Some six or eight months after the Disruption there occurred an amusing dispute between two Edinburgh newspapers, each of which aspired to represent the Establishment solely and exclusively, without coadjutor or rival. The one paper asserted that it was the vehicle of the Established Church, the other that it was the Church’s organ; and each, in asserting its own claim, challenged that of its neighbour. The organ was sure that the vehicle lacked the true vehicular character; and the vehicle threw grave doubts on the organship of the organ. In somewhat less than half a year, however, the dispute came suddenly to a close: the vehicle––like a luckless opposition coach, weak in its proprietorship––was run off the road, and broke down; and the triumphant organ, seizing eager hold of the name of its defunct rival as legitimate spoil, hung it up immediately under its own, as a red warrior of the West seizes hold of the scalp of a fallen enemy, and suspends it at his middle by his belt of wampum. The controversy, however, lasted quite long enough to lead curious minds to inquire how or on what principle a body so divided as the Established Church could possibly have either vehicle or organ.

If the organ, it was said, adequately represent Dr. Muir, it cannot fail very grievously to misrepresent Dr. Bryce; and if the vehicle be adapted to give public airings to the thoughts and opinions of the bluff old Moderates, those of Dr. Leishman and the Forty must travel out into the wind and the sunlight by an opposition conveyance. One organ 241 or one vehicle will be no more competent to serve a deliberative ecclesiastical body, diverse in its components, than one organ or vehicle will be able to serve a deliberative political body broken into factions. Single parties, as such––whether secular or ecclesiastical––may have their single organ apiece; but it seems as little possible that a Presbyterian General Assembly should have only one organ representative of the whole, as that a House of Lords or a House of Commons should have one organ representative of the whole. An organ of the Establishment in its present state of disunion, if at all adequately representative, could not fail to resemble Montgomery’s strange personification of war: ‘A deformed genius, with two heads, which, unlike those of Janus, were placed front to front; innumerable arms, branching out all around his shoulders, sides, and chest; and with thighs and legs as multitudinous as his arms. His twin faces,’ continues the poet, ‘were frightfully distorted: they glared, they grinned, they spat, they railed, and hissed, and roared; they gnashed their teeth, and bit, and butted with their foreheads at each other; his arms, wielding swords and spears, were fighting pell-mell together; his legs, in like manner, were indefatigably at variance, striding contrary ways, and trampling on each other’s toes, or kicking each other’s shins, as if by mutual consent.’ Such would be the true representative of an organ that adequately represented the Establishment.

We are led into this vein on the present occasion by a recent discussion in high quarters on the organship of the Free Church,––a Presbyterian body, be it remarked, as purely deliberative in its courts as the Parliament of the country, and at least sufficiently affected by the spirit of the age to include within its pale a considerable diversity of opinion. It is as impossible, from this cause alone, that the Free Church should be represented by a single organ, as that the House of Commons should be represented by a 242 single organ. The organ, for instance, that represented on the education question the Rev. Mr. Moody Stuart, would most miserably misrepresent the party who advocate the views of the great father of the Free Church––the late Dr. Chalmers.

The organ that represented the peculiar beliefs held, regarding the personal advent, by the party to which Mr. Bonar of Kelso belongs, would greatly misrepresent those of the party to which Mr. David Brown of Glasgow and Mr. Fairbairn of Saltoun belong. The organ that advocated Dr. Cunningham’s and Dr. James Buchanan’s views of the College question, would be diametrically opposed to the view of Dr. Brown of Aberdeen and Mr. Gray of Perth. The organ that contended for an ecclesiastical right to legislate on the temporalities according to the principle of Mr. Hay of Whiterig, would provoke the determined opposition of Mr. Makgill Crichton of Rankeillour. The organ that took part with the Evangelical and Sabbath Alliances in the spirit of Dr. Candlish of St. George’s, would have to defend its position against Mr. King of St. Stephen’s of the Barony; and the organ that espoused the sentiments held on tests by Mr. Wood of Elie, would find itself in hostile antagonism with those entertained on the same subject by Mr. Gibson of Kingston. And such are only a few of the questions, and these of an ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical character, regarding which a diversity of views, sentiments, and opinions in the Free Church renders it impossible that it can be adequately represented by any one organ, even should that organ be of a purely ecclesiastical character. But a newspaper is not of a purely ecclesiastical character; and there are subjects on which it may represent a vast majority of the people of a Church, without in the least degree representing the Church itself, simply because they are subjects on which a Church, as such, can hold no opinions whatever. 243

