THE

ORIGINAL SECESSION MAGAZINE.

JANUARY, 1869.

INTRODUCTORY.

THIS number begins the ninth volume of the present series of our Magazine, and ushers it upon what will be, ere it closes, the seventeenth year of its existence. In view of this fact, and of its present position, we cannot help feeling that it is by help obtained from God it continues unto this day. It owes little, all must admit, to the numbers and influence of the denomination whose name it bears. It owes nothing to such sensational expedients as are adopted to give popularity to other publications, got up avowedly in the interests of religion, but really, it is well known, to sell. It is devoted to the advocacy of principles which it has become common to sneer at as narrow and out of date, and which do in fact lie directly athwart many of the prevailing sentiments and tendencies of the day. Through death in one case, through increasing bodily infirmity in another, it has lost the help it derived from the wise management and the powerful and practised pens of its former conductors. Yet when we think that, despite of all these drawbacks, it has not only proved self-supporting, but continues to grow in influence and circulation, we are surely warranted to see in this a token of the blessing of Him whose truth and covenanted cause it aims to promote. We may indeed be mistaken as to this, but until it can be shown that we are so, we will hold by the animating conviction, and thank God and take courage.

Apart, however, from any success that may have been granted the Magazine hitherto, we feel that we have enough to stimulate our best efforts in conducting it, in the grandeur and importance of the end for which it has been entrusted to us. Its object and our duty is not

NO. I. VOL. IX.

A

NEW SERIES.

to provide agreeable entertainment for the leisure hour, though we should like it to interest as well as instruct. Nor is it merely to set forth the truths and duties of religion with a view to the personal edification of our readers, though we should be sorry if anything appears in it which does not conduce more or less directly to that end. But mainly and distinctively, the end of the Original Secession Magazine is the end of the Original Secession Church-namely, to promote the public honour of the enthroned Mediator and the interests of His public cause in our land, by maintaining the principles of the Reformed and Covenanted Church of Scotland. These principles we believe to be Scripturally true. We regard them as the Word of Christ's patience given us to keep. As we venerate His authority, and would confess Him and His words before men, we can neither surrender nor conceal them. In adhering to them we are clinging to no sapless and worn-out traditions of the fathers, for there dwells in them, as in every part of Divine truth, imperishable vitality and power. So far are these principles from being behind the age, as popular ignorance and prejudice oracularly affirm, they are immeasurably in advance of it, in all that is most essential to its well-being and progress. A general and whole-hearted return to them would solve many of the problems and sweep away many of the evils which human policy is grappling with in vain, and carry society forward to a point of progress in sentiment and attainment far ahead, not merely of what it has yet reached, but of what it has even faith to descry. What an advance, for example, upon the present feeling and actings of the nation toward Popery is that solemn and unsparing repudiation of its idolatries and blasphemous pretensions which lies, sealed with the nation's oath, in the National Covenant! How far have the majority of Presbyterians to rise in their zeal against the unscriptural system of Prelacy ere they heartily own the obligation of the public vow that lies upon them, as upon the whole nation, not merely to sever its connection with the State, but to "extirpate" it. And upon the imagination of which of our modern unionists has there ever dawned a scheme of union so grandly comprehensive in its range and so broadly and firmly based on the foundations of Divine truth as that outlined in the Solemn League; which binds all the Protestants in the realm to "endeavour to bring the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, confession of faith, form of Church government, directory for worship and catechising;" and which binds State and Church together to co-operate, each in its own sphere, as fellow-servants of the same Master, fellow-subjects of the same King, "that the Lord may be one and His name one in the three kingdoms!" When these and

the other great ends of our National Covenants have been more than realised; when the Protestants of the three kingdoms are united in one Church on a basis comprehending more of the truth of God than is contained in the Westminster Standards taken in their entirety, and by a bond larger and more sacred than a national vow and oath to God; when the State, acting in alliance with the Church, and acting both under the obligation of their joint-covenant with their common Head and King, have done their utmost to root out Popery and Prelacy and whatsoever is contrary to sound doctrine and the power of godliness; then and not till then will we confess that the position of the Second Reformation which we occupy has been left behind by the progress of the age, and that the command is, "speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward." Meanwhile, till that position is reached again by the majority of the Church and nation who have so far resiled from it, it would be treachery alike to the cause of God and to the cause of progress for us to abandon it.

Let us call upon our readers to aid us in the noble work of seeking to maintain it. They can do so by their prayers. They can do so by their efforts to extend the circulation of the Magazine. We know some who pay for several copies to fellow-members of the Church who are not able to afford them. We know of others who have excited very considerable interest in our principles and position by handing it to their neighbours. All may do something in this way, and when the organs of error and latitudinarianism are so numerous and influential, the friends of truth are the more called to bestir themselves to supply the antidote.

THE PAST AND COMING YEAR.

