3. The Act for the Yule Vacancy: that is, for keeping Christmas.
"If these three are obtained, the Church will then be restored to her full lustre and authority, and it's hoped will never more have any occasion to complain of being oppressed."[1] So these Acts, reasonable as they were, and beneficial as they have proved to be, were viewed as acts of oppression towards the Church of Scotland. Even De Foe, acute as he was in most matters, was in this totally blinded by his strong prejudices.
The author of the Life of Carstairs, writing in the year 1774, was fully sensible of the advantages which had accrued from the proceedings of this period. "The experience of sixty years has at last evinced, what it was impossible for human sagacity then to discover, that the Act of Toleration and the Act restoring Patronages, which were considered by the friends of the Church of Scotland as fatal to her interests, and which were probably intended as the preludes to greater changes, have proved the source of her greatest security. Upon the one hand, the Act of Toleration, by taking the weapon of offence out of the hands of the Presbyterians, removed the chief ground of those resentments which the friends of Prelacy entertained against them, and, in a few years, almost annihilated Episcopacy in Scotland. Upon the other hand, the Act restoring Patronages, by restoring the nobility and gentlemen of property to their wonted influence in the settlement of the Clergy, reconciled numbers of them to the established Church, who had conceived the most viozlent prejudices
- ↑ De Foe's Memoirs of the Church of Scotland. Appendix.