It is, for instance, not for a Church to say in what degree she trusts the Whigs or suspects the Tories––or whether her suspicion be great and her trust small––or whether she deem it more desirable that Edinburgh should be represented by Mr. Cowan, than mis-represented by Mr. Macaulay. These, and all cognate matters, are matters on which the Church, as such, has no voice, and regarding which she can therefore have no organ; and yet these are matters with which a newspaper is necessitated to deal. It would be other than a newspaper if it did not. On these questions, however, which lie so palpably beyond the ecclesiastical pale, though the Church can have no organ, zealous Churchmen may; and there can be no doubt whatever that they are questions on which zealous Free Churchmen are very thoroughly divided––so thoroughly, that any single newspaper could represent, in reference to them, only one class. The late Mr. John Hamilton, for instance––a good and honest man, who, in his character as a Free Churchman, determinedly opposed the return of Mr. Macaulay––was wholly at issue regarding some of these points with the Honourable Mr. Fox Maule, who in 1846 mounted the hustings to say that the ‘gratitude and honour of the Free Church’ was involved in Mr. Macaulay’s return. And so the organ that represented the one, could not fail to misrepresent the other. Now, we are aware that on this, and on a few other occasions, the Witness must have given very considerable dissatisfaction in the political department to certain members of the Free Church. It was not at all their organ on these occasions; nay, at the very outset of its career, it had solemnly pledged itself not to be their organ.

The following passage was written by its present Editor, ere the first appearance of his paper, and formed a part of its prospectus:––‘The Witness,’ he said, ‘will not espouse the cause of any of the political parties which now agitate and 244 divide the country.’ ‘Public measures, however, will be weighed as they present themselves in an impartial spirit, with care proportioned to their importance, and with reference not to the party with which they may chance to originate, but to the principles which they shall be found to involve.’ Such was the pledge given by the Editor of the Witness; and he now challenges his readers to say whether he has not honestly redeemed it. Man is naturally a tool-making animal; and when he becomes a politician by profession, his ingenuity in this special walk of constructiveness is, we find, always greatly sharpened by the exigencies of his vocation.

He makes tools of bishops, tools of sacraments, tools of Confessions of Faith, and tools of Churches and church livings.

We had just seen, previous to the dÉbut of the Witness, the Church of Scotland converted by Conservatism into a sort of mining tool, half lever, half pickaxe, which it plied hard, with an eye to the prostration and ejection of its political opponents the Whigs, then in office; and not much pleased to see the Church which we loved and respected so transmuted and so wielded, we solemnly determined that, so far at least as our modicum of influence extended, no tool-making politician, whatever his position, should again convert it unchallenged into an ignoble party utensil. With God’s help, we have remained true to our determination; and so assured are we of being supported in this matter by the sound-hearted Presbyterian people of the Free Church, that we have no fear whatever, should either the assertors among us of the unimpeachable consistency of the Conservatives, or of the immaculate honesty of the Whigs, start against us an opposition vehicle to-morrow, that in less than a twelvemonth we would run it fairly off the road, and have some little amusement with it to boot, so long as the contest continued. The Witness 245 is not, and, as we have shown, cannot be, the organ of the Free Church; but it is something greatly better: it is the trusted representative––against Whig, Tory, Radical, and Chartist––against Erastian encroachment and clerical domination––of the Free Church people. There lies its strength,––a strength which its political Free Church opponents are welcome to test when they please.

We must again express our regret that the article on the Duke of Buccleuch, which has proved the occasion of so much remark, spoken and written, should have ever appeared in our columns; and this, not, as the agent of the Duke asserts, because it has been exposed, but because of the unhappy unsolidity of its facts, and because of that diversion of the public attention which it has effected from cases such as those of Canobie and Wanlockhead, and from such a death-bed as that of the Rev. Mr. Innes. Our readers are already in possession of our explanation, and have seen it fully borne out by the incidental statement of Mr. Parker. We would crave leave to remind them that the Witness is now in the ninth year of its existence; and that during that time the Editor stated many facts, from his own observation, connected with the refusal of sites, and other matters of a similar character. He saw congregations worshipping on bare hill-sides in the Highlands of Sutherland, and on an oozy sea-beach on the coast of Lochiel; he sailed in the Free Church yacht the Betsey, and worshipped among the islanders of Eigg and of Skye. Nor did he shrink from very minutely describing what he had witnessed on these occasions, nor yet from denouncing the persecution that had thrust out some of the best men and best subjects of the country, to worship unsheltered amid bleak and desert wastes, or on the bare sea-shore.

