Handout #235

The Scottish Disruption

At its customary annual meeting in Edinburgh, the 1842 General Assembly, the Church of Scotland's supreme governing body, issued a solemn protest about the interference of the Scottish civil courts (the Court of Session) which had upheld the right of private patrons. It ranks as one of spiritual independence.

...the General Assembly, while recognizing the absolute jurisdiction of the Civil Courts in relation to all the temporalities conferred by the State upon the Church, claim as a right freely to possess and enjoy the liberties and rights and privileges bestowed on the Church according to law; declare that they cannot in conscience intrude ministers on reclaiming [objecting] congregations or carry on the government of Christ's Church subject to the coercion attempted by the Court of Session; protest against sentences of the Civil Court in contravention of the Church's liberties, which rather than abandon they will relinquish the privileges of establishment, and call on all Christian people everywhere to note that it is for loyalty to Christ's Kingdom and Crown that the Church of Scotland is obliged to suffer hardship. 

The British government rejected the Claim of Right and the resolutions about patronage which accompanied it, and so in the following year, a dramatic walk-out at the meeting of the General Assembly, led by the previous year's Moderator (Chairman), heralded the formation of the Free Church. The Scottish judge Lord Cockburn recalled the scene:

As soon as Welsh, who wore his Moderator's dress, appeared in the street, and people saw that principle had really triumphed over interest, he and his followers were received with the loudest acclamations. They walked in procession to Hanover Street to Canon mills ... through an unbroken mass of cheering people and beneath innumerable handkerchiefs waving from the windows. But amidst this exultation there was much sadness and many a tear, many a grave face and fearful thought, for no-one could doubt that these ministers left the Church, and no thinking man could look on the unexampled scene and behold that the temple was rent, without pain and sad forebodings. 

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