during the last year voted to revert for ministerial subscription, from the formula framed in 1711, which required acceptance of the whole doctrine of the Confession as truths of God, to the simpler one which has hitherto been used by the elders, and which rests on the act of the Assembly of 1694; while the elders hereafter are only to express their approbation of the Confession. The Free Church, after a year's debate, has appointed a large committee to report to the next Assembly what relief is needed. In America, two overtures looking toward revision were presented to the Canadian Presbytery of Toronto, but voted down; while the General Assembly of our own Church has overtured its Presbyteries with a view to discovering whether there is any widespread or important call for revision among us.
Such a chronicle as this is apt to leave upon the mind an impression of a deep and almost universal disaffection under the pressure of the Westminster Standards. It certainly does prove that there are men everywhere who are dissatisfied either with the Standards themselves or with the relation they find themselves occupying to them. But we must not imagine that the causes which produce this restlessness are everywhere the same, or that all are agreed as to what is needed for relief or that anything is needed. Even among those who really object to the Standards themselves, different men object to widely different things, so that if the attempt were made to exclude everything concerning which any individual cherished doubt, "it would be a poor church," in the paradoxical language of Dr. Macgregor,[1] "which has not in its adult membership a sufficient amount
- ↑ Freedom in the Truth (Dunedin: 12mo, pp. 72), being Dr. Macgregor's speech in the Synod of Otago and Southland in opposition to the overture of the Presbytery of Dunedin, on which the Synod's action was based.
