church." Professor Scougal availed himself of the influence and authority which he derived from his character and station, to recommend the use of a Liturgy, as being more consonant to the general practice of the primitive times, and more conducive to the edification of Christian worshippers when met together in the great congregation. When be was advanced to the chair of theology, he composed a formulary for the use of the cathedral church of Aberdeen, which entitles him to a high rank among devotional writers. It includes every essential branch of prayer: it breathes a fervent spirit of evangelical piety, expressed in a style of majestic simplicity level to every capacity; and upon the whole, may be pronounced not unworthy of those venerable confessors and martyrs of the Protestant cause, to whom we are indebted for our admirable Liturgy.

In maintaining the expediency of Jiturgical forms, Scougal had the good fortune to coincide with the great oracle of the Presbyterians in doctrine and church government; no less a man than John Calvin himself, whose opinion upon that head appears from the following passage in a letter written by him to the Protector of Eng. land, in the reign of Edward the Sixth."As a form of prayer and ecclesiastical rites, I highly approve that it should be certain; from which it may not be lawful for any minister to depart, as well in consideration of the weakness and ignorance of some, as that it may more plainly appear, how our churches agree amongst themselves, and lastly, that a stop may be put to the giddiness of those who affect novelties *."

*A Liturgy was offered to the public some years ago, by a respectable Dissenting ministert, from whose prefatory address, the following passages are selected: "In our present mode of conducting religious worship, too much depends upon the minister: on this account it is to be feared, that some are too apt to look upon prayer as the business of the

The Rev. Mr. Carpenter,

The Professor might have appealed in support of his predilection for liturgical forms to the practice of a church, which is unquestionably the oldest of the whole protestant community, I mean the Unitas Fratrum, or the church of the United Brethren, known in England by the name of Moravians, whose Liturgy in the main points is in unison with our own. He might also have appealed to the authority of Luther and Melancthon, and of their eminent coadjutor John Bagenhagius; to which he might have added the name of an English nonconformist then living, Richard Baxter, whose praise will be in all churches of the saints, to the end of time*. A Liturgy had been used in Scotland, at a very early period of the Reformation, but was soon laid aside, as well as the episcopal form of church government; and the presbyterian discipline and mode of worship were fully established by law before the close of the sixteenth century. King James had no cordial love to this scheme of ecclesias

minister only, and not to consider it, at least not so much as they ought, as a duty in which they themselves are equally concerned. It appears to me, that our mode of worship is 100 refined for the young and ignorant, and I am persuaded, that something ought to be done to render our public services less tireForms of devotion would give a solemnity, some, and more interesting to such persons. and dignity to our public worship, and a stability to our religious societies; in which, I think, they are now deficient. Our public worship is too uncertain and fluctuating: it depends on the frame of the person's mind who officiates, which is variable, and it changes when ministers are changed; and it appears to me, that there is something more solemn and venerable in public Liturgies, where responses are used, and where all the people are evidently employed in the worship of their Maker."

* The writings of Bennet, in defence of precomposed forms of public devotion, may be recommended to students in divinity; as also a treatise entitled Apologia, by the late Rev. John Newton, in a series of letters to an independent minister, wherein the church of Englandmen may be furnished both with a sword and a shield,

tical polity, of which he gave the most unequivocal proofs, soon after his accession to the throne of England, when the hierarchy was restored although the accustomed form of presbyterian worship was retained, he would gladly have introduced the English Liturgy, but he knew the temper of the nation too well to venture precipitately upon such a step. By way of feeling the pulse of his people, he recommended, on the restoration of prelacy, that several rites and ceremonies should be transplanted from England, and engrafted upon a stock which he soon found not to be very congenial to their nourishment and growth. So general and so violent was the opposition to this supposed approximation towards the idolatry of the Romish ritual, that no further innovations were attempted during the reign of James. His successor, Charles the First, imprudently made the attempt to overthrow the national worship, and to establish a Liturgy, which excited tumults and insurrections, that terminated in the destruction of the episcopal order, the abolition of the ceremonies which had been introduced by James, and the re-establishment of the presbyterian discipline and worship with new vigour and fervour. Thus inatters continued until the restoration of Charles the Second, when episcopacy was restored with an intermixture of presbyterian discipline. "But the prelates," to borrow a passage from a late historian *, "intent on the acquisition of power, had introduced no material innovation in the worship or rites of the church. Its worship was still extemporary, or exchanged in some congregations for a portion of the Liturgy. The sacramental rites were administered without kneeling, or the sign of the cross; and as the surplice, the altar, and the offensive ceremonies of the preceding reign were not generally revived, an uniform mode of wor

