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This chapter questions what kind of church the Free Church was, and examines how it responded to its new position as a dissenting church which, despite its claims to be the ‘true’ national Church of Scotland after 1843, had to rely on voluntary methods. The chapter is split into two main sections. The first assesses the ideological position of the Free Church after the Disruption. While most Free Churchmen were intent on defending the establishment principle, with the aim of returning to a ‘pure’ state church, that view was not representative of the entire denomination with some members openly espousing voluntary and anti-establishment views in the immediate aftermath of the Disruption. The second section assesses how the Free Church aimed to establish itself as a truly national church from scratch through voluntary means. The chapter examines the extent to which the Free Church’s experiment in ‘practical voluntaryism’, while trying to maintain the characteristics of a state church, was a success. How did the Free Church attempt to become a ‘national’ church? It also questions whether the Free Church in the years after 1843 could be regarded as a national, dissenting, or voluntary church, either in ideology or in practice.

While the Disruption marked the culmination of over a century of schism within Scottish Presbyterianism, the decade followed saw a series of reunions with Presbyterian dissent. This chapter covers three major events: the 1847 ‘voluntary’ union between the United Secession and Relief churches; the 1852 merger of the establishmentarian Original Secession Church into the Free Church; and the 1857 resolutions to unite the Free and United Presbyterian churches. Though the unions of 1847 and 1852 were on the surface based on competing voluntary and establishment principles respectively, this chapter argues that a dissenting (but not voluntary) and a national (but not strictly establishmentarian) viewpoint emerged from these unions that paved the way for the albeit failed attempt to secure broader dissenting union in 1857, which would in essence create a national dissenting church to truly rival and possibly overtake the Established Church. While historians have generally tended to overlook these church unions, they offer valuable insight into the development of Presbyterian dissent after 1843. This chapter, and the section in general, places greater emphasis on inter-church co-operation within Scottish dissent between 1843 and 1863, and attempts to explain the background to the 1863 negotiations.

The conclusion discusses the union negotiations between the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church between 1863 and 1873. While these talks ultimately failed due to establishmentarian resistance within a section of the Free Church, the increased co-operation between the two churches in the areas discussed in this book proved that in the twenty years after the Disruption the two major non-established Presbyterian churches, while by no means in total ideological agreement, were able to stand side by side on the common platform of dissent. The ‘national’ and ‘dissenting’ characteristics fostered by the Free and United Presbyterian churches after 1843 paved the way not only for the disestablishment campaign of the 1870s but also for the eventual reunion of the vast majority of Scottish Presbyterians within a reformulated Church of Scotland in 1929.