Free Church of Scotland, the name assumed by those who at the 'Disruption' of the Church of Scotland, in 1843, withdrew from connection with the state, and formed themselves into a distinct religious community, claiming to represent the historic church of Scotland, and to maintain the principles for which it has contended since the Reformation.
There has been no serious difference between the Free Church of Scotland and the Established Church in the standards which they have hitherto received; but a catechism, approved by the Free Church Assembly after 1843, makes the right to vary the document of creed, or to exchange it for another (without the sanction of the state), one of the tests of the freedom claimed for the church against the decisions of 1843. Speaking generally, it may be said that the laws of the church existing and in force prior to the Disruption are acknowledged as still binding in the Free as in the Established Church, but only in so far as they have had church authority, and with the exception of those which the Free Church has since repealed. The same Presbyterian constitution subsists in both churches, with the same classes of office-bearers and gradations of church-courts. The Free Church, indeed, professes to maintain this constitution and church-government in a perfection impossible in the present circumstances of the Established Church, because of the supremacy of parliament by which the Established Church is trammelled, and interventions of civil authority to which it is liable. And the whole difference between the Free Church and the Established Church relates to the necessary submission of the Established Church to this control of the civil power in things which the Free Church regards as belonging not to the province of civil government, but to the church of Christ, and to its office-bearers and courts as deriving authority from him; so that the controversy was often described as respecting the Headship of Christ or the Kingdom of Christ. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the doctrine of the headship of Christ over his church, being set forth in the Westminster standards, is fully professed both by the Established Church and by the Free Church of Scotland; the only question between them is whether or not the existing relations of the Established Church of Scotland to the state are consistent with the due maintenance and practical exhibition of this doctrine. And the question does not directly relate to Voluntaryism (q.v.). Those who constituted the Free Church of Scotland in 1843 firmly believed that the church might be connected with the state, and receive countenance and support from it, to the advantage of both. But they maintained that there must not, for the sake of any apparent benefits flowing from such connection, be any sacrifice of the independence or self-government of the church, as the kingdom of Christ, deriving its existence, organisation, and laws from him. Even then, too, most of the leaders of the Free Church held, with Dr Candlish and Dr Cunningham, that the separation of 1843 was practically final, and that in the improbable event of the state acknowledging the church's independence the church should hesitate before again forming with it so close and perilous a connection. The leaning thus indicated has since then steadily increased. Many of the second generation of Free Churchmen have accepted as practically if not theoretically true the inconsistency repeatedly urged upon their fathers by the law-courts, as existing between the claim of church freedom and all establishment whatever. And in coming to the same conclusion of final separation from establishment they have increasingly connected it with the equal rights of conscience of all citizens, and not, as their fathers did, with the claims and confession of the church alone.
The Westminster Confession of Faith asserts that 'there is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ;' and that 'the Lord Jesus, as King and Head of His church, hath therein appointed a government in the hand of church-officers, distinct from the civil magistrate.' The early Presbyterians of Scotland so far prevailed as to obtain at different times important acts of parliament in recognition of their principles, and 'ratification of the liberty of the true kirk;' and finally, after the Revolution of 1688, an act ratified the Westminster Confession of Faith itself, and incorporated with the statute law of the realm all its statements concerning the province of church-judicatories and that of the civil magistrate, and the bounds of their respective powers. The rights and privileges of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, guaranteed by the Revolution settlement, were expressly secured by the Treaty of Union, and jealously reserved from the power of the British parliament; yet within five years afterwards, when Jacobite counsels prevailed in the court of Queen Anne, an act was passed for the restoration of patronage in Scotland, with the design of advancing the Jacobite interest by rendering ministers more dependent on the aristocracy. This act soon became the cause of strife within the Church of Scotland, and of separations from it during the 18th century. But when the 'Moderate' party, long dominant in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, became again the minority in 1834, the accession of the 'Evangelical' party to power was at once signalled by an attempt to restore to the congregation its influence in the election of their pastor. This was done by the Veto Law, by which it was declared that 'it is a fundamental law of this church that no pastor shall be intruded on any congregation contrary to the will of the people.' And the same General Assembly by which the Veto Act was passed asserted the constitutional principles and inherent powers of the church in another important particular, the admission of the ministers of 'chapels of ease' to the same ecclesiastical status as the ministers of endowed parishes, in consequence of which they became members of church-courts, and had districts assigned to them quoad sacra, with the full parochial organisation.
