once

and æsthetic. The writer mildly expostulated with a brilliant young preacher who was pleading enthusiastically for the organ and divers other improvements in the national worship. What,' said I in saddened tones, what would your covenanting forefathers have said if they had heard you utter these sentiments?' And indeed several of the lineage of that youth testified even to the death, and lie in what are by some held as martyrs' graves. He was hopelessly obdurate. He said that was no argument. He said his covenanting forefathers, like the preceding generations of his Popish forefathers, and the following generations of his decent old moderate ancestors, were human, and might go wrong. He quoted, in support of this view, a familiar sentence derived from the Latin Grammar. And finally, in tones which made my blood run cold, he used the awful words, Bother my covenanting fathers!'

fore

It seemed as though the controversy, if it be worth while calling it so, were over. But there are good men who cannot be happy unless in the midst of strife: and some of these, placed in the position of frozen-out gardeners by the collapse of a plan for uniting Presbyterian Nonconformity which had given them plenty to do for several years, have recently turned their eyes upon the ritual defections of the Church of Scotland. A society has been formed which bears the title of The Presbyterian Association on behalf of Purity of Worship. I trust I give the name accurately. I found it in the Scotsman newspaper of one day in May just gone. It consists

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of members of the National Church and of the Free Kirk. I know some of its members and I know that more conscientious and faithful men cannot be found anywhere. There is something thoroughly respectable in the

feeling that no change can be an improvement on the dear old forms of worship we all knew as children. And it is And it is an arguable question whether or not the smallest departure from the very severest simplicity do not tend in the direction of a perilous ritualism, in which the spirit of devotion is lost in its forms, and a vague sentimental excitement of feeling is mistaken for the actual worship of God. Educated folk, no doubt, have generally made up their minds on this matter, and have concluded that the truth here lies in the degree: and that a church so decorous and an order so reverent as not to furnish what may distract and hinder our worship, are good and right things. They have concluded, too, that the man who says he cannot worship unless amid the barest negations of decent order, is the extremest of all ritualists: probably with a great deal of sourness, narrowness, and ignorant selfsufficiency added to a naturally coarse-grained soul. It is a somewhat offensive begging of the question to take for granted that purity of worship means bareness of order. The authority to which all bend says that worship must be 'in spirit and in truth:' that is, must be sincere and hearty: but adds not a syllable on the question whether a severely simple or an ornate and stately worship is the likelier to be such. As for the principle that no worship ought to be rendered in church which has not its authority in Holy Scripture, that is cordially accepted by the improvers of the Scotch services: but it is maintained it refers to the great outlines of divine service and not to its lesser details, which are left to be settled by men's own best judgment; or, as the Directory for the Publick Worship of God well says, 'according to the rules of Christian prudence, agreeable to the general rules of the Word of God.' I do not know how many members this Pure Worship Society has got ; nor do I know

Mixed

the names of more than a very few. But, if one may judge from the published description of a meeting of it held at Edinburgh about the middle of May, it will require much heavier metal to turn the tide which is now running in Scotland. Let the mixed metaphor stand. metaphors are very good things. The men who appeared at that meeting are not strong enough, either intellectually or morally, for the work they propose to do. And the tone of some of the speeches made must be lamented by all good Let us argue, by all means: but do not let us scold, nor call ugly names. Nothing would induce the writer to enter into Scotch ecclesiastical controversy: the only individual, in his judgment, who can be entirely satisfied with its manner and matter, is the Devil. The unfairness, the downright dishonesty, the rancour, the vulgarity, the bandying about of such words as Apostacy and Perjury, with the occasional use of the term Pickpocket, are matters for national humiliation. Whisky, in excess, is bad: but religious malevolence and dis

men.

honesty are far worse. The drunkard is an awful warning: the controversialist unhappily oftentimes draws in good men to do likewise. I do not in the least object to a statement made by the Chairman (whose name I confess never to have seen or heard before in my life) that if they admit the organ, they could not rest, for the principle would carry them on not only to Episcopacy but to Romanism, with all its sensuous worship. (Hear, hear.) Instead of aiding devotion, it had always been found to destroy spiritual religion.' That is an honest opinion, expressed with decency: though in my judgment just as extravagant as to say that two and two make twenty. All fair, too, when another speaker said that there was not only a tendency in the public mind to go the length of an organ and a

hymnbook, but even greater lengths in the direction of loose teaching. ... The love of the organ was almost infallibly connected with other tendencies which he held to be of a most dangerous kind.' I cannot see it; but others may discern that the man who sings Rock of Ages with an organ accompaniment, is on the way to give up the belief that there is any Rock of Ages at all. Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling,' may really mean that a human being hopes to save himself by pipes and bellows. But surely it is going a little too far when a respectable clergyman said of a party in the Church which includes a great part (to say the least) of both its head and its heart, that

'Those innovators evidently thought that Christ made a mistake when He sent forth Apostles to preach the Gospel. In their opinion He should have sent forth a set of dancing masters, pipers, and tumblers. (Laughter.) He had little respect for these brainless innovators, but he pitied them to a certain extent.'

