the strength only of their Divine mission did the blessed Ninian, and Columba, and Kentigern, while the barbarous tribes of our forefathers were held in Gentile errors and idolatry, boldly preach among them the word of salvation, and bring them home as sons to the fellowship of God's Church. Then, as now, the Church had no resources in which to trust but her own hidden might. And, were our faith like that which animated our Apostles and first Fathers, we need not dread the issue. They fearlessly encountered difficulties before which our faint effeminate hearts would quail, labouring in an unkindly region among rude peoplethey endured trials, sufferings, and even martyrdom, but in their toils and blood the Church was planted; in the south, in the west, in the midland, and the northern regions of our country was the heavenly kingdom visibly set up. So great was the zeal, and so wonderful the success that accompanied the blessed labours of the early Fathers of our Church, that one of them is represented, when looking abroad, even in the fifth century, on this fruitful offspring of Christianity and the holy religion everywhere increasing, as giving vent to his gratitude and joy in such strains as the following: "I thank Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, Who, for Thy Holy Name's sake, hast of Thy mercy deigned to illuminate this people for so long time wandering in darkness, and hast caused them to be brought to Thy knowledge: on us, who miserable and darkling heretofore wandered in the region of the Shadow of Death, hath the light of Thy righteousness at length shone, and everlasting peace now reigns among us."

Such was our Mother in her youthful days. How beautiful upon the mountains were her feet bringing good tidings, publishing peace. Her light too was not confined within her own borders; it shone forth also into England. In the seventh century, she conveyed the gift of the Apostolical succession to that country, in the northern parts of which the lately planted Church had been overthrown, when, at the request of an English prince, she consecrated and sent forth as Bishops of Lindisfarne, one after another, the Apostolic Aidan, and Finan, and Colman, by whose zeal and labours Christianity was again restored.2

1 Usserii Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates.-Archbishop Ussher's Works, Vol. vi., p. 220. (Ed. 1842.)

2 Bed. Hist. Eccl., 1. 111., c. iii. v. xiv., § 190. xvii. xxi. xxii. xxv. xxvi., § 238. (Ed. of Eng. Hist. Society, 1838.)

Vicissitudes in the history of our National Church.

5

We can merely, in passing, refer to the stand which the Scottish Church, under that illustrious line of princes the descendants of St. Margaret, so justly and successfully made for her independence against attempted English encroachments. This, also, is not the place to speak at length of that darker era which soon succeeded. How miserably unfaithful, how sadly fallen, the successors of our first Fathers in the faith must have been, before God would have permitted the Church's altars to have been entirely overthrown, in that moral hurricane which swept our land in the sixteenth century!

It opened the way, however, for England to repay the debt she owed us. In the seventeenth century the English Church re stored to us that Divine gift of succession which we had conveyed to her in the seventh. But the time was not yet come for God to have mercy on Zion. Men rose in rebellion against all lawful authority, both spiritual and temporal, and the Church was for a time trampled under foot both in this country and in England.

The death of Laud and Charles, who were martyred as much for the cause of the Scottish Church as for that of her English sister, proved the salvation of the Church and of the Monarchy; and, again, in 1661, England had the privilege of consecrating Bishops for the Scottish Church. It is most instructive here to notice how careful the Scottish Bishops and their Sovereigns, on the one hand, were, both on this occasion and on the previous one in 1610, to avoid anything which might have had the semblance of sacrificing the independent character of their native Church; and how scrupulously the English Church, on the other, guarded against whatever might have the appearance of an assumption of any right of interference in Scotland. The Church, now allied to human power, to outward eyes seemed about to enjoy a season of prosperity; but her trials were not over. The acts of unscrupulous, worldly, or profligate politicians (who, having no thought of her true office and character, seized upon her, and, in her name, pretended to justify their own cruel policy), sadly dimmed her Divine aspect, and obscured her Apostolic witness. She was soon, however, to be freed from this thraldom.

The Revolution of 1688 followed. History records few nobler instances of self-sacrifice, for the cause of high principle and the truth, than that made at this period by the Scottish Bishops and Church. Had they so chosen-if they had been willing to pay the price-they might have purchased the continuance of the Church's

8 The Scottish Bishops Confessors for the Truth.

real sense, were ready to expel her to make way for any body that promised, for the time, to serve better their immediate designs. Thus they thought to put out the name and quench the light of our Scottish Mother, but her

".. brows are royal yet; God's unction aye endures."

From the highest sense of duty, and with the fullest knowledge and appreciation of the extent of responsibility which had devolved upon them, the Scottish Bishops took up their position where truth and loyalty had marked the ground, resolved" to stand by it in the face of all dangers, and to the greatest of losses." They gave up their all, so far as earth was concerned, but the heavenly deposit they dared not yield. The Ark of God's Church had been committed to their keeping, and, even had they desired it, no choice was left to them; for "that power which Christ had given them they were accountable to the Lord for it. But they could not give it away, neither from themselves nor from their successors, for it was theirs only to use, not to part with it."2 Such, indeed, were the principles and the feelings which actuated the self-denying and noble-minded Prelates of our Church at this trying crisis, and we find them giving utterance to them in the following touching and solemn language, on the occasion of the first Consecration of Bishops which followed the Revolution:-" Weighing well," they say, "weighing well, in the fear of the Lord, that the greater part of our most dearly beloved brethren and colleagues in the Episcopal College have, in this late and mournful period of our Church, fallen asleep in the Lord, and that we who by Divine mercy remain, are very few, and all but worn out by divers cares and maladies, and the increasing weight of old age: Wherefore, from the duty which we owe to Almighty God, our Saviour, to His Holy Church, and to posterity, we have resolved to commit the Episcopal office, character, and powers, to other approved and faithful men fit to teach and to govern."3 Although, therefore, the

The Answer of the Archbishop of St. Andrew's to the Duke of Hamilton. Appendix to Keith's Catalogue of Scottish Bishops, p. 496.

