INTRODUCTION
In May 1893, Scotland experienced a Second Disruption when two
ministers, Donald Macfarlane of Raasay and Donald Macdonald of Shieldaig, left
the Free Church. 
They were followed by a hand-full of students who
had been intending to enter the Free Church ministry, as well as a considerable
number of Free Church members and adherents. Within a short period of time the
new Church which they founded had come to be known as the Free Presbyterian
Church of Scotland. Another Scottish denomination had been born.
There were many reasons why the Free Church, itself
the product of the Disruption of 1843, split again in 1893; why a Church which was once
`so happily united that you have no right hand and no left in that place' became one of the most bitterly-divided
denominations in the protestant world. Within the confines of this paper,
though, these reasons will be divided into four basic areas. It will commence
with a section which emphasises those aspects of the changing world which,
directly or indirectly, most affected the Free Churchmen who left at the Free
Presbyterian Disruption; the second section will examine the bitter divisions
engendered in the Free Church by one of the most significant areas of change in
the nineteenth century - biblical criticism; the third section explores the
central issue of the division within the Free Church between the Highlands and
Lowlands; and the fourth and final section is a survey of the movement towards
revision of the Westminster Confession which was to be the official
justification for the Free Presbyterian Disruption. But it is with a brief
examination of the wider situation which produced the Free Presbyterian Church
that this paper commences.
SECTION ONE: THE CHANGING WORLD
On
examination of the process by which the Free Church became sufficiently divided
for another disruption to take place, it becomes clear that the general air of
uncertainty created by the changing world played an important part. One example
was the industrialisation and urbanisation of Scotland, which by the late
nineteenth century was posing serious questions to churchmen. Many within the
Free Church were immensely worried by Scotland's sprawling urban areas,
containing some of the worst slums in Europe. But while some Free Churchmen
undoubtedly saw themselves as having a divinely ordained duty to do their best
to help the poor in their midst, others felt that their duty as a Church was not
to involve themselves in political and social issues but to concentrate on the
preaching of the Gospel.
This was all complicated by the fact that the Free
Church was, in the Lowlands at any rate, becoming more of a middle class
church; S. J. Brown said of the years after 1843 that `the Free Church became
an increasingly middle class body, with a membership proud of their strict work
ethic and social status'. When even a relatively enlightened Free Churchman
like W. G. Blaikie could express the views that the vast majority of the
population were destined to be `hewers of wood and drawers of water,' and that the churches' role in helping the
working classes out of their depressed state was `to stand by and to shout
encouragement to them,' it should perhaps not be surprising that the Free
Church did not do more to respond to the problems of urbanisation. It is
clearly a complex issue but it is evident that the urbanisation of Scotland,
with all its attendant social problems, was a vexing backdrop against which the
Free Church had to work out its position. Disunity was probably always the most
likely consequence.
At the same time the Free Church - a denomination
which was proportionally better represented in the north than in the south of
Scotland - had to grapple with the many problems faced by its Highland people.
The picture was extremely complex, as the combined factors of migration,
emigration, clearances, new technology and economic pressures on both tenants
and landlords all contributed to the difficulties in the region. Earlier
conflicts in the Highlands over the clearances - which, whatever their origins, had left a legacy of helplessness and intense
resentment throughout the Highlands - gave way in the later part of the century
to bitter confrontation over the Land Laws; the legislation governing
land-holding in the Highlands. The church often found itself forced either to
get involved or face the consequences of unpopularity. The grim example was the
Church of Scotland, which had been all but deserted in the Highlands in 1843
partly as a result of Highland antagonism over the Church's lack of activity at
the time of the Clearances.
When it came to the 1880's the religious input to
the struggle was much more overt - the Land Laws campaigner Henry George saw
the land campaign as `essentially a religious movement' - and again the churchman had to ask himself if
it was possible and, if so, practical to turn a blind eye to the issue, saying
that his `kingdom was not of this world'. This subject is worthy of a paper in
its own right, but what is important to bear in mind here is the existence of
this exceedingly controversial issue within the Free Church at exactly the same
time as many other Church issues were beginning to come under review. It seems
almost impossible to ignore the extremely traumatic reconstruction which had
racked the Highlands throughout the nineteenth century when considering the
religious conflicts in that region which characterised the latter years of the
century; it was, indeed, a time of transition, with conflict all but inevitable
and schism an ever-present prospect.