The Ninth Commandment is, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour: in plainer terms, Thou shalt not tell lies to his disadvantage. I cannot say with what sorrow I read that speech. The man who made it is a truly good and faithful man: I know him, and know him to be such. But could he have believed what he said about the 'innovators'? Could he have said it yet not believed it? If I were speaking of almost any other person, I should suggest a most painful dilemma. I will not. But I will tell my reader the names of some of the described as brainless innovators.' Norman Macleod of Glasgow: Principal Caird of Glasgow: Principal Tulloch of St. Andrews: Dr. Robertson, late of Glasgow Cathedral: Dr. Watson of Dundee: Dr. MacGregor of Edinburgh: Mr.

men

John Macleod of Govan: Dr. Robert Lee of Edinburgh: Dr. Wallace of Edinburgh: Dr. Leishman of Linton: Dr. Story of Rosneath Dr. Lang of Glasgow: Dr. Donald Macleod, the biographer of his illustrious brother: Dr. Burns of Glasgow Cathedral. Will that speaker read over these names, and venture to repeat his words? The genius, the eloquence, the devotion, the sound sense, the practical usefulness of the Scotch Church; where are they, if not in these men, and the like of these men? Comparisons are odious, but sometimes proper. Is there a man in the Pure Worship Society worthy to be named with these?

I find that another speaker at this meeting, a minister who appears to have been ordained for six years, has the presumption and insolence to speak of these devoted clergymen who desire to add solemnity and life to the worship of the Church as 'a class of ungrateful and faithless men.' And he goes on to describe those whom he terms the 'organophilists':

They embraced all classes, from the poor quoad sacra minister who was forced into the innovation by some wealthy seat holder, probably a reader of the Scotsman (laughter)-entertaining what he deemed to be liberal religious. opinious, to the highest drawer of stipend in the Church who forced on his rabid opinions about services in defiance of the wishes of his congregation; from the soi-disant lover of aesthetics who wanted to refine the mode of worship to the raw lad entering into the ministry who wanted to get up a sensation; and from the minister of the city parish who could hire an organist, to his respected brother who got up a harmonium to please his wife and daughter. (Laughter and applause.)

Yes: laughter and applause. Such is the reception which a gathering of men concerned for the purity of God's worship give to that kind of thing. I have not heart to say more than that I read the speech, and the account of the reception it met, with bitter shame and humiliation. Christian gentlemen,

God help us! What must heathenish vulgarians be? The theory of the adoption of the organ was concisely stated by a venerable Doctor of Divinity, whom I respect so much for his manliness that I regret to find him in such company: 'He believed it was the case that many men who had not much to say in the way of preaching got an organ in order to fill up the time.' (Laughter.) But as the men who have got the organ, or who have declared for the organ, are the best preachers in the Church; and as some of them are nothing at all if not preachers; it seems unlikely that they will underrate their vocation. As a matter of fact, the statement is one of those loose ones which some theologians make, without the smallest foundation, to the prejudice of such as differ from them in opinion. Every little contemptible bit of stupid and spiteful gossip is grabbed at, and eagerly put about. Information obtained as creditably as by listening at keyholes may be read in the lower class of newspapers. The most innocent actions are suspected and misrepresented. The defence of the faith is undertaken by some individuals with all the arts of lying and slandering. I could easily quote chapter and verse for what I say: but it is really not worth while. And after all, if a young clergyman goes on faithfully doing his duty, he will live down the tattle of the deplorable creatures who go about telling that his church is called Smith's Theatre, or that he calls the morning and evening prayers of his household Matins and Vespers, or that it is suspected he intends having service on the Feast of St. Ananias. Neither need he mind at all though his humble endeavours after some little of the beauty of holiness in God's house are deemed by some beings as Popish; or (as they generally render the word) Poppish.

It has happened to him as it has to his betters. An illustrious Dean had the figures of the four Evangelists placed in the reredos of his great and famous church. A few days after wards he received an anonymous letter, beginning Thou miserable Idolator! I heard him tell the story with much enjoyment. All the idiots in this country are not in places of restraint. That is the sum of the matter.

