HUTCHESON AND FERGUSSON
The names of these two eminent expositors have been before
us already as two who collaborated with Dickson in his project to furnish the
religious public with so many handy expositions of books of the Bible. These
volumes were to be based on a competent acquaintance . with the work of the
learned, but they were to be pitched on such a key as would make an appeal to
the unlearned. Let the enterprise but succeed and the unlearned would be
unlearned no more, but would be well grounded in the truth of the Gospel as it
is set forth in the sacred books themselves.
George Hutcheson and James
Fergusson were both of them ministers in Ayrshire. They were of the class for
whom Spurgeon, as we have seen, had so high an esteem. Hutcheson in the early
days of his ministry was settled at Colmonell. In those days he was one of the
strictest for applying the rule for worship which was accepted in the Reformed
Church. He scrupled at the singing of doxologies that were in common use which
were sung at the close of the singing of the Psalms. This was a usage that
passed with the adoption of the Westminster Directory, so it was not the
Directory that raised questions about it. The question had been keenly
discussed before the Directory was drawn up. All that the Directory did was to
make no uniformity of use that it aimed at, for this old Scottish custom. There
was no obvious connection between Brownism and the position taken up by
Hutcheson and his friends. Baillie was to begin with strongly in favour of
continuing use and wont, yet when the Directory was adopted he honourably
accepted its guidance and ruling.
Now Baillie was not a Protester, much
less a Brownist. And no more was Hutcheson. When the strife between
Resolutioners and Protesters was on foot he was not only not a Protester he was
militant on the other side. Indeed he was one of the pamphleteers in the
controversy on the side of the Resolutioners.
He became one of the
ministers of Edinburgh, and it was during his Edinburgh days that he wrote his
admirable commentaries. It was he who, when the great persecution began,
accompanied to the scaffold the Marquess of Argyll, who was the first of the
Covenanting martyrs. Now Baillie and Hutcheson saw very much eye to eye in
their Church politics. They both alike were loyal to the ideal accepted in the
Westminster documents, and though Baillie. could charge his opponents with
undue compliance with the Sectaries, yet he and they were at one in loyalty to
the uniformity of Faith and Worship at which the Covenant aimed. The use made
of Baillie’s name in giving colour to the charge that the Protesters were
tainted with Brownism and that they were responsible for the plainness of the
type of worship that from Covenanting days was the common Scottish pattern is
one of the disreputable things that belong to an innovating propaganda that is
not marked by the high standard of honour shown in advancing its cause. It is
convenient for this school of innovators to forget that the type of worship
which abjured the lax principle of Anglicanism was undeniably the type for
which both sides in the schism over the Public Resolutions stood.
They were
honest men who might differ on the questions that were at issue between them,
but who were of one mind in holding the Reformed principle of worship and in
accepting the Directory as part of the Covenanted uniformity of the British
Churches. In his later years Hutcheson as an “outed” minister
accepted the position of the Indulged minister at Irvine and by so doing was
criticised for yielding so far to the Erastianism of the day. It was during his
years of service there that he produced his valuable exposition of the 130th
Psalm. He thus ended his ministry in the same county in which it had begun.
Fergusson, too, as we have seen, was a minister in Ayrshire. He was one
of Baillie’s successors in Kilwinning just as Hutcheson in a way was one
of Dickson’s in Itvine, where also Alexander Nisbet was settled. Apart
from his Commentaries on the Epistles from Galatians to II. Thessalonians,
Fergusson was the author of a controversial work which is severely critical of
Toleration. In this respect he was of the conservative Opposition to a
miscellaneous Toleration that found room for all the extravagances illustrated
in Edwards’ Gamgraena.
The Covenanting fathers had no relish for the
Radicalism in Church matters for which the Independents stood. They stood out
strongly for the maintenance of the unity of the Visible Church and looked upon
the system of insulated unrelated gathered Churches as essentially out of
keeping with that unity. At the same time as they were against a general and
unbounded toleration they were distinctly in favour of showing every
consideration to the scruples of godly ministers of a tender conscience. They
were opposed to the organising of separate and rival denominations. They
favoured comprehension in one national Church with adequate ‘provision for
kindly dealing with scrupulous brethren.
They did not envisage such a
condition of things as we have in the present day. Even in the days of Cromwell
the Independents themselves began to circumscribe the limits of the wide
toleration for which they had come to plead.
When we name Fergusson of
Kilwinning in connection with Toleration, it is natural to associate with his
opposition to the ideal of the Independents and the Cromwellian Sectaries, as
they were spoken of in Scotland, the name and the work of James Wood of St
Andrews, who was a very definite Resolutioner. His reply to an English
champion’s plea for Independency is one of the recognised Scots classics
in the realm of Presbyterian Church government of his age.
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