Modern British Heresy

Principal John Caird It took less than a month from the first intimation that an accusation of heresy could be laid against John Caird, Principal of Glasgow University, to its evaporation. The aftermath played out for a couple of months longer.  Intimation of a charge On January 7 1874, Mr William Wallace, an elder at Kirkintilloch, told an ordinary meeting of the Glasgow Synod of the Church of Scotland that he would like to see Rev Caird, Principal of Glasgow University, summoned to the following meeting. He wished to discuss Caird's sermon on “Unbelief” which he had recently preached in Govan and, slightly modified, in Dundee. These had been reported in the Glasgow News on December 22, 1873 and January 5, 1874. Wallace  had already been in communication with Professor Caird by letter. He had suggested to Caird that the tenet that a person was not responsible for his religious belief was at the root of his teaching; Caird had denied that he held such a doctrine. Despite this denia

   This case meets my criteria for inclusion in this study in a way that is unique. My tests are (1) that there should have been an accusation of heresy followed (2) by some form of official response. In every other case I have come across the official response is addressed to the accused - in this case the person who instigated the accusation was the person prosecuted. Exonerated in his first trial, he was condemned in the second.   Part of the context, though beyond the stretch of my focus on heresy, was several court cases in the same year and earlier, on issues of worship and ritual as part of the continuing civil war in the church initially sparked by the Oxford Movement in the 1830s.      Background In the summer of 1874 Rev Flavel Cook, incumbent of Christ Church, Clifton in Bristol, gave a series of sermons on the nature of rationalism. Amongst his congregation and audience was Mr Jenkins, a barrister of independent means. The men and their families lived a few houses apart on