SCOTLAND
029
SCOTLAND
free exercise of religious worship should be conceded to
all Protestant Nonconformists (Catholics, of course,
were carefully excluded) was met by a violent protest
from the authorities of the Estabhshed Church, and was
consequently dropped. The Episcopal body, how-
ever, continued its private worship, though not sanc-
tioned by law, and provided for its continued organi-
zation by the consecration of two more bishops (the
old hierarchy being almost extinct) in 1705, without,
however, claiming for them any diocesan jurisdiction.
The Union of England and Scotland into one king-
dom in 1707; a measure unpopular with the great body
of the Scottish nation, was resisted by many Presby-
terians, through fear of the effect on their Church of a
closer connexion with a kingdom where Prelacy was
legally established. Parliament, however, enacted, as
a fundamental and essential condition of the Treaty
of Union, that the Confession of Faith and the Pres-
byterian form of church government were "to con-
tinue without any alteration to all succeeding gener-
ations"; the religious tests were to be continued in
the case of all holding office in universities and schools,
and every succeeding sovereign was to swear at his
accession to preserve inviolate the existing settlement
of religion, worship, government, and discipline in
Scotland. It was a rude shock to those who believed
the unchallenged supremacy of the Scottish Church
to be thus permanently secured to find the British
Parliament, a few years later, not only passing an act
tolerating Episcopalian worship in Scotland, but re-
storing that right of private patronage to benefices
which, revived at the Restoration, had been abolished,
it was thought forever, at the Revolution. The im-
portance of the latter measure, from the point of view
of the history of the Established Church, can hardly
be exaggerated; for it was the direct incentive to, and
the immediate cause of, the beginning of the long
series of schisms within the body, the result of which
has been, in the words of a Presbyterian historian, the
"breaking-up of the church into innumerable frag-
ments". There were already included within the pale
of the establishment two widely differing parties : the
old orthodox Presbyterians or "evangelicals", who
upheld the national covenant to the letter, and looked
upon the toleration of Episcopacy as a national sin
crying to heaven; and the new and semi-prelatical
party subsequently known as " moderates", who grad-
ually became dominant in the government of the
church, regarded their opponents as fanatics, declined
to check, if they did not actually encourage, the
Arminian or latitudinarian doctrines which were tak-
ing the place of the old Calvinistic tenets, and sub-
mitted without a murmur to the restoration of lay
patronage, which struck at the very root of the es-
Bsntial i)rinciple of Presbyterian church government.
The policy of the moderates prevailed; the revolt of
the presbyteries was quelled, and the popular clamour
to a great extent silenced. But at the same time thou-
sands of people were alienated from the establish-
ment, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century
there were in every centre of population schis-
matic meeting-houses thronged with dissentient
worshippers.
The long period of ascendancy of the Moderate party in the Church of Scotland, which lasted from the reign of Queen Anne well into the nineteenth cen- tury — a period of nearly a hundred years — was on the whole an uneventful one. Faithful to the Hanove- rian settlement, and closely allied with the state, the establishment grew in power and dignity, and pro- duced not a few scholars and philosophers of consid- erable eminence. Principal William Robertson, the historian of Scotland, of America, and of Charles V, was one of the most distinguished products of this period; and he may be taken also as typical of the cultured Presbyterian divines of the ei'^hteenth cen- tury, whose least conspicuous side was the theological
or spiritual element which one might have expected
to find in the religious leaders of the time. Spiritu-
ality, in truth, was not the strong point of the promi-
nent Scottish churchmen of that epoch, whose doc-
trinal la.xity has been acknowledged and deplored by
their modern admirers and fellow-churchmen. Ra-
tionahsm was rife in manse and pulpit throughout
Scotland; and the sermons of Hugh Blair, which were
translated into almost every European language, and
were praised as the most eloquent utterances of the
age, are purely negative from any theological point
of view, however admirable as rhetorical exercises.
Whatever spiritual fervour or devotional warmth
there was in the Presbyterianism of the eighteenth
century is to be looked for not within the pale of the
dominant church, but in the ranks of the seceders
from the establishment — the Burghers and Anti-
burghers, and other strangely-named dissentient
bodies, who were at least possessed with an intense
and very real evangelical zeal, and exercised a pro-
portionate influence on those with whom they came
in contact. That influence was exerted not only
personally, and in their pulpits, but also in their
devotional writings, which undoubtedly did more to
keep the essential principles of Christianity alive in
the hearts of their countrymen, in an unbeheving age,
than anything effected by the frigid scholarship, phi-
losophy, and rhetoric which were engendered by the
established church of the country during the period
under review.
It is singular that the state Church of Scotland, whose own religious spirit was at so generally low an ebb during the greater part of the eighteenth cen- tury, should nevertheless have during that period made more or less persistent efforts to uproot the last vestiges of the ancient Faith in the northern parts of the kingdom, many of which had remained ab- solutely unaffected by the Reformation. It was in 1725 that the yearly gift called the Royal Bounty, still bestowed annually by the Sovereign, was first forthcoming, with the express object of Protestan- tizing the still Cathohc districts of the Highlands. Schools were set up, Gaelic teachers and catechists instituted, copies of the Protestant Bible, translated into Gaelic, widely disseminated, and every effort made to win over to the Presbyterian tenets the poor people who still clung to the immemorial faith and practices of their fathers. Want of means prevented as much being done in this direction as was desired and intended; and for that reason, as well as owing to the unexpected reluctance of the Catholic High- landers to exchange their ancient beliefs for the new evangel of the Kirk, the efforts of the proselytizers were only very partially successful, the inhabitants of several of the western islands, and of many iso- lated glens and straths in the western portion of the Highland mainland, still persisting in their firm at- tachment to the old religion.
Meanwhile the general revival of Evangelicalism, which was in part a reaction from the excesses and negations of the French Revolution, was beginning to stir the dry bones of Scottish Presbyterianism, which had almost lost any influence it had formerly exercised on the religious life of the people. The per- sonal piety, ardent zeal, and rugged pulpit eloquence of men like Andrew Thomson and Thomas Chalmers awoke the Established Church from its apathy, and one of the first evidences of its new fervour was the official sanction given to foreign mission work, which had been condemned as "improper and absurd" by the General Assembly of 1796. The business of church extension at home was at the same time energetically undertaken; and though it was long hindered by the hopelessness of obtaining increased endowments from the Government — the only means, curiously enough, by which the Church seemed for years to think the extension could be brought about
