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Updated: May 3, 2025
And unhappily the same chasm, which marks a division of the church internally, is a link connecting it externally with the Seceders. For how stands the case? Did the Scottish kirk, at the late crisis, divide broadly into two mutually excluding sections? Was there one of these bisections which said Yes, whilst the other responded No?
Such conclusions are irresistible; and upon any path, seceding or not seceding, they menace the worldly credit of ecclesiastical bodies. That evil is now past remedy. As for the other evil, that which acts upon church establishments, not through simple failure in the guarantees of public opinion, but through their own internal vices of composition; here undeniably we see a chasm traversing the Scottish church from the very gates to the centre. And unhappily the same chasm, which marks a division of the church internally, is a link connecting it externally with the Seceders. For how stands the case? Did the Scottish Kirk, at the last crisis, divide broadly into two mutually excluding sections? Was there one of these bisections which said Yes, whilst the other responded No? Was the affirmative and negative shared between them as between the black chessmen and the white? Not so; and unhappily not so. The two extremes there were, but these shaded off into each other. Many were the nuances; multiplied the combinations. Here stood a section that had voted for all the changes, with two or three exceptions; there stood another that went the whole length as to this change, but no part of the way as to that; between these sections arose others that had voted arbitrarily, or eclectically, that is, by no law generally recognised. And behind this eclectic school were grouped others who had voted for all novelties up to a certain day, but after that had refused to go further with a movement party whose tendencies they had begun to distrust. In this last case, therefore, the divisional line fell upon no principle, but upon the accident of having, at that particular moment, first seen grounds of conscientious alarm. The principles upon which men had divided were various, and these various principles were variously combined. But, on the other hand, those who have gone out were the men who approved totally, not partially unconditionally, not within limits up to the end, and not to a given day. Consequently those who stayed in comprehended all the shades and degrees which the men of violence excluded. The Seceders were unanimous to a man, and of necessity; for he who approves the last act, the extreme act, which is naturally the most violent act,
He began immediately by breaking a weak phalanx of women, who sought to re-unite in his rear; but they found that they must first of all circumnavigate the great rock of Captain le Harnois; and, long before that could be effected, so many of the Fleurs-de-lys' people pressed after in the captain's wake that this confluence of the female bisections never took place.
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