wholly unable to launch, would change from being what it now is––a trophy of her liberality and wisdom––into a magnificent monument of her folly. In the second place, she would have to break faith with her existing professors, and to argue, mayhap, when they were becoming thin and seedy, and getting into debt, that she was not morally bound to them for their salaries. And, in the third and last place, she would infallibly secure that, some twenty years hence at furthest, every theological professor of the Free Church should be a pluralist, and able to give to his lectures merely those fag-ends of his time which he could snatch from the duties of the pulpit and the care of his flock. And such, in doubling the Cape Horn of the College question, is all that unanimity of voting could secure to the Church; unless, indeed, according to Carlyle, she voted in accordance with the ‘set of conditions already voted for and fixed by the adamantine powers.’

Nor does the question of Denominational Education, now that there is a national scheme in the field, furnish a more, but, on the contrary, a much less, hopeful subject for 4 mere voting in our church courts, than the question of College Extension. It is not to be carried by ecclesiastical majorities. Some of the most important facts in the ‘Ten Years’ Conflict’ have perhaps still to be recorded; and it is one of these, that long after the Non-Intrusion party possessed majorities in the General Assembly, the laity looked on with exceedingly little interest, much possessed by the suspicion that the clergy were battling, not on the popular behalf, but on their own. Even in 1839, after the Auchterarder case had been decided in the House of Lords, the apathy seemed little disturbed; and the writer of these chapters, when engaged in doing his little all to dissipate it, could address a friend in Edinburgh, to whom he forwarded the MS. of a pamphlet thrown into the form of a letter to Lord Brougham, in the following terms:––‘The question which at present agitates the Church is a vital one; and unless the people can be roused to take part in it (and they seem strangely uninformed and wofully indifferent as yet), the worst cause must inevitably prevail. They may perhaps listen to one of their own body, who combines the principles of the old with the opinions of the modern Whig, and who, though he feels strongly on the question, has no secular interest involved in it.’ It was about this time that Dr. George Cook said––and, we have no doubt, said truly––that he could scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach without finding respectable men inveighing against the utter folly of the Non-Intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the church courts. For the opponents of the party were all active and awake at the time, and its incipient friends still indifferent or mistrustful. The history of Church petitions in Edinburgh during the ten eventful years of the war brings out this fact very significantly in the statistical form. From 1833, the year of the Veto Act, to 1839, the year of the Auchterarder decision, petitions to Parliament from Edinburgh on behalf of the struggling Church were usually 5 signed by not more than from four to five thousand persons. In 1839 the number rose to six thousand. The people began gradually to awaken, and to trust. Speeches in church courts were found to have comparatively little influence in creating opinion, or ecclesiastical votes in securing confidence; and so there were other means of appealing to the public mind resorted to, mayhap not wholly without effect: for in 1840 the annual Church petition from Edinburgh bore attached to it thirteen thousand signatures; and to that of the following year (1841) the very extraordinary number of twenty-five thousand was appended. And, save for the result, general over Scotland, which we find thus indicated by the Church petitions of Edinburgh, the Disruption, and especially the origination of a Free Church, would have been impossible events. How, we ask, was that result produced? Not, certainly, by the votes of ecclesiastical courts,––for mere votes would never have doubled the Cape Horn of the Church question; but simply through the conviction at length effectually wrought in the public mind, that our ministers were struggling and suffering, not for clerical privileges, but for popular rights,––not for themselves, but for others. And that conviction once firmly entertained, the movement waxed formidable; for elsewhere, as in the metropolis, popular support increased at least fivefold; and the question, previously narrow of base, and very much restricted to one order of men, became broad as the Scottish nation, and deep as the feelings of the Scottish people. But as certainly as the component strands of a cable that have been twisted into strength and coherency by one series of workings, may be untwisted into loose and feeble threads by another, so certainly may the majorities of our church courts, by a reversal of the charm which won for them the element of popular strength, render themselves of small account in the nation. They became strong by advocating, in the 6 Patronage question, popular rights, in opposition to clerical interests: they may and will become weak, if in the Educational one they reverse the process, and advocate clerical interests in opposition to popular rights.

Their country is perishing for lack of a knowledge which they cannot supply. Every seven years––the brief term during which, if a generation fail to be educated, the opportunity of education for ever passes away––there are from a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand of the youth of Scotland added to the adult community in an untaught, uninformed condition. Nor need we say in how frightful a ratio their numbers must increase. The ignorant children of the present will become the improvident and careless parents of the future; and how improvident and careless the corresponding class which already exists among us always approves itself to be, let our prisons and workhouses tell. Our country, with all its churches, must inevitably founder among the nations, like a water-logged vessel in a tempest, if this state of matters be permitted to continue. And why permit it to continue? Be it remembered that it is the national schools––those schools which are the people’s own, and are yet withheld from them––and not the schools of the Free Church, which it is the object of the Educational movement to open up and extend. Nor is it proposed to open them up on a new principle. It is an unchallenged fact, that there exists no statutory provision for the teaching of religion in them. All that is really wanted is, to transfer them on their present statutory basis from the few to the many,––from Moderate ministers and Episcopalian heritors, to a people essentially sound in the faith––Presbyterian in the proportion of at least six to one, and Evangelical in the proportion of at least two to one. And at no distant day this transference must and will take place, if the ministers of the Free Church do not virtually join their forces to their brethren of the Establishment in 7 behalf of an alleged ecclesiastical privilege nowhere sanctioned in the word of God.[1]

There is another important item in this question, over which, as already determined by inevitable laws, ecclesiastical votes, however unanimous, can exert no influence or control. They cannot ordain that inadequately paid schoolmasters can be other than inferior educators. If the remuneration be low, it is impossible by any mere force of majorities to render the teaching high. There is a law already