tenderly, and there were various reasons for treating this minority with great consideration. For one thing, they were men, both clergy and laity, without distinction or influence; they had no one among them like Dr. Begg who commanded the ears of Scotland, or who could state their case in a popular fashion. It should also have been remembered that they were largely Celts, a race of passionate loyalty to the = past and the traditional fighters of lost causes, a race also quickly touched by courtesy but absolutely intractable under oppression. And it could hardly be denied that they held in their entirety the original principles of their Church, and stood where Chalmers and the leaders of the Disruption stood. It may be quite right that a Church should change her creed with advancing light and new circumstances, and the writer holds firmly not only that the Church has this power, but that the Scots Church should have exercised it very much sooner and on a much more extensive scale. One who takes this position is, however, on that very account the more bound to act very carefully at every step, and to deal very generously with his conservative fellow-Churchmen. Very likely the authorities of the United Free Church were guided by legal opinion when they locked those Highlanders out of their old home, and there might have been some legal danger in allowing them to meet in the empty Assembly Hall. It turns out to have been bad law, for the Hall belonged to those Highlanders and not to the Church in the market-place; and it is just possible for a Celt is a warm-hearted man-that if the minority had found the Hall placed at their disposal, and a kindly message had been sent them from the Market hall with its thousands, the lawsuit would never have been started, and Scotland would have been saved another bitter controversy. Certainly it was a great mistake in what may be called religious politics, and of course it was an absolute blunder in law, to endeavor to dispossess the minority of the few churches where the people belonged to their way of thinking, and not to offer them one divinity hall in which to train their students. Upon the face of it, it did not strike the lay mind as quite fair, not to say quite Christian, to deny them any share in the accumulated heritage of the Free Church, but to turn them out into the wilderness, houseless and penniless, because they refused to unite with another Church whose characteristic principle of Voluntaryism the leaders of their own Church had once denounced, and because they wished to remain Free Churchmen as their fathers had been before them. It was good statesmanship to unite the two Churches, and it would have been better statesmanship to have tried to unite the three, but it was not statesmanship, and it turns out not to have been law, to penalize those Highlanders because they would not become United Presbyterians. No doubt they ought to have seen that the Stuart dynasty is impossible to-day in theology, and it would be better if they could settle down under the new régime; but a Highlander will not be driven, and loses his reason when he imagines that he has been betrayed by his own friends. So the minority took, as it were, to the hills, and people treated their campaign as a forlorn hope. But, to every one's surprise, they have won their Culloden. The situation which this unexpected victory of the minority has created is incredible, and suggests Alice in Wonderland. All the mission stations of the Free Church scattered throughout the world were handed over to a body which has not a single missionary. The three theological colleges, with their libraries and endowments, belong now to a Church which, until yesterday, had not a professor, and has had to secure such professors as it can from outside its own ranks and from the oddest quarters. All the churches and manses of the Free Church, besides that Assembly Hall in which so much history was made, and the Church offices and colleges, now belong by law to this Highland remnant with a few Lowland camp-followers; while, on the other hand, the former Free Church of Scotland, which was inaugurated by an act of unique sacrifice in 1843, and covered Scotland with churches, and made its missions famous through the world, and set an example of liberality to the Christian Church, is deprived of all her property and left without a roof under which to worship throughout Scotland. Upon the soundness of the law which has wrought this marvel the writer has no opinion to offer; but he expresses the feeling of. the lay mind in saying that nothing so absurd has been done by law in the history of the Scots people. The irony of the situation is not lessened when one looks at the grounds of the decision; for they are two, and the first is, that the Free Church has abandoned the Establishment principle, and that by her constitution she is not at liberty to do so. When one remembers that in 1843 the Free Church paid an enormous price to be free from the control of the State in spiritual affairs, and proudly called herself by the name of the Free Church, it is an amazing illustration of the futility of everything human to find that the Establishment principle is tied as firmly round her neck as ever, and that, having lost all her property once to escape from the Established Church, she is now to lose all she has accumulated since because she had made the Establishment principle an open question. What more could the Free Church have done to be free? Yet it is perfectly evident that she was not free, and one asks with perplexity whether Cavour's famous ideal is possible at all, and there can ever be a free Church in a free State. The other ground was that the Free Church, by certain modifications she had made on the Confession of Faith, which were really of a very modest character, had