William Mc Intyre (minister) - Attitude To Church Union

Attitude To Church Union

Scottish attitudes to colonial church union changed in 1857 and those of Free Church sympathy who stood apart from the union in Victoria in 1859 were refused recognition by the Free Church of Scotland in 1860 and 1861. McIntyre therefore contemplated union of New South Wales Presbyterians and thought he had secured a satisfactory basis in November 1863; it was certainly a better crafted basis than in Victoria. However, some of his natural Gaelic constituency would not contemplate union with those allied to the Established Church of Scotland. Those in Maclean seceded in December 1863. McIntyre ultimately became convinced that while in theory the basis was satisfactory the use which the unionists planned to make of it was not. By receiving ministers from the various Scottish churches on an equal footing, the church became complicit in practical involvement in the errors of the Established Church, he held, and therefore compromised the PCEA testimony against Erastianism. He considered that this signalled an approach to truth that seemed capable of extension to other doctrines of the Westminster Confession of Faith. Ultimately 5 of the 22 PCEA ministers continued outside the union accomplished 1864/65, and several united who were not really in favour. The still-maintained practice of a capella psalmody in the PCEA was not regarded as an issue of principle on the level of the Erastian issue by McIntyre and his colleagues.

He was an able man, a solid if not winsome preacher. He was a man of firm principles of whom Sir Samuel Griffith, one time Premier of Queensland and the first Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, wrote: 'On the whole he was a remarkable man, and his name deserves to be remembered as one of the foremost worthies of New South Wales.'