during this war, we have been profitable allies to Japan. Notwithstanding this, the Japanese are quite ready to keep up the alliance with Great Britain, and even to extend its scope. In China, Great Britain is nothing, and less than nothing, unsupported by Japan. It is interesting to recall the fact that it is to a Japanese envoy that the foreign representatives at Peking owe their first reception by the Chinese Emperor. In a recent number of the Jiji Shimpo, one of the leading Japanese newspapers, a policy of extending the alliance was advocated in all seriousness. Japan expects to obtain the Island of Sakhalin as one of the results of the war, just as Great Britain has obtained a foothold in Tibet as another. The Jiji Shimpo advocates a widening of the alliance to cover the questions of Persia, of Tibet, of India, as well as those of Sakhalin, China, and Korea. "Let each ally have equal rights and benefits. Let the alliance, instead of limiting the extent of the war, serve as a means of preventing all wars. Let each of the allies agree to come to the support of the other if attacked. The danger is equally great for both, because Russia will not more easily forget Tibet than Manchuria." Thus it would seem as if Great Britain might draw still greater advantages from the Japanese alliance should she so wish. On the other hand, if the alliance be ended through British action, then there may well be cause for anxiety. There are already in Australia, and elsewhere, existing questions which, quiescent during the alliance, would naturally The Fortnightly Review. come up for settlement were there no alliance. Neither could any one blame Japan, if she were cast out as a pariah nation, from seeking Asiatic friends, little as she wishes this. The effect upon the native races subject to Great Britain in Asia might also be worth consideration. The progress of Japan has fired their imagination, but they refrain from seeking her as a leader because of the fact that Japan is the friend of Great Britain. All which goes to prove that on the score of national expediency, if on no other, it is necessary to take every measure, not only to secure the continuance of the alliance, but also to infuse international morality into our dealings with our ally. This fact should make it easier and not more difficult for Great Britain to keep adequately her pledged word to Japan or to any other nation. The case of Japan is a case in point at the moment, but the question is one which extends to all British foreign relations. Besides the immediate benefit to us from the alliance, it may lead us to that most desired goal of a new triple alliance, for Peace, when the United States, Japan, and Great Britain shall stand together as the guardians of international justice and morality. Such a combination would be all-powerful, and might well rejuvenate the world. Let us be wise in time, and not, like the unwise virgins of Scripture, be left to mourn outside the door. Great Britain should reform her international ideas, and thus ensure the possession of at least a sleeping partnership in the coming dominant combination. Alfred Stead. THE CHURCH CRISIS IN SCOTLAND. Diffidence is not a marked feature in English character, and there are not many subjects which a full-blooded Englishman will not tackle. It is therefore almost pathetic to notice the hopelessness with which a person who has not had the privilege of Scots blood or a training in Scots history approaches ecclesiastical affairs in Scotland. English visitors cannot remain impervious to the prevailing atmosphere, and are obliged, even though they be Gallios at home, who care for none of these things, to give their attention to the question of the Kirk. They find at a glance that there are various Kirks, and that they are all provokingly like one another; they discover, on going a little into the matter, that the distinctions between them are extremely subtle but very pronounced, and that even the humblest people with whom they associate understand them thoroughly and hold them firmly. Very likely those distinctions may not be more important or more unintelligible than those between the different forms of dissent in England, and the average Englishman will tell you any day without a blush that he has never been able to distinguish between a Baptist and a Congregationalist. The Scots Kirk has, however, in all her branches, her divisions, her controversies, her creeds, something of the rugged strength and irresistible fascination of Scots character and scenery. No one, neither king nor statesman in history, has been able to treat the Kirk as a negligible quantity. If he tried to do so, he got into trouble instantly, and very likely had invited a disastrous defeat. From the beginning of her separate history in the sixteenth century to 1843, the year of the last battle with the State, the Church of Scotland has been the most virile, determined, uncompromising, and unmanageable factor in Scots life. Her attitude expressed in the minds of the people challenges attention, and the English visitor does his honest best to understand the difference between the various parties in what is practically the one Scots Church. It is no reflection upon his intelligence that as a rule he fails, and comes South a chastened man, full of questions to which he has not found an answer, and ideas of his own which are largely wrong. For centuries Scotland has been one large theological debating society, and the national intellect, exercised from school days upon the most profound and speculative themes in Christian thought, has become a perfect instrument for the creation of distinctions and the pursuit of inferences. Has any nation produced a peasantry so learned in theology? to whom, according to David Deans, "Independency is a foul heresy, and Anabaptism a damnable and deceiving