How to Read Reid’s A Cameronian Apostle

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H. M. B. Reid’s A Cameronian Apostle must be read with gratitude, but not with submission. It is one of the most useful books ever written on John Macmillan of Balmaghie, because Reid had access to many materials, read widely, preserved documents, visited places, examined local memories, and tried to reconstruct the life of a man whom lesser historians had dismissed in a paragraph. For that labour he deserves thanks. But the book must be read with theological judgment, because Reid, though often fair and sometimes remarkably perceptive, does not always possess the ecclesiological grammar needed to understand the man he is describing.

The danger is not that Reid despises Macmillan. He does not. He admires him. He sees his force, his courage, his piety, his pastoral power, and his historical importance. He understands that Macmillan was no small man. He knows that Macmillan’s life cannot be reduced to the obstinacy of an obscure parish minister. He recognizes that Macmillan stood at the hinge between the United Societies and the later Reformed Presbyterian Church. He sees, in many places, that Macmillan fought the battle of the Covenants almost alone.

Yet Reid often interprets Macmillan through a late nineteenth-century Church-of-Scotland consciousness. This leads him to mistake certain acts of principled Covenanter catholicity for “tolerance,” “liberality,” or broadening of an otherwise narrow system. That is the central error to avoid. Macmillan’s conduct was not the softening of Covenanter strictness into modern breadth. It was the working out of a coherent doctrine of the covenanted visible Church, her attainments, her courts, her discipline, and her national claim.

The first rule for reading Reid, then, is this: receive his facts, but test his categories.

Reid’s great service is that he shows Macmillan as a man formed by the Society people. Macmillan was not a casual Presbyterian who later adopted Cameronian views as a convenient weapon. From boyhood he was among the strict Covenanters. He knew their meetings, their sufferings, their terms of communion, their memories of Cameron, Cargill, and Renwick, and their protest against Erastian settlement. The blood and discipline of that world were in him. He was not inventing a new platform in 1703. He was recalling the Church to obligations already known, sworn, and sealed by suffering.

This matters because Macmillan’s later controversy cannot be understood as a private quarrel with a presbytery. It was not merely a case of temperament, nor of rustic obstinacy, nor of personal grievance. It was a question of whether the Church of Scotland after the Revolution had lawfully owned the attainments of the Second Reformation. The question was constitutional. The question was judicial. The question was covenantal.

Macmillan understood the Covenanted Reformation. He knew that the Church does not begin anew in each generation. The attainments of the Second Reformation were not antiquarian memories. They were public ecclesiastical and national obligations. The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant were not devotional relics. They bound the Church and nation to preserve and advance the true religion in doctrine, worship, discipline, and government. They also bound posterity, because the moral subject of the oath continued. The Church might forget the oath; she could not thereby dissolve it. A later settlement might ignore the attainments; it could not lawfully repeal them.

This is why Macmillan’s grievances mattered. He complained that the Solemn League was ignored, that the divine right of Presbytery was allowed to fall into the background, that oaths were being imposed which entangled conscience, and that the freedom of the Church was invaded by the State. These were not marginal scruples. They touched the very constitution of Christ’s visible kingdom in Scotland. To treat them as party exaggerations is already to have abandoned the ground from which the Covenanters reasoned.

The reader must also see that Macmillan understood presbyterial government. His critics then and since have often spoken as if he were an anti-presbyterial separatist. That is false. Macmillan’s whole conduct only makes sense if he believed in presbyterial order. He sought license and ordination in the ordinary way when he judged that no other lawful way was open. He accepted a call. He sat in church courts. He brought grievances to Presbytery. He sought redress through the ordinary channels. He was not a congregationalist, not an enthusiast, not a man who believed that zeal alone could create church authority.

This is one of the most important points in reading Reid. Macmillan’s protest against Kirkcudbright Presbytery was not a protest against presbytery as such. It was a protest against a presbytery failing to act according to its own covenanted constitution. Presbyterian government is not mere majoritarian procedure. A presbytery is not lawful simply because ministers meet, keep minutes, and issue sentences. A church court is bound to Christ, to Scripture, to confession, to covenanted attainments, to due process, and to the lawful ends of discipline. When a court refuses these, the question is not whether the protester is anti-government. The question is whether the court itself has become disorderly under the appearance of order.

Macmillan saw that distinction. His issue with the Presbytery was not that it exercised discipline, but that it used discipline to suppress testimony. It did not proceed as a faithful court seeking the reformation of real evils. It treated the grievances as turbulence. It moved against him through defective processes, private accusations, ex parte reports, withheld particulars, and finally deposition without any charge against his life or doctrine. That is not Presbyterian discipline in its proper glory. It is church power turned against the Church’s own obligations.

This point must be pressed. Discipline is not mere control. Discipline is the government of Christ applied to visible persons and visible disorders according to truth. It exists for the preservation of doctrine, worship, government, and holiness. When discipline is used to silence men who plead for confessed attainments, it becomes a contradiction of its own nature. The court may still possess the external name of Presbytery, but its act must be judged by the standard of Christ’s rule.

