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But from that time dates an entire, though always deepening alteration in his manner of preaching, because an entire change in his way of dealing with God's Word. Not that his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even altered-I doubt not that, from a child, he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but was "wise unto salvation"-but it strengthened and clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His Word. He took, as it were, to subsoil ploughing he got a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored; and with a fresh power, with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and his blood was drawn inwards; his surface was chilled; but fuel was heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal burned with a new ardour: indeed, had he not found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendour and combustion, or dwindled into lethargy.

66 The manse became silent: we lived and slept and played under the shadow of that death, and we saw, or rather felt, that he was another father than before. He went among his people as usual when they were ill; he preached better than ever—they

were sometimes frightened to think how wonderfully he preached-but the sunshine was over, the glad and careless look, the joy of young life and mutual love.

"What we lost, the congregation and the world gained. He gave himself wholly to his work. He changed his entire system and fashion of preaching from being elegant, rhetorical, and ambitious, he became concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself moved), keen, searching, unswerving, authoritative to fierceness, full of the terrors of the Lord, if he could but persuade men. The truth

of the words of God had shone out upon him with an immediateness and infinity of meaning and power which made them, though the same words he had looked on from childhood, other and greater and deeper words."

From the time of this loss, John Brown, already a Christian and a Christian minister, was in many respects a new man," a man of intenser devotion to his God and to his work. And if the intensity which now characterised him was subject to any drawbacks, these must be ascribed to the frailty of our nature and the peculiar constitution of the individual. The stroke which wounded so deeply the heart of the young minister at Biggar, contributed much to make him the great and good man that he was all the two-and-forty years of his after life.-1bid.

now to refer to persons, it is only because the defence of principles which are very dear to us, in common with our readers, renders it necessary.

Albany Street Chapel, Edinburgh, is a very unpretending building, especially as seen along side both the

Grecian and Gothic buildings which adorn that city. But the church whose house of prayer it is, has for more than sixty years held an honoured and influential place among the Independent churches of Scotland. It has had for its pastors George Payne, LL.D., Gilbert Wardlaw, M.A., Henry Wilkes, D.D., James R. Campbell, D.D., and William Pulsford. All these gentlemen still live, except Dr. Payne; and all the living are still actively engaged in the work of the ministry, except Mr. Gilbert Wardlaw. On the removal of Mr. Pulsford to Glasgow, the Rev. James Cranbrook, of Liscard, became pastor of the Church in 1865. Of Mr. Cranbrook we know nothing personally, and the statements which we deem it right to lay before the public are founded entirely on published docu

ments.

On the 19th of March, 1866, Dr. W. L. Alexander addressed a letter to Mr. Cranbook, in the name of the Congregational ministers who had been present at the service held to recognise him as pastor of the Church in Albany Street, asking him to meet them in friendly conference on an early day. "The object they have in view in requesting this conference (Dr. A. said), is to ascertain your views on some points of revealed truth, on which they have been led to believe that you hold views very different from those hitherto held and taught in our Churches. In taking this step (he continued) they do not pretend to assume any right to control your liberty of thought or speech. They desire only satisfaction for themselves, that they may know whether they can consistently recognise you as a brother minister."

Mr. Cranbrook declined to appear before what he called a "newly-constituted consistorial court." And in a statement laid before his Church, and published in the newspapers, while declaring that if any of those ministers had called on him individually he

would have met him frankly, he laid down this principle, "I repudiate the right to interrogate me they assume upon the ground that they were present when the Albany Street Church publicly recognised me as its pastor. *** I am an Independent minister, of an Independent Church; and I feel, if I conceded the right thus claimed, I should be sacrificing my people's independency and my own.”