THE year 1868 has added a memorable page to the history of Europe. Events thicken as the time draws on when the mystery of God shall be finished in the overthrow of that huge satanic system of civil and religious despotism, culminating in Popery, which has so long enthralled the nations. Like the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. which have marked the past year, there are disorganising forces at work, which that system itself has generated, and which, by a signal display of Divine retribution, shall rend it in pieces. By a natural reaction Popery has driven many in continental lands into infidelity and atheism; by a similar reaction despotism has called forth among the nationalities it has been crushing, the spirit of communism and revolution; and among these antagonistic forces the conflict has

begun, which, ending in their mutual destruction, shall leave the stage of earth clear for the establishment of the millennial kingdom of Christ. From His mediatorial throne on high He has begun "the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." As out of vast geologic changes, confusing and altering the previously existing state of things, God prepared the earth as a habitation for man, so out of the throes and overturnings of analogous changes in the moral and political world, He will call forth that "new heavens and that new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." "I will overturn, overturn, overturn it; and it shall be no more, until He come whose right it is, and I will give it Him."

To all who long and pray for the overthrow of Antichrist, the great weakening of its political ascendancy on the Continent during the past year must afford matter of gratulation and praise. For centuries AUSTRIA has lain in servile chains at the feet of Rome. Only nineteen years ago it entered into that famous concordat by which it yielded itself up, bound hand and foot, into the power of a domineering priesthood. No nation seemed to be so drunk with the wine of the great harlot's fornication. But the blow struck it by the battle of Sadowa seems to have roused it from its fatal stupor. Its people have awoke to feel that the paralysing power of an all-grasping priesthood is the cause of their national weakness and humiliation. And during the past year its legislature has passed laws in favour of the freedom of education and marriage, and of the equality of all religious denominations in the eye of law, which have given the stipulations of the concordat to the winds, and broken the supremacy of the priesthood in Austria, let us hope for ever. The Pope, of course, has thundered forth his anathemas against these laws and all who comply with them, only to find, however, as in the case of Italy, that the thunders of the Vatican have lost all their power to quell the rising spirit of freedom in the bosom of an awakening people, and that in trying to wield them, he is only irritating that spirit into more angry strength, and making a pitiable display of his own

weakness.

Within the past few months, also, SPAIN has been lost as a political ally and prop to the Papacy. Of all the kingdoms that have given their power and strength unto the beast, none has done Rome's work with such abject submission or such ungrudging self-sacrifice as Spain. Philip the Second owned to his son on his death-bed that he had spent on wars undertaken for the extermination of Protestantism more than five hundred and ninety-four millions of ducats! He might have added that by such wars, by the Holy Inquisition, and by

direct persecution, he and his father had been the means of slaughtering some hundreds of thousands of Protestant lives. Thus has Spain served Rome, and she has received for it Rome's usual wages-— national beggary, corruption, and degradation. The last gift of Popery to her was a Queen, who seems to have been raised to the throne to show how such devotion as Rome counts saintly and delights to honour may coincide with the vilest profligacy that can outrage the law of God or dishonour a throne. But, by a revolution strangely sudden and strangely calm, the Spaniards have cast off the yoke of their unworthy monarch and of the Papacy together; have expelled the Jesuits from their country and confiscated their property; have proclaimed religious liberty, the freedom of the press, the right of public assemblages, radical changes in the system of education, the right of trial by jury, the equality of all men before the law. The revolution caught the priesthood in the very act of persecuting men for reading the Bible, but now the martyrs of prison and exile are free; leave has been granted to build a Protestant church at Seville, where the Inquisition plied its secret enginery of torture and death more terribly than in any other part of Spain; and the whole country, from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, is open to the Word of God. What Christian does not hail the change with grateful wonder and joy? And what a responsibility rests on the Christian Churches of Britain to send that Bible and that Gospel which will give the still benighted Spaniard a higher than political emancipation-the emancipation of his conscience and of his soul !

All the year through, Europe has been agitated and held in alarm by "rumours of war" between two of its mightiest military powers. FRANCE and PRUSSIA have been eying each other with looks of jealousy and menace, but they have hitherto been mercifully restrained from rushing into conflict. We say mercifully; for with armies so immense, wielding such murderous weapons of destruction, the result of war between these powers must be a slaughter of human life such as one shudders to think of. Still, the possession of such vast armaments breeds the temptation to use them; it seems likely that the Providence which has permitted their construction has some purpose of righteous vengeance to serve by their use; and we fear that in the skirts of Papal France there is still to be found the blood of the Huguenots.

But both prophecy and the signs of the times seem to point to a war-cloud gathering over a larger area, and charged with the elements of a mightier devastation. RUSSIA has long been intriguing, not without success, to stir up dissension and insurrection among the rival faiths and motley nationalities of the decaying Turkish empire.