Therefore, when Macmillan declined the Presbytery, or absented himself from meetings, or resisted its proceedings, these actions must not be read as simple insubordination. They may be questioned tactically; no faithful reader needs to defend every manner, phrase, or movement as perfectly wise. But the substance must be rightly understood. His declinature was an extraordinary protest against a court which would not judge itself by the covenanted constitution it was bound to maintain.

This is why Reid is so valuable and so dangerous. He preserves the facts that vindicate Macmillan, but he sometimes interprets them through the wrong binary. He tends to see two positions: narrow Cameronian separatism on the one hand, and broader Church-of-Scotland catholicity on the other. When Macmillan acts more broadly than some later or stricter Cameronian spirits, Reid is tempted to call this tolerance. But that is not the right word. The right word is Presbyterian catholicity.

Macmillan was broader than sectarian narrowness because he was more deeply Covenanter, not less. He could recognize Christian persons outside his own fellowship without granting the lawfulness of the courts under which they acted. He could recognize the validity of ordinances without approving the administration. He could distinguish a civil act from ecclesiastical communion. He could baptize children under the national claim of the Church without reducing baptism to the badge of a voluntary society. He could refuse occasional hearing, not because no truth might be preached elsewhere, but because preaching is an act of church government, and to hear statedly is to submit visibly to the authority that sends.

These distinctions are necessary if Reid is to be read profitably.

The distinction between validity and lawfulness is fundamental. An act may be valid and yet unlawfully administered. A baptism may be true baptism, yet performed under a defective ecclesiastical settlement. A minister may be truly a minister in some sense, yet act under courts to which faithful men cannot submit. A marriage may be lawfully contracted as a civil covenant, even if witnessed by one who also holds office in a corrupted ecclesiastical body. Without this distinction, Macmillan appears inconsistent. With it, he appears coherent.

The distinction between the visible and invisible Church is equally necessary. Saving faith is not, and cannot be, a term of communion in the visible Church, because saving faith is invisible. The Church cannot judge the secrets of the heart. She judges visible profession, doctrine, worship, discipline, government, and outward conversation. Macmillan could exercise private Christian charity toward persons whom he judged to be godly, while refusing visible communion with a constitution he judged defective. Charity toward persons is not submission to courts. Hope concerning invisible grace is not approval of visible disorder.

This also explains why Macmillan cannot be read as a sectarian. A sect narrows the Church to a party. Macmillan did the opposite. He insisted that the covenanted national Church remained morally real, even when her public courts had defected. He did not treat the Societies as a new denomination formed by voluntary preference. He joined them as the suffering remnant adhering to the attained Reformation when the public judicatories refused to own their obligations. The old saying is true: Macmillan did not so much gather a new sect as join the remnant that already stood upon the old ground.

This is also why his conduct regarding ordination and presbyterial order is so important. The Societies had been deprived of ordinary ministry. They could meet, pray, confer, fast, petition, and maintain testimony. But they were not an ordinary presbytery merely because they were organized and zealous. Macmillan knew the difference between a fellowship of suffering Christians and a constituted church court. He did not hastily manufacture jurisdiction. He waited for lawful order as far as it could be had. That does not mean ordination is of the essence of the Church in every case of necessity. Reformed divines distinguish the being and well-being of the Church. Church government belongs to the bene esse, not the esse, of the Church. Where lawful ordination cannot be had, the opening of the hearts of the people and their election may stand in the place of ordination until order can be restored. But necessity is not contempt of order. Macmillan’s instinct was to preserve both truths: the people’s right under necessity, and the Church’s duty to recover presbyterial order.

This is where his greatness appears. He did not collapse into anarchy when the courts failed him. Nor did he submit to disorder merely because it came clothed in the name of Presbytery. He knew that government is for truth, not truth for government. He knew that courts exist to maintain Christ’s order, not to bury covenanted attainments. He knew that the Church’s history imposes moral obligations upon her present courts. This is not fanaticism. It is constitutional Presbyterianism.

Reid’s title, A Cameronian Apostle, is therefore useful if rightly understood. Macmillan was not an apostle in the foundational sense. He was not the source of doctrine. He was not a priestly head of the Societies. He was not a Presbyterian pope. But he was apostolic in the derivative sense of being sent, laborious, pioneering, and burdened with the care of scattered people. For many years he bore alone the ordained ministry among the Society people. He travelled, preached, baptized, administered the Supper, corresponded, argued, suffered, and maintained a public testimony when few were willing to stand with him. The title is fitting only if it is understood ministerially, not hierarchically.

The reader must also resist Reid’s tendency to explain later Reformed Presbyterian history as if the Church gradually matured beyond Macmillan’s strictness. In truth, much later history shows loss in two directions. Some later Covenanters narrowed the national and Presbyterian breadth of Macmillan’s position into the habits of a voluntary sect. Others later dissolved the testimony into broad Presbyterian respectability or ecumenical softness. These are opposite errors, but they arise from the same root: failure to preserve the full grammar of the Covenanted Reformation.

