stituted the supreme civil court for civil affairs (i.e. itself, as the House of Commons;) and therefore the state cannot, upon any constitutional principle, make either of these bodies bend down before the other. The only way of extricating the hitch is to depart from the accident, and revert, pro hác vice, to the principle of the constitution, and incorporate the two Houses for the decision of the question in dispute. We are as convinced as we are of our own existence, that this is the only constitutional procedure competent to the nation—provided our account of the origin of the General Assembly be correct. The probability, we believe the certainty, is, that the Free Church ministers would have been defeated, had the General Assembly met Parliament in a common council. But, as matters were actually conducted, we have no hesitation in declaring that these men (some of them, at least, we fear) now sit at chill firesides, because the state acted in an unconstitutional manner, when it decided their appeal upon other terms than those of a joint meeting. So that, if the General Assembly of 1842, and the preceding years, was wrong in setting itself up as the “church” in opposition to the “state,” Parliament was equally wrong in setting itself up as the superior tribunal.
The only serious or valid objection to the plan we have just proposed is the possible sinfulness, as it may be considered, of allowing a purely civil court to take any part in the decision of ecclesiastical questions; and we have little doubt, that many of the members of the General Assembly, who afterwards became Free Churchmen, would have resisted the incorporation of the two bodies upon that score. But this is an objection which is competent only to a Roman Catholic priesthood. In them it would be a sin to give effect to the plan which we have suggested. For their doctrine is, that, by the Divine enactment, a distinction has been made, not only between civil and spiritual affairs, but, moreover, between civil and spiritual men; and hence they must, consistently with their creed, regard the settlement of spiritual questions by civilians as an infraction of the Divine command. But the Protestant constitution recognises no such distinction, it finds no such distinction laid down in the Scriptures. It holds that each believer is at once both a civil and an ecclesiastical person, and that all Christians share these two capacities in equal
