ne
other, whether Voluntary or Cameronian, are the principles of the Free
Church. A powerful majority in a Presbyterian body, or in a country
possessed of a representative government, are vested in at least the
_power_ of making whatever laws they will to make, for not only
themselves, but for the minority also. But _power_ is not _right_; and
we would at once question the _right_ of even a preponderating
majority in a Church such as ours to introduce new principles into her
framework, and to impose them on the minority. We question, on this
principle, the _right_ of that act of discipline which was exercised
in the present century by a preponderating majority of the Antiburgher
body in Scotland, when they deposed and excommunicated the late Dr.
M'Crie for the ecclesiastical offence of holding in every particular
by the original tenets of the fathers of the Secession.

The overt act in the case manifested their _power_, but the various
attempts made to manifest their _right_ we regard as mere abortions.
They had no _right_ to do what they did. The questions on which the
majority differed from their fathers ought in justice, instead of
being made a subject of legislation, to be left an open question. And
we hold, on a similar principle, that whatever questions of conduct
or polity may arise in the Free Church, which, though new to it, yet
come to be adopted by a majority, should be left open questions also.
Of course, of novelties in doctrine we do not speak,--we trust that
within the Free Church none such will ever arise; we refer rather to
those semi-metaphysical points of casuistry, and nice questions of
conduct, in which the differences that perplex non-established
Churches are most liable to originate,--matters in which one man sees
after one way, and another man after another,--and which, until heaped
up into importance, wave-like, as if by the wind, pertain not to the
province of solid demonstrable truth, but to the province of loose
fluctuating opinion. And be it remarked, that non-established Churches
are very apt to be disturbed by such questions.

They are in circumstances in which the ripple passes into the wavelet,
and the wavelet into the billow. On this head, as on all others, there
is great value in the teachings of history; and the Free Church might
be worse employed than in occasionally conning the lesson. Each fifty
years of the last century and half has been marked by its own special
questions of th