d others within this national
Church the due observance of the Directory for public worship of God
approven by the General Assembly held in the year 1645."

This deliverance may be taken as representing the spirit of all
legislation of the Church respecting worship up to the middle of the
present century. Whenever, in response to overtures from subordinate
courts, or inspired by special requirements of the times, deliverances
concerning any part of worship were prepared by the Assembly, they
uniformly directed the Church to the observance of the regulation of
this department of Divine service as provided for in the Westminster
Directory.

It cannot be claimed, however, that due regard was accorded the
Directory throughout the whole Church. The last half of the eighteenth
century was a time of spiritual coldness in Scotland; not only did
evangelical piety languish but there existed at the same time a
corresponding want of interest in the worship of the Church. Praise
was neglected, and little effort was made to secure suitable singing of
the Psalms; at times the reading of Scripture was entirely omitted,
prayers were brief and meagre, the sermon was regarded as in itself
sufficient for the whole service, and all other parts of public worship
were looked upon either as preliminaries or subordinate exercises, not
calling for any particular preparation or attention. It was a time
when spiritual life was low, and the outward expression of that life
exhibited a corresponding want of vigor. The evil, therefore, from
which the Church suffered at this period was not an excess of attention
to worship, but a neglect of it; not a too great elaboration of forms,
but an almost total disregard of them, even of such as are helpful to
the development of the spiritual life of the worshipper. And thus it
came to pass that the struggle of more than a century against the use
of prescribed forms of worship resulted in a condition more extreme
than had been either anticipated or desired, for not only were such
forms abandoned, but worship itself was neglected and disregarded.

In reviewing the period subsequent to the rejection of Laud's Liturgy
and up to the time of the First Secession within the Church of
Scotland, some features that mark the general trend of the spirit of
Presbyterianism with regard to worship are clearly manifest.

First, in the rapid growth of the sect of the Brownists and their
sympathizers, a growth that ha