How to Read Reid’s The Kirk above Dee Water
James Dodson
H. M. B. Reid’s The Kirk above Dee Water is a book that ought to be read, but it must be read with judgment. It is not to be despised because Reid was wrong in his interpretation of John Macmillan, nor is it to be received uncritically because Reid preserved many valuable details. The proper reader must distinguish between the evidence Reid gives and the categories by which he explains that evidence. Reid is often useful precisely because he records facts which his own ecclesiastical framework cannot properly digest.
This is the first rule for reading Reid: receive his facts, but test his interpretation.
Reid was not a Covenanter. He wrote as a late nineteenth-century minister of the Church of Scotland, with all the instincts, affections, and assumptions belonging to that position. He loved the parish. He loved local memory. He loved the kirk, the kirkyard, the stones, the cup, the river, the habits of the old Galloway people, and the continuity of the National Church as he understood it. In all this there is much to admire. A man who loves place, graves, old communion vessels, and the memory of faithful ministers is not to be treated as an enemy of truth. He saw many things which colder historians miss. He wrote with affection, and affection often notices what bare criticism overlooks.
But affection is not judgment. Reid’s love for Balmaghie enabled him to preserve important material; it did not enable him to interpret Macmillan correctly.
His central mistake is that he reads Macmillan through the wrong antithesis. To Reid, the old Covenanter spirit tends toward harshness, narrowness, and dour separation, while Macmillan’s broader actions appear as signs of softening, tolerance, and liberality. This is the modernized Establishment reading of the matter. It assumes that the only two options are strict sectarianism on the one side and generous ecclesiastical breadth on the other. Therefore, when Reid sees Macmillan acting with charity toward persons, or recognizing certain acts done among those outside the Societies, he concludes that Macmillan was moving away from strict Covenanter principle toward a more liberal and humane temper.
This is exactly backwards.
Macmillan was not becoming less Covenanter when he acted in this way. He was showing what a true Covenanter ecclesiology actually required. His conduct is unintelligible only if one has already lost the distinctions by which Reformed Presbyterian doctrine lives. The key distinction is the difference between validity and lawfulness. An act may be valid without being lawfully administered according to the covenanted constitution of the Church. A baptism may be true baptism, while the ecclesiastical government under which it is administered remains corrupt. A minister may be a true Christian man, and even a true minister in some real sense, while the judicatory that sends him acts unlawfully. A parish may remain under the covenantal claim of Christ, even when its courts have defected from the attained Reformation.
Once this distinction is recovered, Reid’s narrative is transformed.
Macmillan’s fellowship with elders was not ecclesiastical compromise. It was private judgment of charity toward visible professors who might possess saving faith. Saving faith is not, and cannot be, a term of communion in the visible church, because saving faith is invisible. The visible church cannot judge the secrets of the heart. She judges profession, doctrine, worship, government, and outward conversation. Therefore Macmillan could treat certain men as Christian brethren in personal intercourse without submitting to the lawfulness of the corrupted government under which they acted. Personal charity is not presbyterial communion.
Likewise, Macmillan’s marriage by a parish minister was not an act of ecclesiastical fellowship. Marriage is not a sacrament. It is a creation ordinance and a civil covenant. A parish minister, in that circumstance, could function as a public witness or civil registrar of vows without thereby becoming the ministerial organ of church communion. Those who preferred to let their lines die out rather than allow such a civil transaction had not preserved Reformed strictness. They had stumbled toward a sacerdotal view of marriage. That is not Presbyterianism. It is a scruple swollen beyond its proper bounds.
The same principle explains Macmillan’s baptism of children whose parents were not members of the Covenanting Societies. Reid treats this as a sign of wider charity. It was wider than the spirit of some of Macmillan’s later critics, but it was not liberalism. It was the national church principle. In a covenanted nation, the parish is not a voluntary religious club, and the children of the parish are not religiously neutral until they join a private association. Baptism is not the badge of a sect. It is the ordinance of Christ laid upon those who are under the covenantal claim of the visible church. By baptizing such children, Macmillan was not lowering the terms of communion. He was asserting Christ’s claim over them and placing them under obligation to be instructed, disciplined, and brought to the obedience of the faith.
This is the very opposite of sectarianism.
The stricter men who censured Macmillan for this had already begun to exchange the national and Presbyterian doctrine of the Church for a voluntary association model. They made the Societies function as if they were the whole visible church, rather than a witnessing remnant maintaining the attainments of the covenanted Church of Scotland against corrupt judicatories. That error, once admitted, narrows the covenant into a party bond. It makes separation an end in itself, rather than a testimony for the recovery of the Church in her covenanted constitution.
