Faith at Westminister. But toward the close of the last century, the principles
of the French revolution, so active in other countries, had also found their
entrance into Scotland; and there they menaced not only the civil but also
the ecclesiastical authority of the state. This was especially the case in that
body called the Secession, to a part of which Mr. M’Crie belonged. The
Seceders had caught that Gallican spirit so hostile to kings and rulers, and they
now found out that all connection between church and state should cease.
Each was to shift for itself as it best could, without the aid or co-operation of
the other; while kings and magistrates, instead of being bound by their office
to be nursing fathers of the church, were engaged to nothing more, and could
claim nothing higher, than what they might effect as mere members and private
individuals. In this way the Voluntary principle was recognized as the only
earthly stay of the church's dependence, and the party who adopted it thenceforth became, not seceders from the Establishment, but Dissenters. It was thu
that they closed and bolted the door against any future reunion with the parent church, let the latter become as reformed and as pure as it might. In this painful controversy Mr. M'Crie was deeply involved and, superior to that restless spirit of modern innovation by which it was animated, he took the unpopular side of the question, and held fast by those original standards of the Secession which
the majority were so eager to abandon. The result was that numbers and votes prevailed, so that he, and three conscientious brethren of the church who
held the same principles with himself, were formally deposed in 1806. The dissentients, under the new name of the Constitutional Associate Presbytery,
were thus dispossessed of their churches, but not of their congregations, who still adhered to them; and in the new places of worship to which they repaired,
they continued to exercise their ministry as before. In this way they formed a separate and distinct, though small and unnoticed body, until 1827, when
they united themselves with another portion of protesters from the same synod, under the common title of Original Seceders.
During the progress of these events, which extended over a course of years, and with which Mr. M'Crie was so vitally connected, their whole bearing had a most momentous influence upon his future literary labours. They threw his mind back upon the original principles of the Scottish Reformation, and made them the chief subjects of his inquiry; they brought him into close contact with those illustrious characters by whom the Reformation was commenced; and they animated and strengthened that love of religious consistency, and hostility to ecclesiastical tyranny and oppression, that accorded so materially with his original character. In the following sentence from one of his letters in 1802, we can well recognize the man who set at nought the demolition of such things as cathedrals and monasteries, when they hindered the erection of a true church, and who was well fitted to become the biographer of him whose stern principle was, "Pull down the nests and the rooks will flee." "There is something, he thus writes, "in the modern study of the fine arts, belles-lettres, and mere antiquities, that gives the mind a littleness which totally unfits it for being suitably affected with things truly great in characters eminent for love of religion, liberty, and true learning. To demolish a Gothic arch, break a pane of painted glass, or deface a picture, are with them acts of ferocious sacrilege, not to be atoned for, the perpetrators of which must be ipso facto excommunicated from all civil society, and reckoned henceforth among savages; while to preserve these magnificent trifles, for which they entertain a veneration little