These acts were soon the subject of litigation in the Court of Session. A conflict arose which in various forms agitated the whole of Scotland, and which, ere long, related as much to the status of chapel ministers (and of ministers whom the church had of its own authority gladly welcomed back from the seceding bodies outside) as to the mere rights of presentees. It involved, indeed, the whole question of the relations of civil and ecclesiastical powers, at least as far as the Established Church was concerned. There was scarcely a spiritual or ecclesiastical act falling within the region thus dealt with by the church which the court did not now 'interdict' and prohibit; while other spiritual acts, such as admission to the ministry, it ordered the church to perform under penalties. But a graver matter still was the principle upon which these orders were uniformly based. The court not merely disallowed the claim of the church to freedom and legislative self-expansion; it founded its long series of judgments, beginning with the Auchterarder case, on the absolute subjection of the church to parliament, and on the authority of statute even in matters ecclesiastical. The heads of the Court of Session and House of Lords announced the law that 'parliament is the temporal head of the church, from which it derives all its powers;' that 'the law, and that alone, gave the church jurisdiction;' that therefore it is impossible to admit, not only 'that an establishment can ever possess an independent jurisdiction,' but even that there can be such a thing as 'a conflict between the civil and ecclesiastical courts of a country in which a church is established and endowed by the state.' And as to the plea that the rights of congregations were guarded on the religious side by a 'fundamental law' of the church, the House of Lords laid it down that 'whether that is, or ever was, a law of the Church of Scotland, is perfectly immaterial, if the statutes contain enactments and confer rights inconsistent with it.' These principles, common enough in the jurisprudence of some countries, appeared violently hostile to the old doctrine of the Church of Scotland. But the one thing in which that church now agreed with the court was that its carrying out the orders of the latter in the church sphere would involve acquiescence in the principles of establishment authoritatively laid down. Accordingly, the General Assembly formally refused, and in 1842, by a majority of 241 to 110, passed a Claim of Right, declaring to parliament and the crown that the church, unless relief were granted, must separate from the state. In November of the same year a Convocation was held to arrange for the future. In parliament Mr Fox Maule's motion for inquiry, made on 7th March 1843, was supported by a large majority of the Scotch members, but rejected by Sir Robert Peel and the house. The crisis came on 18th May 1843, when the General Assembly should have constituted itself in Edinburgh. Instead of doing so, the ex-Moderator, Dr Welsh, handed a protest to the Queen's commissioner, and he and the others who had signed it, issuing from St Andrew's Church, moved in a long procession down the northern slope of Edinburgh to Canonmills. There 474 ministers (out of a total of 1203) resigned their churches, incomes, and homes; and amid a scene of great emotion Dr Chalmers was called to the chair of the first Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland.
The event produced an impression throughout Christendom. 'To the moral attitude of the Free Church,' said Mr Gladstone to the House of Commons a quarter of a century later, 'scarcely any word weaker or lower than that of majesty is, according to the spirit of historical criticism, justly applicable.' The sacrifices and sufferings which not only its ministers but its congregations were called on to undergo, especially in districts where land-owners for years refused sites for buildings, were no doubt the first cause of this. But something must be allowed to the extraordinary qualities of the Scotsmen who became the leaders and founders of the new body. Dr Chalmers, the greatest of them all; Dr Candlish, for thirty years his brilliant successor; Dr William Cunningham, the controversialist and theologian of the body; Dr Robert Buchanan, its administrator (in his Ten Years' Conflict) its historian; Dr Guthrie, its orator; Mr Murray Dunlop, its lawyer; Hugh Miller, its littérateur; these men and some others, as they are sketched in their own utterances and in books like Lord Cockburn's Journal, take no common rank even as individuals. And they formed a group so impressive, intellectually and morally, that even the Duke of Argyll, who declined as a young man to follow the Free Church, when looking back thirty years later over the Victorian age with its statesmen and thinkers, describes these as 'the best and greatest men whom I have ever known.' But what chiefly attracted the eyes of public men outside Scotland to the Free Church was its success as an experiment in the voluntary support of the church on the great scale—by means of contributions not local or congregational, but with a national altruism and solidarity. The foundation for this success was already laid in its Presbyterian constitution, which, as Lord Selborne observes, always enables a church, so long