There were naturally many other factors which
contributed to the changing world of nineteenth-century Scotland - the decline
of traditional sabbatarianism and the increasing Roman Catholic population to
name but two - and taken as a whole the social turbulence of the late
nineteenth century threw up profound challenges for churchmen; for Highlanders
of theologically conservative views this was crucial in contributing to their
outlook. They found themselves in a rapidly changing world and this exaggerated
the apparent threats posed by change within the Church. Of course this
turbulence alone did not produce the Free Presbyterian Disruption, but in
varying ways it was transforming the world in which the men who were to form
the Free Presbyterian Church lived and worked; in many ways their
self-perception as a small group of righteous men facing an alien and hostile
world is a direct - if not inevitable - product of the times which moulded
them.
SECTION TWO: BIBLICAL CRITICISM
In
an age of change and development, almost every accepted religious theory was
being tested in what the Free Church professor Marcus Dods 
described as the `crucible' of criticism. Men were
being confronted with what has been called `the riddles to which the spirit of
a new age was demanding a solution from every thinking man'. In the memorable words of one moderator of the
Free Church General Assembly as he looked back over the developments of the
nineteenth century;
There has been no lack of scrutiny.
Every question connected with the Faith has been placed under the microscope;
everything sacred, whether book or doctrine, has been called on to show its
credentials. Science, philosophy, criticism, history, have each been led
forward to take part in the testing process.
In the minds of conservative churchmen in general
and of the Free Presbyterian founders in particular, perhaps the intellectual
movement which did most to cast doubt on the veracity of `the Old Paths' during
the nineteenth century was biblical criticism. This is not the place to repeat
the history of biblical criticism; what is important to understand though is how the
Free Church of Scotland responded to this vital area of nineteenth-century
thought. And it is quite evident that the Free Church did not make a unified
response to developments in biblical criticism; indeed these different
responses produced a lasting bitterness which ultimately contributed to the
Free Church splitting in 1893.
On one side the Free Church had some of the most
celebrated biblical critics in Britain. One such was William Robertson Smith,
the brilliant young academic appointed a professor
in the Free Church in 1870 at the age of
twenty-three, and whose writings accepted many of the most far-reaching
conclusions of continental (especially German) biblical criticism. While men like A. B. Davidson, 
Smith's teacher at the New College in Edinburgh,
played a vital part, it is widely acknowledged that it was Smith who did most
to make the critical movement visible, with his popular writings in such places
as the Encyclopedia Britannica and his much publicised heresy trials in
the late 1870s and early 1880s. Smith's role, perhaps, was to take his various
mentors' ideas further than they had been taken before from within the pale of
a Church which considered itself fairly rigidly Calvinist. By the last quarter
of the nineteenth century the doctrines of biblical higher criticism had very
much `arrived' in the Free Church of Scotland, where they were preached with
vigour by some of the leading men of the Church, such as A. B. Bruce, Henry
Drummond and Marcus Dods. Dods, in fact, once described biblical criticism in
the following terms:
Criticism is not a hostile force
hovering round the march of the Christian Church, picking off all loosely
attached followers and galling the main body; it is rather the highly trained
corps of scouts and skirmishers thrown out on all sides to ascertain in what
direction it is safe and possible for the Church to advance.
Many others in the Church would have agreed with
this view.
The problem for the Free Church, however, was that
it also contained within its pale some of biblical criticism's fiercest
adversaries. One of the first Free Presbyterians, Neil Cameron, 
for example, referred to the men responsible for
making `the absolute infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible, as being the
Word of God...become a thing of the past' as `traitors to God and men', while
referring to the changes which were taking place in the Free Church as `this
flood which Satan was casting out of his mouth in order to carry her (the Free
Church) away completely.' Professors Davidson and Dods were two of the
principal enemies of all that these conservatives held dear, but Cameron's
colleague Donald Beaton did see a distinction:
(Davidson's) great gifts were used
in administering the higher critical poison in small doses. It was done
cautiously, but none the less effectively.... Dr Dods was not quite so
cautious; he poured out glassfuls where Davidson administered drops, but both
in the Old Testament and in the New Testament studies the deadly poison was
instilled into the minds of students....
