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Remarks on the present position of the Church of Scotland
Remarks on the present position of the Church of Scotland Author:Thomas Chalmers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and wholesale sort of imputation, which we may gather from his pages—as if the love of power were the predominant affection of us ecclesiastics, and as if the en... more »actment of the Veto had been one of its strongest and most egregious manifestations. But this appears more as an element in the course of his reasonings—in the shape I should say rather of an historical imagination, than of a personal charge. There is no impeachment that I can see of the motives or character of individuals. And it is a comfort, a great comfort, when the spirit of the times is so fast and so fearfully vulgarising, to fall into the hands of a gentleman and man of honour. The Dean of Faculty is a chevalier. He is not a roundhead. And there are certain higher attributes which entitle him to the acknowledgments of our still profounder respect—his undoubted earnestness, his unbending principle; and my only wish is that this property of the unbending, confined to principle alone, had not so extended itself over the system of his habits and opinions—as to have worked in him an adhesiveness the most tenacious and uncompromising, to the practice and policy of his younger days. And it is thus that those institutions which lie most venerates and loves, would be placed in extremes! jeopardy, were they at all committed to his hands. That error, which, in an unguarded moment of debate, fell, and fell but once, from the lips of the Duke of Wellington, is graven on the heart of the Dean of Faculty. In his unsparing warfare against all novelties, he would proscribe not merely the flexibility of change, which nakedly and of itself is a vice—but the flexibility of adaptation, which, whether in civil or ecclesiastical politics, is often a great and necessary virtue. And thus the sure effect of that resistance to the increasing...« less