ABSTRACT
On 18 May 1843 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland met at St Andrew’s Church in Edinburgh amidst customary pageantry and unusual excitement. After some of the preliminary formalities had been completed, the moderator, Dr David Welsh, departed dramatically from the normal procedure by reading a protest against the ‘violation of the terms of the Union between Church and State in this land’ and announcing that he and his supporters would be ‘separating in an orderly way from the Establishment’. A vivid eye-witness account takes up the story:
The Moderator laid the Protest on the table—lifted his hat— turned to the Commissioner, who had risen—and bowed respectfully to the representative of Royalty, an act which seemed to many as if the true old Church of Scotland were then and there bidding farewell to the State which had turned a deaf ear to her appeals. Leaving the chair, Dr Welsh moved towards the door…. Man after man rose, without hurry or confusion, and bench after bench was left empty, and the vacant space grew wider as ministers and elders poured out in long procession. Outside in the street, the great mass of spectators had long been waiting in anxious anticipation, and when at last the cry arose, ‘They come! they come!’ and when Dr Welsh, Dr Chalmers, and Dr Gordon appeared in sight, the sensation, as they came forth, went like an electric shock through the vast multitude, and the long deep shout which rang along the street told that the deed had been done. 1
When calculations were made it transpired that 454 of the Kirk’s 1,195 clergy had solemnly and publicly left the Established Church to form the Free Church of Scotland. 2 This was no mere storm in an ecclesiastical tea-cup, but a movement that struck at the heart of one of Scotland’s key national institutions. Subsequent months saw the creation, in a remarkably short space of time, of a new church with a presence in every part of Scotland, supported solely from the commitment and financial resources of its own adherents.