2 Sherlock's Summary of Controversies, p. 119, quoted in Bishop Skinner's Sermon, preached at Aberdeen 14th November, 1784, on the occasion of the Consecration of Dr. Seabury as Bishop of Connecticut. Aberdeen, 1785. P. 14.

3" In timore Domini ponderantes plerosque fratrum nostrorum carissimorum, et in Collegio Episcopali collegarum (hoc nupere elapso et Ecclesiæ nostræ luctuoso curriculo) in Domino abdormiise, nosque perpaucos qui Divina miseri

The Witness of the Scottish Church under persecution. 9

Church had been deserted and proscribed by the State, she remained true to her own Apostolical character and institution; and, as the spiritual Mother of Scotland, continued to lift up her witness as she best might in the midst of persecution, insult, and suffering. We cannot pause here to speak at length of the Church's season of trial and confessorship. Nothing but her Divine existence and character could have preserved her in that exterminating persecution to which she was subjecteda persecution planned with such consummate art, and persevered in with such relentlessness, that the miracle is, not that few remained faithful, but that the visible form of the Church even survived at all. We know, indeed, of no parallel to it, but those measures by which the apostate Julian thought to compass his presumptuous design of extinguishing the light of Christianity itself, and which were such, that even a pagan historian,1 the panegyrist of Julian, has recorded his wish for the credit of his hero, that they had been buried in perpetual oblivion. We may form some faint idea, how intensely bitter that period of endurance must have been which the faithful adherents of the Church underwent, from the rancorous tone which, even yet, is on every side excited by the merest reference to the sufferings of our fathers, sufferings, be it remembered, as much undergone for our sakes as for their own. Whenever we read or hear such language, from whatever quarter it may come, we ought thankfully to listen to it as the unwilling testimony of the enemy to our fathers' patient confessorship for the truth's sake, and as a warning to ourselves how little we have deserved the preservation of that truth so dearly won for us, whose inestimable privileges we have so faintly realised and acted up to, and for which we have done so little. How unworthy indeed have we all often proved ourselves of that Truth which has been handed on to us. How have we carried on that testimony? Have our sacrifices kept pace with our boastings? Nay, have not our stammering words frequently belied our Mother? Have we not too often sought

cordia superstites sumus, multiplicibus curis, morbis, atque ingravescente senio tantum non confectos esse: Quapropter ex eo quod Deo Supremo, Servatori nostro, sacrosanctæ Ejus Ecclesiæ, et posteris debemus, in animum induximus, officium, caracterem, et facultatem Episcopalem, aliis probis, fidelibus, ad docendum et regendum idoneis hominibus committere." Letters of Consecration of Bishop Sage, 25th January, 1705. Appendix to Keith's Catalogue of Scottish Bishops, p. 518.

1 Ammianus Marcellinus.

The

to cast the mantle of the world around her, and obscure that witness which she has been set faithfully to maintain ? Church ought to be as a city set on a hill which cannot be hid, and her light derived from above should stream forth clearly that the world may know and behold her. Let us not then allow ourselves to be deceived and misled, by the insidious temptations of the worldly spirit, to acquiesce in its false maxims of liberality. If the Church in Scotland be a sound member of the Universal Church, she is the spiritual Mother of all Christians in this country-she alone is entitled to claim their allegiance. The Church can occupy no neutral ground; she is either the Church absolutely or not at all. In one locality there can be but one society, whose communion Christians are bound to seek in preference to all others. "The Lord himself," says St. Cyprian, "admonishes and teaches us in His Gospel, saying, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd; and does any one imagine that there can be in one place many shepherds or many flocks?" This then is the position occupied by the Scottish Church. By the most solemn command of her Lord, her especial work upon earth is to bear witness to the one truth, to bring all men into one fold, to denounce and eradicate all error, to carry on an unceasing war against the powers of darkness:2 an awfully great and responsible position, doubtless, in times like the present; but on us her sons, will mainly fall the loss, the shame, and the punishment, if she shall prove unworthy of it.

Now, without further statement or reasoning, it is evident from these considerations how inexcusable is the conduct, and how indefensible the position, of those who have so lately departed from the Church. By their separation, they have not only by their own act, "when the Church neither wished nor desired it, from their own consciences passed sentence upon them

1 We have no occasion here to consider any exceptions to this fundamental principle of the Church, which may exist in some extreme cases of societies or individuals, who, although not in communion with the Church of the country in which they reside, still may not be separated from the Church Catholic. Whatever may be thought of such cases, it is most abundantly evident that they cannot, in the slightest degree, afford the shadow of a justification to the recent schismatics.

2 See Palmer's Treatise on the Church of Christ, vol. i. p. 68, and Sewell's Christian Politics, pp. 281, 286, 287, 295. The Scottish Church indeed is the only body that even claims to be the Church of our country in the proper ecclesiastical sense of the term.