Refusal to gather as the greater sin?

[Phil D.]

Just a few thoughts from an interested bystander...

I am partway through Holfelder's work and it is a definite eye-opener. I've read a fair bit of Scottish history before in broader treatments of it, but this work fills in a lot of gaps, especially with regard to the state Kirk. As Chris has mentioned, it does much to disabuse the "golden-era" of Presbyterianism sometimes inferred in various accounts. I would go a step further, and say it offers a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of at least some forms of establishmentarianism, some of which (to me) seem inevitable and even built-in. Human nature, even when redeemed and sanctified, is still human nature. In this setting, whether one was holding tight to their strict religious beliefs and practices, or freely adapting them, or being more accepting of others' in an attempt to better deal with "reality" - personal pride, dishonesties (frankly), and political intrigues still occurred on both sides. And the nation suffered tremendously as a result.

I also agree with Jake's assessment that Howie's Scots Worthies often seems a bit slanted toward the Protestor side. Durham is characterized as, "...though always blameless and moral in his life, both in the university and when he left it, yet he was much a stranger to religion in the serious exercise and power of it, and through prejudice of education, did not stand well affected to the Presbyterian Government." About the only way to account for such an appraisal seems to be Durham's unwillingness to always stand squarely with the Protestors. One also wonders if some of Howie's work was in mind when Holfelder mentions previously published "hagiographical biographies" that have had considerable influence in the common perception of things. Holfelder also has the great advantage of having consulted many more primary resources than previous authors on the subject. Something along those lines that shows this is a statement by Howie concerning James Wood (a leading Resolutioner) - "there seems to be nothing on record concerning this bright star of Presbytery, previous to the year 1651" - whereas Holfelder references Wood numerous times with respect to some momentous events prior to 1651. Wood even played a significant role in the first Treaty of Breda (1650).

 

[NaphtaliPress]

Just a few thoughts from an interested bystander...

I am partway through Holfelder's work and it is a definite eye-opener. I've read a fair bit of Scottish history before in broader treatments of it, but this work fills in a lot of gaps, especially with regard to the state Kirk. As Chris has mentioned, it does much to disabuse the "golden-era" of Presbyterianism sometimes inferred in various accounts. I would go a step further, and say it offers a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of at least some forms of establishmentarianism, some of which (to me) seem inevitable and even built-in. Human nature, even when redeemed and sanctified, is still human nature. In this setting, whether one was holding tight to their strict religious beliefs and practices, or freely adapting them, or being more accepting of others' in an attempt to better deal with "reality" - personal pride, dishonesties (frankly), and political intrigues still occurred on both sides. And the nation suffered tremendously as a result.

I also agree with Jake's assessment that Howie's Scots Worthies often seems a bit slanted toward the Protestor side. Durham is characterized as, "...though always blameless and moral in his life, both in the university and when he left it, yet he was much a stranger to religion in the serious exercise and power of it, and through prejudice of education, did not stand well affected to the Presbyterian Government." About the only way to account for such an appraisal seems to be Durham's unwillingness to always stand squarely with the Protestors. One also wonders if some of Howie's work was in mind when Holfelder mentions previously published "hagiographical biographies" that have had considerable influence in the common perception of things. Holfelder also has the great advantage of having consulted many more primary resources than previous authors on the subject. Something along those lines that shows this is a statement by Howie concerning James Wood (a leading Resolutioner) - "there seems to be nothing on record concerning this bright star of Presbytery, previous to the year 1651" - whereas Holfelder references Wood numerous times with respect to some momentous events prior to 1651. Wood even played a leading role in the Treaty of Breda (1650).

