power of an abstract principle. But the hour struck when the abstract principle must, for the safety of the state, assume a concrete form, and be incorporated with the British constitution: no statesman was so ready to bow to the inexorable necessity. It was unfortunate for the Church of Scotland that when Sir Robert Peel was premier of England, the laird of Haddo House held a chief seat in the cabinet. Had the son of the Lancashire cotton-spinner bent his eminently practical understanding to the comprehension of the ecclesiastical polity of the evangelical party in Scotland, he might not indeed have fully mastered the principles it maintained, but he would have better appreciated the exigencies of its position than the Scottish lord. Eminent statesmen have, we know, sketched the character of Aberdeen in more flattering colours than it has been painted in the columns of the Witness. Guizot has described him as a man of "unfettered, yet judicious mind, as just as delicate, always ready to understand and admit the changes of time, the motives and merits of men." But it must be remembered as some abatement of this very favourable portrait, that in Tahiti, in Morocco, and in Spain, Lord Aberdeen had quietly acquiesced in the dominance of French over English policy. It would, therefore, have been in the last degree ungraceful had the great doctrinaire failed to pay a fitting tribute to that readiness "to understand, and admit the motives

and merits of men," which so often and so signally served his interests when first minister of the Citizen King.

In point of fact, remembering the antecedents of Byron's "travelled thane, Athenian Aberdeen," had Hugh Miller sat down to write a historical sketch rather than to pen a stinging article, he could scarcely have drawn the portrait in other colours. George Hamilton Gordon belongs to that tribe of mediocrities, who, on the death of Pitt, parted the mantle of the "heaven-born minister" amongst themselves, and down to the period of the Reform Bill misgoverned England. For the genuine power of that great, if erring, statesman, his pseudosuccessors had substituted the basest prejudices and passions of the times. Their policy was a pandering to popular ignorance; exclusion was the principle of their political constitution, and restriction the genius of their commercial system.

Reasons of state induced them to cast their blandishments upon the Scottish Church, especially upon the evangelical section of that Church; and in an evil hour did the evangelicals give to it their political allegiance, flattered by being esteemed a bulwark of British institutions. When the manly heart of Chalmers at length discovered that it was a tool, not an ally, the State sought in the Church, we can easily understand the utter revulsion of soul with which he recoiled from con

tact with so much gartered and coroneted meanness, found where he had expected to find only the soul of chivalry. The Earl of Aberdeen did, indeed, affect to have been made the victim of misrepresentation by Dr. Chalmers, and most solemnly asserted he had acted throughout in the most perfect good faith. But Chalmers and his coadjutors were in no mood to accept fair words as an atonement for foul acts. They knew what he had done; what his intentions might originally have been they could not so well compute; and to all assurances of purity of aim and rectitude of purpose, were disposed to reply much after the manner Mary Stewart once addressed a time-serving friend. Lords Ruthven and Lindsay, in conjunction with Lord Melville, had borne to the queen a somewhat unwelcome message. Melville turned, as they retired, to assure her Majesty that his loyalty and truth were still unchanged. “Tush! Melville, tush!" said Mary, "what signifies the truth that walks hand in hand with mine enemy-falsehood ?"

CHAPTER XIII.

THE DISRUPTION.

THE "Ten Years' Conflict" had now brought the leaders of the evangelical party in the Scottish Church face to face with. the Disruption. The first five years had been years of effort; the latter, years of negotiation. All had been done human ingenuity could do, short of dereliction of highest duty, to turn aside the blow about to be dealt to the religious interests of Scotland. In vain had Chalmers elaborately demonstrated to the great ones of the earth, that the principles he had given his imprimatur had really nothing in common with the vulgar radicalism of the day. With a few honourable exceptions, the aristocracy of Scotland continued impervious to every appeal on behalf of the independence of the Scottish Church, and the foe, though vanquished in the field of reason, took refuge in the strong tower of self-interest, whence he looked forth in laughter at the shaking of the spear.

"By their fruits ye shall know them," is the test the highest authority has left us for the trial of men and of

.

systems; and on the threshold of the catastrophe of the Church of Scotland we pause to ask, what had Chalmers and his coadjutors done that they were doomed to such an alternative? The Church at the period the men ultimately its evangelical leaders became connected themselves with it, was in what may be regarded as the normal condition of an establishment. The majority of its ministers were 66 at ease in Zion," loving more the comfortable independence a benefice conferred, than the work for which that independence was bestowed. As an illustration of by no means the worst class the Robertsonian policy had given the Church, a Buteshire clergyman, whose acquaintance the late Dr. Jamieson, author of the Scottish Dictionary, made when a probationer, may be given. The young dissenting licentiate had received appointments as a preacher in the parish of this clergyman. Fortunately for Mr. Jamieson, the man, though fully sharing the irreligion, was free from the intolerance of his class. The young preacher had not been many days in the locality, when the parish minister called and intimated, that as there was plenty of room in the manse, it was useless being at the expense of separate apartments; he might therefore just leave his lodgings and live with him. After some further conversation, the clergyman began to make inquiry about Mr. Jamieson's habits of study, and his intentions as to sermon-writing. "Do you," he said—