The PuritanBoard - View Single Post - Lectures on the establishment and extension of national Churches -- Thomas Chalmers

VirginiaHuguenot · #10 (**permalink**) 01-04-2008, 07:32 PM

One of Thomas Chalmers' students wrote concerning the Disruption of 1843:

Quote:

Thus in one day the Free Church of Scotland, as she fitly called herself, started into vigorous existence. Her very name implied nationality and connexion with the historical Church of Scotland. She arose, not as a sectarian denomination, not as assuming any new ground or principle unknown to the confessors and martyrs of Scotland. She repudiated, and will repudiate, the attitude of a sect. She was conscious of being, what she called herself, the Church of Scotland, Free, and would not break her connexion with the past three centuries of Scottish church history. The principle of national establishment of religion as the fitting homage of the nation, and as the duty of the nation to Christ, the Prince of the Kings of the Earth, was her avowed principle, and could not be surrendered by her without becoming a new church and forfeiting her name. Her protest was not against the Establishment as such, but against the submission with which the Establishment succumbed to the ursurpations and encroachments of the civil power. And had a protesting minority continued within the pale of the Establishment, maintaining the church's independence and the people's rights, they would have had the warm sympathy of every Free Churchman. The footing on which they resolved to go out, and on which the practical steps were taken with a view to a new organization, was unmistakably put before the public to this effect. -- George Smeaton, Memoirs of Alexander Thomson of Banchory (Edinburgh, 1869), p. 289 (emphasis is Smeaton's), quoted by John W. Keddie, George Smeaton: Learned Theologian and Biblical Scholar, pp. 48-49, 191

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