Of course, no wise clergyman will ever press improvements in ritual upon honest folk who in an ill-informed conscientiousness object to them. Such good people must be gradually educated. And even a small minority in a congregation which desires to keep the dear old way is entitled to much kind consideration. But there must be a limit to that sort of thing. It cannot be taken as meaning that a handful of the stupidest and most ignorant persons in the country are to decide what shall be the worship of the National Church. Already the disposition to act upon that notion has driven out of the Church those whom she can ill spare. And I cannot imagine an event more to be deprecated by every patriot, than that instead of rich and poor meeting together in Divine worship, the educated class should be gathered in one church, and the mass of the people in another. Things have gone much too far in that direction already. And the social results have been disastrous. Those members of the Scotch aristocracy who do not worship with the vast majority of their countrymen have made themselves an alien class, parted by a deep gulf from the sympathy of their humbler neighbours. Had they stuck by the National Church, they might have done much to ameliorate it in divers ways. They would have strengthened the hands of the more intelligent among its clergy and laity. In the parishes where they attend

the parish church, they have done incalculable good, æsthetic, moral, and political. It is not too late, even yet, to retrace mistaken steps; and to make Scotland, ecclesiastically, what devout and enlightened men would desire to see it. There can be no question but that the National Church is at present the rallying point of everything in this country which is in the best sense Conservative. But the Church must open her eyes to the signs of the times; and permit the freest latitude in theological theory, so the two or three main things be right; and the utmost flexibility and va riety in ritual, so the old lines be in the main adhered to. Let the worship be essentially the traditional worship of the Kirk in her best days; but let reasonable reform be welcomed from all sides, and where a congregation is practically unani-. mous let it have (in reason) what service it pleases. The Church of England has always had this freedom of ritual. Though the prayers to be said be the same, and the Psalms and Lessons, with what variety that order may be rendered! Read quietly in a sick-room, where two or three are gathered: rising to the fitnesses of a parish church with a small or a great congregation; developing, finally, to the glory of the worship of a vast crowd in a majestic cathedral, where one is made to feel that here, indeed, in all things," the offering is of man's very Best. No one has proposed, south of the Tweed, to enforce a senseless and unattainable uniformity. Let the like healthful variety in substantial unity be frankly permitted and recognised in Scotland too. The attempt to enforce a law that an educated congregation in a great or small city shall not have instrumental music or meet for worship on Christmas-day, till every outlying flock in the Hebrides agrees to give them leave to do so, would (if successful) simply drive educated Scotland out of the Church. If our sons

and daughters are not suffered to find what they desire in the Church, they will go elsewhere and get it all.

But I feel I had better stop. I have got into a line on which I could go on at interminable length, but in a fashion which would be wholly without interest to the readers of this Magazine. There is much more I should have liked to tell them: as about the abolition of patronage and how it works and promises to work: the attempts made to conciliate Nonconformists and the success attending these the distinct tendency to play to the galleries which in some quarters now prevails, no doubt in the desire to dish the Dissenters: the hope that certain folk who left the Church because they were so bigoted, ignorant, and stupid, may through these same characteristics be induced to return to her: the very small encouragement hitherto given to that hope. I lately read a pamphlet by a conspicuous Free Churchman in the North, in which the clergy are spoken of in terms of pharisaic condemnation which have probably hardly been equalled since the occasion when an individual standing in the temple thanked God that he was not as other men. There is something grievous, too, in the fashion in which competing 'bodies' advertise their liberality in giving money. Apparently every shilling spent on the whitewashing of a chapel is noted down and reckoned up, so that a great total may be published at the end of the financial year. There are men to whom all this appears in the last degree degrading to all concerned. Yet no doubt it kas its effect. And some day it will all be quoted in speeches in the House of Commons. On the whole, with all drawbacks, the out-look is hopeful. There are good men in all

But we must get out of this stuffy chamber. There is pure air outside, and there are green trees. One or two of the Assembly's decisions were reactionary and regrettable: others were in a high degree goahead. It will all come right next May. There is one comfort: I never saw a better Moderator. Suave, dignified, handsome, quite youthful-looking after his faithful service of six and thirty years, pretty close to the ideal of the clergyman and the gentleman, not lacking in the business talent of his race, was Dr. George Cook, whom the writer is proud to call his dear friend. He arose to give his closing address at 11.30 on the evening of Monday, May 29, and he talked good sense with good taste till I A.M. on Tuesday, May 30. Then His Grace followed with a little speech, genial and dignified: next, the ancient verses of the hundred and twenty-second psalm (the last three) were sung to St. Paul's, as they always are; and the crowded assembly was dismissed with the benediction. In the chilly dawn the members walked away to their several places of abode, pleased that things had ended well, yet bidding each other farewell rather sadly. Princes Street was silent; the trees in the gardens were fragrant; the Castle Rock was grim, not caring in the least about any General Assembly. We must get away home, and take to work again. And there will be things innumerable to do.