Here most distorted views were held of the Voluntaryism which most of its ministers and members professed.  It was represented as equivalent to National Atheism, and from this the transition was an easy one, especially in districts where few of the people had even seen a United Presbyterian, to the position that an upholder of National Atheism must himself be an Atheist.  It became increasingly clear, as the years passed, that if the Union were to be forced through, there must be a new Disruption, and a Disruption which would cost the Free Church those Highland congregations which for thirty years it had been its glory to maintain.  Moreover, it was currently reported that the Anti-Union party had taken the opinion of eminent counsel, and that these had declared that, in the event of a Disruption taking place on this question of Union, the protesting minority would be legally entitled to take with them the entire property of the Church.  The conviction was forced on the Free Church leaders (and in this they were supported by their United Presbyterian brethren) that the time was not yet ripe for that which they so greatly desired to see, and that even for Union the price they would have to pay was too great.  And so with heavy hearts they decided in 1873 to abandon the negotiations which had been proceeding for ten years.  All that they felt themselves prepared to carry was a proposal that Free Church or United Presbyterian ministers should be “mutually eligible” for calls in the two Churches—­a proposal that did not come to much.

Three years later, the Reformed Presbyterian Church united with the Free Church, and in the same year (1876) the United Presbyterian Church gave up one hundred and ten of its congregations, which united with the English Presbyterian Church and thus formed the present Presbyterian Church of England.  The original idea, at least on the United Presbyterian side, had been that all the negotiating bodies should be welded into one comprehensive British Church; but this, especially in view of the breakdown of the larger Union, proved to be unworkable, and the final result for the United Presbyterians was that they came out of the negotiations a considerably smaller and weaker Church than they had been when they went into them.

In all the labours and anxieties of these ten years Dr. Cairns had borne a foremost part.  At the meetings of the Union Committee he took an eager interest and a leading share in the discussions; and, while never compromising the position of his Church, he did much to set it in a clear and attractive light.  In the United Presbyterian Synod, where it fell to his lot year by year to deliver the leading speech in support of the Committee’s report, his eloquence, his sincerity, and his enthusiasm did not a little to reassure those who feared that there was a tendency on the part of their representatives to concede too much, and did a very great deal to keep his Church as a whole steadily in favour of Union in spite of many temptations to have done with it.  Dr. Hutton, one of those advanced Voluntaries who had never been enthusiastic about the Union proposals, wrote to him at the close of the negotiations:  “We have reached this stage through your vast personal influence more than through any other cause.”