REGISTERED FOR]

No. 1.]

Our Objects.

SCOTLAND has often been called an ecclesiastical country. Certain it is that matters religious and ecclesiastical have interested the Scottish mind ever since the Reformation in a degree hardly paralleled elsewhere. Questions which in other countries would have been left to the clergy, or wholly let alone, have here been claimed by the people as their own. The effects of this have been in many ways beneficial. It has been good for the people to have their minds exercised in what concerns the Church and the public interests of religion. It has been good for ministers and officebearers to feel the influence of popular sympathy and popular opinion. Both parties—people and office-bearers-have been bound together; they have had their views enlarged and their aims elevated. It is important that this interest in religion and the Church should be acknowledged, and that it should be cherished. There are now-a-days many forces at work that tend to weaken it. It ought to be. cultivated and exercised; it ought to be embodied in every suitable form, and appealed to in every fair and reasonable way.

Missionary publications, which record the usual operations of the Church, do not meet this want. The ordinary work of the Church, to which chiefly these refer, is in substance and principle much the same at all times. But, in addition to this, the Church has her providential position assigned to her by the times through which God calls her to pass. She is acted on by emergent affairs, and is called to act upon them. Questions of duty arise that must be determined by a variety of mixed considerations. Great interests come into view which may not yet have assumed practical form, but which ere long may do so, or ought to do so; and they demand thought and care. In Presbyterian Churches the discussions of the Church Courts afford the chief means, and a highly important one, of forming opinions in regard to matters of this kind. But though such discussions are indispensable, they are not sufficient. At the present day, every important class of interests, in order to have justice done to it, must be subjected to discussion through the press. The interests of the Church and of religion certainly require to be discussed in this form.

It seems desirable, therefore, to have a periodical which shall come in as a supplement to ordinary newspapers and magazines, not meddling with their field of labour, and cultivating its own in a way which they neither are able to achieve nor desire to attempt.

In the Free Church, especially, an organ of this kind has been long earnestly called for, and of late more loudly than ever. It is, therefore, primarily with a view to the Free Church community that the PRESBYTERIAN has been planned. In taking this course we shall not be suspected of any desire to isolate the Free Church from others. We gladly acknowledge, and hope to show, that the questions and the interests with which the Free Church has to deal, for the greater part, are common to her with sister Churches, and that for her and for them they fall to be disposed of on the same principles and in the same way. We shall rejoice, therefore, if it shall be found that, without effort and without sacrifice, our pages find a welcome in other Churches besides the Free Church, and become the channel through which members of other Churches may find it suitable to address their Presbyterian brethren. But we stand on the platform of the Free Church, and take for granted her known position

and attainments.

With these views, we intend that the PRESBYTERIAN shall embrace the following departments:-First, a summary of ecclesiastical news. The object will be to bring news of this kind before the mind of our readers in a connected form, so as to show the tenor and current of ecclesiastical affairs. Careful selection and classification will be the objects here.

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Secondly, reviews and notices of ecclesiastical and religious literature, intended both to make our readers aware of what is passing in this department, and to aid them in forming a judgment upon it. Thirdly, articles, generally brief, through which we shall hope to take part usefully in the process of ripening the mind of the community on important questions, and fixing attention on the great principles and the great interests which demand the care of men who are public-spirited in their Christianity. Fourthly, we intend to have a department for correspondence. We shall welcome contributions in this department from men of different views, if only they are written in a proper spirit, and appear likely to promote useful discussion. But our space and the character of our periodical require that we claim leave, when necessary, to give the substance of a letter briefly, and by extracts. We shall do our best to avoid using this right unfairly or unreasonably; but we must distinctly claim it.

In all these departments our object will be to bring our readers to a clearer view and a stronger sense of our common position, and to secure more full and earnest consideration for all that belongs to it.

With respect to the question of Union with the sister Churches with which negotiations are now proceeding, the PRESBYTERIAN Will advocate the importance of Union, and the propriety of forbearance on the minor differences disclosed under the First Head of Programme of the Joint Union Committee. At the same time it will deprecate the prosecution of the movement in a hasty or an overbearing manner, and will seek to do justice to the claims which members of the same Church have on mutual forbearance.

The position of Presbyterianism throughout the world is a still larger subject, and offers more various aspects and ramifications. The essential unity of all the important branches of the Presbyterian Church is a feature of the highest interest: all the more because that unity is becoming more manifest and articulate from year to year. In this age of rapid change, the importance attaching to such a phalanx of sister Churches, and to the providential position which they occupy, can hardly be overestimated. We desire constantly to keep it in view-and the name we have adopted is intended as a tribute to this great fact, and to the hopes which it inspires.

