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IT is easy enough for
us now, after several centuries of uninterrupted progress in
Scotland, to look back into her heroic ages, to see the meaning of
the great principles then so fiercely contested, and to trace the
results which have flowed from the vindication of those principles.
In no part of the world is the true philosophy of history more
easily discerned than in the history of Scotland. And in no part of
Scottish history have her gallant people given to mankind a more
important and impressive lesson for all ages than in the heroic
times of Wallace, Bruce and Knox, and their successors of the Solemn
League and Covenant. Through all the dark pages God's hand is
clearly seen protecting his true Church and establishing the right.
It must never be
forgotten that Scotland had a double battle to fight---first, that
of national independence and constitutional liberty against her more
powerful neighbor, and then the harder, nobler battle for conscience
and a pure Church, against both papal and prelatical domination.
There are few sublimer chapters in history than those which recount
the deeds of the Scotch Reformers of the sixteenth century, the
Presbyterian Covenanters of the seventeenth century, and the
never-to-be-forgotten founders of the Free Church in the nineteenth
century. The time was long, the causes of the conflicts were
different, but the battle was substantially the same. The rights,
liberties and principles of an evangelical Christianity and a pure
spiritual Church, preached in Scotland by the martyred Wishart and
Hamilton, heroically defended before kings, queens and nobles by
Knox and Melville, vine dicated and established by Henderson,
Gillespie, Rutherford and their compeers, solemnly sworn to by the
whole people in their national League and Covenant, cemented with
the blood and attested by the last breath of thousands of martyrs in
the "killing-time" of the bloody Claverhouse, —these grand
principles of a Reformed religion and an evangelical
Presbyterianism, for ever asserting Christ's cross and crown and
covenant in a free State and a free Church, we have lived to see
carried to their consummation and establishment under the leadership
of Thomas Chalmers and his five hundred coadjutors in the memorable
Free-Church movement of 1843, the deed and the day of Scotland's
greatest ecclesiastical glory.
It was in vindication
of these principles that John Knox had dared to tell Mary Stuart the
truth even at the cost of her queenly anger and her woman's tears.
At a time when men were beheaded or driven into exile for their
sentiments, and when kings had power to send a subject to the
scaffold for a word, it required courage of the highest order to
stand up as Andrew Melville did before James VI. and utter these
memorable words: "Sir, we will always reverence Your Majesty in
public; but since we have this occasion to be with Your Majesty in
private, and since you are brought into extreme danger of your life
and crown, and along with you the Church of God are alike to go to
wreck for not telling you the truth and giving you faithful counsel,
we must discharge our duty or else be traitors both to Christ and
you. Therefore, sir, as divers times before I have told you, so now
again I must 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 lie is not a king, nor a lord,
nor a head, but a member. Sir, those whom Christ has called and
commanded to watch over his Church have power and authority from him
to govern his spiritual kingdom, both jointly and severally; the
which no Christian king or prince should control and discharge, but
fortify and assert, otherwise they are not faithful subjects of
Christ and members of his Church. We will yield to you your place
and give you all due obedience, but again I say you are not the head
of the Church: you cannot give us that eternal life which we seek
for even in this world, and you cannot deprive us of it. Sir, when
you were in your swaddling-clothes, Christ Jesus reigned freely in
this land, in spite of all his enemies. Permit me, then, freely to
meet in the name of Christ and attend to the interests of that
Church of which you are the chief member."
Well and nobly said,
brave Melville! Well and nobly done ! Never was a grander truth more
manfully stated and more stoutly stood by through all Old Scotia's
battlefields by all her truest sons and daughters. That granite
truth so nobly wrought out of Scottish quarries is today the very
corner-stone in our glorious temple of civil and religious liberty.
The struggle had been long and fearful; it had lasted a hundred
years; it had cost the sacrifice of generations of suffering men and
women driven into exile or wafted to heaven in a winding-sheet of
flame; but the triumph was glorious at last.
