meeting. They met with a distinct refusal, and a severe reprimand. They had a similar mortification in another part of the island, where they wished the use of an extension chapel for the same object. In Bute the canvass was conducted by prayers and preaching, combined with the more usual appliances of wheedling and whisky. Ministers who owed their places and en. dowments to Lord Bute, voted against his interest, under the influence of the fanatical feelings with which they were animated. We are horrified to be obliged to say, that on the hustings the allusions of the candidate and his friends to the "headship," were received by the mob with loud “hurrahs!” It should be added, that Mr Dunlop, disappointed at the loss of his election, did not vote for Mr Mure in Renfrewshire, whom he had previously promised to support.

Such are the scenes and proceedings that would habitually disgrace this country, if the spirit we have described should gain the ascendancy which it seeks. It has of late been chiefly directed against the Conservative candidates, when it was found that they were intractable; but the same machinery would equally be put in motion to oppose or embarrass a Whig government, if they were the party likely to possess power; and every effort would be used to fetter their supporters by pledges as much at variance with all constitutional government as those demanded by the Chartists themselves.

For all this violence, no doubt, it will be pleaded as a justification, that the question at issue is truly one not of policy but of principle, and of a principle, too, which is essentially religious, and which could not be waived without criminal indifference. The moment the case is so put, we must take it up as raising in that view a counter principle of paramount importance; and from the very defence which they thus maintain, we trust to be able all the more conclusively to demonstrate, that the conduct of these violent Non-intrusionists is in the highest degree dangerous to good order, and destructive of civil governments.

The principle for which the violent section of the Church contend, is embodied by them in the very appalling and fearful term of THE HEADSHIP OF CHRIST. That Our blessed Sa

viour is the Great Head of our Church, is a proposition which no one will deny; but the practical operation of the principle, as urged by the Nonintrusionists, involves this assertion, that the majority of the General Assembly have an absolute power of determining to what the Headship of Christ extends, and a right to declare the mind of Christ in reference to any matter by which the Established Church may be affected. We consider all such pretensions as unfounded and monstrous. If not absolutely blasphemous, they are essentially anti-Protestant and anti-Presbyterian. They can be compared to nothing but the assumptions of infallibility and inspiration which were advanced by the Popish Church, and from which it was the object and glory of the Reformation to set us free. We deprecate all introduction of so sacred a topic into questions of this description; and if we were superstitious, we should say that we saw a providential, as we undoubtedly see a moral warning against it in the scene which occurred in the late General Assembly, when a declaimer upon the "Headship" became insane, while he was yet in the act of speaking. No man or body of men, whether laymen or presbyters, have a warrant to promulgate the mind of our Saviour on such subjects. Will any man presume to say, that it is the Divine mind that patronage should exist, and that it is not the Divine mind that the presentee should be inducted if found qualified by the Presbytery? Who can presume to tell what is the Divine mind in such matters, except in the sense in which all can say that it is the Divine mind that every thing should be done "decently and in order :" that we should hold as essential doctrine that which is expressly revealed, and that in that which is not revealed we should seek what under all circumstances is most expedient? It is the mind of Christ that the Church should be duly order ed: but it is also the mind of Christ, if it is the command of God, that the law should be obeyed.

To change the language of its demands, the Church claims that the State should recognize its spiritual independence: which being interpreted, means an independent jurisdiction in all things which it shall allege to be spiritual. This pretension, it is obvious, is equal

ly dangerous and inadmissable as the claims of Popish infallibility, to which we previously adverted. We admit the independence of the Church in all things in which the State, through its judicial organs, shall recognize its independence; but we cannot concede to it any further privilege.

But truly the question as to the limits of secular or spiritual power is not here raised in its simple or abstract form. We are not dealing with a body of ordinary Christians who claim an immunity from civil interference, and freedom to follow their own forms, however crotchety or absurd. The question here is with a statutory Established Church, and all that we have occasion to ask relates to the terms on which it has been established. We have nothing to do with the question in what manner a Church ought to be established. We have an actual and existing case, in which we are merely called on to determine the nature and effect of the constitution which the Church has received.

The Church as an Establishment is "the creature of the State." Such, we are glad to see, are the sentiments and language of the Non-Intrusionist Lord-Advocate, and we say the same thing, without meaning to use the words in a derogatory sense. The Established Church has been created by the State. The Church of Christ is co-eval and co-extensive with Christianity; but we are not now speaking of a Spiritual Church. Neither are we speaking of a certain voluntary sect. In this country the State at the Reformation selected a Protestant and Presbyterian body of Christians, and established them as a National Church. It offered to them certain conditions, which individuals were free to accept or decline. It still offers the same conditions; but it presses them on no one. It merely says to individuals, "If you like my conditions, take my endowments; but if you do not accept the one, you ought not to seek the other."