as it is not impeded from without, to exercise itself 'in the whole art and power of self-government, self-legislation, and self-expansion.' But the crisis called for new efforts and more powerful organisation. The order of deacons was restored or enlarged; an army of local collectors worked under them, and the money locally collected was paid into a central Sustentation Fund and equally divided among the ministers throughout Scotland. A hundred thousand pounds was subscribed for building the churches even before the day of the disruption: five hundred of them were built within the first year. Manses were erected; schools built for the schoolmasters, for they also had been obliged to leave the parish schools; colleges instituted for theological students, under professors now excluded by law from the universities; and a home mission or church extension scheme was founded, through whose influence the number of pastoral charges in the Free Church has been almost doubled. But the church found it impossible, even amid the struggles of its infancy, to confine itself within Scotland. All its missionaries throughout the world had left the state with it, and thrown up their enrolments; and schemes and funds for foreign missions, for colonial missions, for continental missions, for Jewish missions, and a special scheme for the Highlands and Islands were instantly and simultaneously started. That enthusiasm should initiate all this in the moment of suffering was, perhaps, not wonderful: what is more noteworthy is the permanence of the results. During the earlier part of the first half-century of its existence the contributions of the Free Church maintained their average, and during the later part they have much increased it. The following are the figures for the year opening each decade: 1843, £363,871; 1853, £289,670; 1863, £343,626; 1873, £511,084; 1883, £628,222. For the year ending in 1899 the amount was £713,742. In 1900 there were 1070 regular charges in the church.
The history of the Free Church since 1843 has reflected increasingly the general course of church life outside it in Scotland. In its earlier years it was much occupied, like every body on a national scale, with questions of centralisation as against local government. Thus, a controversy whether it should have one college or more was terminated by its adherents in Glasgow and Aberdeen liberally endowing, and so securing, the institutions in either city. In 1858 the Cardross Case arose, and created much interest, as raising legal questions affecting Free Church principles. But, while the earlier decisions of the Scottish courts in it appeared to threaten interference even with the internal action of churches, their later findings refused to the deposed minister of Cardross the means of prosecuting even that civil action of damages which the church professed their readiness to meet. In 1863 Dr Candlish and Dr Buchanan started the proposal of union with the United Presbyterian Church, which had by this time gathered into itself nearly all the Scottish secessions of the 18th century. Negotiations went on for years, and terminated in 1873 in a postponement of incorporating union, but with an obligation for a working agreement in the meantime, to include 'mutual eligibility' of ministers. Renewed and promising negotiations were in progress in 1896-98. In 1874 patronage was abolished by parliament in the church established, without any proposed change upon the general Scottish law of church and state. The Free Church Assembly at once resolved that disestablishment was the proper remedy for the divisions of Scottish Presbyterianism (see note); and its union in 1876 with the Cameronian body (see CAMERONIANS) seemed to unite these ancient traditions with modern views. Theological questions of course retained their dominant interest; and in 1881 the church refused to retain Mr Robertson Smith as its professor in Aberdeen, while declining at the same time to affirm that his biblical views were heretical. This compromise was unsatisfactory to all sides. In 1889 a large committee was appointed to consider the question of revising the church's confession while maintaining its central doctrines of faith. Although its Highland ministers were well known not to agree with their Lowland brethren about the necessity for creed revision and union with churches that renounce the Establishment principle, on the resumption of negotiations for union with the United Presbyterian Church it became clear that the party insisting on maintaining in full the testimony of the church to the Establishment principle had decreased; from 1896 on increasing majorities voted for the union under the leadership of Principal Rainy. The two churches, each retaining its principles, finally agreed (the Free Church by a majority of 643 to 27, the United Presbyterians unanimously) to incorporation as the United Free Church; and though a small protesting party withdrew and claimed the name and rights of the Free Church, the union was consummated at Edinburgh in a joint assembly on the 31st October 1900.
See Subordinate Standards of the Free Church, with 'Claim of Right' and 'Protest' (1851); Buchanan's Ten Years' Conflict (1849); Taylor Innes, Law of Creeds in Scotland (1867); Annals of the Disruption (1877); and works by Bayne (1893) and Riley (1893).