He had been a Voluntary ever since he had begun to think on such questions.  His father, in the days of his boyhood, had subscribed, along with a neighbour, for the Voluntary Church Magazine, and the subject had often been discussed in the cottage at Dunglass.  It will be remembered that during his first session at the University he was an eager disputant with his classmates on the Voluntary side, and that towards the close of his course, after a memorable debate in the Diagnostic Society, he secured a victory for the policy of severing the connection between Church and State.  These views he had never abandoned, and in a lecture on Disestablishment delivered in Edinburgh in 1872 he re-stated them.  While admitting, as the United Presbyterian Synod had done in adopting the “Articles of Agreement,” that the State ought to frame its policy on Christian lines, he denied that it was its duty or within its competence to establish and endow the Church.  This is, to quote his own words, “an overstraining of its province,—­a forgetfulness that its great work is civil and not spiritual,—­and an encroachment without necessity or call, and indeed, as I believe, in the face of direct Divine arrangements, on the work of the Christian Church.”

These, then, being his views, what led him to seek to make them operative by taking part in a Disestablishment campaign?  Two things especially.  One of these was the activity at that time of a Broad Church party within the Established Church.  He maintained that this was no mere domestic concern of that Church, and claimed the right as a citizen to deal with it.  In a national institution views were held and taught of which he could not approve, and which he considered compromised him as a member of the nation.  He felt he must protest, and he protested thus.

The other ground of his action was the conviction, which recent events had very much strengthened, that the continued existence of an Established Church was the great obstacle to Presbyterian Union in Scotland.  It is true that there was nothing in the nature of things to prevent the Free and United Presbyterian Churches coming together in presence of an Established Church.  As a matter of fact, they have done so since Dr. Cairns’s death, though not without secessions, collective and individual.  But experience had shown that it was the existence of an Established Church, towards which the Anti-Union party had turned longing eyes, which was the determining factor in the wrecking of the Union negotiations.  Besides, Dr. Cairns looked forward to a wider Union than one merely between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches, and he was convinced that only on the basis of Disestablishment could such a Union take place.  To the argument that, if the Church of Scotland were to be disestablished, its members would be so embittered against those who had brought this about that they would decline to unite with them, he was content to reply that that might safely be left to the healing power of time.  The petulant threat of some, that in the event of Disestablishment they would abandon Presbyterianism, he absolutely declined to notice.