CHAPTER I

ON THE SCOTCH MOVEMENT AND THAT OF THE FREE CHURCH ON THE CONTINENT.
People are in error on the continent, on the subject of the Scotch movement. This movement has been essentially popular. The king of England and the great noblemen, episcopal for the most part, had the right to nominate to a very large number of parishes, which, for a century past, had been a subject of contestation in the Church of Scotland.
As to the clergy, whence does their power come, when they have any? Who would put confidence in it? However, I confess, I have no fear that the Free Church, such as it has manifested itself in these countries, will come to that.
The people wished to name their pastors. Attempts at accommodation were made; they failed. The ministers and the evangelical elders put themselves at the head of the movement. The civil tribunals having constrained certain parishes to receive ministers named by the patrons, the separation took place. The evangelical ministers left the synod; the people of the parishes left the churches. The mass of the population found thus a means of escaping from the ancient rights of patronage of the episcopalian aristocracy, which the tribunals and the whole civil order maintained in these rights.
In the Canton de Vaud, the inverse of this is the case. The popular cause is nationalism subjected to the state. In Scotland, the nationals are the ministers without the people. On what side is that found in Switzerland?
Churches are not made on paper-they are formed by faith. A church of the multitude can only be the result of a powerful principle acting upon the masses. This principle is found either in superstition, or, as at the Reformation, in the remarkable intervention of Providence, which, favoring the movement of faith, where abuses disgust natural conscience or clash with the will of man, throws the mass on the side of the good which is acting by the grace of God. It is this which explains, on the one hand, the history of all false religions; on the other hand, the history of the Reformation, and, finally, on a smaller scale, the Scottish movement.
There exists nothing that answers to this in the dreams of a free church, in which those minds take pleasure, who, at the present day, while opening for themselves a way in which the nation does not follow them, seek to unite, the nation being wanting in this combination, popularity with the preservation of existing institutions. In order to popularize their cause and their church, they grant it certain rights and certain privileges, preserving, all the while, for themselves the consecrated system, the citadel of the clergy. Let them, however, understand this: if there are popular rights in the church, the people themselves will be judges of them. Such is the popular principle-the principle of the age. The people will exercise their rights themselves, in fact as well as in title. That will be their affair. The ministers will have the task of protecting, if they can, the rights they have given to themselves, so far as these rights are compatible with the will and action of the people. Their business will be to watch over the preservation of their clericalism. The people will dispose of the rest, and the ministers will be, if they can, their clergy. There will result from this, under whatever variety of form, independent dissenting churches, with a clergy whose efforts will tend to bind the whole into a Presbyterian bundle, in order to give it, if it can, harmony and strength.
This is, I venture to predict, the future of the Free Church of the Canton de Vaud. This is what will happen wherever ministers seek to organize a free-church system, by contriving beforehand its mechanism.
On a larger theater than the Canton de Vaud, the ministers would probably succeed in acquiring a stronger link among themselves and a more decided clerical position; but, at bottom, each of them, in his locality, would find himself to be the pastor of a dissenting church with a congregation of the people as his flock. Their part would be purely to preserve clericalism. Sad task! A task to which, nevertheless, where this attempt has taken place, their operations and reasonings are reduced.
The Free Church lacks a first principle of power. There is found in it neither the principle of God, nor the principle of the man of the age. That there may be found, on the part of certain individuals, a vital principle, true faith, I do not doubt. But, evidently, that is not the question. Powerful principles act noiselessly, but cause themselves to be spoken of. The Free Church speaks a great deal about itself, before even having taken its rise.
Let us, however, examine its principles, as far as it has put them forth.