived of the public preaching of the gospel. 'Take from us,' said Knox, 'the freedom of assemblies, and take from us the Gospel'; but it was left to her to send a commissioner. So early was the doctrine of the Headship maintained by the Church of Scotland. In 1560, no less than 1843, the question was clear. In 1557 they had resolved that the election of ministers, according to the custom of the primitive church, should be made by the people; and in the First Book of Discipline of 1560, re-enacted in 1578, it was laid down that 'it appertaineth to the people and to every several congregation to elect their minister, and it is altogether to be avoided that any man be violently intruded or thrust in upon any congregation.' The fabric was laid: three hundred years have not started a plank.

The difference of the Reformation in England and in Scotland at once emerges. Knox had the nation at his back; and, besides being, as Milton said, 'the Reformer of a nation,' he had found the people by mental temperament, or by concurrent historical reasons, anchored to a doctrinal system with a political side which has coloured ever since the stream of its existence. Calvinism, in every one of its forms, exaggerated or diluted, has this double side. It is felt in this way. To a nation believing that the divine decree of election has singled out the individual, the claims of a church with the greatest of histories and the most unbroken of descents are of slight value. To the individual believing it is God's own immutable decree that has made his calling and election sure, the whole retinue of priests and priestly paraphernalia appears but an idle pageant. To the nation, and to the individual alike, regarding itself or himself as fellow-workers with God in the furtherance of His immutable decrees, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers have for ever lost their awe or a power to coerce. Wherever the belief has been carried these results have been seen. There has been, what Buckle failed completely to see, a rooted aversion to ecclesiasticism, and a no less rooted aversion to tyranny. And in no better words could the doctrinal and political principles be laid down than in the famous words of Andrew Melville which we have set at the head of this chapter.

Again, when Knox laid hold of the nation his schemes in their very first draft embraced the people as a whole. It was not a merely piecemeal or monarchical business as in England. The Reformers were not content with merely formulating an Act like Henry; they proceeded to carry out in detail their plans for a national system of education. They had no idea of setting up a church of their own invention. There is something in the Scottish intellect, in this resembling the French, that seeks for the completest realisation in detail of its ideas. As Professor Masson has said, its dominant note is really not caution, with which it is so frequently credited, but emphasis. While the English Independents during the later years of the Civil War appear as either sectaries or as individualists, the contention of the Scots was ever for a national system. This feature in the character of the nation is really at the root of what Hallam calls the 'Presbyterian Hildebrandism' of the elder M'Crie. Johnson, too, could with some considerable truth say to Boswell, 'You are the only instance of a Scotchman that I have known who did not at every other sentence bring in some other Scotchman.' But this is the very feature that Buckle has overlooked, and it is this that explains how the new church spoke in the authoritative tones of the old; this, too, which explains how, outside of the waning Episcopalian sect, there are no dissenters in Scotland in the true sense. We have parties, not sects. While the Secession, the Relief, the Cameronians, the Burghers were all mere branches of the parent stock, retaining in detail its fundamental nature in discipline and worship, the established church in England finds itself face to face with organised and hostile dissent. So entirely has the national unity been preserved in Scotland that Professor Blackie has said, with no less truth than pith, that while Presbyterianism is the national and the rational dress of the land, Episcopacy is but the dress coat by which the nakedness is hid of the renegade from the nation, and the apostate from its church. Dean Stanley found that 'the questionable idols' of the Episcopalian sect were Mary Queen of Scots, Montrose, and Dundee. These have never been the idols of the Scottish people: the last, indeed, occupies in its memory the peculiar niche of infamy.

The political side of the national religion is expressed no less clearly in facts. The Scottish Crown is held by a contract,[1] and the coronation oath is the deliberate expression of it. In his De Jure Regni in 1579, dedicated to the king, Buchanan had made this apparent to Europe, and in his Lex Rex, in 1644, Buchanan was reinforced by Rutherfurd in the doctrine that the people is the source of power, and his officers are merely ministri regni non regis, 'servants of the kingdom, not of the king.' Startling doctrine this to the slobbering vicegerent of God, conceding to the people acts to be revoked at his pleasure. In the light of ordinary facts, therefore, what are the national covenants of 1580 and 1638, but very simple Magna Chartas or Reform Bills with a religious colouring? One half of the statements of Hume and Robertson about fanaticism, austerity, gloom, enthusiasm, democracy, and popular ferocity, and all the bugbears of the writers so terribly 'at ease in Zion,' would be discounted by a simple regard for facts. When Leighton and Burnet went into the west in 1670 to try and induce the people to recognise the establishment of Charles, what did they find? Wranglings or harangues after the manner of Scott's Habbakuk Mucklewrath? 'The poor of the country,' says Burnet, 'came generally to hear us. We were amazed to see a poor commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, and on the bounds to be set to the power of the civil magistrate and princes in matters of religion: upon all these topics they had texts of Scripture at hand, and were ready with their answers to everything that was said to them. This measure of knowledge was spread even among the meanest of them, their cottagers and servants.' Leighton might well have remembered the case of his own father. History loves not the Coriolani, says Mommsen, and Miller has well seized this incident to bring out the popular side of the national religion. To the question, in an inn at Newcastle, what the Scottish religion had done for the people, he could reply, 'Independently altogether of religious considerations, it has done for our people what your Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and all your Penny and Saturday Magazines will never do for yours; it has awakened their intellects and taught them to think.'

