How to Read Naismith’s Historical Sketch of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland

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Robert Naismith’s Historical Sketch of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland, to its Union with the Free Church in 1876 must be read with gratitude, but also with great caution. It is a useful book, and in many places a noble one. Naismith writes as a man who loves the Reformed Presbyterian Church, knows her history, reveres the martyrs, understands the importance of the Covenants, and desires to preserve the memory of a small but ancient body which bore witness for Christ’s crown and covenant through long generations of suffering and reproach. He is not a scoffer. He is not an enemy. He is not ashamed of the Covenanters.

Yet he writes from a dangerous position. He writes immediately after the union of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland with the Free Church in 1876. This fact governs the whole book. Naismith is not merely writing history; he is justifying an ecclesiastical conclusion. His narrative moves toward union, and therefore the reader must constantly distinguish between the history he preserves and the interpretation he imposes upon its end.

The book has two tendencies. One tendency preserves the old Reformed Presbyterian testimony with considerable strength. The other explains the practical surrender of that testimony as the natural fulfilment of its own principles. The first tendency is valuable. The second is perilous.

The first rule, therefore, is this: read Naismith as a witness, but not as the final judge of the testimony.

Naismith’s great virtue is that he understands the Reformed Presbyterian Church as a church of attainments. He does not explain the name “Reformed Presbyterian” as a mere denominational label. He says it was historical, because the Church claimed to adhere to the attainments of both the First and Second Reformations in Scotland. That is the right starting point. The Reformed Presbyterian Church did not arise from religious preference, emotional protest, or sectarian self-will. It stood upon public, ecclesiastical, national, and sworn attainments. Its testimony was not the private judgment of a party, but the judicial preservation of truth once received, confessed, and covenanted by Church and nation.

This is one of the best things in Naismith. He sees that the Reformed Presbyterian Church must be interpreted historically and constitutionally. He knows that the attainments of 1560, 1638, and 1649 are not ornamental dates. They mark real advances in public reformation. The Church is not free to retreat from light once attained. To forget is not to repeal. To neglect is not to absolve. To cease speaking is not to cancel obligation.

Naismith is also strong on the Covenants. He gives the old argument for their continuing obligation: the divine party cannot die; the human party, the nation, still exists; the evils sworn against still abound; therefore the obligation remains. This is sound reasoning. A national covenant is not dissolved because one generation dies. Nations, like persons, possess moral continuity through time. The parts change, but the moral subject remains. If this is true in treaties, debts, laws, inheritances, and crimes, it is surely true in vows made to God.

This point must be preserved against all modern evasions. The National Covenant and Solemn League were not mere political programmes suited to a crisis. They were public religious vows. They bound the swearers and their posterity in their places and callings. They expressed duties already moral before they were sworn, and the oath added solemn obligation to those duties. Naismith sees this clearly in his earlier chapters, and the reader should receive it gratefully.

He is also useful in his account of the Revolution Settlement. He gives the essential reasons why the Cameronians could not enter the Church established in 1690. The difficulty was not that they were enemies of Presbyterianism, or that they despised the visible Church, or that they denied the existence of Christians in the Revolution Church. Their objection was that the settlement failed to own the attainments of the Second Reformation. It left the Act Rescissory unrepealed. It allowed the civil power to prescribe conditions to the Church. It went back to 1592 rather than forward to the full attainments of 1638–49. It admitted unfaithful and scandalous elements with insufficient discipline. It failed to restore the covenanted constitution.

This is crucial. The Cameronians were not schismatics. Naismith himself preserves the evidence. The Societies desired union. They pleaded for the removal of stumbling-blocks. They cried for comfortable communion with the Church, but communion on Reformation grounds. Their separation was not a denial of the Church; it was a testimony for the Church’s covenanted constitution. They did not say, “We are the only Christians.” They said, “The attained and sworn obligations of Christ’s visible kingdom must not be buried under a defective settlement.”

Naismith’s treatment of lawful resistance is also strong. He understands that the Covenanters were not anarchists, and not revolutionaries in the modern infidel sense. They were constitutional men. They held that rulers are bound by law, oath, and covenant; that kings may forfeit just authority by tyranny, perjury, and subversion of religion and liberty; and that subjects may resist when the constitution itself has been overthrown by those sworn to maintain it. This was not rebellion against lawful order. It was resistance to lawless power. The Revolution of 1688 largely vindicated, in public constitutional form, principles for which the stricter Covenanters had already suffered.

Naismith is valuable, then, because he preserves the inner logic of the testimony: Christ is Head of the Church; Christ is King of nations; Church courts possess intrinsic spiritual authority under Christ; civil rulers are bound to own and promote the true religion according to their office; the Covenants continue to bind; the Revolution Settlement was defective; and the Reformed Presbyterian Church existed as a witness for unrepealed attainments.

