Rare Book Monthly
Articles - October - 2003 Issue
The Doctrine of Caiaphas by Rev. David Murdoch D.D.
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The members of the Chemung Presbytery have now a standard to test the standing of one another by, when the “free conversation on the state of religion” comes up at their meetings. Let us suppose Brother ---- on the stand.
Presbytery. Are any of your people sighing over the desolation around you?
Pastor. Not a soul is sighing with us.
Pres. Are the services of the sanctuary entirely appreciated?
Pastor. O, yes; I am very well liked by all my people.
Pres. Are you making aggressions upon the world?
Pastor. Large numbers are brought in; our reports will show scores.
Pres. Are your people liberal?
Pastor. Very. We are not of debt; my salary well paid, and all the causes of the church aided to satisfaction.
Moderator. You may remain in your place; but let the man who cannot answer those questions in the affirmative beware, for if twenty members of his congregation ask for his removal, we shall give him the best “recommend” in our possession, and tell him to go.
On the Friday succeeding the meeting of Presbytery, I was ordered to desist from administering the sacrament on the following Sunday, our usual season. Of course I submitted. When I saw this temper, my courage gave way. Men who will tamper with that ordinance, or who are not in a fit state of mind to go to the table of the Lord, will go any length for the time. I was pressed to name a time for dissolving the pastoral relation. I left it to a committee, who made for me a conditional private contract, at which eleven men were present, and, as the paper then drawn up shows, “the Pastor and congregation were to unite in asking, at a proper time, a dissolution of the relation.”
So it stood till the month of September 1860, three months from December, when Mr. Robinson, taking upon himself to judge for me, and for all the eleven, proceeded to carry out the plan, without once asking whether the conditions upon which this private contract were made, had been kept. To my mind, it had been most flagrantly, egregiously and deliberately violated; and I was waiting for that Committee to meet and report, when I would have sustained my words, by showing that Dr. Beadle and Solomon L. Gillett put upon me, their Pastor, an insult, over the cold ashes of their late companion, before the public; thus violating the terms and the spirit of one of the articles of agreement, which required “that the leaders in the opposition against me should, while I remained, do their utmost to sustain me.”
