Page:(1848) Observations on Church and State- JF Ferrier.pdf/16

16 second House of Parliament was only the first under a new face and somewhat different organisation.

A very little reflection may convince any one of the absurdity of assigning to our General Assembly any other origin than this. Was the General Assembly set on foot for the purpose of providing the Reformed ministry with a court exclusively their own, (or nearly so,) and of which they were to have the uncontrolled direction? The hypothesis is altogether untenable. This would have been to adopt and perpetuate the worst abuses of the church of Rome. The capital doctrine of the Reformation was, that the clergy were not the church. It is truly remarked by the Duke of Argyll, that it was from heresy as to what was the church, that, in the opinion of our early Reformers, “all other heresies had sprung.” This leading heresy, or mistake of the Romanists, consisted in their holding that the clergy were  the church. To correct this heresy, the Reformers proclaimed that the church consisted of the whole body of Reformed Christian communicants. Is it reasonable, then, to suppose, that they would have adopted a line of conduct in direct contradiction to their own most emphatic declaration, as they would have done had they proposed to vest the legislature of the church in a quarter in which this whole body of believers was not most abundantly represented? To have committed the legislation of the church to the clergy, would have been tantamount to declaring that the clergy were properly and emphatically the church.

But consider further—on what title could the Reformed clergy have claimed or obtained a court exclusively their own, for the supreme legislation of the church? On the ground that they were the spiritual estate of the realm? They were not so. The only spiritual estate, the Catholic prelates—who possessed, indeed, a separate council, in subordination to the court of Rome; but which, at this time, we presume, was pretty nearly defunct,—this estate was fast dying out on the benches of the other parliament, and there has been no ecclesiastical estate in Scotland since its decease—just because the whole nation, at the time of the Reformation, became an ecclesiastical estate. Did, then, the Reformed clergy found their title upon the nature of the vocation to which they had been called? Alas! they held their office, as we have shown, by a merely human tenure. They wanted the