In the late discussions there has been a vain attempt to assimilate the Church and its independent jurisdiction to Parliament and its privileges. The extravagance of the claim carries with it its own answer. The Church, in the sense already explained, is the creature of the State-it is the creature

of the Legislature. Is Parliament in the same predicament? Is Parliament the creature of an Act of Parliament? The crown and the two Houses of the Legislature are not the creations of law. They are the great sources of it; their original functions are its fountain heads, hid like the Nile in inaccessible distance or obscurity. The law is their creature, and the parent has retained over its child certain mysterious, inherent, and immemorial rights, which it may sometimes be difficult to decide, but which it is never possible to deny. But the Church as an establishment in this country, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, has no immemorial existence to boast of. It owes its formation to acts of the Legislature of comparatively modern date, and without which confessedly it would be no establishment at all.

A question here arises of fundamental importance in this discussion. When the State created an endowed Church by a legislative act, in whom was vested the power of interpreting that act, if its meaning should be contested? On this point, no doubt can be entertained-no compromise can be permitted. It is an essential requisite of all government, that the interpretation of statutes belongs to the courts of law;-it belongs to the supreme secular judicatures of the State. To say that the interpretation of a statute constituting the Church, can be interpreted by the Church, is an unworkable absurdity. The statute is a civil ordinance; it flows from the civil power; it must operate according to the interpretation of the civil tribunals. That every individual, or set of individuals, deriving their rights and their constitution from the legislature of the State, must hold those rights, and observe that constitution, according as the supreme courts of the State may construe the grant or charter that has been given them, is a proposition which needs no demonstration. It is elementary-it is axiomatic-it cannot be denied without subverting the nature of the things to which it relates, and striking at the root of all government and justice.

The Church, then, was constituted as an establishment, by means of a civil ordinance, and upon the terms which that ordinance must be held to import, according to the interpretation of the civil courts. As soon as

be violated by any man who holds the office to which the duty is attached.

What answer is it, then, to our complaint to allege that the Church is willing to renounce the temporalities?

In the first place, no majority of the Church can renounce its temporalities. As long as the establishment has a legal existence, the temporalities are inalienably attached to the respective offices of its parochial ministers. Individuals may renounce temporalities for themselves; or rather they may demit the office to which the temporalities are attached.

In the next place, let us see what these contumacious ministers say. They are charged with retaining their civil endowments, while they refuse to perform the legal conditions on which the civil power bestowed them. What is their answer? "We are ready to relinquish the temporalities." Well, that seems fair and honourable. We respect you as conscientious men, and are sorry to lose you as established ministers. "Oh, but we are not ready to relinquish the temporalities which we possess ourselves: we are only ready to relinquish the temporalities which we don't possess; we are ready to relinquish the vacant temporalities which you want to bestow upon your presentee." The portly ringleader of a rebellious Presbytery magnanimously surrenders the Exchequer stipend of a vacant cure which he prevents from being filled up, while our reverend recusant is at the very time the pursuer of a process of augmentation, with the prospect of an additional couple of chalders, which can only be due to him in respect of his performing the duty he thus repudiates. Mr Candlish and Mr Cunningham, in abetting the non-obedience of the law, are willing to relinquish the temporalities of Marnoch and Auchterarder, which they would never have enjoyed; but they retain their share of the Edinburgh annuity-tax, which is only given to them by the same law which says, that all members of the Church courts, in addition to discharging their individual functions, shall be obliged to receive and admit presentees or ministers in other parishes. An easier example of self-denial, a cheaper acquisition of the honours of martyrdom, was probably never before made a subject of boast.

The very sacrifice thus pretended to be made, so far from being an answer to the complaints of the State, is an illustration and aggravation of the evils complained of. The State endowed ministers, in order to secure an endowed clergy over the whole length and breadth of the land. Its essential intention was, that the benefice and the function should nowhere be ever separated; and it enacted that presbyteries should be OBLIGED to concur with it in that object. The pretended relinquishment of other men's temporalities, for which credit is now claimed, is a direct frustration of the State's purpose. The refusal to admit a legally qualified presentee to the pastoral office, is not expiated or excused by a pretended consent that he shall receive the stipend, without the cure of souls. The State has no desire to give the endowment to any man who is not to discharge the spiritual duties; and it insists that the Church shall admit and receive to the spiritual office the man to whom the endowment is due. The conduct of the clergy in refusing to admit, is an attack by these members of the Establishment on the very principles which have established them. It is a divorce, to that extent, between Church and State. The essence of an Establishment is not that there shall be an endowed minister here and there, but that there shall be an endowed minister every where, and that there shall be no Established minister that is not endowed. conduct, therefore, of Established ministers, in retaining their individual temporalities, while they refuse to promote an indispensable object which the State contemplated and avowed when those temporalities were instituted, is such as, in the affairs of ordinary life, would deserve no other name than that of downright dishonesty.