And yet, of all the many facts which he thus communicated on his own authority, because resting on his own observation, not one of them has ever yet been disproved; nay, 246 scarce one of them has ever yet been so much as challenged.

Of course, in reference to the statements which he has had to make on the testimony of others, his position was necessarily different; and a very delicate matter he has sometimes found it to be, to deal with these statements. A desire, on the one hand, to expose to the wholesome breathings of public opinion whatever was really oppressive and unjust; a fear, on the other, lest he should compromise the general cause, or injure the character of his paper, by giving publicity to what either might not be true, or could not be proven to be true,––have often led him to retain communications beside him for weeks and months, until some circumstance occurred that enabled him to determine regarding their real character and value. And such––with more, however, than the ordinary misgivings, and with an unfavourable opinion frankly and decidedly expressed––was the course which he took with the communicated article on the Duke of Buccleuch.

That the testing circumstance which did occur in the course of the long period during which it was thus held in retentis was not communicated to him, or to any other official connected with the Witness, he much regrets, but could not possibly help.

In the discussion on the Sites Bill of Wednesday last, the Honourable Fox Maule is made to say, that ‘the Witness contained many articles which had been condemned by the Church.’

Now this must be surely a misreport, as nothing could be more grossly incorrect than such a statement. The voice of the Free Church––that by which she condemns or approves––can be emitted through but her deliberative courts, and recorded in but the decisions of her solemn Assemblies. On the merits or demerits of the Witness, through these her only legitimate organs, she has not 247 yet spoken; and Mr. Maule is, we are sure, by far too intelligent a Churchman to mistake the voice of a mere political coterie, irritated mayhap by the loss of an election, for the solemn deliverance of a Church of Christ. With respect to his reported statement, to the effect that the Witness ‘contained many articles which had done great harm to the Free Church,’ the report may, we think, be quite correct. The Witness contained a good many articles on the special occasion when the Free Churchmen of Edinburgh conspired––‘ungratefully and dishonourably,’ as Mr. Maule must have deemed it––to eject a Whig Minister, and to place in his seat, as their representative, a shrewd citizen and honest man.

And these lucubrations accomplished, we daresay, their modicum of harm. With regard, however, to the articles of the Witness in general, we think we can confidently appeal in their behalf to such of our readers as perused them, not as they were garbled, misquoted, interpolated, and mis-represented by unscrupulous enemies, but as they were first given to the public from the pen of the Editor. Among these readers we reckon men of all classes, from the peer to the peasant––Conservative landowners, magistrates, merchants, ministers of the gospel. Dr. Chalmers was a reader of the Witness from its first commencement to his death; and he, perusing its editorial articles as they were originally written––not as they were garbled or interpolated in other prints––saw in them very little to blame.

Not but that some of our sentences look sufficiently formidable in extracts when twisted from their original meaning; and this, just as the Decalogue itself might be instanced as a code of licentiousness, violence, and immorality, were it to be exhibited in garbled quotations, divested of all the nots. In the Edinburgh Advertiser of yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:––‘It [The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of 248 the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the “bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets of Paris.” It has reminded them of the time when a “grey discrowned head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;” insinuating that, if they persisted in opposing the claims of the Free Church, a like fate might overtake the reigning dynasty of our time.’

When, asks the reader, did these most atrocious threats appear in the Witness?

They never, we reply, appeared in the Witness as threats at all. The one passage, almost in the language of Chateaubriand, was employed in an article in which we justified the sentence pronounced on the atheist Patterson. The other formed part of a purely historic reference––in an article on Puseyism, written ere the Free Church had any existence––to the Canterburianism of the times of Charles I., and the fate of that unhappy monarch. We thought not of threatening the aristocracy when quoting the one passage, nor yet of foreboding evil to the existing dynasty when writing the other. On exactly the same principle on which these passages have been instanced to our disadvantage, the description of the Holoptychius Nobilissimus, which appeared a few years ago in the Witness, might be paraded as a personal attack on Sir James Graham; and the remarks on the construction of the Pterichthys, as a gross libel on the Duke of Buccleuch. It is, we hold, not a little to the credit of the Witness, that, in order to blacken its character, means should be resorted to of a character so disreputable and dishonest. From truth and fair statement it has all to hope, and nothing to fear.

June 14, 1848.