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IV. Lastly, we have to sum and to appreciate the ultimate consequences of these things. Let us pursue them to the end of the vista.–First in order stands the dreadful shock to the National Church Establishment; and that is twofold: it is a shock from without, acting through opinion, and a shock from within, acting through the contagion of example. Each case is separately perfect. Through the opinion of men standing outside of the church, the church herself suffers wrong in her authority. Through the contagion of sympathy stealing over men inside of the church, peril arises of other shocks in a second series, which would so exhaust the church by reiterated convulsions, as to leave her virtually dismembered and shattered for all her great national functions.

As to that evil which acts through opinion, it acts by a machinery, viz. the press and social centralization in great cities, which in these days is perfect. Right or wrong, justified or not justified by the acts of the majority, it is certain that every public body–how much more, then, a body charged with the responsibility of upholding the truth in its standard!–suffers dreadfully in the world’s opinion by any feud, schism, or shadow of change among its members. This is what the New Testament, a code of philosophy fertile in new ideas, first introduced under the name of scandal; that is, any occasion of serious offence ministered to the weak or to the sceptical by differences irreconcilable in the acts or the opinions of those whom they are bound to regard as spiritual authorities. Now here, in Scotland, is a feud past all arbitration: here is a schism no longer theoretic, neither beginning nor ending in mere speculation; here is a change of doctrine, on one side or the other, which throws a sad umbrage of doubt and perplexity over the pastoral relation of the church to every parish in Scotland. Less confidence there must always be henceforward in great religious incorporations. Was there any such incorporation reputed to be more internally harmonious than the Scottish church? None has been so tempestuously agitated. Was any church more deeply pledged to the spirit of meekness? None has split asunder so irreconcilably. As to the grounds of quarrel, could any questions or speculations be found so little fitted for a popular intemperance? Yet no breach of unity has ever propagated itself by steps so sudden and irrevocable. One short decennium has comprehended within its circuit the beginning and the end of this unparalleled hurricane. In 1834, the first light augury of mischief skirted the horizon–a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. In 1843, the evil had ‘travelled on from birth to birth.’ Already it had failed in what may be called one conspiracy; already it had entered upon a second, viz., to rear up an Anti-Kirk, or spurious establishment, which should twist itself with snake-like folds about the legal establishment; surmount it as a Roman vinea surmounted the fortifications which it beleaguered; and which, under whatsoever practical issue for the contest, should at any rate overlook, molest, and insult the true church for ever. Even this brief period of development would have been briefer, had not the law courts interposed many delays. Demurs of law process imposed checks upon the uncharitable haste of the odium theologicum. And though in a question of schism it would be a petitio principii for a neutral censor to assume that either party had been originally in error, yet it is within our competence to say, that the Seceders it was whose bigotry carried the dispute to that sad issue of a final separation. The establishment would have been well content to stop short of that consummation: and temperaments might have been found, compromises both safe and honorable, had the minority built less of their reversionary hopes upon the policy of a fanciful martyrdom. Martyrs they insisted upon becoming: and that they might be martyrs, it was necessary for them to secede. That Europe thinks at present with less reverence of Protestant institutions than it did ten years ago, is due to one of these institutions in particular; viz. to the Scottish kirk, and specifically to the minority in that body. They it was who spurned all mutual toleration, all brotherly indulgence from either side to what it regarded as error in the other. Consequently upon their consciences lies the responsibility of having weakened the pillars of the reformed churches throughout Christendom.