class="i6">'Which rang with a music so soft and intense
That it passed for an odor within the sense.'

The varying light of the fire, shining warmly upon her, touches even the folds of her black gown into a subdued repetition of the quivering glories that flicker among her hair.

Those were the disruption times, which all have heard of, and the middle-aged among us can recall more or less vividly. Times so different from the present! When we look back on them, knowing how much there was that was narrow, rugged, and unlovely, we must still feel a regretful admiration for an atmosphere of earnestness and more heroic warmth of feeling than is now attainable to the cold-blooded clear-sightedness and electric dispassionateness of the critical spirit now prevalent, which admits good and detects shortcoming in all varieties of faith and opinion alike, and so, leaves the seeker after the better to follow the worse in pure weariness, satisfied in the end to pursue material advantage, seeing that Truth and Goodness have become abstractions, too high to be attained, or else too widely diffused to be missed, in whatever direction the wayfarer may stray.

In those days the seeker after the goodly pearl of truth, felt constrained to forsake all and followed it; and doubtless the forsaking and the quest brought a moral benefit, though it by no means follows that the form in which they sought it, the Ultramontane fetish of ecclesiastical supremacy--exemption from State interference, combined with an unlimited right to meddle in the State--was in any sense a truth at all. An earnest following out of the supposed truth cannot but be wholesome to the seeker, and to fight for an idea of any kind, must be good in materialistic times.

One is led to use the word 'Ultramontane' in connection with the Free Church 'movement,' by the curious resemblance between the claims of these ardent Presbyterians, and those of the Ultramontane section of the Catholic Church, as well as by the very similar language in which both expressed and supported them. It would seem indeed as if since 1840 a wave of turbulence had passed over the minds of all Churchmen, beginning in this Northern Kingdom and rolling Southwards. England and Ireland have since then been disturbed by unruly priests, and the long pontificate of Pius IX. has witnessed in every country a continued effort of the Spiritual Estate to assert itself against secular authority.

That the struggle in Scotland was for no absolute truth, would appear from the change of front which the body that then arose now presents. It commenced by claiming to have inherited the rights of the historical church, confirmed by act of parliament, to guide the nation and the state in questions of faith and morals. Now it places itself with the voluntary religious associations, and clamours for depriving its own successors of the endowments which its members themselves resigned because of conditions which now do not exist. When Chalmers, ten years before the Disruption, fought the battle of Establishments against Voluntaryism, not only in Scotland, but in England also, he little thought that the Church he was to found, would, in a quarter of a century, become the hottest association of voluntaries in the country! New circumstances have begotten new 'principles,' let us say, for it would not be well to impute anything like trade jealousy to holy men.

Roderick Brown was pursuing his theological studies in Edinburgh, during the years of theological excitement which preceded the catastrophe. Youth is sympathetic, and the leaders of the movement had holy names and historic memories to conjure with. It is not wonderful, therefore, that he caught the enthusiasm of the men about him, and thirsted to bear his part in contending for the truth. At each succeeding vacation he returned to his father's manse with a heightened ardour for ecclesiastical combat; and many and long were their discussions on the Church question and its new lights. To the young man's surprise, he found his arguments fall rather flat and pointless in presence of his father's calm and dispassionate statements of the case; but the elder found the wisdom and understanding gathered in sixty years' intercourse with the Church and the world equally powerless to cool down the heat and ardour of the enthusiastic youth. Therefore, as must ever be the case where affection and respect are combined with common sense, they finally agreed to differ, each forbearing to insist on his own preferences, and confident that the other sought only the right according to his lights.

The disappointment to Doctor Brown was not slight. He felt himself rapidly failing, and he had hoped to find in his son an assistant and successor in whose hands he might contentedly leave the care of his beloved flock, and pass on to an uninterrupted fulfilment the many good works he had commenced in his parish. Besides his parish, the future of his daughter may also have weighed much on the old man's mind. She had been born and bred in the manse, and was as well known to every one of the parishioners, as the minister himself. To the poor she had been the recognised messenger of mercy. Ever since her mother's death (when she was thirteen), had devolved on her with the assistance of the old housekeeper, the many and onerous duties that fall to the country minister's wife; and in fulfilling these she had won the love of rich and poor alike.

Roderick too had been bred in the manse, and was known to every living soul in the parish. He had fished the burns with the sons of the farmers and crofters, when a lad, and as he grew older shot on the moors with the lairds. Gentle and simple alike had only kind words to say of the minister's son, and to these was added sincere respect when he entered on his theological studies, and afforded such assistance to his father in his sacred duties as the laws of the Church permit to the unordained. There would have been but one voice in the parish from Patron, Heritors, and People, as to who should succeed Doctor Brown in his charge, and it was very bitter to the old man to find that for an enthusiastic scruple all his hopes were to be laid low.

In the year of the Disruption, Dr. Brown died, and in the same year his son Roderick was licensed to preach by the Free Church. On many therefore fell a double bereavement; his father was taken away, and forthwith it became necessary to gather up his household gods, the relics of his past, steeped in all the memories of childhood and of those who had made it glad, and to move forth into a new and an untried life.

General Drysdale, the patron and chief heritor of the parish, a staunch Conservative in Church and State, was greatly disappointed at the step taken by the son of his old friend, in quitting the church of his father. He would gladly have presented him to the living, and felt personally aggrieved that he had deliberately incapacitated himself from accepting it. The late minister had been his frequent guest at Inchbracken, and the intercourse between the families of the great house and the manse had been constant and cordial, and had formed a most useful bond of connection between the laird and his poorer tenants; but now, owing to the wrongheadedness of an inexperienced youth, all this must cease, and who could tell how the new incumbent would answer? The breeding of himself and his family might make their presence unacceptable at the castle, and in that case intercourse would necessarily cease, and the laird and his people, in consequence, would drift apart from want of the old link; or even should the new comer answer, it would be long before a stranger could establish ties between himself and the different orders of his flock, and longer still before he could become a bond between one order and another.

But even this did not make up the whole sum of Roderick's offences. His personal