THE

SCOTTISH GUARDIAN.

JANUARY 1865.

CHRISTMAS 18 6 4.

WE are once more in the midst of the holy festivities of Christmas. Once more does universal Christendom commemorate the great event upon which the salvation of mankind depended. In the Church in Scotland it has long been a season of mingled joy and of sorrow. With the prison and the scaffold before them, Scottish Churchmen, little more than a century ago, assembled with closed doors. The priest celebrated the sacred meal of the holy Eucharist, ere long looking for an untimely and bloody end. The scaffold reeked with blood. The prison houses were filled to overflowing with the noblest of the land; but here we are in 1864 a vigorous and spreading plant, appointed to do a great work here in Scotland. Christmas, 1864, is the merriest Christmas our Church has passed for many a long day. "The movement" has fairly begun; and the first gun has been fired by Mr. Flemyng.

There are, doubtless, penury and want in many of the houses of the clergy. We have got only as yet the miserable minimum of £120, but that is a great step from £90. Fifteen thousand pounds

in the bank is the best answer to gainsayers.

Christmas is a season for rejoicing, and a season for forgiveness. We trust that all Christians will follow the ancient practice of the Church and forget all quarrels, more especially those which relate to the Church. The Church is the mother of us all, and should decide all miserable bickerings there may be between us.

VOL. II. NO. XII.

1

All of us have our trials, our
Let no divisions prevent us

There is a great work before us. sorrows, our triumphs, and our joys. from aiding the Church in her great work of the saving of souls. Few are the years allotted to us here below for doing the work of Christ. Exposed we may be, as our Great Master was before us, to the taunts and ridicule of the world. What is all that to her compared with an heavenly crown? The work must be done, and we must do it. What is this work? It is a theme wide and comprehensive. This poor despised Church of Scotland, as she was called, which within our memory, used to go "begging and whining" to England, has become a vigorous and healthy plant. She no longer trembles and cowers at the sight of the policeman; she no longer assembles in the back alleys; she no longer appears in the police calendar. She arrests the attention of the legislature and of government. She appears fearlessly in the open day to do a great work in this our Scotland. In the hour of her weakness and of her trial she was presented with a daughter, the Church of America, who has opened up the most important question which can affect Chrisendom-a union with the great Church of the East, a communion numbering within her pale some eighty millions. The Church in Scotland naturally looks with great interest upon the settlement of this great question.

The movements in Italy, in Denmark, and in Germany are all also engaging our anxious attention, inasmuch as it can only be by our American daughter and ourselves such questions can be brought to a satisfactory issue. Then, again, our relations to the Church of England are, by civil law, clearly defined. The brand has been removed from off us. It was a question which the legislature has settled almost unanimously, so evident was its injustice, so clearly established was its unreasonableness. The Church of England, through various of her members, has heretofore done us good service. She has now done it as a Church in her corporate capacity. Holding, as we do, that we possess many advantages over her in our voluntary position-in our freedom from State control-in our ancient and pure traditions—still there can be no doubt it is a matter worthy of all congratulation, that two Churches holding identically the same creeds and the same doctrines should not be by civil law even partially dissevered, and that justice, however tardy, should have been done us at last. In saying this, also, it would be shameful to forget the great services that have been rendered by the Duke

of Buccleuch in this matter, which, we must say, our Church has not as yet in any way adequately expressed. But it would be also very ungrateful did we not acknowledge the deep debt we owe to the Primus. His tact and his forbearance materially aided his Grace, as his Grace will, we feel assured, be the first to acknowledge, in his dealings with the English Episcopal College. We cannot also forbear tendering him the thanks of the Laity of our Church, which we think we may do without any presumption, for the aid he has rendered to our Lay movement. His tact, his love of fair play, which we must say, however reluctantly, is more congenial to the English than the Scottish temperament, and his genial temper, has carried our Church through many trials and difficulties, both in the important matters laid before our late Synods, and in his management of the financial movement of 1863. But there is a great work yet before us. What a work has to be done in the towns. In Edinburgh, in Glasgow, in Aberdeen, the Church has a great mission to fulfil. What puny efforts have yet been made to grapple with the evils of the times.

To provide Gaelic clergy for the thousands in Argyleshire and Inverness-shire yearning to hear the Word of Life, to raise the minimum of each Bishop to £500, and of each Incumbent to £150, such is the work for 1865. To repair the past is the watchword which should be in every Churchman's mouth; at any rate, Forward is the word, for the "movement " has begun.

HUGH SCOTT, of Gala.

THE CHURCH SOCIETY.

OUR last number contained a full report of the meeting of the General Committee of the Church Society held on 17th November. The meeting of the General Committee has always, in a business point of view, been the most important Annual Meeting of the Society. It is then that the result of the Society's operations for the year preceding is first made public, and the Report of the Committee on Claims brings up for final settlement by the General Committee all the important questions affecting the distribution of the funds collected. Last meeting, however, was one of peculiar interest and importance, being the first held since the development of the Society under its new rules, as the great financial organ of the Church. We felt, therefore, at the time that no apology was needed for fully reporting that meeting and the great

gathering at Glasgow on 3d November, even to the exclusion of other matter from our columns, and we trust that a short review of the Society's progress during the first year of its greatly extended operations will now prove not uninteresting to our readers.

As a basis for our remarks, we have abstracted from the Society's Reports for 1863, and from two other reports-that of Mr. Jamieson, Auditor of the Society, to the Committee on Funds, and that of the Committee on Claims-to the General Committee, both dated November last the following vidimus, contrasting in parallel columns the position of the Society at the end of 1863 with its position at the end of 1864, and its operations during each of these years:

We should have been unwilling to introduce into this article such an array of figures, more especially as the Auditor's Report, with its clear exposition of the Society's present position, must be in the hands of many of our readers, but that such a parallel statement as we have presented shows at a glance the pecuniary improvement and the greatly extended usefulness that have resulted from the late re-constitution of the Church Society. Such contrasts, moreover, cannot fail to have a salutary effect; and, regarding the development of the Church Society as the best test of the prosperity of the Church, we hope that this will be only the first of a long series of annual reviews of the Society presenting the progress of each future year in a contrast as favourable as the present to that of the year before.

To the information that may be derived from a comparison of these parallel columns we have little to add. It appears from these that in one year the Society has received an addition to its capital of £13,000, and that its revenue has increased by more than £800. These figures, however, represent only the sums that have come into the hands of the General Treasurer of the Society, and it must no be forgotten that, under the new system of finance, the local Committees retain for congregational purposes half of all subscriptions, half of the donations to the Clergy Fund, and one-fourth of the unappropriated donations collected through their agency. We are under the mark in estimating the amount of subscriptions so retained at £800, and the increase of revenue last year ought therefore to be stated at £1600. There is no doubt also that the proportion of donations retained by the local Committees exceeds £400.

The immediate practical results are not less encouraging. In the department of Stipend Aid, the Society assisted last year only fifty Incumbents-the maximum grant to each being £45, and no Incumbent receiving aid whose stipend, without a parsonage, amounted to