I didn't deal with this particular slander of Durham (wish I had; it irks me to no end) but Howie also repeated Alexander Clarkson's slander of John Carstares, Durham's sometime editor; the polemicists of the society men were not averse to engaging in character assassination. I deal with this for several pages in the bibliography of Durham in v3 of the Lectures on Revelation for the Naphtali Press and RHB NP Special Editions series. See if I can cut and paste without a lot of format loss (looks like it loses the italics; sorry):

As the last work by Durham to note appeared many years after his death, before describing it, it may not be out of place to defend John Carstares from an unjust aspersion cast on his character in the years before its publication. A claim was made in 1731 in a defense issued by the United Societies who chose to remain separate from the Scottish kirk after the Revolution Settlement of 1690, that John Carstares had altered the text of Durham’s Treatise Concerning Scandal.[1] Plain Reasons (1731) was reissued by the famous John Howie in 1787, who also repeated the charge in his life of James Guthrie in his often reprinted Biographia Scoticana.[2] The claim was made amidst a complaint about the Resolutioners’ deposition of several Protester ministers from their ministries in 1651, including Patrick Gillespie and James Guthrie.[3]

which malignant resolutioners excommunicated worthy, pious and zealous Colonel Strachan also (for his adherence to the Remonstrance, agreeable to sound Covenanted principles, against the Public Resolutions)[4] with design to gain the favour of the court: and by Mr. John Carstares, in the High Church of Glasgow, was that unjust sentence pronounced; the man that doth preface all Mr. Durham’s posthumous works, some of which are alledged to be vitiated by him, particularly that upon scandal, which seems inconsistent with itself, and clearly opposite to his other works, especially his writings upon the Revelation, Chap. ii. but particularly on the church of Pergamos.[5]

Howie retains the text in full in his reissue of Plain Reasons,[6] but in his life of Guthrie, he reduced this to a note that reads, “This unjust sentence was pronounced in the high church of Glasgow by Mr. John Carstairs, who prefaceth Mr. Durham’s posthumous works, some of which are supposed to be vitiated by him, especially his treatise on scandal.” M’Gavin in his revision of Howie, abridged this even more to only the first clause.[7] However, even this is inaccurate because it was not an unjust sentence, and without the full historical context even that remnant remains a prejudicial statement against Carstares.

Whatever the demerits of the actions of the Resolutioners, this charge seems clearly designed to cast doubt on the integrity of the Treatise Concerning Scandal, because the Society Men did not care for implications it had for their continuing separate from the establishment church. The question in dispute about a divided church uniting, was whether parties should unite first and then address defects and discipline, or whether parties should refuse to unite until those are addressed. The Society Men were committed to the latter. Durham was committed to the former, and he is not inconsistent on this question when comparing the lectures on Revelation 2–3 (delivered in 1653, revised and published in 1658) to the treatise (published in 1659). In the treatise Durham writes that “when church officers are defective in their duty” to discipline error and uphold sound doctrine and practice, church members “are to continue in the discharge of the duties of their stations, and not to separate from the communion of the church, but to count themselves exonered in holding fast their own integrity.”[8] Durham observes at great length the same duty in his lecture six on chapter two of Revelation concerning the Letter to the Church in Thyatira (the lecture immediately following the one singled out in the false claim).[9] [….]

The above published text is greatly expanded from that in the surviving manuscript of the lecture as given in 1653; however, it delivers the same central point.[10]

2. Observe, that the main things here that concerns reproof for the neglect of the exercise of discipline and drawing out of censures, and the main things that concerns commendation, is not to be looked on as relating to the people primarily, but as relating to the church officers, guides and overseers. Therefore, it is said to you officers distinct from the rest of the people, and then to the people as sharing in these exhortations, commendations, reproofs, directions for duty that are in the epistle.

3. Observe, though it was a fault in these church officers to suffer Jezebel and her followers to bide in the church, they ought to have discovered and casten her and them out, yet it was no fault to the people to remain in the church, though they were tolerant. There was great odds betwixt their guilt who suffered them and the peoples’, and He never directs the people to cut themselves off from the church fellowship or to separate in all these epistles, because they were tolerat[ed], though He direct to cut off or cast out the corrupt teachers. If the corruption of ordinances did pollute the people, certainly it would have [sic have not] been more condemnable in them to have biddin [sic? abided] in the fellowship of these churches than to have separat[ed]. But they are never bidden [commanded to] separate. Ergo.

