Evangelical Union, the name assumed by a religious body constituted in Scotland in 1843 by the Rev. James Morison of Kilmarnock (afterwards Dr Morison of Glasgow, 1816-93) and other three ministers, along with the congregations adhering to them. They had been separated from the United Secession Church on account of their doctrinal views, and were soon increased by a number of ministers and churches expelled from the Congregational Union of Scotland for holding similar doctrines. Their ecclesiastical system is a modified independency, ministers and representative delegates from the churches having control over all denominational funds, as well as over home-mission work and the theological hall. Individual churches have different forms of internal government, some modelled on Presbyterianism, others on Independent usage. In 1889 there were 93 churches; in 1896 the Evangelical Union was incorporated with the Congregational Union of Scotland (see INDEPENDENTS).
The doctrine of this body is expressed in a Doctrinal Declaration, issued in 1858 as an explanation of their faith, but not forming a fixed creed. They are Trinitarians, holding the divinity and substitutionary work of Christ, and the personality of the Holy Spirit. They also hold the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, and in much their teaching corresponds to that of the Wesleyans. The distinctive elements in their creed, which led to the expulsion of their leaders from the bodies to which they belonged, are, in the words of their
'Basis of Union,' the 'love of God the Father in the gift and sacrifice of Jesus to all men everywhere, without distinction, exception, or respect of persons; of God the Son, in the gift and sacrifice of himself as a true propitiation for the sins of the world; and of God the Holy Spirit in his present and continuous work of applying to the souls of all men the provisions of divine grace.'
Believing in the freedom of the human will, they hold election to salvation to be conditional. The whole movement in which the body originated was a reaction from the Calvinistic doctrine of the Westminster Confession, in so far as that relates to predestination and to unconditional election and reprobation. They have been much identified with temperance reform, all their ministers requiring to be total abstainers from intoxicating drinks. Their doctrines have also been known (from Dr Morison's name) as the Morisonian heresy, or as Morisonianism. Their views have been much misrepresented, and for a full statement of these the reader is referred to the Doctrinal Declaration of the Union, and to the 'Basis of Union,' published yearly in the Evangelical Union Annual. See also the History of the Evangelical Union, by Dr Fergus Ferguson (1876).