But the exigencies of the romance-writer are often the means of corrupting history, and the largest class of readers will ever prefer to read it, in the phrase of Macaulay, with their feet on the fender. To that class, therefore, the political crisis of 1638, one of no less magnitude than the French Revolution, will ever be obscured by airy talk about religious intolerance and popular fanaticism. The history of Scotland in consequence becomes either, as Carlyle said, a mere hunting-ground for intriguing Guises or else is left to the novelist with the Mucklewraths, wild men, and caricatures. Even yet the mere English reader of Hume and Robertson has not got beyond the phrases of 'iron reformers' and 'beautiful queens.' The intrepidity of Knox, like the conduct of Luther at the Diet, becomes material for the sentimentalist to decry or the latitudinarian to bewail. The courtly Dean Stanley approaches the maudlin in his remarks at this stage, and he thinks of Scott as he 'murmured the lay of Prince Charlie on the hills of Pausilippo, and stood rapt in silent devotion before the tomb of the Stuarts in St. Peter.' But the admirers of the greatest of all novelists will remember also no less his statement that he gave the heart without giving the head, and will even regard it as a merely temporary aberration, like his presence at Carlton House with the Prince Regent, where, says Lockhart with curious lack of humour, 'that nothing might be wanting, the Prince sang several capital songs!' The spell of Sir Walter should not blind us to the real and the false in the national story. Eminently clear-headed and politically sound were the men of 1638, worthy compeers of the great men that sat in England's Long Parliament. The Jacobite Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident in the history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 1843 will show the peculiar spirit of the people in a fairer flowering. How curiously illusory are the generalisations of philosophers! Calculation, shrewdness, pawkiness—these are the traditional marks of the stage-Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's perfervidum ingenium is surely much truer, and mere calculation is just what is not the national mark. If her poverty and pride were seen in Darien, no less truly was her religious and political side seen in these other events. But the question of the Headship still awaits us. On the accession of William, the shattered remnants of the kirk were gathered together by Carstares after twenty-eight years of persecution: nec tamen consumebatur. Perhaps, in the circumstances under which both king and country found themselves, no other compromise could so well have been come to as that of 1690. The election was left in the hands of elders and the heritors, to be approved of by the people, leaving an appeal to the Presbytery. At the Union, Scotland seeing the danger to which she was exposed by her scanty band of forty-five members being swamped in the English or Tory phalanx—a danger to which every year subsequent has added but too evident a commentary—had exacted the most strenuous obligations for the unalterable preservation of her ecclesiastical system. But five years witnessed the most shameless breach of public faith, by an Act which had the most ruinous effects, political and religious, upon the people. The Tories had come into power on the crest of the Sacheverel wave, and in 1712 Bolingbroke proceeded to carry out his scheme of altering the succession and securing the return of the Pretender. An Act of Toleration was passed for the Episcopalian dissenting sect in Scotland, and an oath of abjuration sought to be imposed upon the Scottish Church for the sake of exciting confusion. An Act restoring patronage was rushed through the House by the Tory squires, who composed five-sixths of the House of Commons. Against this the Whigs and Carstares protested vigorously, and appealed to the Treaty of Union, but appeal was lost upon the ignorant class, who were not overdrawn in the Squire Western of Fielding's novel. For a hundred years this Act bore evil fruits. The nobility of the land were only too ready to seize upon the poor spoils of the national endowment in order to renew their waning power in the country, and in so doing they managed to set themselves and their descendants in hereditary opposition to the great mass of the people. The English peerage has done much for the English people. In Scotland, it may be asked, which of the four Scottish Universities has had a farthing of the money of the nobility, and what have they done for the Church in any one of her branches?