Here Reid, unintentionally, helps us greatly. He shows us facts which later party-spirit and modern liberalism both misread. Macmillan refused to hear Establishment preaching, not because he denied that any Establishment minister might be a Christian, nor because he denied that any act done among them might have validity, but because preaching is an act of government. The minister does not preach as a private lecturer. He preaches as one sent. To hear him in the stated ordinances is to submit, visibly, to the authority that sends him. Occasional hearing, therefore, is not a question of gathering useful religious information from a gifted speaker. It is a question of ecclesiastical submission.
Modern evangelicalism cannot understand this because it has reduced preaching to communication. It treats sermons as religious content. But the Reformed churches never understood preaching so nakedly. Christ sends ministers through His Church. A preached sermon is not merely information; it is an official act. Therefore, to refuse hearing under a corrupted sending authority is not a denial that truth may be spoken there. It is a refusal to legitimate the government under which that ministry is exercised.
This is why Macmillan’s position is neither sectarian nor latitudinarian. He did not say, “There are no Christians there.” Nor did he say, “Since there are Christians there, we may commune with them.” He knew that invisible grace and visible order are not the same thing. Saving faith belongs to the inward work of the Holy Ghost. Visible communion belongs to the outward government of Christ’s house. Charity may hope well concerning persons; discipline must judge visible constitutions, administrations, and terms of communion.
This distinction also explains the later tragedy of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. When the validity-lawfulness distinction and the attainments principle are lost, only two paths remain. One may narrow into a sect, treating one’s own voluntary association as if it alone exhausts the visible Church. Or one may dissolve into indifferentism, treating all valid acts as equally lawful and all sincere Christians as entitled to visible communion without regard to doctrine, worship, government, or covenantal obligation. These appear to be opposite errors, but they spring from the same root: the loss of a covenanted doctrine of the visible Church.
The later Reformed Presbyterian Church, at different times, fell into both temptations. Some narrowed the testimony into sectarian rigor, losing the national breadth that Macmillan preserved. Others later imagined that “generosity” meant loosening the very attainments for which the martyrs suffered. But Macmillan was neither the father of sectarian narrowness nor the herald of liberal ecumenism. He was a minister of the covenanted national Church maintaining lawful testimony against unlawful government.
This is why Reid must be read. He preserves the scene in which these questions become visible. He gives us the kirk above Dee Water, the old communion cup, the martyrs’ stones, the ministers’ graves, the memory of Macmillan, the affection of Balmaghie, and the living tension between parish continuity and covenantal faithfulness. A merely abstract ecclesiology can become bloodless. Reid reminds us that these controversies took place among real people, in real parishes, with rivers, bells, manse doors, communion tables, and graves. The Church is visible. Her history is visible. Her corruptions are visible. Her testimonies are visible. Therefore her history must be read visibly and morally, not sentimentally.
But Reid must also be resisted. He wants Macmillan to become useful to the Church of Scotland’s own nineteenth-century story of restored worship, broader taste, and national continuity. He sees Macmillan as great, but not as right in the deepest sense. He admires the man while domesticating the testimony. That is the danger. The reader must not allow Reid’s affection to become interpretation. Reid can show us Balmaghie; he cannot be allowed to define the meaning of Balmaghie.
Read Reid, then, as a witness. Read him for local fact, for atmosphere, for preserved inscriptions, for parish memory, for the way a thoughtful Establishment minister viewed the Covenanter past. Read him to understand how Macmillan could be admired and misunderstood at the same time. Read him also to see how easily historical charity becomes theological misclassification when first principles are absent.
Above all, read Reid with the proper key: validity is not lawfulness; invisible grace is not visible communion; personal charity is not ecclesiastical submission; a civil act is not a sacrament; baptism is not the badge of a voluntary sect; and attainments once lawfully received by the Church are not erased by later compromise.
With that key, Macmillan reappears. He is no longer the dour sectarian whom later ages generously outgrew. Nor is he the first step toward a liberalized Reformed Presbyterianism. He is the non-sectarian Covenanter: charitable toward persons, disciplined toward corrupt government, national in his doctrine of the Church, Presbyterian in his patience for lawful order, and steadfast in maintaining the covenanted attainments of Christ’s visible kingdom.
That is why Reid is worth reading. Not because he gets Macmillan right, but because he gives us enough material to get Macmillan right against Reid’s own interpretation.