166 FUTURE VARIATIONS IN CREEDS. [HAP. XII, 



should return to the Church of England, whose doctrines they 

 had never renounced. But the most signal instance of a fixed 

 determination to prevent any one congregation from changing its 

 mind in regard to any dogma or rite, until all the others associat 

 ed with it are ready to move on in the same direction, has been 

 exemplified in our times by the Free Kirk of Scotland. More 

 than a million of the population suddenly deserted the old estab 

 lishment, and were compelled to abandon hundreds of ecclesiasti 

 cal buildings, in which they had worshiped from their childhood. 

 Some of these edifices remained useless for a time, locked up, 

 and no service performed in them, because the minister and 

 nearly all the parishioners had joined in the secession. It was 

 necessary for the separatists to erect 700 or 800 new edifices 

 and school-houses, on which they expended several hundred 

 thousand pounds, having often no small difficulty to obtain new 

 sites for churches, so that their ministers preached for a time, 

 like the Covenanters of old, in the open air. It was under these 

 circumstances, and at the moment of submitting to such sacrifices, 

 that their new ecclesiastical organization was completed, provid 

 ing that if any one of several hundred congregations should here 

 after deviate, in ever so slight a degree, from any one of the 

 numerous articles of faith drawn up nearly three centuries ago, 

 under the sanction of John Knox, or from any one of the rules and 

 forms of church government then enacted, they should be dispos 

 sessed of the newly erected building, and all funds thereunto 

 belonging. Had any other contract been proposed, implying the 

 possibility of any future change or improvement in doctrine or 

 ceremony, not a farthing would have been contributed by these 

 zealous Presbyterians ; nor have they acted inconsistently, inas 

 much as they are fully persuaded that they neither participate in 

 an onward or backward movement, but are simply reverting to 

 that pure and perfect standard of orthodoxy of the middle of the 

 sixteenth century, from which others have so sinfully departed. 



It is only in times comparatively modern, that the opinion has 

 gained ground in Europe, and very recently in Scotland, that in 

 the settlement of landed property there should be some limitation 

 of the power of the dead over the living, and that a testator can 



