sound or orthodox to teach that we must forsake sin in order to our
coming to Christ, and instating us in Covenant with God." The General
Assembly condemned this part of the Creed of Auchterarder. The Rev. Mr
Hog, looking for weapons in defence of Auchterarder, republished part of
a forgotten book of 1646, 'The Marrow of Modern Divinity.' The work
appears to have been written by a speculative hairdresser, an
Independent. A copy of the Marrow was found by the famous Mr Boston of
Ettrick in the cottage of a parishioner. From the Marrow he sucked much
advantage: its doctrines were grateful to the sympathisers with
Auchterarder, and the republication of the book rent the Kirk.

In 1720 a Committee of the General Assembly condemned a set of
propositions in the Marrow as tending to Antinomianism (the doctrine that
the saints cannot sin, professed by Trusty Tompkins in 'Woodstock').
But--as in the case of the five condemned propositions of Jansenius--the
Auchterarder party denied that the heresies could be found in the Marrow.

It was the old quarrel between Faith and Works. The clerical petitioners
in favour of the Marrow were rebuked by the Assembly (May 21, 1722); they
protested: against a merely human majority in the Assembly they appealed
to "The Word of God," to which the majority also appealed; and there was
a period of passion, but schism had not yet arrived.

The five or six friends of the Marrow really disliked moral preaching, as
opposed to weekly discourses on the legal technicalities of
justification, sanctification, and adoption. They were also opposed to
the working of the Act which, in 1712, restored lay patronage. If the
Assembly enforced the law of the land in this matter (and it did), the
Assembly sinned against the divine right of congregations to elect their
own preachers. Men of this way of thinking were led by the Rev. Mr
Ebenezer Erskine, a poet who, in 1714, addressed an Ode to George I. He
therein denounced "subverting patronage" and

"the woful dubious Abjuration
Which gave the clergy ground for speculation."

But a Jacobite song struck the same note--

"Let not the Abjuration
Impose upon the nation!"

and George was deaf to the muse of Mr Erskine.

In 1732, 1733, Mr Erskine, in sermons concerning patronage, offended the
Assembly; would not apologise, appeared (to a lay reader) to claim direct
inspiration, and with three other brethren constituted himself and the