their taste. Their Testimony was adopted in 1837.
This document ostensibly consists of two parts, historical and
doctrinal; but really only of the latter as _authoritative_. This will
appear from the preface to the history, as also that it is without the
_formal_ sanction of the Synod, which appears prefixed to the doctrinal
part of the book. A considerable time before they ventured to obtrude
this new Testimony on the church; they had prepared the way for its
introduction, by supplanting the authoritative "Rules of Society,"
framed and adopted by their fathers. This was done by issuing what they
called a "Guide to Social Worship," which the Scottish Synod sent forth
under an ambiguous _recommendation_, and the spurious production was
republished by order of Synod, in America, 1836, with the like equivocal
expression of approbation.

What has been just related of the Ref. Pres. Church in Scotland, will
apply substantially to that section of the same body in Ireland. On the
doctrine of the magistrate's power _circa sacra_, however, there was a
controversy of several years' continuance and managed with much
asperity, in which Rev. Messrs. John Paul, D.D., and Thomas Houston were
the most distinguished disputants. Their contendings issued in breach of
organic fellowship in 1840. Indeed the sister-hood which had subsisted
for many years among the Synods east and west of the Atlantic ocean, was
violated in 1833; when the rupture took place in the Synod of America,
by the elopement of the declining party, who are since known by alliance
with the civil institutions of the United States. Among these five
Synods, the principle called _elective affinity_ has been strikingly
exemplified; while what the Scripture denominates _schism_, has been as
visibly rampant as perhaps at any period under the Christian
dispensation.

This brief historical sketch may serve to show the outlines of the
courses respectively pursued by the several parties in the British Isles
and America, who have made professions of attachment to that work in the
kingdom of Scotland especially, which has been called the Second
Reformation. But the duty of fidelity to Zion's King, and even the duty
of charity to these backsliding brethren; together with the informing of
the present and succeeding generations, require, that we notice more
formally some of the more prominent measures of these ecclesiastical
bodies and so manifest more fully our relation to them. It i