Theological Essays and Other Papers, vol 2 | Page 2

earliest
requisition, was that which prompted their second. Almost everybody
was contented with the existing mode of creating the pastoral relation.
Search through Christendom, lengthways and breadthways, there was
not a public usage, an institution, an economy, which more profoundly
slept in the sunshine of divine favor or of civil prosperity, than the
peculiar mode authorized and practised in Scotland of appointing to
every parish its several pastor. Here and there an ultra-Presbyterian
spirit might prompt a murmur against it. But the wise and intelligent
approved; and those who had the appropriate--that is, the religious
interest--confessed that it was practically successful. From whom, then,
came the attempt to change? Why, from those only who had an alien
interest, an indirect interest, an interest of ambition in its subversion.
As matters stood in the spring of 1834, the patron of each benefice,
acting under the severest restraints--restraints which (if the church
courts did their duty) left no room or possibility for an unfit man to
creep in--nominated the incumbent. In a spiritual sense, the church had
all power: by refusing, first of all, to '_license_' unqualified persons;
secondly, by refusing to '_admit_' out of these licensed persons such as
might have become warped from the proper standard of pastoral fitness,
the church had a negative voice, all-potential in the creation of
clergymen; the church could exclude whom she pleased. But this
contented her not. Simply to shut out was an ungracious office, though
mighty for the interests of orthodoxy through the land. The children of
this world, who became the agitators of the church, clamored for
something more. They desired for the church that she should become a
lady patroness; that she should give as well as take away; that she
should wield a sceptre, courted for its bounties, and not merely feared
for its austerities. Yet how should this be accomplished? Openly to
translate upon the church the present power of patrons--that were too
revolutionary, that would have exposed its own object. For the present,
therefore, let this device prevail--let the power nominally be transferred
to congregations: let this be done upon the plea that each congregation
understands best what mode of ministrations tends to its own
edification. There lies the semblance of a Christian plea; the
congregation, it is said, has become anxious for itself; the church has
become anxious for the congregation. And then, if the translation

should be effected, the church has already devised a means for
appropriating the power which she has unsettled; for she limits this
power to the communicants at the sacramental table. Now, in Scotland,
though not in England, the character of communicant is notoriously
created or suspended by the clergyman of each parish; so that, by the
briefest of circuits, the church causes the power to revolve into her own
hands.
That was the first change--a change full of Jacobinism; and for which
to be published was to be denounced. It was necessary, therefore, to
place this Jacobin change upon a basis privileged from attack. How
should that be done? The object was to create a new clerical power; to
shift the election of clergymen from the lay hands in which law and
usage had lodged it; and, under a plausible mask of making the election
popular, circuitously to make it ecclesiastical. Yet, if the existing
patrons of church benefices should see themselves suddenly denuded of
their rights, and within a year or two should see these rights settling
determinately into the hands of the clergy, the fraud, the fraudulent
purpose, and the fraudulent machinery, would have stood out in gross
proportions too palpably revealed. In this dilemma the reverend
agitators devised a second scheme. It was a scheme bearing triple
harvests; for, at one and the same time, it furnished the motive which
gave a constructive coherency and meaning to the original purpose, it
threw a solemn shadow over the rank worldliness of that purpose, and
it opened a diffusive tendency towards other purposes of the same
nature, as yet undeveloped. The device was this: in Scotland, as in
England, the total process by which a parish clergyman is created,
subdivides itself into several successive acts. The initial act belongs to
the patron of the benefice: he must '_present_;' that is, he notifies the
fact of his having conferred the benefice upon A B, to a public body
which officially takes cognizance of this act; and that body is, not the
particular parish concerned, but the presbytery of the district in which
the parish is seated. Thus far the steps, merely legal, of the proceedings,
were too definite to be easily disturbed. These steps are sustained by
Lord Aberdeen as realities, and even by the Non-intrusionists were
tolerated as formalities.
But at this point commence other steps not so rigorously defined by