ership, and sometimes by that of presbytery; and where our present
authorised version of Scripture reads "with the laying on of the hands
of the presbytery," the Genevan version reads, "with the laying on of
the hands of the companie of the eldership."[279]

[Sidenote: The Kirk-Session.]

The only other alternative is that suggested by the late Procurator
Cook, that in the Second Book of Discipline the functions of the two
courts were as yet undistributed; and that when they came to be legally
distributed by the Act of Parliament of 1592, those which the framers of
the Second Book assigned to the eldership were in nearly its very words
appropriated to the presbytery, and a much more limited province
assigned to the kirk-session--the court called by the Puritans of the
south by the name of the Lesser Presbytery. Perhaps it may be regarded
as a rather curious confirmation of this theory of Procurator Cook's,
that what he supposes to have been first intended by the framers of the
Book as a common court is asserted by Gillespie, the ablest of their
successors in the following century, to have been really characteristic
of the presbytery of the primitive church. Whatever may be thought of
his argument in vindication of what he calls the two presbyteries, the
fact remains that he explicitly admits there was but one in the
primitive church;[280] and this will be all the more remarkable if,
with Mr Cook, we hold that what the framers of the Second Book of
Discipline really designed was one presbytery or eldership governing a
larger or smaller number of churches in common; and that we owe the
distribution of the power between the two courts rather to the Act of
Parliament than to the Second Book of Discipline. I agree with
Gillespie, however, that in the circumstances of the church in a
thoroughly Christianised country it would have been a matter to be
regretted if every congregation had not had its session or lesser
presbytery, with such definitely limited powers as by the Act of
Parliament, and by the later acts of the church, are entrusted to it;
and I am not sure that we do not owe this arrangement to the episcopal
rather than to the presbyterian party, and that it was a concession made
by them as the only presbytery they could well acknowledge, if they were
to leave any function for the bishop at all in this court. At least the
rough draft of the clause of the subsequent Act of Parliament in regard
to the kirk-session appe