The General Assembly [pp. 536-562]

Tize General Assembly.
quate, viz., that " being a question of mere review of records,
a judicial complaint does not lie." If these records are
records of a judicial proceeding by a lower court serving
under the review of a higher, the approval or disapproval of
them may be, in substance and effect, a judicial act, and if decidedly wrong, a just subject of complaint to, and call for revision by, a higher court. Moreover, in the actual practice of
the Assembly, the "decision by an inferior judicatory, which in
the opinion of the complainants has been irregularly and unjustly made," has been taken in its broadest sense to mean
not only "judicial," but any "decision" which, in the judgment of complainants, is "irregularly and unjustly made."
The questions thus brought up and issued by the Assembly on complaint are such as the propriety of one man
being simultaneously elder in two churches; the mode of
electing certain ruling elders; against a reference of a case to
a higher court by a Presbytery; against a Synod for dissolving a
Presbytery, etc., etc. Indeed, it does not appear how great
wrongs by inferior judicatories can, in many cases, be presented
to the higher courts for correction, if complaints must be confined to strictly judicial action, or if judicial records cannot be
made a matter of "judicial complaint." Suppose these records
omit the vital elements in a case; what then?
Into the original merits of the case as a whole, to which the
above mentioned acts refer, we have neither time nor space to
go. Even the matter of the complaints and appeals above referred to is not before us. We have touched only the reasons
which the record presents for the Assembly's manner of dealing
with them, and some of the objections of the protestants.
As all such decisions, or the expressed reasons for them, by
the Assembly, tend to acquire authority and harden into precedents, especially when they pass unquestioned, we have
deemed it worth while to discuss, not the decisions themselves, of the justice of which we have no means of judging, because we have no adequate authoritative knowledge of
the facts, but the sufficiency of the reasons assigned for
them. The literature of the case has already become so
enormous as to be extremely difficult to collect and digest.
Mr. McCune is now out of our Church, and we can hardly believe that a case that has issued in making our communion too
uncomfortable for him and such as he, will afford permanent
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