abandoned sound doctrine; and here again one is affected by the irony of the situation. If there ever has been any Church in our land which has prided herself upon orthodoxy and stormed against heresy, it has been the Free Church. Her leaders denounced Broad Church theology in every shape, and distinguished ministers were prosecuted for suggesting even a modification in the application of the Jewish Sabbath law. while Robertson Smith, who was the glory of scholarship in Scotland, was removed from his chair and died in exile from his Church. If this Church be found untrue to the Confession of Faith and the orthodox creed, then one despairs of orthodoxy altogether. It is right, however, at the same time to admit-although this did not come within the range of the House of Lords -that although Robertson Smith was expelled, his spirit remained, and Biblical criticism has found a congenial home in the Free Church. One has a shrewd idea that, if he got to the background of the Highland mind, it would be found that the remnant would not have vexed themselves so much about any statement of free grace which the Free Church made, if they believed that the Free Church was loyal to the Word of God. They were haunted with the idea that critics within the Free Church were shaking the very foundation of faith by their daring treatment of Holy Scripture; and it is open to believe, although it cannot be proved, that there never would have been any lawsuit, and possibly there never would have been any division, if the remnant had not been scared by the higher criticism. One reason, when you go to the inwardness of things, why the Free Church left the Established Church in 1843, was that they were more evangelical; and one reason, when you get at the inwardness of things again, why the Free Church is stripped of all her possessions in 1904, is that she is less evangelical. is a Church to do if she be penalized first for orthodoxy and next for heterodoxy? What The absurdity of the position is quite as great when one comes to the matter of property and the anxiety of the Law Courts that it should be administered according to the will of the donor. On the one hand, they take the whole of the property from the Free Church because they consider them improper people to administer it, and they hand it over to the remnant who cannot administer it at all, and this is done in order to preserve the sanctity of the law of trusts. On the other hand, they take the property of the Free Church, three-fourths of which was accumulated after that Church had declared that it did not consider the Establishment principle to be of the essence of its faith, and hand over not only the one-fourth raised, as the judges would say, upon the prospectus of Dr. Chalmers, but the three-fourths raised upon quite a different prospectus, to the remnant because they are the proper people to administer such property. In other words, three-fourths of the property of the Free Church is taken away from the Church the donors love and to which they gave it, and handed over for administration to a body of men with whom the donors for the most part disagreed, and for the furtherance of whose views the donors for the most part would never have given a penny. And this is done to establish the confidence of the public in the law VOL. XXVI. 1370 LIVING AGE. of trusts. As many of those donors are living, and see the churches which they have built delivered to the remnant against whom they have been voting for thirty years, one would like to know their opinion of the law of trusts. If this law which is the fetish of English judges is intended to secure first that a trust be efficiently administered, and secondly that it be administered according to the intention of the donors, then the House of Lords have secured by law-which I wish again to say is no doubt perfect law-that this particular trust be scarcely administered at all, and next, that so far as it is administered it shall be contrary to the wishes of seventy-five per cent. of the donors. It is indeed unreasonable and intolerable that a Church which exists for the teaching of truth and the develop, ment of the religious life should be regarded as a joint-stock company which is raising money upon a prospectus as for banking or mining. If such a Church is to fulfil her purpose and justify the gifts which have been given her, she should keep abreast of theological science, and lead her people further into truth every year; and it would be an anomaly if such a Church is denied the liberty of growth and the opportunity of life, and a grave injustice if, whenever the Church had vindlcated her own existence by her intellectual sincerity and her liberty, she should be muleted of her property. If the Church of Christ is to fulfil her purpose in history, and if she is to secure the loyalty of her people in modern times, she must be free to shape her creed according to her conviction, and it must no longer be possible for the dead creed of the past to grip her throat at any moment and threaten her with the loss of her substance because the Church is declaring the mind of Christ as He has been pleased to reveal it in these latter days by His indwelling spirit. The crisis in Scotland in the first issue gravely affects the Scots Kirk, and therefore calls forth the sympathy of every one of her sons, wherever he may be living; in the last issue it affects the freedom and the future of the Christian Church The Hibbert Journal. throughout the English-speaking world. The Scots Kirk has often suffered in the past, and she is ready to suffer again; she has suffered in the cause of freedom, and now, whatever happens, the world may be sure Scotsmen will not sell the pass. John Watson. THE GIRL WITH THE SOFT GRAY EYES. I doubt if I could give her real name. One so soon forgets the unimportant