The

Perhaps the argument we have now urged could not be more clearly and closely stated, than in the following passage extracted from the first edition of Mr Dunlop's Law of Patronage.

"In the case of the admission of a minister, the title to the temporality (meaning thereby the whole patrimonial rights) is a question of purely civil cognizance; the admission to the spiritual office of purely ecclesiastical cognizance. But in accepting the sanc tion of the civil power, and the endowment thereby provided for those

who should be admitted to the spiritual office, the Church, in terms of the condition on which I must here assume this sanction and endowment were conferred, became bound to admit the qualified presentees of patrons. The church thus submitted to an obligation CIVIL in respect of its being contracted towards the civil power, and established by merely civil ordinances. This civil obligation, then, may be by the civil power prevented from being violated; and there seems nothing, therefore, to prevent the supreme civil court from interdicting the proceedings of presbyteries in violation of it, as to the admission of ministers, any more than from interdicting or even rescinding quoad civilem effectum their proceedings in regard to the admission or deposition of schoolmasters, which has been found competent.

"Further, there is a civil interest which may be affected by the proceedings of the presbytery; for although they cannot in the face of a competition confer on a person, not duly presented, any right to the fruits of the benefice, admission by them is essential to enable the true presentee to obtain possession thereof; and if they proceed to fill up the pastoral office of a parish, they place a bar to his attaining the enjoyment of the benefice so long as the other party retains the pastoral office, during which period the benefice must remain vacant, and its fruits be disposed of accordingly; and the court have found a less material civil interest than this, sufficient to warrant their interference with the proceedings of a church

court.

“ It may no doubt be said, that the Church Courts, in proceeding to the admission of a minister not presented by the lawful patron, do not pretend to confer on him any civil right, but merely a spiritual office, which, as a Church Court, it is competent for them to do, without reference to any temporal rights or power whatever; and (apart from the consideration that they are thereby excluding the civil right of another) this might be true, were the Church entirely unfettered by obligations come under by herself. But the object of the State, in creating an established Church, was to cONJOIN the patrimonial rights of the benefice to the spiritual rights of the pastoral charge,

and establish ONE OFFICE which should combine the two classes of rights in the same person ; and to secure this, and, at the same time, preserve the former rights of patrons, it is held to have been made a condition of the endowment, that the Church should receive and admit the qualified presentees of lawful patrons; while, on the other hand, the Church, by accepting the endowment so regulated, became a party to the object for which it was intended, and BOUND herself to fulfil the condition whereby this was to be effected.

"Nor will it do to maintain that it was unlawful for the civil power to prescribe such a condition, whereby to fetter Church Courts in the exercise of their spiritual jurisdiction, because, 1, The Church have submitted thereto by accepting the benefits tendered by the State on that condition, while, had they deemed the condition unlawful, they had it in their power to have rejected the benefits therewith clogged; and, 2, A Civil Court cannot listen to any objection on the supposed unlawfulness of any enactment of the legislature, as their only province is to obey and to enforce it."

It is true that this reasoning is only employed, by Mr Dunlop, as establishing the right of the civil courts to interdict the Church from admitting to the pastoral office any other than a lawful presentee. But the premises, taken in connexion with the express terms of the statutory enactments, lead equally to the conclusion, that the civil power can compel the Church to induct a lawful presentee, in the same manner as they can prevent it from inducting one who is not lawfully presented. If, in Mr Dunlop's words, the Church, in accepting the sanction and endowments of the State, "became BOUND to admit the qualified presentees of patrons;" if the OBLIGATION to which the Church "thus submitted" was in its nature" CIVIL, in respect of its being contracted towards the civil power, and established by merely civil ordinances," then it assuredly follows, not merely that "this civil obligation may be by the civil power prevented from being violated," but that it may by the civil power be positively enforced. Nor will it do to maintain that it was unlawful for the civil power to prescribe such a condition: "Because, 1st, The Church have submitted thereto, by accepting the