later date proved more successful; and a majority of the ministers of that church with their congregations were united with the Free Church in 1876. (J. S. Bl.) In the last quarter of the 19th century the Free Church continued to be the most active, theologically, of the Scottish Churches. The College chairs were almost uniformly filled by advanced critics or theologians, inspired more or less by Professor A. B. Davidson. Dr A. B. Bruce, author of _The Training of the Twelve_, &c., was appointed to the chair of apologetics and New Testament exegesis in the Glasgow College in 1875; Henry Drummond (author of _Natural Law in the Spiritual World_, &c.) was made lecturer in natural science in the same college in 1877 and became professor in 1884; and Dr George Adam Smith (author of _The Twelve Prophets_, &c.) was called to the Hebrew chair in 1892. Attempts were made between 1890 and 1895 to bring all these professors except Davidson (similar attacks were also made on Dr Marcus Dods, afterwards principal of the New College, Edinburgh) to the bar of the Assembly for unsound teaching or writing; but in every case these were abortive, the Assembly never taking any step beyond warning the accused that their primary duty was to teach and defend the church's faith as embodied in the confession. In 1892 the Free Church, following the example of the United Presbyterian Church and the Church of Scotland (1889), passed a Declaratory Act relaxing the stringency of subscription to the confession, with the result that a small number of ministers and congregations, mostly in the Highlands, severed their connexion with the church and formed the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, on strictly and straitly orthodox lines. In 1907 this body had twenty congregations and twelve ministers.