et.
Proceedings were (1876) taken against him before the Presbytery of
Aberdeen, and the case found its way thence to the Synod of Aberdeen,
and ultimately to the General Assembly of the Free Church. In one form
or another (for the flame was lit anew by other articles published by
him in the _Encyclopaedia_) it lingered on for five years. So far from
yielding to the storm, Robertson Smith defied it, maintaining not only
the truth of his views, but their compatibility with the Presbyterian
standards as contained in the Confession of Faith and the Longer and
Shorter Catechisms. In this latter contention he was successful,
proving that the divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
had not committed themselves to any specific doctrine of inspiration,
still less to any dogmatic deliverance as to the authorship of
particular books of Scripture. The standards simply declared that the
Word of God was contained in the canonical books, and as there had
been little or no controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics
regarding the date or the authorship or the divine authority of those
books (apart of course from disputes regarding the Apocrypha), had not
dealt specifically with those last mentioned matters. As it was by
reference to the Confession of Faith that the offence alleged had to
be established, Smith made good his defence; so in the end, finding it
impossible to convict him of deviation from the standards, and thereby
to deal with him as an ordained minister of the Church, his
adversaries fell back on the plan of depriving him, by an executive
rather than judicial vote, not indeed of his clerical status, but of
his professorship, on the ground of the alleged "unsettling character"
of his teaching.

Meanwhile, however, there had been an immense rally to him of the
younger clergy and of the less conservative among the laity. The main
current of Scottish popular thought and life had ever since the
Reformation flowed in an ecclesiastical channel; and even nowadays,
when Scotland is rapidly becoming Anglicised, a theological or
ecclesiastical question excites a wider and keener interest there than
a similar question would do in England. So in Scotland for four years
"the Robertson Smith case" was the chief topic of discussion outside
as well as inside the Free Church. The sympathy felt for the accused
was heightened by the ingenuity, energy, and courage with which he
defended his position, showing a power of ar