How fickle are the ways of mankind. With considerable effort the government had coaxed a suspicious Presbyterian Church into the Union of 1707. Despite promises being made and a law being passed guaranteeing ‘that the said Presbyterian Government shall be the only Government of the Church within the Kingdom of Scotland,’ it only took five years for such vows to be cast aside as worthless. Along with this came the re-imposing of the patronage of the landowner, to choose the local church minister, even though this system had been abolished in the 1690 Church Settlement. History was repeating itself. The cause of this betrayal was the alliance of the Jacobites, who were determined to restore the Roman Catholic, James Francis Edward Stuart, ‘the Old Pretender’, to the throne, with the Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians and Tory politicians, who sought power. As G.N.M. Collins, Professor of Church History, once wrote, it was a ‘flagrant violation of the Act of Union’, for the government ‘re-imposed Patronage on the Scottish Church’ in order to control it.
Queen Anne favoured such a policy, for it suited her ‘to make Churchmen more dependent on the aristocracy.’ We had broken free from the tyranny of the papal system, only to be ensnared by the tyranny of kings; but now the Church of Scotland would be held captive by the State through the aristocracy. The Patronage Act of 1712 was passed so quickly, without proper consultation, that leaders in the Church of Scotland were taken by surprise. They attempted later, through their commissioners, to try and repeal the Act, but all to no avail. Soon, against the democratic constitution of the Presbyterian Church, the landowners were granted the right to nominate the pastor of their choice, and so they began to dominate the church landscape. Many of the landowners were pro-Episcopalian and liberal, more interested in land and titles, than in true godliness. Through this doorway came greater compromise and liberal values into the Church of Scotland, thus preparing the way for the Enlightenment.
Since 1560 the struggle had largely been over the right of the church to follow biblical teaching, without interference by any external authority. In the Second Book of Discipline (1578), the Christian democratic election of leaders by the people was clearly stated, ‘so that none be intruded upon any congregation, either by the prince or any inferior person, without lawful election and the assent of the people over whom the person is placed, as the practice of the apostolical and primitive kirk and good order crave.’ The 1712 Patronage Act was a backward step into another form of tyranny that would dominate the Church of Scotland for another 130 years, leading eventually to the break-away movement, later known as the Free Church of Scotland. It would not be until 1874 that the Church Patronage Act was passed for the Church of Scotland, thus freeing it to practice its biblical democracy without government interference.
‘Here is the patience of the saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus’ (Revelation 14:12, NKJV).
Image: Portrait of Queen Anne of England, in a tinted engraving from an atlas commissioned by Augustus the Strong (King of Poland and Elector of Saxony), 1706-1710, public domain, Wikipedia.