As for the principle at stake, in his treatise Durham writes that there is “an absolute necessity laid upon a rent church to unite.”[11] Durham maintained the same thing six years earlier, four months before he even began the lectures on Revelation. In his retiring moderator’s sermon before the Synod of Glasgow, which had become bitterly divided over the Public Resolutions, Durham preached,

If union be the great step to edification as dissention and strife are the door that lets in distraction, then division and separation cannot be the cure, but union is the first and great step of edification. Therefore, separation cannot be the cure. Separation has ever been the greatest enemy of edification and reformation.[12]

This one statement undermines any thought that Durham would justify a continued separation in the case at hand. It is clear that this false claim was made because of the Society Men’s inability to view the works except through the distorting lens of their raison d’être. Hence, they concluded there must be inconsistency, whereas the actual problem was that they were trying to read support for their continued division, when Durham throughout his writings consistently offers no such support. However, unwilling to directly charge one so universally praised as Durham was, they fixed on a rumor, surely invented amongst themselves, that inconsistency was introduced by a malevolent editor. First, Carstares is painted as some unworthy character who supported the public Resolutions because of his reading of the notice of Strachan’s excommunication. Then, because he is supposed to have had a hand in the text of Concerning Scandal, the smear is suggested that he adulterated the true text. There is no evidence of any of this. It is pure character assassination, and all for the goal of explaining away and in order to dismiss inconvenient parts of that book. One would think any Christian would have had a higher view of the ninth commandment than to use half-truths and innuendo against a man no longer alive to defend his name, but especially those bound by oath to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, and the many ways that commandment is violated.[13] There are serious problems with the allegations, which show just how scurrilous they are:

1. Durham completed all the text submitted for the publication of the Revelation commentary himself and most of the work on scandal, dictating the fourth part from his bed. He had the manuscript of the work on scandal sent to Robert Blair, who prepared the text and saw it to press, and who assures the reader the text throughout the process was Durham’s.[14] Carstares freely admits that he necessarily had to make up for the inadequacies of the sermon manuscripts of the later publications.[15] However, though Carstares served as publisher for the earlier works, and specifically took responsibility for any defect in Concerning Scandal, this was apparently in regard to the chapter divisions added to the fourth part, and there is no reason to think Carstares had any significant hand in editing it or the lectures on Revelation.

2. Carstares was a Protester. This is indisputable, and Baillie faults him for being one of the driving forces of that cause in Glasgow.[16] He suffered as much as any who were not executed, and while MacWard and he disagreed on the more severe views of the field preachers, such as hearing the indulged ministers preach, MacWard nevertheless characterized Carstares as that other great gospel preacher with which Glasgow was blessed.[17]

3. Colonel Strachan held a key position as a leader of the Western Army which through necessity the Resolutioners had allowed the Protester dominated west to form, after assurances they would nevertheless maintain a unified front against the invading English.[18] Strachan appears to have been in the extremist portion of the Protesters who were influenced by English sectarianism and who would just as soon see Cromwell take over Scotland. His actions, or lack thereof, eventually undermined the defense of the country and helped allow exactly that to take place. Strachan became uncontrollable to the Protester leaders and even Patrick Gillespie saw him as a liability. The Protester leadership forced Strachan to resign because he threatened their gaining broader support from the moderates (those Resolutioners who were not Royalists).[19] He further sealed his own fate when he defected to the English. He thus had rendered himself odious and a problem for the Protesters, and when the Commission of the General Assembly gave out the sentence of excommunication, for treason essentially, there does not seem to have been any hue or cry.[20] The fact that Carstares read his sentence of excommunication, therefore, in no way suggests Resolutioner sympathies on Carstares’ part.