The matter, as thus put, involves a grave question in relation to our Independent polity. And we do not hesitate to avow our concurrence in the view taken by Dr. Alexander, Dr. Gowan, Mr. Cullen, and others, when they wrote, "Allow us to remind you that we stand before the public bound by an act of recognition, on the occasion of the service held at your induction, as Pastor of the Church in Albany Street. That recognition was given in the belief that you were at one with us on all essential points, as we are with our brethren in the South, according to the declaration of faith issued by the Congregational Union of England and Wales, and that you followed the order of Church polity which our churches both here and in the South follow. What we thus gave on certain conditions, you surely will admit, we are entitled to recall, if we find these conditions departed from." The Rev. H. Batchelor asserted the same principle in his address as Chairman of the Scottish Union, in these words: “If any minister among us depart from the Gospel of Christ, it will be the duty of those who remain faithful to the truth to withdraw from him, and assign their reasons for doing so. My obligation to fraternise with a minister who seems to me to be doing the work of Christ, implies the correlative obligation to separate from him, when he appears to me to oppose the faith of the Lord Jesus. Such is the tenor of apostolic example and injunction. We can do no more-no less. Less we cannot do;

more we would not. For any one to pretend that one minister may not enquire into the Christian beliefs of another, as an interpretation of Congregationalism, is puerile, disingenuous, and something worse."

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Something worse," we echo. Our ordination and recognition services are, to use Lord Denman's famous words, a mockery, a delusion, and a snare,” if they do not imply that the ordaining and the ordained, the recognising and the recognised, are united on the basis of a substantial common faith, and that the union subsists only so long as the common basis lasts. Let our ordination and recognition services not be robbed of their significance, but made more real than they too commonly are.

The meetings of the Congregational Union of Scotland, which were held some six weeks after the correspondence between Mr. Cranbrook and his Edinburgh brethren, were thrown into no small confusion by the position of affairs. But as the discussions had to do with formal and technical matters arising out of the action of the committee, and not with the principles of Congregationalism, we pass them by.

On the 21st of February, 1867, Mr. Cranbrook resigned the pastorate of the Church in Albany Street, and the Scotsman of the next day contains the address which he read to the Church on the occasion. From this address we learn that in November last the deacons of the Church waited on him, and represented that there was growing dissatisfaction in the Church with his teaching; that an important meeting had been held in the house of one of the members, where many had expressed their feelings strongly, and that they (the deacons) felt it their duty to come to him to urge him to modify his preaching, so as to meet the views of these brethren. The "modifying" thus recommended must surely be understood in a "modified" sense-as limited, by what it was believed the

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And first, as to. "Churches." Mr. Cranbrook has "done with them," he hopes, for ever;" thus renouncing entirely the character of a pastor and of a Congregational minister. "Churches" are only organizations which impede God's truth and human progress." What they desire to hear is not "the highest truth a man has learned, all that is noblest and best in a man's soul, but changes rung on a few superstitious notions." Mr. Cranbrook does "not think that Christ contemplated the formation of a Church. The only two passages in the synoptical Gospels which seem to indicate the contrary I believe (he says) were never uttered by him, they are so contrary to all else which he said and did to the entire spirit of His Gospel." We do not stay to remark on the presumption which would cancel from the Gospels everything which the reader chances to suppose contrary to the spirit of Christ, or on the antagonism in which Mr. Cranbrook puts himself to the Apostles who founded and constituted Churches everywhere, and who claimed to do so

in the name and by the authority of Christ. Enough for our present purpose to explain that Mr. Cranbrook "has done with Churches" as only evil, and that he will henceforward stand to no man in any relation but that of teacher. Men may come to his lecture room and go, and be nothing to him but hearers, (as he is careful to explain,) to accept or reject what they hear without mutual responsibility of any kind.

Secondly. As to the substantials of his creed-if we may use a word which Mr. Cranbrook never uses but to scorn -we really hesitate to set down what seems to us to be the gist of his "Explanatory" discourse, lest in spite of the most honest effort to understand we should have misunderstood it. There are two marked tendencies of the age, he tells us, or one tendency which may be regarded under a twofold aspect. "1st. The diffusion of the scientific spirit, under which has been developed absolute confidence in the immutability of the laws of nature." No theist would deny the possibility of an interference with these laws, physical and mental. But the more they are studied, "the deeper rooted becomes the conviction that such an interference will not take place. The wisdom and the goodness of God themselves become the guarantee that it will not." Now comes into operation the second tendency of the age—“ the tendency to demand strictly scientific proof for the genuineness of alleged historical facts and documents." Feeling the insuperable difficulties thus created, Mr. Cranbrook says that years ago he "sought his God by a simpler and more direct method." "I believe God is found in everything great, beautiful, noble, and good upon earth." "I only know of Him

what He has revealed in the facts of man's life and nature's laws." All this does not diminish to him, he says, the value of the Bible. "It leaves me

free to contemplate and yield myself up to its sublime and holy influences, to its devotional excitements, and above all, to the Divine ideal of the Son of man, depicted in the life and death of Christ."

