with others, assailed Mr Simson, who was in bad health, and “could talk of nothing but the Council of Nice.”  A committee, including Mar’s brother, Lord Grange (who took such strong measures with his wife, Lady Grange, forcibly translating her to the isle of St Kilda), inquired into the views of Mr Simson’s own Presbytery—­that of Glasgow.  This Presbytery cross-examined Mr Simson’s pupils, and Mr Simson observed that the proceedings were “an unfruitful work of darkness.”  Moreover, Mr Simson was of the party of the Squadrone, while his assailants were Argathelians.  A large majority of the Assembly gave the verdict that Mr Simson was a heretic.  Finally, though in 1728 his answers to questions would have satisfied good St Athanasius, Mr Simson found himself in the ideal position of being released from his academic duties but confirmed in his salary.  The lenient good-nature of this decision, with some other grievances, set fire to a mine which blew the Kirk in twain.

The Presbytery of Auchterarder had set up a kind of “standard” of their own—­“The Auchterarder Creed”—­which included this formula:  “It is not sound or orthodox to teach that we must forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ, and instating us in Covenant with God.”  The General Assembly condemned this part of the Creed of Auchterarder.  The Rev. Mr Hog, looking for weapons in defence of Auchterarder, republished part of a forgotten book of 1646, ‘The Marrow of Modern Divinity.’  The work appears to have been written by a speculative hairdresser, an Independent.  A copy of the Marrow was found by the famous Mr Boston of Ettrick in the cottage of a parishioner.  From the Marrow he sucked much advantage:  its doctrines were grateful to the sympathisers with Auchterarder, and the republication of the book rent the Kirk.

In 1720 a Committee of the General Assembly condemned a set of propositions in the Marrow as tending to Antinomianism (the doctrine that the saints cannot sin, professed by Trusty Tompkins in ’Woodstock’).  But—­as in the case of the five condemned propositions of Jansenius—­the Auchterarder party denied that the heresies could be found in the Marrow.

It was the old quarrel between Faith and Works.  The clerical petitioners in favour of the Marrow were rebuked by the Assembly (May 21, 1722); they protested:  against a merely human majority in the Assembly they appealed to “The Word of God,” to which the majority also appealed; and there was a period of passion, but schism had not yet arrived.

The five or six friends of the Marrow really disliked moral preaching, as opposed to weekly discourses on the legal technicalities of justification, sanctification, and adoption.  They were also opposed to the working of the Act which, in 1712, restored lay patronage.  If the Assembly enforced the law of the land in this matter (and it did), the Assembly sinned against the divine right of congregations to elect their own preachers.  Men of this way of thinking were led by the Rev. Mr Ebenezer Erskine, a poet who, in 1714, addressed an Ode to George I. He therein denounced “subverting patronage” and