Malcolm Laing's History of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 49.

ship was not difficult to be restored." The bishops, however, did not make the attempt to establish uniformity in worship; and it was impossible that an established church could exist in peace or vigour under so vague and undefined a scheme of discipline and worship as prevailed in Scotland, between the period of the Restoration and the Revolution; an unhappy period, the annals of which were marked by an unrelenting spirit of persecution on the one hand, and on the other, by a sour, narrow, unaccommodating temper, which spurned the olive-branch when held out by that truly apostolical man, Archbishop Leighton. In such a state of things, it must be allowed that Professor Scougal had a difficult and delicate part to perform; and with what success he performed it, the reader may be left. to judge from the following passage in Dr. Gairden's funeral sermon. "Yea, the several sects among us lament his loss, and seem to confess that a few like him would soon heal our schisms."

It was unfortunate for the episcopal church of Scotland that there were but few men at that time like Scougal, among her dignified ecclesiastics. The primate, Archbishop Sharp, had rendered himself odious to the Presbyterians by his dissimulation and treachery at the period of the Restoration. On the subject of church government, he displayed all the high notions of Laud, without any of his private virtues; and the men whom he recommended to fill up the vacant sees had generally few + pretensions to the character of Christian

Perhaps not, had the bishops been, generally speaking, such men as Leighton and Scougal, and the great body of the inferior episcopal clergy possessed of the spirit and temper of Burnet, Nairn, and Charteris.

"I observed," says Bishop Burnet, "the deportment of our bishops was in all points so different from what became their function that I had a more than ordinary zeal kindled within me upon it. They were not only fu rious against all that stood out against them

bishops although there were at that time, both of the episcopal order and among the inferior clergy, men who would have done honour to the purest ages of the church. The father of Professor Scougal, who was bishop of Aberdeen, approached nearer to the fervent piety of Leighton than any of his contemporaries, and governed his diocese in a manner which shewed that he united, in an uncommon degree, the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove. Sharp was the last man that ought to have been pitched upon for the primacy. This unhappy man, as Bishop Burnet styles him (and no one knew him better) formed a perfect contrast to Archbishop Leighton, whose pacific and healing counsels he contemptuously rejected. Leighton, with a view to unite the two great parties into which the nation was divided on the point of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, proposed to the Primate the adoption of Archbishop Usher's scheme of reduced episcopacy; but Sharp, although he himself had been bred a presbyterian minister, would listen to nothing short of the re-establishment of episcopacy in its ancient vigour and

but were very remiss in all the parts of their function. Some did not live within their dioceses; and those who did, seemed to take no care of them they shewed no zeal against vice; the most eminently wicked were their particular confidants: they took no pains to keep their clergy strictly to rules and to their duty; on the contrary, there was a levity and a carnal way of living about them that very much scandalized me." Hist. of his Own Times, vol. ii. folio edit, page 217. The same author thus speaks of the inferior episcopal clergy in the west of Scotland: "They were generally very mean and despicable in all respects; they were the worst preachers I ever heard; they were ignorant to a reproach, and many of them were openly vicious; they were a disgrace to the sacred function; those of them who arose above contempt or scandal, were men of such violent tempers, that they were as much hated as the others were despised." Such was the state in which Leighton found

bis dioceser

splendour,-a notion the most visionary that could be conceived at that juncture, and which shews how completely the mind of Sharp was intoxicated by pride and ambition.

Another design which Leighton had much at heart, was, the introduction of a more regular and uniform mode of public worship. He was aware that any attempt to establish the English Liturgy must prove abortive, although no man more cordially approved that Liturgy in every part than he did. He was very much disgusted with the manner in which the generality of the presbyterian elergy performed the devotional services of the church; and he proposed a middle way between the platform of the Directory, and the service of the Church of England, as the best calculated to promote general har mony. But the Primate would neither listen to this proposal, nor bring forward a plan of his own; and every man was left to model the service of the church according to his own fancy. Sharp and his creatures, being wholly bent on the aequisition of power, had no leisure, nor inclination to follow the path marked out for them by Leighton; and thus, as Bishop Burnet observes, that good man "quickly lost all heart and hope, and said often to me upon it, that in the whole progress of that affair, there appeared such cross characters of an angry Providence, that how fully soever he was satisfied in his own mind as to episcopacy itself, yet it seemed that God was against them, and that they were not like to be the men that should build up his church."

From the hints that are scattered in the miscellaneous remains of

Leighton, respecting the mode of conducting the services of the sancthat his views on this subject were tuary, there is no room to doubt congenial with those of Professor Scougal; and had the task of regulating the external order of public worship been committed to them, they would have accomplished it