All this is good, and it should be accentuated.

But the reader must also see the danger. Naismith writes as one who wishes to show that the 1876 union with the Free Church was not a surrender but a consummation. His metaphor of the mountain rill entering the broader river is beautiful, but beauty can conceal danger. The question is not whether the Free Church was larger, stronger, more public, more useful, or in many respects noble. The question is whether the Reformed Presbyterian testimony remained judicially intact after union. Did the united body maintain the Covenants as binding? Did it maintain the distinctive terms of communion? Did it preserve political dissent from an immoral constitution? Did it continue to testify, as a Church, against the Revolution Settlement and against the national support of Popery, Prelacy, and Erastianism?

If not, then the rill did not simply enter a purer river. It lost its banks.

This is the main pitfall in reading Naismith: he tends to transform public testimony into private liberty. He is anxious to show that Reformed Presbyterians entering the Free Church were free to retain their views. But liberty to retain an opinion is not the same thing as a Church maintaining a testimony. A doctrine tolerated within a broader body is not the same as a doctrine confessed by that body. A man may privately believe the Covenants remain binding; but if that belief no longer functions as a term of communion, a judicial testimony, or an obligation imposed upon the visible Church, then the testimony has been reduced.

The Free Church could receive Reformed Presbyterians; she could not thereby become the legitimate Covenanter successor unless she judicially adopted and maintained the Covenanter testimony. Since she did not do so, the union did not preserve the Reformed Presbyterian Church as a witnessing body. It absorbed former Covenanters into a broader Presbyterian communion while leaving the distinctive Covenanter testimony without its proper public judicatory.

That reduction is the essence of recession.

The old Reformed Presbyterian position was not merely that individuals may hold strict opinions about the Covenants, the Revolution Settlement, magistracy, and national obligation. The position was that Christ’s Church must publicly confess and maintain these truths. They were not optional historical interpretations. They were attained duties. Once such attainments are made open questions, they cease to function as attainments. An open question may be discussed. A testimony must be maintained.

This is where Naismith’s book becomes unsafe. Earlier he argues well for the continued obligation of the Covenants. Later, when explaining the union, he says that this obligation had, to a considerable extent, fallen into disuse, and that the question was properly left open. But this is not a small adjustment. If the Covenants remain binding, the Church has no authority to make their obligation optional. A generation may neglect a vow, but neglect does not annul the vow. Disuse is not repeal. The very fact that the doctrine had fallen into disuse should have been a call to repentance, not a reason for making it an open question.

The same danger appears in his treatment of the 1863 division over political dissent. Naismith presents the majority as clearing away a misapprehension about the oath of allegiance and political rights. He relies heavily on legal opinions concerning the meaning of the oath. But the old Covenanter question was deeper than the technical construction of an oath. The issue was whether participation in the civil constitution, as then framed, involved visible homologation of an order still maintaining Erastian, prelatic, and Romish elements. The question was not merely, “Does this oath legally bind me to every evil in the constitution?” It was, “Can I, as a Covenanter, visibly incorporate myself into this political order without betraying the testimony against national defection?”

Naismith’s legal reasoning does not adequately answer that question. It narrows a theological and covenantal issue into a matter of civil interpretation. That is a common path of declension. The conscience asks, “What does Christ require?” The lawyer answers, “What does the oath technically mean?” The answer may be useful, but it cannot be final. The Church must judge morally, covenantally, and visibly.

Nor is it enough to say that the British constitution had improved. Improvement is not reformation. A government may become less tyrannical without becoming covenanted. It may cease persecuting the saints and still refuse Christ’s crown. It may grant liberty while maintaining religious pluralism, Erastian supremacy, Prelacy, and national support of error. The question is not whether Britain was better in 1863 than in 1688 or 1662. It was. The question is whether it had become such that Covenanters could lawfully own it without testimony against its defects. Naismith assumes too quickly that improvement justifies participation.

The reader must also beware of Naismith’s treatment of union as if unity were self-vindicating. The Solemn League and Covenant itself sought the nearest conjunction and uniformity of the Churches in religion, confession, government, worship, and catechising. Therefore, the Covenanter is not anti-union. Indeed, the Covenanter should be more zealous for true union than almost anyone else. But the very words of the Solemn League define the kind of union desired: conjunction and uniformity in truth. Union is not attained by placing hard duties in the category of private liberty. Union is not attained by lowering terms until former testimonies can survive only as tolerated memories. That is not covenantal union. It is absorption.

A true union preserves every attained truth in its proper place. It does not require every former phrase, custom, or denominational habit to remain. Names may change. Arrangements may change. Courts may be reconstructed. But sworn attainments must not be demoted. If the receiving body does not judicially own what the smaller body had maintained as testimony, then the union may be affectionate, orderly, and outwardly peaceful, but it is not a preservation of testimony.

