FREEMAN
258
FREE-THINKEES
for the erection of churches in the first year after the
"Disruption", as it carae to be called. Colleges for
the training of the clergy were subsequently built at
large cost in Edinburgh and Aberdeen; manses (resi-
dences for the ministers) were erected at a cost of a
quarter of a million; and an equal or larger amount
was expended on the building of congregational
schools. After the passing of the Education Act of
1872 most of these schools were voluntarily trans-
ferred by the Free Church to the newly established
school-boards.
The Free Church never professed to adopt any new article of faith, to inaugurate any new ritual, or origin- ate any new principle of doctrine or discipline. She claimed to represent the Presbyterian Church of the country enjoying its full spiritual independence, and freed from the undue encroachment of the State; but it did not abandon the principle of establishment, or give up the view that Church and State ought to be in intimate alliance. This raised the difficulty in the way of its union with the United Presbyterians, the next most numerous and important body of seceders from the Establishment, and for many years rendered all negotiations for such union abortive. In 1876, however, another dissenting body, known as the Cameronians, or Reformed Presbyterians, joined the Free Church, and, possibly under the stimulus of this achievement, negotiations were renewed for union with the U. P.'s, as they were familiarly called. These proved finally successful, and the union between the U. P.'s and the Free Church became an accomplished fact on 31 October, 1900. A small minority of Free Churchmen resisted the fusion of the two bodies, and the.se (the "Wee Frees", as they were nicknamed) were successful in the Scotti-sh Courts in claiming, as the original Free Church, nearly all the buildings erected by the body during the previous fifty-seven years. This anomaly, however, was rectified by a sub- sequent Act of Parliament (following on a Royal Com- mission) which permitted the "Wee Frees" to retain only such churches and other edifices as were propor- tionate to the small number of their adherents.
The well-wishers of the new United Free Church are naturally looking forward to an enlarged field of influ- ence and a wider scope of activity, both at home and in the mission-field. What must, however, fill with anxiety every friend of Scottish Christianity who studies the teaching of this body, both in its training colleges and in its pulpits, is the spirit of rationalism by which it is becoming more and more pervaded. A generation has passed away since its most brilliant member, William Robertson Smith, was summarily removed from his professorial chair at Aberdeen on account of his latitudinarian views as expressed in his published articles. The "higher criticism" in the Free Church of to-day, largely based as it is on the rationalizing influence of German Protestant theology, goes far beyond the "heresies and errors" for which Smith was indicted thirty years ago. It is hardly too much to say that the modern Free Churchman is really not a Christian at all, in the Catholic sense of that word. The United Free Church, by the re-arrange- ment of its two constituent bodies, has now (1908) twelve synods and twenty-four presbyteries. Its su- preme court is the General Assembly, which meets every May in Edinburgh. According to the latest statistics, the total membership of the body is about 504,000, divided into 162.3 congregations. 244,000 scholars, taught by 26,000 teachers, frequent the Sun- day Schools, which number 2400. Some 300 agents from Scotland, and nearly 4000 native pastors and teachers, are employed in foreign mission work, and the whole income of the Church, at the close of the last financial year, was estimated at £1,029,000.
ToRNER, The. Scollish Secession of 18I,S (EdinburRh, 1854); Wilson, free Church Principles (Edinburgh, 1887); Brown, Annals of the Disruption (Edinburgh, 1885); Buchanan, Ten
Years' Conflict (Glasgow, 1849); Sydow. Die scholtischen
Kirchen (Potsdam, 1845); Hanna, Life of Chalmers (1852).
D. O. Hunter-Blair.
Freeman, William, Venerable, priest and martyr, b. at Manthorp near York, c. 1.5.58; d. at Warwick, 13 August, 1.595. His parents were recusants, though he conformed outwardly for some time to the religion of the country. Educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, he took his degree as B..\. in 15S1, then lived for some years in London, where he witnessed the martyrdom of Edward Stransham in 1586. Strongly impressed with this example, he left England and was ordained priest in 1587 at Reims. Returning to England in 1589, he worked for six years on the borders of War- wickshire, and in his interesting life many persons are mentioned who were contemporaries or friends of Shakespeare. In January, 1595, a special commission was sent down to Stratford-on-Avon to search the house of Mrs. Heatli, who had engaged his services as tutor to her son. William Freeman was arrested, and spent seven months in prison. He denied his priesthood, but also refused all friendly offers to escape, not wishing to lose his opportunity of martyrdom. Owing to the treachery of a fellow-prisoner, William Gregory, he was at last sentenced as a seminary priest, and in spite of a touching protest of loyalty, suffered the death of a traitor at Warwick.
Pollen, Ca(/!. Record Soc, V. 343; GiLLOw, BtW. Dict.Eng. Calh., II, 332; Bo.lSE, Oxford Register, II, iii, 92.
J. H. Pollen. Freemasonry. See Masonry.
Free-Thinkers , those who, abandoning the reli- gious truths and moral dictates of the Christian Reve- lation, and accepting no dogmatic teaching on the ground of authority, base their beliefs on the unfet- tered findings of reason alone. Free-thought, of which they make profession, is an e.xaggerated form, though a quite logical development, of the doctrine of private judgment in religious matters. The free-thinker holds such principles, whether of truth or of action, as he is persuaded that he can prove; and he gives assent to no others. He is a rationalist. But since the persua- sion of having proved (or of being able to prove) even the doctrines of natural religion by leason alone varies indefinitely with the individual, it is difficult, save on the most general lines, to class free-thinkers together. This difficulty is apparent in the case of the Deists (see Deism), to whom the appellation was characteristio- ally applied in the latter end of the seventeenth cen- tury. They all agree, however, in refusing to accept the doctrines of an authoritative Christianity; and it is on this negative ground that their position is most clearly defined.
Although the words "Free-thinker" and "Free- thought" first appeared in connexion with the English Deists [Collins, " Discourse of Freethinking occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a Sect called Freethinkers" (1713), gives the deistical tendency this name], "the phenomenon of free-thought has existed, in specific form, long before it could express itself in propagan- dist writings, or find any generic name save those of Atheism or Infidelity" (Robert.son). Taken in the broad sense in which Robertson here uses it, the term would seem to include the reactionary movement against any traditional form of doctrine to which men were expected to assent. In this sense it is possible to speak of free-thinkers of Greece or Rome, or, indeed, of any considerable body that can impress its teaching upon the multitudes. There were undoubtedly, to a certain extent at any rate, in classical times those who either publicly scoffed at the authoritative myths of their country's religion or philosophically explained their meaning away. So — but this in a truer sense — in the Middle Ages there were to be found rationalists, or free-thinkers, among the philosophers of the schools. The Fathers of the Church had met paganism with its own weapons and argued against its falsehoods with
