The Church of Scotland's Parochial Extension Scheme and the Scottish Disruption

Abstract

British governments in the years after the first reform bill came under increasing pressure from defenders of the United Kingdom's ancient state church establishments to extend national religious facilities to meet expanding urban numbers. In England Sir Robert Peel's government initiated the series of acts which would very gradually transform the Church of England, and Lord John Russell's Whig government undertook that first national religious census which so deeply shocked staunch sup porters of Church and queen by its revelations of nonattendance upon the services of the Church of England. Growing pressure from vocal bodies of Catholic dissent in Ireland and Protestant dissent in England, Scotland, and Wales meant that the national religious establishments could no longer rely on state financial assistance in their struggle to maintain their traditional prestige positions. The Church of Scotland obtained some assistance in endowing new parliamentary parishes in needy and remote Highland districts during the 1820s, but by the 1830s even strongly sympathetic Conservative friends of the establishments like Sir James Graham admitted that the reform bill had made systematic state financial assistance toward the extension of the national churches no longer possible.