error," and to whom an Erastian, a Romanist, an Arminian, and a Cocceian, as well as all sectaries, are equally obnoxious. Perhaps the most wonderful achievement of the Scots intellect has not been Hume's philosophy, or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but the distinctions which separate the branches of the Scots Church; and the second most remarkable achievement has been understand ing them. And my modest but perhaps not unuseful purpose in this article is not to discuss the law of a recent momentous decision of the House of Lords, but to explain the situation, how it came about, what it means, and what is likely to be its issue. Before one approaches the history of the divisions in the Church of Scotland he ought to understand that idea of the Church which from the Reformation has possessed the imagination of the Scots people, and which in some of its features may have come over from the mother Church of Rome. According to this doctrine, which is stated formally in the Second Book of Discipline, published in 1578, which has been expounded by the great defenders of the Church like Melville, and which glows and burns through the letters of a mystic like Samuel Rutherford, the Church is no creation of the State, and far less a joint-stock company holding money on a legal trust. The Church is the body of Christ in Scotland of which He is the only head; she is the bride of the Lord, and as Rutherford would say, "My mother, the Kirk of Scotland." As a Church she does not receive her power from the State, and she is not responsible to the State; the "power ecclesiastical is an authority granted by God the Father through the mediator Jesus Christ unto His Kirk gathered." In civil affairs the State was to be supreme, being also the creature of God; in spiritual affairs the Kirk was supreme. The Kirk did not desire to intrude upon the province of the State (although it would be difficult to say that she has not done so, say in the seventeenth century, when she tried to force Charles II. upon England); on the other hand, the Kirk has demanded that the State should not interfere in her province. There was to be a covenant between them, and this was to be the condition, in words that sound strangely to Southern ears, but were understood by shepherds on the hills of Scotland: "Co-ordinate jurisdiction with mutual subordination." The State was to do her work, such as making laws about property; and the Church was to do her work, attending to the spiritual welfare of the people; and Christ was King of both; but it may frankly be admitted that the Church has been more than once the dominant partner. If any Church has ever been the Church of the people, it has been the Kirk of Scotland, for she has been a faithful custodier of the national liberty, and the faithful mother of her children. The people have more or less obeyed her, and have been loyal to her, because she was loyal to them, and because by her very claim to be the Body of Christ she witnessed to the things unseen and eternal. It would be far from right to say that the Scots mind was hankering after a theocracy in which the Kirk would really rule both in things spiritual and things civil; but it would be nearly right to say that the Scots mind regarded the Kirk as the nation dealing with spiritual affairs, and the State as the same nation dealing with civil affairs, and that, while Christ was the alone Lord of the Kirk, the King was to be acknowledged as his vicegerent in the State. With this mystical and yet very practical idea dominating the intense imagination of the Scots people, one can see at once that the situation in Scotland would be very different from that in England. The English analogy of Church and dissent indeed will only mislead the mind and confuse the issue. The Church of England has the sovereign at her head, and is under the strict control of Parliament, which appoints her chief officers through the ministry of the day. The dissenting bodies of England have nothing to do with Parliament as Christian denominations, and do not desire any recognition at the hands of the State. But the Scots Church has believed that Church and State should be in alliance, the Church strengthening the State and the State supporting the Church. It is also worth remembering that while in England the Established Church and the Free Churches differ widely in wor ship, in creed, and in church government, in Scotland, if we exclude the comparatively small bodies of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, together with a few Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists, the Scots people belong to one Church; and although that Church has been divided, all the different denominations are one in their form of worship, of belief, and of government. Were one asked to guess what would cause division in a Church so intensely national and so conscious of her own mission, he might safely say this ideal but critical relation of Church and State, and he would be right. When one grasps the fact that all the unfortunate divisions in the Scots Church are due to friction between the Church and the State, then he has got one end of the clue which will guide him to an understanding of the Scots situation. It may indeed be said that from the year 1560, when the Church of Scotland was reconstituted as a Protestant Church, its mind has been torn between two opposing tendencies, alliance with the State and independence of the State. When the persecution of the Stuarts ceased, and the Church of Scotland was established at the Revolution Settlement, there was even then one body of Presbyterians who separated themselves and would not form a part of the National Church. They were the representatives of the Covenanters, or, as they were sometimes called, the Cameronians, or with reference to their sufferings