Sword & Trowel 2020: Issue 1
the Church of Scotland (the national church) who could no longer tolerate the practice of so-called patronage. This was the legally valid and en- forced practice in Scotland whereby a patron, often the local landowner, sometimes the British crown, had the right to choose who would be the parish minister, regardless of the wishes of the congregation. This meant that non-evangelical ministers would often be foisted on to an evan- gelical congregation by landowner or crown. After an epic ten-year struggle
(1833-43) by Church of Scotland evangelicals to have the patronage law repealed, the majority of them finally decided in 1843 that the cause was lost. Almost all the evangeli- cal ministers of the national church then broke away in May 1843, and reconstituted themselves as the Free Church of Scotland, where each congregation had the right to elect its own minister. To give you some idea of how serious the split from the
national church was, it lost roughly one third of all its ministers – 474 Church of Scotland ministers out of a total of 1226 left the national church. In the Scottish Highlands, almost the entire population abandoned the parish churches and joined the Free Church. This left the Highlands a virtual desert and wasteland as far as the national church was concerned. The Free Church became the church of the Scottish Highlands. Its numeri- cal strength in the Scottish lowlands, however, was still substantial. The Free Church of Scotland was
a movement of evangelical protest against state interference in church life – a protest we ourselves may have to imitate, sooner or later, under the creeping tyranny of political correct- ness. My personal sympathies are with those Church of Scotland min- isters who walked out of the national church in 1843. For many of those ministers it was a courageous choice, leaving them without a manse, without a church building, without a guaranteed in- come, sometimes facing fierce hos- tility from local landowners. This movement
of protest was led by some of the grandest names in
New College, Edinburgh was built in 1846 as a college of the Free Church of Scotland.
page 20 From Divine Revelation to Human Reason
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