With these views and aims we begin. We shall say nothing now of the standard of performance we hope to reach. We are aware of the difficulties and temptations that have been found to attend the conducting of such periodicals as ours. From all who feel disposed to look favourably on the enterprise, we ask their active interest, their indulgence, and their prayers.

OUR PRESBYTERIAN EMPIRE. PRESBYTERIANISM, as such, is not sectarian. Our Presbyterian principles bid us regard and cherish as Christian brethren all who make a credible profession of Christianity, with their children. Our system thus binds us, as our affections draw us, to recognize and honour the visible Christianity even of those who disown us as unchristian; though Dr. Pusey should feel constrained, by his so-called catholicism, but real sectarianism, to put us outside of the pale of catholic Christendom, yet we, as Presbyterians, are free to own and esteem the author of the master-work on "Daniel" as a great Christian thinker and true father of the Church. And, of course, we are still more free to sympathize and fraternize with evangelical Protestants who may differ from us on more or less important points of government and discipline. Still we are most fully in sympathy with those whose principles are most fully in harmony with ours. Other things being equal, our warmest affection is due to those, and we may most hopefully seek co-operation or incorporation with those, who, like us, are Calvinistic in doctrine and Presbyterian in government. And it gives us real and great pleasure, in this our first number, to call the attention

of our readers to the wide field for Christian affection and co-operation presented by the evangelical Presbyterian branch of Christ's Church in the world.

Presbyterianism has just claims to the designation of Catholic, in the sense of pertaining to the visible Church as a whole. It was the form of government of the primitive Church, down even to the time of that Cyprian who is claimed by Prelatists as the great patron of their system. Lordly Prelacy, as it had begun to exist in his day, was an innovation; and accordingly, after the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when a large part of the Catholic Church threw off the yoke of Antichrist, all the National Protestant Churches became in substance Presbyterian, and have remained in substance Presbyterian to this day, with the one exception of the English Church, which retained the lordly Prelacy at the bidding of the Erastian Tudors, but did not pretend to claim for Prelacy anything like divine authority till two generations after the breach with Rome.

The same fact has been most strikingly exemplified in Scotland, the British Isles, and the new nations which recognize these islands as their cradle. Lordly Prelacy in Scotland is not only an innovation, but a very recent innovation. Before the Popish Prelacy succeeded in intruding itself on the Scottish Church, there had been an evangelical Presbyterian Church in Scotland for nearly a thousand years. Even in the time of a thousand years. Even in the time of Malcolm Canmore, the Church of Scotland was still, though in some respects degenerate, the Church of Columba and of the Culdees. There is reason to believe that, under the name of Lollardism, for instance, that old evangelical Church continued to live on, though not publicly manifested, down to the Reformation. And at the Reformation, as soon as the alien yoke was thrown off, the National Church found herself evangelical Presbyterian, in her leading features the counterpart of the Church of Columba, as if the spirit of the Culdees, having slumbered for four or five centuries, had suddenly awakened again and resumed possession of the National Church under the leadership of Knox, and Henderson, and Chalmers.

Of this National Church one characteristic has always been a disposition to expand itself beyond the nation. Under Aidan and his successors, the Culdee Church carried the gospel not only from Northumberland all over England, but even over wide districts of the Continent; so that footprints of the missionaries of Iona were left among the dark forests of then pagan Germany, and still more among the kindred Celts who inhabited Gaul, and even among those Gauls who inhabited Italy beyond the Alps. And so, after having achieved her Reformation at home, the Reformed Scottish Church cordially accepted the invitation of a revived English Church to endeavour to bring about a scriptural uniformity among all professing Christians within the four seas of Britain-a uniformity which might bring them all into closer resemblance to, and more intimate alliance with, "the best Reformed Churches" on the Continent.

It must not, however, be imagined that at the time of the Westminster Assembly Presbyterianism was imported into England from Scotland. On the contrary, it was England that first proposed the Solemn League and Covenant-the members of the Westminster Assembly were almost all English-the adoption of the Westminster Standards by that Assembly was a spontaneous act of the English Church, in her Puritanic section, declaring in favour of Presbyterianism on the first and only occasion on which she was ever consulted about the proper form of Church government and discipline. Ever since the time of Wycliffe, there had been in the English Church an element of that Puritanism in doctrine which has always been found adverse to Prelacy in government and Ritualism in worship. This Church, of course, was greatly augmented in amount by the Reformation movement; and the Solemn League and Covenant was the confluence of the two streams of National Church life-the English and Scottish Evangelism-while the Westminster Standards, and the Churches now holding by these Standards, ought to be regarded as neither merely English in their origin, nor merely Scottish, but really British-deriving their being, under God, from an evangelical council of Christians in Britain as a whole.