Macmillan was neither of these. He was not a narrow voluntarist. He did not think the Church was merely the gathered company of those who joined his societies. He was also not a proto-liberal. He did not think charity toward Christians elsewhere justified communion with defective courts. He was a Covenanter churchman: national in his doctrine of the Church, presbyterial in his doctrine of government, disciplined in his view of communion, and catholic in his recognition of visible realities beyond his own immediate fellowship.

This is the key to reading Reid’s evidence concerning Macmillan’s supposedly broader practices. When Macmillan maintained fellowship with certain elders, he was not thereby conceding the lawfulness of corrupted courts. When he recognized marriage by a parish minister, he was not entering ecclesiastical communion; marriage is a creation ordinance and civil covenant, not a sacrament. When he baptized children beyond the narrow bounds of the Societies, he was not lowering the covenant, but asserting the national parish claim of Christ’s visible Church. When he refused to hear Establishment ministers, he was not denying that they might be Christians, but refusing submission to the sending authority under which they preached.

Reid sees the facts. The reader must supply the grammar.

Nor should the reader miss Macmillan’s pastoral character. Reid’s documentation shows not merely a controversialist, but a parish minister. He was called by the people. They adhered to him because he had ministered to them. He was not merely a pamphleteer against Erastianism. He was a preacher, a pastor, and a man of prayer. If his testimony had been merely argumentative, it would not have held the people as it did. The parish knew him as a shepherd before the courts treated him as a delinquent.

This is important because modern readers often separate testimony from pastoral usefulness. They imagine that strong principles make weak pastors, and that pastoral kindness requires doctrinal softness. Macmillan refutes this. He was loved because he was faithful, and faithful because he loved the Church under Christ. Discipline, testimony, and pastoral care were not separate compartments in his mind. They were all parts of one ministry under the Mediator’s crown.

Still, Reid should not be rejected because of his interpretive defects. To reject him would be foolish. He gives too much. He preserves local knowledge, records, pamphlet history, procedural detail, personal texture, and the whole atmosphere of Balmaghie and the Societies. His appendices alone make the work indispensable. He often allows Macmillan and his opponents to speak for themselves. That is precisely why the book is so useful. A reader who possesses the right principles can often draw stronger conclusions from Reid’s evidence than Reid himself draws.

The profitable way to read A Cameronian Apostle is therefore as follows.

Read Reid first for evidence. Mark dates, documents, proceedings, places, persons, pamphlets, court actions, and quotations. Reid did careful work, and his work should be used.

Read him second for atmosphere. He helps the reader feel the parish, the presbytery, the distance between places, the old church, the people’s affection, the loneliness of Macmillan’s position, and the strangeness of the post-Revolution settlement.

Read him third for unintended vindication. Reid often records facts that prove more than his own conclusions. When he shows that no charge was made against Macmillan’s life or doctrine, he strengthens the case that the issue was testimony. When he shows defective procedure, he strengthens Macmillan’s protest against the courts. When he shows Macmillan’s charity toward persons and strictness toward government, he gives the very evidence needed to recover the validity-lawfulness distinction.

Read him fourth against nineteenth-century categories. Do not let words like tolerance, narrowness, broadening, schism, and liberality do the thinking. Define them covenantally. A man may be called narrow because he refuses to abandon sworn truth. A man may be called broad because he has learned to tolerate defection. A man may be called schismatic because he refuses communion with unlawful courts. A man may be called liberal because he lowers the terms Christ has imposed. Such words must be judged, not swallowed.

Read him fifth with the Second Reformation in view. The true question is never merely, “Was Macmillan easy to govern?” The question is, “What government was lawful according to the attainments of the Church?” The true question is not, “Did he submit to Presbytery?” The question is, “Was the Presbytery submitting to Christ, Scripture, confession, covenant, and its own lawful constitution?” The true question is not, “Did Macmillan disrupt peace?” The question is, “What kind of peace was being maintained, and at what cost?”

If read in this way, Reid becomes one of the most profitable witnesses to Macmillan’s greatness. He shows a man who understood that the visible Church is historical, constitutional, and covenantal. He shows a man who understood that presbyterial government is not mere machinery but Christ’s ordered rule in His house. He shows a man who understood that discipline must serve truth, not suppress it. He shows a man who understood that attainments bind until lawfully removed, and that no defective settlement can erase the Church’s sworn obligations.

The final judgment is plain. Reid’s A Cameronian Apostle should be read because it gives us Macmillan in fuller historical form than any brief denominational sketch can do. But it should be read with the key Reid himself does not always use consistently: Macmillan was not a sectarian softened by occasional tolerance. He was a Covenanter Presbyterian applying the principles of the Covenanted Reformation to a Church whose courts had failed to maintain them.

He understood the Church better than his judges. He understood Presbytery better than the presbyters who deposed him. He understood discipline better than those who used discipline to silence grievances. He understood catholicity better than those who mistook submission to defective courts for unity. And he understood the attainments of the Second Reformation better than those who treated them as inconvenient memories.

That is why Reid must be read. Not to learn that Macmillan was a stubborn relic of a harder age, but to recover a man whose apparent contradictions disappear when the covenanted constitution of the visible Church is restored to view.