In Miller's Letter to Brougham this cardinal point of 1712 is made clear:—

The immediate result was seen in the conduct of the patrons. As the Regent Morton had established tulchan bishops and secured the revenues of the sees, the patrons now named such presentees as they deliberately saw would be unacceptable to the people, protected as they were by the appeal to the Presbytery, so that during the protracted vacancy they drew the stipend. No actual case of intrusion, however, seems to have occurred until 1725, but the rise of moderatism[2] within the Church gave too frequent occasion for such forced presentations as, we have seen, took place at Nigg, in 1756, in the days of Donald Roy, Miller's relative. The secessions of the Erskines in 1733 and of the Relief under Gillespie in 1752 were the results of intolerant Moderatism, and its long reign under Robertson the historian, lasted for well-nigh thirty years in the Assembly, till his withdrawal in 1780.

Were we to credit the eulogies of Dean Stanley and others upon Home, Blair, and Robertson, we should regard this as the golden age of the Church of Scotland. Robertson he describes as 'the true Archbishop of Scotland.' But there are men who seem fated, in the pregnant phrase of Tacitus, to make a solitude and call it peace. The reign of Robertson was simply coincident with the very lowest spiritual ebb in the country, to which his own long rÉgime had in no slight degree contributed. The Spaniard dates the decline and fall of his own country from the days of Philip II., segundo sin segundo, as Cervantes bitterly calls him, 'the second with (it was to be hoped) no successor.' Even in 1765, such had been the spread of religion outside the national establishment that the Assembly was forced to reckon with it. They found 'a hundred and twenty meetinghouses, to which more than a hundred thousand persons resorted.' Patronage was found, after debate, to be the cause. It is no tribute to Alva that he found the Low Countries a peaceful dependency of Spain and left them a free nation; none to the policy of 'thorough' that it sent Laud and Strafford to the block. An impartial verdict will be that Robertson undermined for ever the edifice which Carstares had reared.

An attempt has been recently made again to cast a glamour over the old Scottish moderates of the eighteenth century. Their admirers point to Watson the historian of Philip II., to Henry the historian of Britain, to Robertson, to Thomas Reid the philosopher, Home the dramatist, Blair the sermon-writer, Adam Ferguson, Hill of St. Andrews, and George Campbell of Aberdeen. Not even the Paraphrases have escaped being pressed into the field to witness to the literary and other gifts of Oglivie, Cameron, Morrison, and Logan. But the merits of a class are not best seen by the obtrusion of its more eminent members, but by the average. We do not judge the provincial governors of Rome by such men as the occasional Cicero and Rutilius, but by the too frequent repetition of men like Verres and Piso. Nor even in these very upper reaches will the Moderates bear a close inspection. No one now reads Home's Douglas. Young Norval has gone the way, as the critic says, of all waxworks, and curious is the fate of the great Blair: he lives not for the works upon which immortality was fondly staked, but for having given breakfasts to Burns in his Edinburgh days. 'I have read them,' says Johnson of these sermons; 'they are sermones aurei ac auro magis aurei. I had the honour of first finding and first praising his excellencies. I did not stay to add my voice to that of the public. I love Blair's sermons, though the dog is a Scotchman and a Presbyterian, and everything he should not be.' This avalanche of laudation seems strange to the modern reader, who will find in them the rhetoric of Hervey's Meditations on the Tombs, united to a theology that could pass muster in a deistical writer. Burns, though he lent himself to be the squib-writer of the Ayrshire Moderates, was fully aware of the merely negative tenets of the school, and in his Holy Fair he asks

But the spirit of Moderatism was to be fully seen in the debate upon Missions in 1796. It was moved in the General Assembly by Robert Heron, the unfortunate friend of Burns, and deeply shocked was old Jupiter Carlyle. It wounded the feelings for the proprieties of the old man. For half a century, said he, had he sat as a member, and he was happy to think that never till now had he heard such revolutionary principles avowed on the floor of the house! Clergymen of lax life, and whose neglect of parochial duties was notorious, were unanimous in declaring that charity should begin at home. The spectre of Tom Paine rose before them. Never, they maintained, while still there remained at home one man under the influence of attack from the Age of Reason, should such a visionary overture be entertained. But there was worse behind this. The missionary societies were united with various corresponding centres; accordingly, in the days of the Dundas dynasty, when Burns during this very year was reminded that it was his place to act and not to think, when the Alien and Traitorous Correspondence Act of 1793 and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1794 had revived the worst of obsolete and feudal enactments, a wily use of this reign of terror was made to defeat missions by an attack on their supposed insidious and political designs. The lawyer who was afterwards to sit on the bench as Lord President Boyle, rose and said: 'The people meet under the pretext of spreading Christianity among the heathen. Observe, sir, they are affiliated, they have a common object, they correspond with each other, they look for assistance from foreign countries, in the very language of many of the seditious societies. Already, it is to be marked, they have a common fund. Where is the security that the money of this fund will not, as the reverend Principal [Hill of St. Andrews] said, be used for very different purposes? And as for those Missionary Societies, I do aver that, since it is to be apprehended that their funds may be in time, nay, certainly will be, turned against the Constitution, so it is the bounden duty of this House to give the overtures recommending them our most serious disapprobation, and our immediate, most decisive opposition.' The legal mind is not often remarkable for profundity, but the fine violation of reasoning in the 'nay, certainly will be,' is just on a par with Jonathan Tawse's 'clean perversion of the constitutional law,' which we have seen before. The detection of treason, too, lurking in the apparently harmless missions fairly rivals Serjeant Buzfuz in Pickwick, with his exposure of the danger underlying the 'chops and tomato sauce' of the defendant. Such had been the unhappy legacy of Robertson. Such was the legal spirit infused from the bar to the bench that was to act in decisions against the true interests of the Church during the Ten Years' Conflict.

