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SCOTLAND’S THREE “PROTESTANT” EPISCOPAL CHURCHES

The “Evangelical Advocate” of Edinburgh states that there are now three separate Protestant Episcopal church bodies in Scotland.

The Scotch Episcopal Church, or as it is called The Episcopal Church in Scotland, is the Sacerdotal and Ritualistic portion of the Episcopal Churches in Scotland. Within its communion the most rampant Ritualism is in full practice, and it varies little from the practices and doctrines of the Church of Rome. It stands wholly on its own account, without any connection or affiliation with the other churches.

Another portion of Episcopal Churches which may be called the Church of England in Scotland, maintaining purity of Evangelical doctrine and church administration, are in connection with the Church of England, under Bishop E. H. Beckles D.D. (the late Bishop of Sierra Leone), put into that position to keep the protestants from leaving the church’s communion.

And another portion is known as the Reformed Episcopal Protestant Church of England in Scotland.

In the year 1873, ten thousand English Protestant churchmen, with Bishop Gregg

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broke off from the church (not however in the way of schism) and formed a Reformed Church of England, and in January of 1880 the St. John’s Episcopal Church, Dundee, Scotland, decided by the unanimous wish of the incumbent church-wardens, trustees, vestry, and congregation to place the church under the jurisdiction of the bishops of the Reformed Church of England, and this has had its effects upon other similarly circumstanced churches objecting to Sacerdotalism and Ritualism, thus forming the third Protestant Episcopal Scotch Church.—The Christian Family Annual.

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— October, 1887 —