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Past votes may not absolutely pledge a man to a future course of action; warned in time, such a man may stand neutral in practice; but thus far they poison the fountains of wholesome unanimity–that, if a man can evade the necessity of squaring particular actions to his past opinions, at least he must find himself tempted to square his opinions themselves, or his counsels, to such past opinions as he may too notoriously have placed on record by his votes.

But, if such are the continual dangers from reactions in the establishment, so long as men survive in that establishment who feel upbraided by past votes, and so long as enemies survive who will not suffer these upbraidings to slumber–dangers which much mutual forbearance and charity can alone disarm; on the other hand, how much profounder is the inconsistency to which the Free Church is doomed!–They have rent the unity of that church, to which they had pledged their faith–but on what plea? On the plea that in cases purely spiritual, they could not in conscience submit to the award of the secular magistrate. Yet how merely impracticable is this principle, as an abiding principle of action! Churches, that is, the charge of particular congregations, will be with them (as with other religious communities) the means of livelihood. Grounds innumerable will arise for excluding or attempting to exclude, each other from these official stations. No possible form regulating the business of ordination, or of induction, can anticipate the infinite objections which may arise. But no man interested in such a case, will submit to a judge appointed by insufficient authority. Daily bread for his family is what few men will resign without a struggle. And that struggle will of necessity come for final adjudication to the law courts of the land, whose interference in any question affecting a spiritual interest, the Free Church has for ever pledged herself to refuse. But in the case supposed, she will not have the power to refuse it. She will be cited before the tribunals, and can elude that citation in no way but by surrendering the point in litigation; and if she should adopt the notion, that it is better for her to do that, than to acknowledge a sufficient authority in the court by pleading at its bar, upon this principle once made public, she will soon be stripped of everything, and will cease to be a church at all. She cannot continue to be a depository of any faith, or a champion of any doctrines, if she lose the means of defending her own incorporations. But how can she maintain the defenders of her rights, or the dispensers of her truths, if she refuses, upon immutable principle, to call in the aid of the magistrate on behalf of rights, which, under any aspect, regard spiritual relations? Attempting to maintain these rights by private arbitration within a forum of her own, she will soon find such arbitration not binding at all upon the party who conceives himself aggrieved. The issue will be as in Mr. O’Connell’s courts, where the parties played at going to law; from the moment when they ceased to play, and no longer ‘made believe’ to be disputing, the award of the judge became as entire a mockery, as any stage mimicry of such a transaction.

This should be the natural catastrophe of the case; and the probable evasion of that destructive consummation, to which she is carried by her principles, will be–that as soon as her feelings of rancor shall have cooled down, these principles will silently drop out of use; and the very reason will be suffered to perish for which she ever became a dissenting body. With this, however, we, that stand outside, are noways concerned. But an evil, in which we are concerned, is the headlong tendency of the Free Church, and of all churches adulterating with her principle, to an issue not merely dangerous in a political sense, but ruinous in an anti-social sense. The artifice of the Free Church lies in pleading a spiritual relation of any case whatever, whether of doing or suffering, whether positive or negative, as a reason for taking it out of all civil control. Now we may illustrate the peril of this artifice, by a reality at this time impending over society in Ireland. Dr. Higgins, titular bishop of Ardagh, has undertaken upon this very plea of a spiritual power not amenable to civil control, a sort of warfare with Government, upon the question of their power to suspend or defeat the O’Connell agitation. For, says he, if Government should succeed in thus intercepting the direct power of haranguing mobs in open assemblies, then will I harangue them, and cause them to be harangued, in the same spirit, upon the same topics, from the altar or the pulpit. An immediate extension of this principle would be–that every disaffected clergyman in the three kingdoms, would lecture his congregation upon the duty of paying no taxes. This he would denominate passive resistance; and resistance to bad government would become, in his language, the most sacred of duties. In any argument with such a man, he would be found immediately falling back upon the principle of the Free Church; he would insist upon it as a spiritual right, as a ease entirely between his conscience and God, whether he should press to an extremity any and every doctrine, though tending to the instant disorganization of society. To lecture against war, and against taxes as directly supporting war, would wear a most colorable air of truth amongst all weak-minded persons. And these would soon appear to have been but the first elements of confusion under the improved views of spiritual rights. The doctrines of the Levellers in Cromwell’s time, of the Anabaptists in Luther’s time, would exalt themselves upon the ruins of society, if governments were weak enough to recognise these spiritual claims in the feeblest of their initial advances. If it were possible to suppose such chimeras prevailing, the natural redress would soon be seen to lie through secret tribunals, like those of the dreadful Fehmgericht in the middle ages. It would be absurd, however, seriously to pursue these anti-social chimeras through their consequences. Stern remedies would summarily crush so monstrous an evil. Our purpose is answered, when the necessity of such insupportable consequences is shown to link itself with that distinction upon which the Free Church has laid the foundations of its own establishment. Once for all, there is no act or function belonging to an officer of a church which is not spiritual by one of its two Janus faces. And every examination of the case convinces us more and more that the Seceders took up the old papal distinction, as to acts spiritual or not spiritual, not under any delusion less or more, but under a simple necessity of finding some evasion or other which should meet and embody the whole rancor of the moment.