The Ecclesiastical Disruption of 1861 [pp. 321-351]

326 TilE ECCLESIASTICAL DISRUPTION OF iS6i. [Aprilr
churches, that is, churches bounded by national lines, is, in the
present condftion of human nature, a benefit," the Address says:
"If it is desirable that each nation should contain a separate
and an independent church, the Presbyteries of these Confederate States need no ap~logy for bowing to the decree of
Providence, which, in withdrawing their country from the government of the United States, has at the same time determined
that tl~ey should withdraw from the church of their fathers. It
is not that they have ceased to love it, not that they have abjured its ancient principles, or forgotten its glorious history. It
is to give these same principles a richer, freer, fuller development among ourselves than they possibly could receive under
foreign culture." "In sub~ection to a foreign power, we could
no more accomplish it than the church in the United States
could have been developed in dependence upon the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The difficulty there would have been,
not the distance of Edinburgh from New York, Philadelphia, or
Charleston, but the difference in the manners, habits, customs,
and ways of thinking, the social, civil, and political institutions
of th people. These same difficulties exist in relation to the
Confederate and United States, and render it eminently proper
that the church in each should be as separate and independent
as the governments."
Now, while it is freely admitted that these statements and
this line of argumentation-when viewed from a given standpoint-may possibly be consistent with the averment of this
Address, that "the first thing which roused our presbyteries
to look the question of separation seriously in the face," etc.,
was the action at Philadelphia before referred to, yet, when we
bear in mind that the division of the country into two nations
was then universally received at the South as a settled question-the government of the Confederate States having been
fully organized some ten months before-this political division
is assigned such prominence and is urged with such force in
this Address, as to give it the place of a ruling and decisive
reason for the ecclesiastical separation; and thus, in this light,
this argument to justify the church in following the fortunes
of the State, in the premises, becomes invested with an appreciable importance which can not otherwise attach to it. If
this be not its true position and purpose, why is it dwelt upon