The integrity of Scripture was such a central
tenet of the Free Church conservatives that the idea of interfering with it
filled them not only with anger but also with horror. The sermons of many of
the early Free Presbyterians were heavily peppered with quotations from
Scripture; in some sections of their sermons, every second line is a portion of
Scripture, reeling off parts from various books of the Bible to make and prove
virtually every point. It is this love of, reverence for and familiarity with
the Bible that must be borne in mind when considering the Free Presbyterian
opposition to the higher critics. They believed that the Bible was absolutely
infallible and verbally inspired and they believed that those who accepted
biblical criticism were denying these crucial doctrines.
There can be little doubt that the Free
Presbyterian Church's founding fathers viewed the higher criticism as a
development which denigrated the Bible, and as such something which had brought
nothing but shame to the Free Church; shame which would have to be shared by
all those who had not separated themselves from the polluted Church. This would
seem to be the crucial point and it is worth repeating; the Bible was of such
importance to all those who left in 1893 that the perceived attacks upon it
from the higher critics were themselves sufficient justification for
separation. The Bible meant almost everything to these men, and their whole attitude
to the higher critics was shaped by that Bible-centred perspective. Conflict
between the biblical critics and their opponents was unavoidable, given the
sheer scale of the divide between the opposite ends of the Free Church spectrum
on this key issue. The statements of a man like Marcus Dods on the literal
integrity of Scripture could hardly have been further from those of Donald
Macfarlane or Neil Cameron, despite the fact that all claimed loyalty to the
Free Church of the Disruption and all were professedly trying to do God's work
in their own way. Dods would have considered himself to be as much a `believer'
as he was a `critic' but despite the evidence for this, to the men who left at
the Free Presbyterian Disruption of 1893 the phrase `believing critic' was a
palpable nonsense. Separation seems to have been inevitable.
SECTION THREE: THE HIGHLAND-LOWLAND DIVIDE
A third reason why the Free Church split in 1893
was because of the presence of a fault line which had existed within the denomination
for decades. During the fifty years between 1843 and 1893 an increasingly
obvious divide had come to exist in the Free Church between the Highland and
Lowland congregations. On most of the issues which disrupted the unity of the
nineteenth-century Free Church, the Highlanders and the Lowlanders were on
opposite sides. This was particularly so on issues such as biblical criticism
and revision of the Westminster Confession of Faith, with the Highlanders
tending to be opposed to ecclesiological or theological change. On the religion
of much of the Highland Free Church, with this implacable opposition to
religious innovation of any kind, the Southern part of the Church looked with
bewilderment, ignorance and exasperation.
At the same time the language of the Highland Free
Church, Gaelic, was under sustained attack. From the early modern period
onwards, `both the Gaelic language and its speakers were to be equated with
backwardness and incivility.' English rapidly advanced to become, in the words of
Charles Withers, `the language of gentility, of status, and as the medium of
progress and the yardstick of cultural acceptability'. `There has', he said,`
been a particularly long-standing antipathy towards the [Gaelic] language and
its culture.' Gaelic came to be perceived as an inferior
language, an obstacle to advancement, and the sooner that it was replaced by
English then the better it would be for everyone. It has to be stressed that
Gaelic was overwhelmingly the language of both the preachers and the
congregations who stood out against the new ideas of the young, liberal and
Lowland Free Church. The Gaelic language, Highland religion and resistance to
theological change tended to be closely tied together. It was not a combination
on which the Lowland Free Church looked with much relish.
There was, however, an even more sinister side to
the divide between the two regions of Scotland. The mid-to-late nineteenth
century was a time when racism was rife in the British Isles, having been given
the spurious camouflage of pseudo-science. This pseudo-scientific racism
created a structure of races which sought to place everyone in their
appropriate place in a grand hierarchy. One of the foremost proponents of
`scientific racism' was Robert Knox, whose infamous 1850 work, The Races of
Men, is accepted as `one of the most articulate and lucid statements of
racism ever to appear.' While it is mainly studied because of its stance
on the differences between the White and the Coloured races, it also contains
important references to the Celt.
