The History of a Corporation of Servants

John Witherspoon wrote this satirical treatise in 1765 as a pointed critique of the Church of Scotland's patronage system, which allowed wealthy landowners and civil authorities to appoint ministers to parishes regardless of congregational preference. Writing during the height of tensions between the Popular Party, which opposed patronage, and the Moderate Party, which accepted it, Witherspoon employed biting irony to expose what he saw as the spiritual corruption inherent in treating ministry as a commodity controlled by secular power.

Witherspoon constructs his argument through an extended allegory, presenting the Church of Scotland as a "corporation of servants" whose members have gradually abandoned their proper master—Christ—to serve new masters who offer worldly advancement and comfort. He traces this fictional corporation's descent from faithful service into a system where servants compete for the favor of wealthy patrons, compromising their integrity and abandoning their original calling. The work systematically dismantles defenses of patronage by showing how it corrupts both those who exercise it and those who submit to it, creating a church more concerned with social respectability than gospel faithfulness. Witherspoon's theological framework emphasizes the absolute sovereignty of Christ over his church and the fundamental incompatibility between spiritual authority and worldly power structures.

The treatise established Witherspoon as a leading voice in Scottish ecclesiastical politics and contributed to his later prominence in American Presbyterianism, where he would become president of Princeton and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. His sharp wit and clear theological reasoning in this work influenced subsequent debates about church independence and the proper relationship between religious institutions and civil authority. Who should read this: those interested in the development of Presbyterian polity, students of eighteenth-century religious and political thought, and anyone examining how spiritual communities maintain integrity while navigating worldly pressures.