accessories; all the quicker for the inverse vividness of the main facts, the things that the memory will never let go. With men who knock about the world in strenuous living, objects are oftenest referred to by the phrase that best and most permanently hits them off. Girls are objects no less than men and things. In war-time they are seen and missed again, so quickly and casually that their names are mere arbitrary accidents, and they are remembered, if at all, by that which quickest and surest brings them up in the mind again. This, then, is the story of "the girl with the soft gray eyes." It was Morgan, the man most concerned, who first used the phrase. And when it was all over; when the war at last ended, and we, who knew of the incident, had dispersed to the four clean winds of heaven from the tainted air of the veldt; then, if any man of us ever thought of her in his retrospect, it was by Morgan's phrase that he named her in his mind. Morgan was an officer of M.I., recovering so slowly from a bad wound that he was not allowed out on trek, but sternly bidden to sit and rest himself as part of the garrison of a certain little town on the railway in the Transvaal-and I am not always cer tain that I remember even the name of that. The time was the time when many, but not nearly all, of the women and children from the back veldt had been brought into the concentration camps. The girl was-but you'll hear of her as you go on. The town was held by a conglomeration of all sorts of odds and ends of derelict troops; stragglers, details, men from hospital, and dismounted men of operating columns; altogether a weary hotch-potch for an eager man to bark his shins and skin his heart upon. There was no more than one officer of any one unit, neither was there any regular mess. Barely any two of the officers joined rations and made pretence of chumming. In the insufferable dulness of life in a never-sniped garrison men had grown insufferable also to each other. Whisky had begun to go to the stomach, leaving the head merely the more morose. The place offered only two alternatives. A man could either flirt with a dozen "English" girls and women of the town, not necessarily the best looking, or he could exchange mordant banter with as many of the burgher girls as were surreptitiously eager to pick up infor mation for the use of their friends outside. Of course there was always the eternal accident of love, and, as almost always in such circumstances, it was oftenest the women who got hurt in that tragedy. At last Morgan was seen to grow cheerful-so cheerful that the doctor became an unofficial member of that mess which had previously consisted only of Morgan and Hutchings, lieutenant of part of a Volunteer company that was soon to go home. Then came a day when the three were sitting in the mess hut, midday scoff just finished, pipes going and silence reigning. It was Morgan who broke the harmony of the moment by speech, causing the doctor to frown for a moment at such folly as talk. "I'll take out the gun and try to get a hare or a kurhaan for dinner," said Morgan. "Too much bally biscuits and bully, you know”– A moment's silence, which the doctor hoped might last, was exploded upon by Hutchings. "If you get us the game you are really going after, the girl with the gray eyes, that would be something to amuse us at least," spoke he, half savagely. "The girl with the soft gray eyes," corrected Morgan once again with all that air of a man who "fancies himself in that particular quarter." The doctor looked up. Morgan looked across at him. "Hutchings has never forgiven me because it was I instead of himself who emptied three-parts of the mess stores into her Cape cart, when she drove in for provisions and found the shops had none." "Yes," growled Hutchings to the doctor. "Fancy the beggar! He was field officer that day. If I'd been field officer she wouldn't have been allowed in at all-that's the way information goes out. But my lord Bairam here, the wild ass, he goes riding round on his long-tailed gee-gee, and he finds her stating her case to my sergeant on outpost there you know these girls with the big gray eyes and how they look at a man-so this wild ass must promptly bring up half the outpost and lug off all the mess stores that were any good and dump them into her cart. I suppose he looked at her then with a sort of an 'anything, anything else, queen of my heart?' sort of gaze, as if he'd done something wise." "So I had, my dear little son," put in Morgan, with his most insufferable air. "Ladies first-that's always wisdom." "You!-you penny noveletter, you!" retorted Hutchings to him in hugest disgust. Then, turning, "Well, doctor," he went on, "I suppose she looked at him with the 'You are so very kind' sort of flapdoodle in her eyes. At least, ever since that time there's hardly a day but my Lord John Ass here goes out-shooting!" "While you still continue to fare sumptuously every day on-biscuits and bully," suggested the doctor in his most casual manner. And Hutchings growled. "And the girl with the gray eyes," added the doctor presently. "She comes out to carry the bag home-I don't say to whose home?" ended he. "No, that's it," returned Hutchings, with fresh disgust. "He goes right bang on into the house and drinks coffee with her people, just like a bally Boer on the opset. You can watch him go, any afternoon, through the big telescope Harrison's got up there on the koppie with the gun. You can follow the beggar all the way, and almost see the smirk on him." "Not all the way," corrected Morgan suavely. "There's one dip there, a quarter of a mile wide or so, with a sluit in it. The veldt's not so flat as it looks from the koppie." "No, but you are; you just dashed are as flat as you look when one watches you go through that telescope," delivered Hutchings crushingly. |