to study and authorship. Both men seem
to have come to their results largely from the application of their own
sound religious sense to the Scriptures. That the Scottish Church should
have rejected the truth for which these men contended was the heaviest
blow which it could have inflicted on itself. Thereby it arrested its
own healthy development. It perpetuated its traditional view, somewhat
as New England orthodoxy was given a new lease of life through the
partisanship which the Unitarian schism engendered. The matter was not
mended at the time of the great rupture of the Scottish Church in 1843.
That body which broke away from the Establishment, and achieved a purely
ecclesiastical control of its own clergy, won, indeed, by this means the
name of the Free Church, though, in point of theological opinion, it was
far from representing the more free and progressive element. Tulloch
pays a beautiful tribute to the character of Erskine, whom he knew.
Quiet, brooding, introspective, he read his Bible and his own soul, and
with singular purity of intuition generalised from his own experience.
Therewith is described, however, both the power and the limitation of
his work. His first book was entitled _Remarks on the Internal Evidence
for the Truth of Revealed Religion_, 1820. The title itself is
suggestive of the revolution through which the mind both of Erskine and
of his age was passing. His book, _The Unconditional Freeness of the
Gospel_, appeared in 1828; _The Brazen Serpent_ in 1831. Men have
confounded forgiveness and pardon. They have made pardon equivalent to
salvation. But salvation is character. Forgiveness is only one of the
means of it. Salvation is not a future good. It is a present fellowship
with God. It is sanctification of character by means of our labour and
God's love. The fall was the rise of the spirit of freedom. Fallen man
can never be saved except through glad surrender of his childish
independence to the truth and goodness of God. Yet that surrender is the
preservation and enlargement of our independence. It is the secret of
true self-realisation. The sufferings of Christ reveal God's holy love.
It is not as if God's love had been purchased by the sufferings of his
Son. On the contrary, it is man who needs to believe in God's love, and
so be reconciled to the God whom he has feared and hated. Christ
overcomes sin by obediently enduring the suffering which sin naturally
entails. He endures it in pure lov