The disruption, continued

Re Letters, March
One must go back to The Disruption of 1843 when preachers such as Candlist and Chalmers brought about the end of Patronage, something Knox had been unable to do because of resistance from the Nobility. This of course split the protestant church into two — Church of Scotland and the large break-away Free Church with two smaller secessions, The Auld Licht Church and the Wes Free Church — all still preaching infallibility and total Sabattarianism.
However, around 1860 new thinking which emanated from Germany appeared among the Free Church, known as “high criticism.” It suggested that Genesis was nothing but a children's story written to explain the six days it took to form the Earth. Darwinism, evolution and geology were used to promote high criticism. Slowly a serious schism took place with Conservatives believing implicitly in infallibility and Sabbatarianism and the new thinking group, which took hold of this new concept and gradually infiltrated the majority of the professional chairs in the main colleges — Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen.
It was a little known fact that in Scotland there was hidden racism. This was based on the fact that the Lowlanders (south and east) treated Highlanders (west and north) as intellectually inferior. It so happened that the majority of the “Conservatives” in the Free Church were Highlanders and in 1893 broke away and formed the Free Presbyterian Church.
To get a more complete understanding of how our Free Church/Free Presbyterian Church forefathers tackled the why and wherefores of this seriously complicated subject matter it is suggested The Scottish Historical Review Monograph No. 8 – The Second Disruption by James Lachlan MacLeod would make worthwhile reading. Calvin Brown and Zander Dunn would find no better place to enrich their studies of biblical criticism.