I have chosen a subject both common and extremely difficult. Where is God leading us, in the matter of Church union? What is our next task, in the Church of Scotland? We older members remember two Church unions. I do not expect to see a third—unless it be with some of our own separated fragments in the Highlands, or with the United Free Church. May God grant these in His time. For the moment these hardly appear to be tasks. What can we do but pray for the Spirit of God to move both these Churches and ourselves, and live as ‘visible Christians’ alongside them?

There are more perplexing problems. We know that our unions of 1900 and 1929 have been part of something greater, a ‘movement’, a ‘vision’ (we say) of our era. But the next steps for ourselves, what are they to be? Our unions of 1900 and 1929 were ‘cheek by jowl’ re-unions. Those towards which we are now being drawn, are mostly strange to our people. I imagine everyone who has tried to prepare our people, in any way, for whatever ‘drawing closer’ may be God's will, has found that. The difficulty of ‘ecumenism’ is not just the name. It means other churches that are strangers to the vast majority of our folk. Societies aiming at Church union not infrequently find, that eager members of a few years back have left them, feeling that they were ‘getting nowhere’.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Scottish Episcopacy in the period 1560 to 1689 with a view to discovering how it was regarded by those chiefly concerned and how near or far apart the Churches of Scotland and England were at that time. In estimating these matters reference will have to be made to the doctrine of apostolic succession, by which we shall mean the doctrine that bishops who have received their office by succession from the Apostles are the necessary ministers of ordination and that the apostolic, succession so understood is essential for the authority of the ministry, the visible unity of the Church and the validity of the Sacraments.

When was there episcopacy in post-Reformation Scotland? The answer depends on whether the frame of reference is ecclesiastical or constitutional.

In the Bible we find Baptism suddenly appearing for the first time in that action of John the Baptist which, according to one way of reading Mark I.I, was ‘the beginning of the Gospel’. The Evangelists speak of Baptism not as a strange rite invented by John, but as something so familiar that it requires neither detailed description nor careful explanation.

To readers of the present day, however, the sudden appearance of Baptism at the beginning of the New Testament is a source of bewilderment which can easily lead to the kind of false interpretation of Scripture that underlies the Baptist movement et hoc genus omne.

It is therefore necessary to try to discover all we can as to the origin and significance of this strange rite.

The New Testament uses two cognate nouns: βάπτισμα and βαπτισμóς. βάπτισμα is found only in the New Testament and in Christian writers, and in the New Testament is used only of Baptism, whether it be John's Baptism or Christian Baptism. βαπτισμóς is used in the New Testament meaning a special form of ‘washing’. It occurs only at Mark 7.4, Heb. 6.2 and 9.10. In all these cases the reference is to ritual washings either of persons or of things. It is never used of Baptism in the New Testament, though Josephus, the only profane author to use the word, applies it to John's Baptism (Ant. xvii.v.2).

Both the construction ('And it came to pass… that Jesus came’) and the expression ‘in those days’ have a distinctly OT flavour (cf. e.g. Exod. 2.11). As neither is frequent in Mark, we might perhaps venture the suggestion that either consciously or unconsciously he is giving to his narrative a special touch of solemnity at the point at which he introduces Jesus for the first time.

That Jesus was baptised by John1 can scarcely be doubted. The fact that the submission of Jesus to a baptism of repentance caused the early Church embarrassment, as may be seen in Matt. 3.14 f and in the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Gospel according to the Hebrews (see Huck, Synopsis, 9th edit., p. 12), makes it extremely unlikely that the Church would ever have invented the incident.2

To the question why He submitted to baptism various answers have been given. Some have suggested that it was because He was conscious of sin and felt the need to repent3; but this seems to be ruled out by what Dr Taylor has called ‘the entire absence of the consciousness of sin in His personality, as it is revealed in the Gospels’.4 Others have suggested that Jesus was simply availing Himself of John's baptism ‘as a means of expressing the will to live a pure life’5 or that He submitted to it merely in order to show His personal approval of the Baptist's movement.

There are signs in nearly all the Christian communions of the Western world today of restlessness and dissatisfaction with our inherited patterns of public worship. This is indicated by the numerous experiments that are being made and by the movements for liturgical reform that are active in many denominations. A great variety of motives lies behind these movements for reform; but in general it might be said that we are conscious of living in a world that has changed more fundamentally in the last fifty years than in any remotely comparable period of the past, and feel that these changes, while not affecting the essence of Christian worship, must surely be reflected in its forms. This is felt by convinced and instructed Christians who have a vision of what worship might be as the expression of our highest and holiest activity and are disappointed at its meagre realisation in the normal practice of their church: it is felt even more by the semi-convinced who are genuinely seeking to know and experience more of what we mean by worship, and who find our services unilluminating and uninspiring. It is certainly not ill-will, and may not even be indifference, that keeps multitudes of potential worshippers from entering our churches. The blight that seems to afflict public worship in our day might be characterised in one word—irrelevance.

Now the charge of irrelevance is not to be disposed of by a series of sermons on the relevance of the Christian faith and of Christian worship.