What, then, is Mr. Cranbrook's "position?" Can it in any proper sense be called Christian? Is it not substantially, and almost formally, that of M. Rénan? A supernatural interference with nature may not be impossible, but it cannot be proved; or the proof of it is so difficult that men must "seek their God," not in persons alleged to be supernatural, or in communications alleged to be supernatural, but "in the facts of man's life and nature's laws." The Incarnation, then, is a myth. If not an absolute impossibility, it cannot be proved. The miracles ascribed to Christ may not be absolute impossibilities, but they cannot be proved. The great miracle of the Incarnation, and all that was supernatural in the works and teaching of the Incarnate One, must stand aside in this scientific age, to make room for the teaching of nature's laws!

On this whole case we remark, first, that we have not to deal with a man who is in perplexity and doubt, and is on that ground entitled to tender sympathy, such sympathy as would have been given by Him who broke not the bruised reed-but with a man who denounces the notions of those who seek God in "the facts and documents" of a supernatural revelation, as

holding of the pastorate of a Christian Church, and the teaching of the doctrines now avowed, to a Christian Church, is chargeable with what the correspondent of the English Independent (and we do not know who he is) calls a grave immorality."

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"When I came (to Edinburgh) " Mr. Cranbrook said, in resigning his charge, "I held substantially the same doctrines as I hold this day." To the deputation which awaited on him with the call of the Church, he said that he claimed for himself the fullest liberty in his teaching and action, and the deputation assured him that the Church in Albany Street always had and always would grant it. Let this be understood in mitigation of the offence with which Mr. Cranbrook is charged. But we say, without any fear of contradiction, that the brethren from Edinburgh, in assuring him of the fullest liberty, could not have contemplated the possibility of his claiming, the liberty to propagate doctrines subversive of the claim of the Bible to be regarded as a supernatural" revelation, and subversive of all faith in Christ as being in any proper sense a supernatural" Being. Accepting the fundamental principles of the Gospel as a scheme of redemption by the Incarnate Son of God, as they must have done themselves and understood him to do, they could not mean that they held him at "liberty" to renounce these and still to maintain his position as their pastor.

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That Mr. Cranbrook was not for a long time understood by the Church as holding the opinions which he now avows, is very plain. "I had perhaps a different way of stating them," he says; "I often used phrases I have now given up, and the more directly religious aspect of them was more frequently stated. "Here and there," he said in his Hopetoun Rooms' discourse, "one meets with a small congregation of cultivated people, whose

culture prevents them treating any man's intellect coarsely. Such congregations exercise the utmost toleration, provided a few fundamentals' are not overtly denied. A minister may transform these fundamentals into any shape he pleases, always provided there is the ring of certain words, or no direct attack on the cherished shibboleths. But such congregations are few and far between. In the majority of congregations there is a party of ignorant and vulgar people, large enough to make a minister timid of it when it cannot rule his thoughts. There is always a fear of this party acting upon his efforts to comprehend and set forth the truth; and many is the tit-bit of evangelical sentiment thrown into his discourse, like a sop to Cerberus, to satisfy its superstitious demands." We have no hesitation in calling this a false accusation-ministers and people being, with exceptions so few as not to be worth reckoning, one in holding evangelical sentiments to be their life and not a vain superstition, but we may accept it as descriptive of the process by which Mr. Cranbrook has, whether with or without intention, disguised in Edinburgh the doctrines which he now avows, and which he says he held in substance from the first.

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Now if we call this "immoral," it is not that we wish to press hard on Mr. Cranbrook, but that we wish distinctly to reprobate such a procedure, by whomsoever practised. To falsify a word for any man under the sun (Mr. Cranbrook has well said) is to engender the parasite of error in the teacher's inmost nature." But this is what he has been compelled to do, on his own showing, as pastor of an Independent Church. Even the most tolerant and cultured Churches, few and far between," require "the ring of certain words," he says, whether these are true to the pastor's own thoughts or not. And in the majority of congregations many titbits of evangelical sentiment must be

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