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CHALMERS AT LAST A DISSENTER.

such things occur not here alone! non nobiscum solum, but, alas they are to be found in all Europe, especially where royal prerogative interferes, for some favorites by mandamus, and the oraculous degree-makers respond, in all their loyalty, and somebody is emblazed by fiat of the king!* But, all this apart, it is now our hope, as it was then our averment, that the tendency of things among us, on the whole, counterworking other and lamented tendencies, the stronger against the weaker, is UPWARD as well as ONWARD; elevation as well as progress; raising the standard of education, and scholarship, and universal learning, ab ovo usque ad malum, of the whole curriculum and the total entertainment.

On other topics I think it not necessary to dwell. In what is here written, the reader is probably aware that I profess to give the substance mainly, without the form or the order, historical, of our conversation. But I have aimed in all to represent the truth, and especially to do justice to the high and lucid character of Chalmers. In quite a number of instances, I have used very nearly his language, his identical words, and in all have shown fairly, I trust, his real sentiments. On the subject of establishments, little could either of us suspect what occurred about ten years afterward at the memorable disruption, as they correctly term it-when Chalmers became de facto et de jure a dissenter; leading that grand and general exodus from the Established Church of Scotland, which is now so exemplary and so honorable in our American eyes, and in the eyes of all the world, as the FREE Church OF SCOTLAND. They are now, we trust, free indeed; and what is this but a confession of the compromises and the bondage of their former state, as well as that yet extant of the residuary Church there? These are they "free?"

It was in July, 1846, that, on my second visit to Scotland, I again enjoyed the pleasure of several interviews with ChalHe was living at Morningside, a mile or two from * I say nothing of bribes for honors, and Alma Matres growing rich-BY DEGREES.

mers.

POLITICS-PARTISAN AND MONETARY SWAY. 73

Edinburgh, in a suburban retreat from the smoke, and the din, and the dust of the metropolis. There, on one occasion, I breakfasted with him; on another, had a second full conference with him alone, and by appointment, in his study, and afterward a preaching service with him, of a singular character, in Burk's Close, West Port, just south of the Castle of Edinburgh. Of these three interviews, selecting some interesting parts of each, I shall attempt, in the sequel, some description—omitting others, as, on different accounts, less proper to my pen or the public eye.

Cæ

Great changes had occurred in the interval of thirteen years. No longer was Chalmers the propugnator of establishments on either side of the Tweed. Whatever might be his philosophic preference or his general theory, he was Cæsar's man no more. Chalmers was, in fact, a dissenter. sar's men and he were at odds. They called him a worshiper in conventicles, and his party a set of renegades from civil and ecclesiastical order. The Bishop of London would award him no more favors or honors-like the composition of a Bridgewater, with the convenient quiddam honorarium of a thousand sterling for his exemplary and his masterly trouble and performance. He was now in combat for the rights and the sites of new church edifices; and the proud, and the loyal, and the inexorable Dukes of Buccleugh and Sutherland, with all the stipendiary officials of the queen, and all the religionists in the queendom, whose consciences are in the keeping of royal favor and the public purse, were illumined, and converted, and confirmed by bishops to be his enemies.

The exchequer of England is a powerful casuist. It is also an oracle, a magnet, and an enlightener of the eyes. Some men can plainly see their duty only in relation to it; and if wrong by coincidence, it requires more powerful argument than Chalmers could wield to convince them of it. Hence the mighty ferment, the collisions, and the animosities, and the alienations accruing and rampant in Scotland. The

D

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PRESBYTERIANS IN EARNEST.

Scotch have neck of their own, and a vertebral column which, when stiffened to a special perpendicular, will brook no common deflection from its assumed, and commonly its real rectitude. The spirit of Knox is not dead in the nation -if we may so speak. Hence their partisan warfare is no child's play. They scatter the rooks, by breaking up the rookeries and tearing down their nesting-places. There are no controvertists, especially in a matter where religion is concerned, or its apostolical purity and polity, against prelacy and the Stuarts, or their resultant branches, is implicated; none so stern, so tenacious, so impregnable as the roused and the resolute Presbyterians of Scotland. And well they may be—mindful of all the bloody raids and infernal persecutions which the treacherous Charleses and the persecuting Jameses have enacted to persuade them, vi et armis, to forego the truth of the glorious gospel of the blessed God, and the excellent order that it inspires, and that maintains its purity and its glory, and take that meretricious system to which the Stuarts apostatized, and in which, with terrible consistency, Cæsar takes the precedence, and Christ is a mere appendage to his usurpations, eclipsed and perverted at that, and properly Head no more of his own Church—if his, in propriety, may still be called and continue! No wonder they have an ancestral and a patriotic, as well as a religious horror of the prelatical system, of all Erastianism, and of whatever they conceive inimical to the true interests of Scotland and the Church of God. Hence the severity of their present partisanship.