The result was a free
Church and a free State, corelated to God and to the people, but
each independent of the other in the proper sphere of its
jurisdiction. The result was a vindication in a manner never before
understood in any land of the true spiritual import of those
memorable words uttered by Christ before Pilate's bar: "Render unto
Cesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are
God's." That great truth incorporated in the Westminster Confession
is the basis of all religious liberty and of all the Presbyterian
Churches in the world: "God alone is Lord of the conscience, and
hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which
are in any thing contrary to his word, or beside it in matters of
faith or worship. So that to believe such doctrines, or to obey such
commandments out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of
conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute
and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason
also."
This grand
deliverance of scriptural truth, so clearly formulated in the
Presbyterian Standards and so bravely maintained at every cost in
Scotland through the centuries following the Reformation, may be
regarded as the essential article of all true ecclesiastical polity
and of all religious liberty. To maintain it intact and to hand it
down to posterity was well worth the blood and the treasure which it
cost the heroic founders of the Scotch churches. Certainly there is
not a Presbyterian church in the world to-day which does not thank
God for this glorious inheritance of Christian liberty, and rejoice
that our Scottish forefathers were able to stand up for it in the
hour of peril and bring it safely with them through the fiery
ordeal. If the Scottish heroes who suffered unto death for Christ's
covenant and crown had rendered no other service to mankind, this
sacrifice alone in behalf of freedom of conscience had been enough
to immortalize the service and entitle them to the gratitude of the
latest posterity.
It was strikingly
appropriate that a service to freedom and to mankind so great and
inestimable should find honorable mention at the First General
Presbyterian Alliance, held in 1877 at Edinburgh, the very seat and
centre of the memorable conflict. That great council, gathered from
the Presbyterian Churches of all lands, in the bosom of this
venerable mother-Church of the widely-dispersed family, was itself a
demonstration of what Scotland had done for Christendom by the long
struggle for civil and religious liberty. It was one of the many
results of the conflict, and no inconsiderable one at that; for the
men there assembled from so many widely-separated Christian lands
were themselves representatives of the very principles for which the
Scottish forefathers had so long and so bravely battled. One of the
delegates from the United States, Archibald A. Hodge, D. D., of
Princeton, New Jersey, speaking of this priceless Presbyterian
birthright of civil and religious freedom, in pertinent and truthful
words thus called to remembrance the place and the period from which
it came: "In the original conflict these principles were brought
into antagonism with absolutism both in Church and State. They
first, though at the sacrifice of countless martyrs, especially in
France, Holland and Scotland, broke the power of the hierarchy and
conquered liberty in the sphere of religious faith and practice.
More gradually, but by inevitable consequence, they secured popular
liberty in the sphere of civil and political life. The conditions of
modern times, to the wants and tendencies of which it is our duty to
adjust and apply Presbyterian principles, are largely the outcome of
the influence exerted during the past three hundred years upon the
life of European nations by those Presbyterian principles
themselves."
Another
representative from America on that occasion, Moses D. Hoge, D. D.,
of Richmond, Virginia, also called to remembrance the principles and
the heroes of the great conflict in the following impressive words:
"The saddest, and yet the brightest, pages of our ecclesiastical
history are those which recount the struggles of our fathers in
behalf of the sacred rights of conscience. I need not speak of the
practical power of our principles as they have been so often
illustrated in the heroic conflicts for the right and the true,
whether in the glens of Scotland, or in the villages of France, or
on the northern coast of Ireland, or among the mountains of
Switzerland. A portion of the people of my native State trace their
ancestry back to the noble race of men who were compelled by Bourbon
tyranny to flee from their once happy homes on the fertile plains of
Languedoc or in the delightful valleys of the Loire, and who found
an asylum on the high banks of the James River in Virginia or on the
lowlands of the Cooper and Santee Rivers of South Carolina. Others
of my Virginia people are the descendants of the men who contended
for Christ's crown and covenant at the foot of the heath-clad
Grampians, or who fought the dragoons under Claverhouse at Bothwell
Bridge, or who at the siege of Londonderry held out to the bitter
end against James himself. There is yet in a branch of my own family
the old family Bible which their Huguenot ancestors carried with
them first to Holland and then to Virginia. Its covers are worn, its
leaves are yellow and faded; they have often been wet with the salt
spray of the sea and the salt tears of the sorrowing exiles; but,
though the names are growing dim on the family register, I trust
they are bright in the book of life; and now, thank God! the
descendants of the Huguenot and Covenanter, and of the noble martyrs
of the North of Ireland, are found dwelling together in one happy
ecclesiastical household on our peaceful Virginia shores, with none
to molest or make them afraid, yet ready, as I trust in God—ready
once more, if need be—to brave and peril all for the testimony of
Jesus and for the defence of the faith once delivered to the
saints."
