“Therefore I wish that peace may still Within Thy walls remain”--
I wept like a very child. I spoke, however, for three and a half hours, and not a soul moved!... The result has been most gratifying. Of ten elders not one has left me. The people are nearly unanimous, or at all events so attached to me personally that they are about to present to me a gold watch and an address from all parties.’
About the same time (February 1843) circumstances compelled him to take action in the presbytery. Along with the Veto Law the Chapel Act had been passed, giving seats in the church courts to the ministers of non-territorial charges. The House of Lords had just declared that also to be illegal, when the Presbytery of Irvine met to elect commissioners to the General Assembly. The minister of Loudoun happened to be Moderator. Should he allow the chapel ministers to vote? There was more in his mind than the law; ‘it was the avowed intention,’ he says, ‘of the High Church party to get the majority in the Assembly by means of the _Quoad Sacras_ ... and then, as the Assembly of the National Church, to dissolve the connection between Church and State, excommunicating those who might remain.’ Refusing the illegal votes, he set up a separate presbytery; and here was the first actual split in the Church.
Of all the members of the General Assembly who witnessed or took part in the procession from St. Andrew’s Church on May 18, 1843, there were none more sorrowful than the minister of Loudoun. But ere the day was over a little indignation came to his relief. ‘How my soul rises against those men who have left us to rectify their blundering, and then laugh at our inability to do so!’ Principal Tulloch has said that the act of secession would always be deemed heroic in the history of Scotland; but Norman Macleod, who, unlike the other, was an eye-witness and in the thick of events, wrote in his journal immediately after the Disruption: ‘The great movements, the grand results, will certainly be known, and everything has been done in the way most calculated to tell on posterity (for how many have been acting before its eyes!): but who in the next century will know or understand the ten thousand secret influences, the vanity and pride of some, the love of applause, the fear and terror, of others, and, above all, the seceding mania, the revolutionary mesmerism, which I have witnessed within these few days.’ For himself he felt how much easier it would have been to go than it was to stay. ‘Never,’ he wrote, ‘did I have such a fortnight of care and anxiety. Never did men engage in a task with more oppression of spirit than we did, as we tried to preserve the Church for the benefit of our children’s children. The Assembly was called upon to perform a work full of difficulty, and to do such unpopular things as restoring the Strathbogie ministers, rescinding the Veto, etc. We were hissed by the mob in the galleries, looked coldly on by many Christians, ridiculed as enemies to the true Church, as lovers of ourselves, seeking the fleece; and yet what was nearest my own heart and that of my friends was the wish to preserve the Establishment for the well-being of Britain. While the “persecuted martyrs of the Covenant” met amid the huzzas and applauses of the multitude, with thousands of pounds daily pouring in upon them, and nothing to do but what was in the highest degree popular; nothing but self-denial, and a desire to sacrifice name and fame, and all but honour, to my country, could have kept me in the Assembly. There was one feature of the Assembly which I shall never forget, and that was the _fever_ of secession, the restless, nervous desire to fly to the Free Church.’ In the course of one of his speeches in the rump Assembly he exclaimed: ‘We shall endeavour to extinguish the fire which has been kindled, and every fire but the light of the glorious gospel, which we shall, I hope, fan into a brighter flame. And the beautiful spectacle which was presented to us on Sabbath evening, in the dense crowd assembled here to ask the blessing of God on our beloved Church, enabled me to distinguish amid the flames the old motto flashing out, _Nec tamen consumebatur_. We shall try to bring our ship safe to harbour, and if we haul down the one flag, “Retract: no, never,” we shall hoist another, “Despair: no, never.” And if I live to come to this Assembly an old man, I am confident that a grateful posterity will vindicate our present position, in endeavouring through good report and bad report to preserve this great national institution as a blessing to them and to their children’s children.’