1JOHN2

candlish

DANGERS of the POST-DISRUPTION CHURCH

It is interesting to observe how the men who were prominent in Disruption times were alive to the dangers of the position. “It seems to have fallen in the providence of God to the Free Church,” said Dr. Candlish, “to attract on various accounts the attention of other bodies, and we cannot but feel that this, among other circumstances, puts this Church in a situation of peculiar responsibility. If we are as a city set on an hill, and if we have been so moved and directed in the adoption of our measures as to call forth the regards and attract the sympathies of other bodies of evangelical Christians,-and, above all, if we have any reason to believe, as others are ready to believe, and some of us are constrained to feel that, as a Church, we have, in some measure, experienced the presence and power of the Spirit of God,-I say, all these considerations are fitted, not to fill us with exalted feelings of complacency, but rather to make us sensible of our deep unworthiness and heavy responsibility.”*

Commission of General Assembly, August, 1844 - Witness newspaper.