Scottish Presbyterianism

Despite the secessions of the previous century, based principally on contested rights of patronage, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of the Scottish population—perhaps between 80 and 90 per cent—adhered to the national Church of Scotland (S. Brown, "Belief" 116). The hallmark of the national church persisted to be the Reformed principals of Scripture rightly preached, the sacraments of baptism and communion rightly administered, and discipline maintained by active kirk sessions staffed by the minister and elders. The Kirk, as it was colloquially called, continued to be the principal provider of both primary education and poor relief, based on its status as the Established Church, which had been upheld in the 1707 Act of Union. However, the massive social changes brought about by industrialization and corresponding urbanization placed enormous strain on the traditional role of parish churches and prompted demands for the building of new churches and the establishment of new parishes (S. Brown, "Thomas Chalmers"). Thomas Chalmers used the newly established parish of St. John's in Glasgow as an experiment to revivify the local parish in its role as primary provider of education and poor relief. He secured the city council's cessation of poor relief in his parish and instead organized ministerial visits to all houses, established a Sunday school, and distributed poor relief through the local church, thus requiring participation in the local parish as a prerequisite to accessing these services (S. Brown, Thomas Chalmers 91–151). While the experiment was highly controversial, it did reflect the ambitions of some in the Church of Scotland to maintain the historic centrality of the parish in community life (S. Brown, "Thomas Chalmers"). Victorian churches, particularly those with an evangelical sensibility, restored congregational discipline where it was feared to have lapsed. According to Stewart J. Brown, "For many Scots, kirk session discipline was linked with the mid-Victorian emphases on self-help, individual respectability and moral improvement" (S. Brown, "Belief"128). For men such as Chalmers, new, active and engaged parishes were essential for the effective ministry of the Church, and these required like-minded men in the pulpit. They began to be openly defined as "evangelicals" and represented a growing voice in the Church of Scotland calling for changes to be made, a view opposed by the Enlightenment-minded moderates who had held sway over the national church for a century.¹

In 1834, evangelicals held a majority in the general assembly. Longstanding concerns over patronage led to the passage of the Veto Act, which empowered congregations to block unwanted nominations from heritors, referred to as "non-intrusion." While not securing the positive power to call, the act secured congregational authority over final appointments. A second change in church law, the Chapels Act, enabled chapels of ease to be constituted fully as parish churches, thus giving them the right to representation in higher courts. The erection of chapels of ease resulted from the massive population boom driven by the Industrial Revolution, as did the church extension program Chalmers convened from 1834, which used voluntary contributions to erect new buildings (Chambers). Over the decade that followed, both the Veto and Chapels Acts came to be contested in appeals to secular courts. The cases were driven by men with heritable rights who feared the innovations were infringements on their privileges and that elevating chapels of ease to the status of full-fledged parishes would flood the church's courts with evangelicals. In the case of the Chapels Act, the Court of Session determined that it breached the rights of the historic parishes out of which the new had been carved. The Veto Act also fell in the Court of Session, which declared the General Assembly had acted ultra vires in directly infringing upon patrons' rights. The Court of Session further determined that since the Church of Scotland had been established in 1560 by an act of Parliament, the Kirk was in fact a creation of the state and thus subordinate to secular law. By the 1840s, two factions existed in the national church, termed polemically by Hugh Miller as "missionary" and "anti-missionary" (The...