What this book and many other examples of
mid-Victorian race theory make clear is that the Celt was considered an
inferior being, possessing an inferior culture and speaking an inferior
language. It was a view which was widely popularised
throughout the nineteenth century, not least by the fashionable Oxford School
of historiography written by men like William Stubbs, Edward Freeman and John
Richard Green; men whose influence went far beyond academia. By the later part
of the nineteenth century most of Britain's leading historians were advocates
of what has been called Anglo-Saxonism; stressing the over-riding importance of
Race, believing that all that was good in English history was as a result of
Teutonic origins.
It can hardly be stressed enough that these views
were being put forward by some of the brightest and most progressive minds in
Britain - by an intellectual elite. That these views had an impact on the
liberals in the Lowland Free Church seems to be almost a certainty, and for
evidence it is necessary to look no further than their own words. Time and
again the leaders of the liberal or progressive side of the Free Church
resorted to crude racial generalisations to explain away Highland opposition to
their plans.
One racial slur, for example, that the Highlanders
followed their leaders blindly and unhesitatingly, was repeated frequently by the Lowland Free
Church in the later nineteenth century; Norman Walker, in speaking of the Free
Presbyterian Disruption of 1893, said that the Highlanders displayed a
tendency to move in masses...the
habit of following leaders (is) a remnant of the old feeling of loyalty to the
chiefs.
Indeed, he had even managed to discover that,
`individuality is less common in the Highlands than in the Lowlands.' A. T. Innes, a prominent Edinburgh lawyer and
Free Church layman, wrote that `The process of independent thought ... is far
less popular among serious minds in the North than it is with the corresponding
class in the South.' At almost every point of departure between the
Highland and Lowland viewpoint in the late-nineteenth century Free Church, the
disparity was explained in terms of the Highlanders being, in Patrick Carnegie
Simpson's words,
a people impressionable, not always
informed, and already, by racial differences of temper and habit, inclined to
look strangely and even suspiciously across the Grampians.
Statements such as this would be remarkable if it
were not for the fact that they were so common, not only from secular sources
but also from religious men; there are dozens of examples of this language
being used by Lowland Free Churchmen. Indeed, when taken individually,
statements like these ones from Walker, Simpson and Innes might be explained
away as abberations, or simply as the products of frustration over
ecclesiastical opposition from men of perceived lower intellect. But when they
are put alongside one another they rapidly begin to add up to evidence that the
racist ideology of the nineteenth century was being used by the Free Church's
Lowland intelligentsia when it suited them so to do. Race became the key
whenever the Highlanders acted in a way which the Lowlanders in the Free Church
could not explain.
Having said that, it has also to be stated that
there was precious little Christian love and brotherly understanding flowing
south from the Highland part of the Free Church. The Highlanders felt
themselves both beleaguered and wronged, facing what they considered to be the
virtual tyranny of the majority; this helped to produce what can be called a
`laager mentality.' The situation worried the Highlanders, but they were either
unaware or unconcerned that their own attitude, of holding what they had at all
costs, was contributing in large measure to the impending rupture in the Free
Church. Ultimately, if the price for maintaining the status quo was to be the
splitting up of the Free Church of Scotland, it was to them a price worth
paying.
Thus it can be seen that the pressures for
division in the Free Church were coming from both sides of the Highland Line.
This mutual antagonism may not have alone splintered the Free Church, but it
has been ignored far too often in the past, and deserves to be given careful
consideration, both now and in the future.
SECTION FOUR: REVISION OF THE WESTMINSTER
CONFESSION OF FAITH
Although
the factors already discussed were critical to the Free Presbyterian
Disruption, in the eyes of the men who took part in it there was one consideration
which outweighed all others: this was the framing and passing of the
Declaratory Act, the Act by which the Free Church qualified its commitment to
the Westminster Confession of Faith. The conservatives in the Free Church were
undeniably extremely gloomy about the developments which were taking place both
within and without the Church; crucially, however, the position of the Free
Church of Scotland remained formally unchanged until 1892. The final and
formal act which eventually forced them to make their decision to split the
Free Church came with the passing of the Declaratory Act. `The Declaratory Act,' commented one Free
Churchman to the General Assembly in 1894, `had provoked the flower of the
Church into secession.'