4. James Durham was on the commission that ordered the sentence of excommunication, and we have no record that he had any objection to it.[21] And while we have no word from Durham pro or contra as to the verdict of the commission on which he sat, we do know what he thought of Cromwell. He preached to the General’s face against the invasion in the April after this verdict of January 6!

5. The sentence was ordered read first by a Rev. Alexander Rollock at Perth (where the commission was sitting), and thereafter read from the pulpit on the Lord’s day by the presiding minister as the news reached other places. If Carstares indeed read the sentence, it was only because he was presiding the Lord’s Day after the news reached Glasgow, and he is no more to be faulted than anyone else that read the sentence throughout the country.

6. Linking the excommunication to the deposition of Protester ministers is misleading. The Commission of the General Assembly passed the sentence of excommunication in January of 1651, which had no relation to the subsequent depositions of the four ministers by the royalist dominated General Assembly of July of that year.[22]

7. Wodrow makes the comment that the commission laid this sentence on a better man (Strachan), after it removed the excommunication of John Middleton, who had led a foolishly conceived and horribly executed royalist coup, with a plan to grab the king and take over the government. This may be related to the “please the court” in the claim. They both deserved the sentences, so this must relate to the otherwise better character of the one over the other.[23] However, Middleton repented in sackcloth while Strachan simply did not show up before the court and fled. As the charge makes clear, he had defected to the enemy who had been spilling the blood of his countrymen. The government subsequently charged him with treason. If anything seems askew it is the church’s commission acting prior to the government. But the commission had done the same thing when the Protesters had the votes to excommunicate Middleton at James Guthrie’s urging.

Therefore, with so many facts illustrating the absurdity of this charge against John Carstares, it is clearly nothing more than a baseless smear to malign him, the real goal being to undermine Durham’s arguments against unjustified division in the church in his work on scandal. If one thought there was inconsistency in the works, the honest course would be to disagree with the author, James Durham. Claiming to stand with him while fabricating a lie to lay the alleged contradictions at the feet of another godly man seems rather redolent of building the tombs of the prophets (Matt. 23:39). “Thus it is that history is falsified and good men slandered”[24]

---

[1] . Andrew Clarkson, Plain Reasons for Presbyterians Dissenting from the Revolution-church (1731), pp. 46–47. Howie writes that Clarkson drew up this work from materials collected by the United Societies, which appears to have been the work of a committee. Reformation Principles, &c. Re-Exhibited (Glasgow: David Niven, for Robert Farie, 1787), p. xv. Hay Fleming notes that the work was created in response to Patrick Walker’s Some remarkable passages of the life and death of these three famous Worthies : ... viz. Mr. John Semple, Mr. John Welwood, Mr. Richard Cameron (1727), and two other works. “In the Minute-book of the Societies preserved in the New College Library, Edinburgh, is the following entry, under 7th August 1727: ‘It is desired that Mr. John M’Neill, Mr. Charles Umpherston, Mr. Alexnder Marshall, and Mr. Andrew Clarkson, and George Paton consider Carnwath’s and Kersland’s Memoirs, together with Patrick Walker’s scandalous pamphlet, ... and to give a short answer thereto in order to wipe off their false aspersions.’ The outcome was the volume:--Plain Reasons for Presbyterians dissenting from the Revolution-Church in Scotland, 1731.” Like Alexander Shields, Walker, though not happy with many things, joined the Revolution Settlement church. He strongly disapproved of the views of men like John M’Millan, the Cameronians’ first minister. Patrick Walker, Six Saints of the Covenant, 2 vols., ed. David Hay Fleming (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1901), 1.xxxv; 2.175.

[2] . Biographia Scoticana (1775; 1781), p. 257; Reformation Principles, &c. Re-Exhibited (Glasgow: David Niven, for Robert Farie, 1787), p. 197.

[3] . Holfelder, p. 134.

[4] . As previously detailed, the Public Resolutions allowed royalists (i.e., “malignants”) who had previously been ejected, back into the army and their former positions in the government.