the Hill Folk, and they lifted up their testimony for a COVenanted king and a covenanted people. In the eighteenth century the conflict between Church and State grew acute, and in 1733 certain ministers who had seceded from the Kirk constituted themselves into what was called an Associate Synod, but what was popularly known as the Seceders; and the difference between the Seceders and the Established Church was that the former insisted that congregations should have the right of choosing their ministers, while the latter was willing the parish minister should be appointed by a patron. The Associate Synod, still pursuing this interminable controversy, and still following out the lamentable principle of disruption, split into two bodies in 1747 over an oath taken by burgesses in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Perth, and which ran: "“I profess and allow with my heart the true religion presently professed within this realm, and authorized by the laws thereof." So many were willing to take this oath, so many thought that it was wrong; and the one body was called Burghers and the other AntiBurghers, and they started to excommunicate one another. In 1761 another secession took place, again on the old question of patronage, and what was called the Relief Church was formed, which, it ought to be added, was much more liberal than the other secessions. By the middle of the eighteenth century, therefore, there were the Established Kirk and four nonconforming bodies. In 1799, by way of celebrating the close of the eighteenth century, the Burghers split into two over the power of the civil magistrate in religion; and in 1804, by way of celebrating the opening of the nineteenth century, the Anti-Burghers split into two; so that at that day and date there were seven Presbyterian bodies in Scotland, the Kirk and six nonconforming denominations. And while in England Nonconformists are less churchy than Conformists, each secession in Scotland, and each remnant of a secession, was more Presbyterian, and more high-flying in its doctrine of the Church, than the one before. With the more reasonable influence of the nineteenth century, the Scots people began to regret what had become a convention of disruption, and to have some sense of the duty of unity. In 1820 the Burghers and the AntiBurghers united, although not without the loss of a small minority, and this Church, which was called the United Secession, amalgamated with the Relief Church in 1847. In 1839 one of the minor secessions had united with the Church of Scotland, so that, had it not been for the Disruption of 1843, the Presbyterian denominations of Scotland would have been reduced in the middle of last century to the Established Church, the Reformed Presbyterian, the United Presbyterian Church, and one of the minor secessions which called itself the Original Seceders; which at any rate was a slight abatement in the principle of disruption, and showed some practical desire for union. Unfortunately, while the secessions were trying to adjust their differences, the old feud had broken out in the mother Church, and as usual it was over the question of patronage, and had reached a condition of almost intolerable friction. If the patron appointed a minister whom the people did not like, the ecclesiastical court would not induct him, and therefore he could not obtain his living. The civil courts then ordered the ecclesiastical courts to induct him, and when one inferior court obeyed, the superior ecclesiastical court suspended its members from the ministry; so that things had come to a deadlock. In 1843 upwards of four hundred ministers seceded from the Church of Scotland and formed the Free Church, which added another denomination. In 1850, therefore, there was the Established Church, which held that the State ought to endow the Church, and was willing to receive the money on the State's own terms; and there was the Free Kirk, which also held that the State ought to endow the Church, but on the Church's terms; and then there was the United Presbyterian Church, whose position by this time was that it was better for the Church to have nothing to do with the State, and whose ministers would not accept any endowment at the hands of the State. The position of the Free Church was really half-way between the two extremesErastianism, which would make the Church subservient to the State, and Voluntaryism, which would break the tie altogether between Church and State. The ideal of the Free Church was the ancient imagination of Scotland-Church and State working together in legal alliance and each independent in its own sphere. It was perhaps inevitable, but it has turned out very unfortunate, that great leaders of the Free Church like Dr. Chalmers should have asserted in strong terms the dislike of the Free Church to Voluntaryism and their devotion to the Establishment principle, for from that day forward it was held by a certain section of the Free Church that the Establishment principle was a part of the constitution, and that any union with a Voluntary Church would be a violation of that constitution. Circumstances are, however, stronger than theories, and if a Church knows that it will never get endowment on its own terms, and that it must always be a self-supporting Church, it inevitably follows that that Church will attach less importance every year to the Establishment principle, and will regard the heresy of Voluntaryism with growing indifference. A Church which is voluntary in practice will be very apt to become voluntary in theory. Free Churchmen and United Presbyterians began to ask why they should not be one Church, and heal a wide division in Scotland, and in 1863 negotiations for union were opened. It might almost have been hoped that, as both parties were non-established and neither of them would ever be estab |