One of the grand
results secured by the long and bitter conflicts in Scotland was the
settlement on a permanent basis of the true scriptural doctrine of
religious tolerance. Clear as was the teaching of Christ on the
subject, the princes and rulers of this world, and even his profound
followers in the Churches established by law, were slow to learn the
great truth. It is a truth which the papal Church never learned,
being one diametrically opposed to its whole doctrinal and political
system. Nor has it been always fully understood and practiced even
in Protestant lands where the Erastian principle of state supremacy
in matters of religion has been asserted. But from the dawn of the
Reformation it was fully understood by the Presbyterian Church of
Scotland, and for ages maintained at every cost, even when there
were some within her bosom who coveted alliance with the State and
stood ready to sacrifice the independence of the Church and the
rights of conscience at the bidding of lordly power. The great
doctrine of a broad universal toleration—so strongly maintained, and
at last secured, by the Presbyterians of Scotland—was but the
necessary logical sequence of the fundamental article of their
ecclesiastical creed that God alone is Lord of the conscience in all
matters of religious opinion. Where there is no authority to bind
the conscience except God and his inspired word, every man is
necessarily free to exercise his own private judgment in
ascertaining what the truth is, and his own conscience in accepting
and following the truth. This is true religious liberty, and this
the basis of religious toleration.
It was the true moral
glory of the Scottish Reformers, and of their successors through the
ages that followed, that they understood these essential principles
of Presbyterianism and dared to maintain them in the face of all
opposition. It is true that they did not always live up to them with
an absolute consistency, for in ages of intolerance and persecution
and Erastian interference on the part of the civil power they were
sometimes driven to the wall and compelled, in self-defence, to
strike back the iron hand that showed no toleration and sought only
to crush them. Still, through all oppressions from without and amid
all the feuds and divisions within, they did maintain to the last,
and they brought unscathed through the conflict, that glorious
heritage of a free Church and a free State, with equal rights of
conscience for all classes of men, in which not only Scotland, but
the whole Presbyterian world, rejoices to-day. The distinction is as
just as it is honorable that through all its history the
Presbyterian Church of Scotland has been a liberty-loving, a
conscience-asserting and a tolerant Church. The Presbyterian Church
has never been, either in Scotland or in any other land, an
intolerant or a persecuting Church. It could never have persecuted
without violating the fundamental principles of its divine
constitution.
It was no empty
boast, but the truth of history, when the Right Honorable Lord
Moncrief, one of the chairmen of the Edinburgh council, said, "The
Presbyterian polity has been the cradle of toleration, and it has
always been the stronghold of civil liberty. I do not know a better
test of the efficiency and purity of a Church than these two
features. A Church which is the enemy of toleration and a Church
that is the intimate companion of political oppression I do not
think by any possibility can be an apostolic Church. But the
Presbyterian Church was the cradle of toleration. I am far from
saying that in days when religious opinions were really the politics
of the times, and when men's lives hung by a thread, political or
religious toleration was much in vogue; but this I do say—that where
Presbyterian principles have prevailed there toleration has sprung
and flourished, and that in the quarters where the principles of the
early Reformers and Presbyterians first acquired strength the
principles of toleration followed in their wake. The Presbyterians
of the North have had a large part in establishing civil and
religious liberty in this country, and I am quite certain that where
the Presbyterian polity prevails there will toleration, there will
liberty, flourish." |