[5]. See Durham, A Commentary on Revelation, volume 1 (2020), pp. 270–282.

[6]. Reformation Principles, p. 197.

[7]. John Howie, The Scots Worthies, ed. William M’Gavin (1827; 1858), p. 240.

[8] . Concerning Scandal (1659; Naphtali Press, 1990), p. 106.

[9] . This is cited at length to show how clearly absurd the claim is that Durham is inconsistent. See Commentary on Revelation, volume 1 (2020), pp. 302–305.

[10] . See the text in the appendix in Commentary on Revelation, volume 1 (2020), pp. 482–483.

[11] . Concerning Scandal (1659; Naphtali Press, 1990), p. 262.

[12] . James Durham, “A Sermon on Ephesians 4:11–12,” 61 Sermons, p. 933.

[13] . See WLC 144 and 145. One might be tempted to simply lay this fault solely on Andrew Clarkson, who had only been with the Societies a few years at this time, before subsequently leaving for the Associate Presbytery. Howie says that he only organized and prepared what was gathered in by the committee. Whomever invented the charge, the Society Men own the fault for having published it. And it is not as if this was not a pattern of behavior. The same tactic was used to try to taint Alexander Shields’ Church Communion as counterfeit, with all too similar and even more vicious slanders. See Patrick Walker’s account and objection to an added postscript to James Renwick’s and Shields’ Informatory Vindication (1687) in Six Saints, 1.145–147, 2.150–151, and the text on pages 230–231 in the 1707 reissue of Informatory Vindication. See the reasons for Walker’s rejection of the postscript in Matthew Vogan, “Alexander Shields, the Revolution Settlement & the Unity of the Visible Church,” The Confessional Presbyterian 14 (2018), pp. 96ff. As for Clarkson, he left the Societies, renouncing their tenets, and was accepted into the Associate Presbytery as one of the first divinity students. At his entering into trails, Walker came before the committee with concerns about slanders of another individual, and when all this was cleared up, he and Clarkson shook hands and agreed to bury the past. Six Saints, 2.235–236.

[14] . See Blair’s statement of the care with which he ensured the integrity of Durham’s text as previously cited on page 531, under Treatise Concerning Scandal.

[15] . See 72 Sermons on Isaiah 53, p. 80, n35.

[16] . Letters & Journals, 3.249.

[17] . See the MacWard letter describing Durham’s death given in the biography (p. <?>).

[18] . As noted in the biography, leaders of the Protester dominated west, requested authority to raise a separate army. Despite their doubts of the veracity of these assurances, the Resolutioners saw no way to avoid doing so. See Baillie, Letters & Journals, 3.112. Those involved “promised to rise in arms for the suppressing of the enemy, which was granted unto them.” Holfelder, p. 54. The Life of Mr. Robert Blair, edited for the Wodrow Society by Thomas M‘Crie, D.D. (Edinburgh: Printed for the Wodrow Society, 1848), p. 241. This grant essentially gave the brethren in the west their own army. Strachan eventually began his own independent negotiations with Cromwell. The Protesters “were livid at Strachan’s unauthorized proceedings.” They removed him from his command, and he later with some followers deserted. Holfelder, pp. 72, 94.

[19] . Holfelder, p. 72.

[20] . Cf. Christie, Records of the Commissions of the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland, vol. 3 {1909}, p. 215; Holfelder, “Factionalism,” p. 72.

[21] . Records, 3.193.

[22] . Holfelder, p. 134. Christie, ibid.

[23] . Wodrow, History of the Sufferings, 1.163.

[24] . David Hay Fleming, “Knox in the Hands of the Philistines,” Critical Reviews Relating Chiefly to Scotland (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912), p. 192. For a thorough discussion of the issue of joining the Revolution Settlement Church, see Matthew Vogan, “Alexander Shields, the Revolution Settlement & the Unity of the Visible Church,” ibid., pp. 73–114.