Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 17.djvu/411

 ,’ which began in 1717 [see, the elder, (1677–1732)], and being one of the ‘twelve apostles’ who signed the ‘representation’ of 11 May 1721, he shared the rebuke passed on them by the assembly of 1722. His contumacy interfered with his advancement in the church, though it does not appear that he was anxious to leave Portmoak. He was proposed as a candidate for Kirkcaldy, Fife, but the synod on 1 Oct. 1724 prohibited his preaching on trial. In May 1725 Andrew Anderson arraigned him before the commission of assembly on the ground of certain sermons, some of which had been preached ten years before. He was called to Kinross, but on 4 April 1728 his translation was refused. Had he been a member of the assembly (1729) which confirmed the suspension of John Simson, divinity professor at Glasgow, for heretical teaching, he would have joined Boston in his protest against the inadequacy of the sentence. At length, on 28 April 1731, he was called to the third charge, or west church, of Stirling. He was admitted on 8 July, and transferred from Portmoak on 6 Sept. His entrance on this important charge was followed by his election to the moderatorship of the synod of Stirling and Perth. In his improved position he redoubled his opposition to the policy which ruled the proceedings of the assembly.

In 1732 the assembly passed an act to regulate the election to vacant churches in cases where patrons had failed to present. This act, which ignored the right of popular choice, was pushed through in a somewhat unconstitutional way, and Erskine initiated a protest against it, which the assembly refused to receive. Preaching in the following October as outgoing moderator of synod, on ‘the stone rejected by the builders,’ Erskine inveighed against the act as of no ‘divine authority.’ After three days' debate the synod, by a majority of six, passed a vote of censure on the sermon. Erskine appealed to the assembly, but only escaped the synod's solemn rebuke by retiring from the meeting, a course which he repeated in April. On 14 May 1733 the assembly sustained the action of synod, and Erskine was rebuked at the bar of the house by the moderator, John Goldie or Gowdie. Anticipating this censure Erskine, in concert with three others, had prepared a protest, which they now asked permission to read. This being denied they withdrew, leaving the paper behind them. By ill luck this paper fell into the hands of James Naismith of Dalmeny, Linlithgowshire, who, at the evening session, called the assembly's attention to its contents. At eleven o'clock at night the assembly's officer was sent to the four protestors [sic], with a citation to the bar of the house next morning. They appeared and were handed over to a committee, in the hope of getting them to retract the protest. As they would not do this, the assembly directed them to appear in August before the standing commission, which was empowered to suspend, and in November to depose them, if they remained obdurate. On 16 Nov. 1733 a sentence equivalent to deposition was carried by the moderator's casting vote.

On the same day Erskine and his three friends (William Wilson of Perth, Alexander Moncrieff of Abernethy, and James Fisher of Kinclaven) put their names to a formal act of secession. At Gairney Bridge, near Kinross, they constituted themselves (6 Dec.) an ‘associate presbytery,’ with Erskine as moderator. They had the enthusiastic support of their flocks, who, at Perth and Abernethy, resisted the deputation of assembly appointed to declare the churches vacant. The spring communion at Abernethy drew a vast concourse of people from all parts of Scotland. The ‘testimony’ of the new religious body, issued in March, had roused the whole country. The assembly began to feel that it had gone too far. Accordingly in 1734 the obnoxious act was declared to be informal and ‘no longer binding;’ and on 14 May 1734 the synod was empowered to remove the censure from the four ministers, and restore them to their status. This was done on 2 July. That nothing might be wanting to the grace of the restoration, Erskine was in his absence re-elected to the moderator's chair.

Wilson would have accepted these healing measures, but Erskine had now embarked on a course from which he could not turn back. He regarded the assembly's whole ecclesiastical policy as a compromise, and was not to be won by personal concessions. The proceedings of the assemblies of 1735 and 1736 confirmed his distrust of the overtures for conciliation, and brought applications to the ‘associate presbytery’ for ‘supply of preaching’ from seceding bodies in various parishes, where the appointment of ministers under the law of patronage had been confirmed by the assembly in the face of congregational remonstrance. After the assembly of 1736 Wilson came round to Erskine's view of the situation, and on 3 Dec. 1736 the four seceding ministers issued their second or ‘judicial testimony,’ which reviewed the history of the church of Scotland from the Reformation, and presented an elaborate indictment of the policy pursued since 1650.

Modern successors of Erskine's movement agree that the ‘judicial testimony’ is a document of very unequal merit. Its historical