It were superfluous to dilate upon the provinces of the Presbyterian empire, whose lineage we have been tracing. As to its greatness, it is enough to mention, in addition to the British Isles, Anglo-Saxon America, the new nations which constitute our colonial empires, and the various mission fields in which Christian Churches are framed on the Westminster basis. What neither Columba, nor Knox, nor Henderson could have dreamed of, Chalmers was permitted to see-a Presbyterian empire on which the sun never sets, all of whose provinces rejoice in deriving their origin, under God, from the evangelical Presbyterianism of Britain. And there is one respect in which this Presbyterian empire of ours is honourably

distinguished even among the Presbyterian Churches of the Reformation. Among all its branches there has survived a large amount of loyalty to the Christian faith, as set forth in the Westminster and other Protestant symbols. It is true that all its provinces have felt, and been deeply injured by, the Moderate movement which characterized the last century all over Protestant Christendom. But in no one of them has there been such a lamentable bankruptcy of faith as has been witnessed even among the Calvinistic, and still more among the Lutheran, Presbyterian Churches on the Continent. And, correspondingly, in all its provinces there appears to have been a more full experience of the blessed revival of Christian faith and life which has characterized the first half of the present century than has been vouchsafed to many of those sister Churches abroad; so that our Presbyterian empire of Westminster, while in numbers, wealth, and disciplined intelligence, it is probably the most powerful of all Protestant Churches, is at the same time, as a whole, the most thoroughly" orthodox" Church in the world.

To all the citizens of this great empire, in all its provinces, we desire to cherish a special affection. The special affection to them does not exclude, but tends to deepen and widen, the affection we owe to all Christians and all men; as domestic affection trains us for patriotism, and patriotic affection trains us for universal philanthropy. And it has occurred to us to bring our remarks to a head by pointing out one way in which the special affection might be brought into pleasant and profitable operation and exemplification-viz., by holding a council of Presbyterians who hold by the Westminster Standards, once in five, or ten, or twenty years, alternately at Edinburgh, London, and New York, at which all the Churches might confer for ecumenical purposes; while each Church, for local purposes, would always retain her own autonomy, and hold herself perfectly free to accept or reject the decisions of the council in the exercise of her own independent judgment under Christ.

Such a council might profitably confer on resuming the "mission" of the Covenanters, the "extirpation" of Prelacy; or, in other words, the propagation of Presbyterianism by all lawful means. Still more profitably they might confer as to the best methods of dealing with the spiritual diseases and providing for the spiritual wants of our time, and of co-operation in missionary enterprises. And one class of questions would be more advantageously dealt with by such a council than in any other way-we mean, any question about revision of the Westminster Standards, or formation of new ones in their place, or authoritative interpretation of the old. We are far from wishing to stir up such questions; but we desire, in the event of their arising—an event by no means unlikely—that there should be some salutary drag upon the levity of small bodies of Presbyterians, so that no important step may be taken in a matter so vitally important at the instigation of small sectarian impulses; and that every such step may result from deliberation as solemn, and, if possible, authority as high, as that from which the Standards emanated at the first. And for this end, the best means would be such a council as we have suggested—a council which, like the Westminster Assembly, might be attended by those who, though differing from us in some points of government or discipline, yet accept the catholic doctrine of our confession as a whole. But, apart from such practical points, it would be pleasant and profitable; it would really be most animating and cheering to see, from time to time, such a council, for its own sake, attended by "true blue" Presbyterians, not only from all Britain, Ireland, America, and our colonies, but from the recently Cannibal Islands of the South Seas, some of which are now as a "heaven on earth;" and from China, whose stereotype is broken up at last, and which contains at least one Presbytery of ours; and from that great subject empire of our Queen where a Church, newly won from heathenism, is looking across the Indus into the cradle of man's race. And though the idea of such a council should be but a day-dream, yet the dream will serve to illustrate the subject of this article.

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY.

THE approaching General Assembly of the Free Church, we believe, will not fall short, in point of interest, of those which have preceded it. Probably it may be less exciting than the last; but undoubtedly there will be work enough, and important enough, to command the Church's best attention. Without dwelling on details, we will run over a few of the matters which appear likely to call for special care.

Among the Church's schemes, the Sustentation movement may be said to stand foremost, not merely on account of its importance, but on account of its peculiar circumstances. The result of last year's efforts in connection with the scheme lately adopted will come before the Assembly. It is to be