it

It was like the civil war of the roses, the red and the white in bloody contest, only that the arena was more contracted; words were used, and not bullets, and the contest was ecclesiastical, or rather ecclesiastico-political alone. Many of his friends and brethren of the Free Church were worshiping in the open air, sometimes where two or more ways met, exposed to all the stormy perils of the boreal elements, because

DISRUPTION HERE AND THERE.

75

their principles had wrought their secernment from their former places of worship, and because the great lords of the soil in their vicinities denied them a site on which to build a house for the glory of their God, and the celebration of his proper, and his primitive, and his purer worship, according to their creed, and their conscience, and their Bible.

Besides, Presbyterianism was shaken in the other hemisphere—its fabric, not its principles; and like their national ecclesiastical device, the burning bush, in flames and yet unscathed, because the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob is there, its motto was every where vindicated-NEC CON* a piece of eternal asbestos which fire can illustrate, but not destroy. There had been a disruption, also, in America, a few years older than theirs; and this fact occasioned some mutual interest and sympathy, as well as suggested several topics of inquiry and explanation.

SUMEBATUR ;

It was plain to myself that the mind of Chalmers, as well as other minds in league with him, were in process of undergoing a great change in reference to the question of "the Christian expediency" of enthroning Cæsar in the kingdom of heaven. God was teaching them a lesson, which their great teachers were slow to learn, and slower to propagate, about the sole HEADSHIP of Jesus Christ in his own Church; and that his kingdom is not of this world, in a sense and to a degree which their previous wisdom had not appreciated. God will do more, in this way, there and in our own country.

It was hard for the renowned advocates and the time-honored champions of establishment all at once to revolutionize their sentiments, and their preaching, and their publishing, on that great theme; with friends and enemies by thousands, alike the spectators of the movement, and alike or variously interested in its similar or its various issues. They had to change their tactics, their allies, and the very nomenclature of their technical erudition. It was intrusion or non-intru

* The motto of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

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ANTIQUITY MORE ANCIENT.

sion; Christ or Cæsar; the only true and worthy headship of the Church; the apostolic way; a spiritual legitimacy or a corrupt Erastianism; a free church or a servile one; the primitive precedents and the traditions of the feudal ages; texts of Scripture and acts of Parliament; a good conscience and a fat stipend; Christian principle and temporizing policy. It was a time of new questions, new issues, and new controversies, in Scotland. It was this-or its opposite, in stiff conflict. It was, generically, a new phase of papacy or protestantism. It was a learned going back to the sacred antiquity of the Christian fathers, with all the lore and the ore of their precious wisdom-or a going farther back, to a more learned, and a more sacred, and a more ancient antiquity, of the Christian GRANDFATHERS, the Apostles themselves; as the inspired and the plenipotentiary oracles of Christ, with their documents of divine wisdom; standing on the platforms that inspired, and supported, and constituted all the sound, and the true, and the valuable, of “the Christian fathers;" and that would have made them more and better, if those Christian fathers, in their own patristic folly and manifold imperfections, had not so often deserted those divine platforms-the only basis of wisdom and of safety to the standing and the walking of any uninspired adventurer of any other age subsequent in this world, ancient or modern, peasant or philosopher, Christian or theologian, Turk or Jew; and in any age of the world, virtually just the same thing! God's true sheep drink of the rain of heaven from the pure springs that Himself has opened for them in the side of the Rock of Ages; while churchism, in all its manifold forms of mutual exclusiveness and fantastic dotage, enacts the dirty idolatry of drinking only at the turbid streams-the farther removed from the proper fountain, the better; since then their illusion of antiquity has a more imposing range, and a vaster retrospect, gloriously umbrageous, and canopied by the venerable and the filthy smoke of the paganizing, the illiterate, and the