This is why Naismith’s claim that there was “really no change of principle in either Church” must be challenged. If there was no change in principle, why did the continued obligation of the Covenants cease to be a term? Why did the old political dissent cease to function as discipline? Why did the distinctive Reformed Presbyterian name disappear ecclesiastically, except for civil property purposes? Why were the former Reformed Presbyterians merely left free to retain views which the united Church did not require? These are not merely administrative changes. They touch the public form of testimony.

The reader should not judge Naismith harshly as though he had no love for the cause. He clearly loved it. But love can be disordered. A man may love his mother and yet persuade himself that her disappearance into another household is no loss because she will be treated kindly there. The question is not whether the Free Church possessed many excellencies. It did. The question is whether the mother’s own testimony continued to speak with her own judicial voice.

This is the central warning: the leaven of recession usually works by admiration, not contempt. It praises the martyrs. It prints the history. It quotes the Covenants. It honours the old ministers. It speaks warmly of Christ’s crown and covenant. But then it says that changed circumstances allow the practical relaxation of what the fathers treated as binding. It does not deny the old testimony outright; it converts it into heritage. It turns terms of communion into historical distinctives. It changes obligation into liberty. It keeps the memory and loosens the bond.

Naismith must be read with this danger in mind.

The profitable reader will therefore read him in two directions. First, read him forward to understand the historical development of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. See the continuity from the First Reformation to the Second, from the Covenants to the Societies, from Cameron and Renwick to Macmillan, from Auchensaugh to the Reformed Presbytery, from the “Four Johns” to nineteenth-century missions. This reading is valuable and edifying.

Second, read him backward from the point of union and ask whether the end has colored the telling of the story. Does he preserve the earlier principles more strongly than he applies them to his own day? Does he honour the Covenants historically while making their present obligation optional? Does he defend the objections to the Revolution Settlement while allowing a union in which those objections no longer bind the Church? Does he celebrate the Societies’ desire for union while forgetting that they desired union by the removal of stumbling-blocks, not by the toleration of unreconciled differences?

These questions keep the reader awake.

Naismith is best where he explains why the Covenanters acted as they did. He is weakest where he explains why later Reformed Presbyterians could cease to act so. He is strong in narrating attainments; weak in justifying their demotion. He is strong in defending separation from the Revolution Settlement; weak in explaining how a later union could leave the decisive questions open. He is strong in showing that the Covenanters were not schismatics; weak when he implies that the cure for separation was broader incorporation rather than fuller reformation.

Still, the book should be read. It contains much that is useful. It gives a concise historical argument for the Reformed Presbyterian position. It preserves important statements of principle. It records the old terms of communion and their later altered form. It shows the stages by which political dissent was weakened, union negotiations proceeded, and the separate Scottish Reformed Presbyterian Church entered the Free Church. For that very reason, it is a document of both testimony and warning.

The reader should come away with gratitude for what Naismith preserves, but grief over what he normalizes. He preserves the old vocabulary: Covenant, testimony, attainments, Christ’s crown, spiritual independence, national obligation, Revolution defects. But he also helps us see how that vocabulary can remain after its judicial force has been weakened.

That is why Naismith is so instructive. He is not a crude defector. He is a loving son of the old Church explaining why he believes the family inheritance has been safely carried into a larger house. But the careful reader must inspect the inheritance. If the heirlooms are kept only as ornaments, while the deeds and obligations attached to them are no longer enforced, then something more than a change of address has occurred.

Read Naismith, then, with double attention. Accentuate the good: his love for the Covenanters, his doctrine of attainments, his defense of the Covenants, his objections to the Revolution Settlement, his constitutional doctrine of resistance, his insistence that Christ is King of nations, and his preservation of Reformed Presbyterian principles. But warn against the pitfall: his post-union tendency to treat recession as providential enlargement, and the demotion of binding public testimony as Christian liberty.

The final judgment may be stated plainly. Naismith is a useful historian of the Reformed Presbyterian testimony, but an unsafe guide to the meaning of its union with the Free Church. He knows the old attainments well enough to narrate them, but his ecclesiastical position tempts him to explain their surrender as their fulfilment. Therefore, read him gratefully, but not submissively. Let him teach you what the Reformed Presbyterian Church was; do not let him persuade you that it could cease to maintain its distinctive testimony and remain, in the same public sense, what it had been.

The old question remains the decisive one: were the covenanted attainments preserved as the Church’s public testimony, or were they allowed to survive only as the private convictions of some of her members?

If the latter, then the union was not simply the union of a rill with a river. It was the loss of a separate witness. And the loss of a witness is never to be celebrated without repentance.