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The Row Heresy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2011
Extract
On May 25th, 1831, an aged Presbyterian clergyman rose to his feet in the supreme ecclesiastical court of Scotland, the General Assembly, to utter a final plea for his eldest son, who stood accused of a charge of the utmost gravity before the venerable tribunal which was about to determine his fate. An interrupter protested that intervention at that stage was out of order; nevertheless the court allowed him to continue, and at length he ended with these words:
“I bow to any decision to which you may think it right to come. Moderator, I am not afraid for my son; though his brethren cast him out the Master whom he serves will not forsake him; and while I live I will never be ashamed to be the father of so holy and blameless a son.”
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1950
References
1 Row is a village in Dumbartonshire, Scotland, pronounced roo, and now spelt Rhu, a reversion to the original spelling. The case here described is commonly known as “the Row heresy.”
2 There are five judicial censures which, traditionally, may be administered by the Kirk to her clergy: admonition, rebuke, suspension, deposition, and excommunication. This last is the one referred to in the sentence quoted, where “the highest censure of the Church” is threatened. But deposition, which excludes the offender from enjoying either the spiritual or material benefits of an office to which he has been appointed for life, was accounted a ferocious penalty, and it is one which the Kirk's rubrics direct should be “resorted to only in very serious cases.”
3 The Order and Conduct of Divine Service in the Church of Scotland, p. 43.
4 Trustees of ecclesiastical property.
5 Iron rings for the neck, used in public punishment ordered by the courts of the Kirk. Specimens may still be seen hanging outside the doors of some churches in Scotland; there is one at Duddingston, Edinburgh. Dr. George Sprott, a careful historian writing as late as 1868, says that, “till within a few years a common threat to children was: ‘The Minister will put you in the jogges.’” But they had nevertheless fallen into general desuetude by Campbell's time.
6 Letter to his eldest son, March 8th, 1870. Memorials (2 vols., Macmillan, 1877), edited by Donald Campbell, the son of John M'Leod Campbell; vol. i, p. 72.
7 This was the court of ordinary jurisdiction, exercising functions comparable to those of the bishop in episcopal systems.
8 Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 345.
9 Milner's Church History, vol. ii, p. 466 f.
10 The writer, not Calvin, italicizes.
11 E.g., on Matt, xxvi, 28: “Sub multorum nomine non partem mundi tantum designat, sed totum humanum genus.” And on Rom. v, 18: “Communem omnium gratiam facit, quia omnibus exposita est, non quod ad omnes extendatur re ipsa. Nam etsi passus est Christus pro peccatis totius mundi atque omnibus indifferenter, Dei benignitate offeretur: non tamen omnes apprehendunt.”
12 A Full Report of the Proceedings in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, in the case of the Rev. John M'Leod Campbell, late Minister of Row, published by Lusk, Greenock, 1831. The proceedings in the inferior courts, no less tedious, have also been published.
13 Letter to D. J. Vaughan, November 13th, 1862 (Memorials, vol. ii, p. 35).
14 The Presbytery of London, one of the Kirk's presbyteries “furth of Scotland.” The sentence of excommunication was evidently ineffective for certain technical reasons. In 1833 sentence of deposition was passed by the Presbytery of Annan.
15 Memorials, vol. ii, p. 208.
16 Letter, May 21st, 1865; op. cit., p. 91.
17 Campbell's italics.
18 Letter, June 11th, 1865; op. cit.
19 i Timothy 4.16.
20 Lux Mundi, a series of studies edited by Charles Gore; vii, The Atonement, by the Rev. and Hon. Arthur Lyttelton; (12th edit., New York, Thomas Whittaker) p. 256.
21 Sc, that of the United Presbyterian Synod in 1879, that of the Free Church of Scotland in 1892, and that of the Established Church of Scotland in 1910. The latter was intended to facilitate the Union of Scottish Presbyterians which took place in 1929.
22 Section 4 of the Act of 1879.
23 A characteristic tract, dated 1738 and entitled An Essay upon the Sacred Use of Organs, openly proclaims this attitude, saying (p. 4) that the people of Scotland “seem never to have much admired such pompous, gauding Braveries in the Worship of God, as the musical Whistlings of a Pair of Organs” and that they “for the generality, have something else to do with what little Moyety their barren Clime can afford , em, than to lavish it out upon an expensive Organ, and a Choir of chanting Quiristers.”
24 Arnot, Hugo, History of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Creech, 1788), p. 35Google Scholar.
25 The Row case was unsuccessfully recalled by a speaker at the Assembly of 1897, when the young incumbent of the parish of Kilmun, not far from Row, was charged with heresy. This heretic, Alexander Robinson, had written a somewhat immature book in which he seemed to deny the divinity of Christ and to repudiate belief in miracles. At that Assembly there happened to be another disciplinary case under consideration, in which the accused was charged with misconduct, including gross drunkenness. The leader of the house, Dr. Archibald Scott, said that it was a painful duty to bring forward this latter case, in which he begged the Assembly to show leniency in their judgment of a brother minister. When the Kilmun case was considered, however, Dr. Scott explained at once that here he had no compunction: it was a question of doctrine. Even despite the recommendation of leniency by W. P. Paterson, then of Aberdeen University and later Dean of Divinity at Edinburgh, Robinson was deposed after 308 votes had been recorded in favor of this sentence and but 134 against it. It should be remembered that the alternative proposed by those against deposition involved severe censure and the injunction to future care and reverence in questions of faith.
26 Jer. vi, 16.