There can be little doubt that the Free Church of
1843 was a church which broadly adhered to the Westminster Confession; it seems
fair to say that in its early years there were relatively few Free Churchmen
who would have disagreed radically with Dr Buchanan's claim in the 1843 General
Assembly that they were
teaching the pure doctrines of the
Scriptures as embodied in the Confession of Faith...We do not separate from the
Confession of Faith, which we do truthfully and assuredly regard as the sound and
scriptural exposition of the word of God.
As Kenneth Ross has perceptively observed,
although there might have been disagreement among the Disruption Fathers as to
what precisely was implied by Confessional subscription, `it was not pressed,
since all were equally warmly attached to the Calvinism of Westminster.'
With the passing years, however, things changed,
and by the 1880s movements to revise the Confession were in existence in many
parts of the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. Scotland was no exception, with the United Presbyterian Church, in
many ways the sister church of the Free Church, passing their Declaratory Act
in 1879. Although the movement within the Free Church to revise the Westminster
Confession clearly emerged out of a growing disquiet with the doctrines that it
contained, it also has to be placed in the context of the growing movement in
the Free Church that favoured Union with the United Presbyterian Church. There
had been prolonged and determined efforts to secure Union in the 1860s and
1870s, with many of the brightest lights in the Free Church heavily involved. At that time one of the main obstacles to Union
had been the fact that the United Presbyterians were Voluntaries while the Free
Church was not; in other words, one Church favoured the Establishment principle
while the other favoured Disestablishment. Over the course of the 1870s and the
1880s, however, the Free Church, led by the great ecclesiastical politician
Robert Rainy, 
came increasingly to favour Disestablishment
itself, and by the 1890s that subject was no longer a source of serious
disagreement between the two denominations. Also by then, as has been seen, the United Free
Church had qualified its terms of subscription to the Westminster Confession,
and so a desire on the part of the Free Church to do something similar can be
seen in the context of desiring to remove one last key difference between the
two Churches in order to facilitate Union.
It is perhaps significant that within eight years of the passing of the
Free Church Declaratory Act, Union with the United Presbyterian Church took
place. The first overture to the Free Church General Assembly on the subject of
Confessional revision appeared in 1887, and by the summer of 1889, the trickle
of overtures regarding the Confession of Faith had been transformed into a
deluge. The General Assembly of that year received no fewer than thirty-three
of them. About one third of these were in favour of retaining the present
relationship between Church and Confession but, significantly, all of the rest
betrayed more or less hostility towards Westminster.
After much discussion and a great deal of
contentious debate, the Free Church passed its Declaratory Act on 26 May 1892
by a majority of 346 to 195. The Act sought to make subscription to the
Westminster Confession easier by qualifying it in various ways, stressing the
centrality of the love of God, playing down some of the implications of the
Calvinist doctrine of the divine Decrees and wrapping up the whole package by
declaring that, `diversity of opinion is recognized in this Church on such
points in the Confession as do not enter into the substance of the Reformed
Faith.'
Those who left the Free Church in 1893 believed
that the Declaratory Act fundamentally altered the Church; they believed that
`a modified acceptance of Confessional doctrine' now prevailed in the Church,
and that `in fact a new standard of doctrine has been set up...This change of
standard we hold is an obvious change in the constitution'. Believing as they did that the Free Church was
now a different denomination, those who disagreed with the Declaratory Act had
few options left. In the words of Neil Cameron;
When they [the liberals] had filled
the Church with the flood of heresies, carnality in worship and practice, the
infamous Declaratory Act was duly passed into `a binding law and constitution
in the Church.' This meant that all the innovations contained in that Act were
to be bound on all who would continue in future fellowship with that Church. We
refused to put our necks under this Satanic yoke, so we separated in 1893 in
order...to continue the existence of the Free Church of Scotland as that Church
was settled in 1843.
The Free Presbyterians, then, believed that
dissociation from a flawed denomination was their only scriptural option, and
in May 1893, on the ratification of the Act by that year's General Assembly,
Donald Macfarlane tabled his protest and severed his connection with the Free
Church. Not for the first time in the history of the Scottish church and,
sadly, not for the last time, disagreement had led to Disruption.
University of Evansville
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Here is a selection of some Victorian
Free Church Figures
All have some role to play in the Second Disruption
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