But the tide was to turn. Years of dissatisfaction had at last produced the inevitable reaction, and in 1834 the General Assembly had bowed to the storm and passed the Veto Act. Then were discovered the evils of co-ordinate jurisdictions, the mistake committed in 1690 and 1707 by which no provision had been made for a line of clear demarcation between the ecclesiastical and civil courts, and the blunder committed in intrusting great questions affecting Scotland to the judgments of aliens in political sympathies. The tone of many a decision of the House of Lords was to make people think upon Seafield's brutal jest about 'the end of an auld sang,' and Belhaven's trumpet-warning about the risks to the 'National Church founded on a rock, secured by a claim of right, descending into a plain upon a level with Jews and Papists.' There were limits even to the loyalty of the most faithful, and for ten weary years the conflict between the courts was to run its course. In 1842 the Church had instructed its Lord High Commissioner to lay before Her Majesty a series of resolutions by which it was hoped that a rupture could be averted. On the 18th of May 1843 the Commissioner for the Crown was the Marquis of Bute, and after the levÉe in Holyrood Palace, the retiring Moderator, Dr. Welsh, preached in St. Giles, and in St. Andrew's Church the Assembly—the last Assembly of the real Church of Scotland—met. The scene so often described had best be given in Miller's own words, as at once affording a capital specimen of his editorial style and as the work of an eye-witness. We abridge from his leader of May 20:—

'The morning levÉe had been marked by an incident of a somewhat extraordinary nature, and which history, though in these days little disposed to mark prodigies and omens, will scarce fail to record. The crowd in the Chamber of Presence was very great, and there was, we believe, a considerable degree of confusion and pressure in consequence. Suddenly,—whether brushed by some passer by, jostled rudely aside, or merely affected by the tremor of the floor communicated to the partitioning, a large portrait of William the Third, that had held its place in Holyrood for nearly a century and a half, dropped heavily from the walls. "There," exclaimed a voice[3] from the crowd,—"there goes the Revolution Settlement." For hours before the meeting of Assembly, the galleries of St. Andrew's Church, with the space behind, railed off for the accommodation of office-bearers, not members, were crowded to suffocation, and a vast assemblage still continued to besiege the doors…. The Moderator rose and addressed the House in a few impressive sentences. There had been infringement, he said, of the constitution of the Church,—an infringement so great, that they could not constitute the Assembly without a violation of the Union between Church and State, as now authoritatively defined and declared. He was, therefore, compelled, he added, to protest against proceeding further, and, unfolding a document which he held in his hand, he read, in a slow and emphatic manner, the protest of the Church. For the first few seconds, the extreme anxiety to hear defeated its object,—the universal "hush, hush," occasioned considerably more noise than it allayed; but the momentary confusion was succeeded by the most unbroken silence; and the reader went on till the impressive close of the document, when he flung it down on the table of the House and solemnly departed. He was followed at a pace's distance by Dr. Chalmers; Dr. Gordon and Dr. Patrick M'Farlan immediately succeeded, and then the numerous sitters on the thickly occupied benches behind filed after them, in a long unbroken line, which for several minutes together continued to thread the passage to the eastern door, till at length only a blank space remained. As the well-known faces and forms of some of the ablest and most eminent men that ever adorned the Church of Scotland glided along in the current, to disappear from the courts of the State institution for ever, there rose a cheer from the galleries. At length, when the last of the withdrawing party had disappeared, there ran from bench to bench a hurried, broken whispering,—"How many? how many?"—"four hundred": The scene that followed we deemed one of the most striking of the day. The empty vacated benches stretched away from the Moderator's seat in the centre of the building, to the distant wall. There suddenly glided into the front rows a small party of men whom no one knew,—obscure, mediocre, blighted-looking men, that, contrasted with the well-known forms of our Chalmers and Gordons, Candlishes and Cunninghams, M'Farlans, Brewsters, and Dunlops, reminded one of the thin and blasted corn ears of Pharaoh's vision, and like them, too, seemed typical of a time of famine and destitution.'