churchmen, because we do not believe any great number of them have even yet adopted those principles. But without going that length, it will be conceded pretty generally that at least a more common-sense view of matters is beginning to be entertained. The Free Church is gradually discovering that an establishment after its model is a hope not to be realized; and coincident with this conviction on the one side, voluntary churches have discovered that the principle of which they are so enamoured, is not the alpha and the omega of Christianity. In this somewhat modified attitude of both the great sections of Scottish Dissent towards each other, is folded up the germ of a future union. Should the movement for that object, already so auspiciously inaugurated, go steadily onward to its consummation, we may anticipate some very important political changes in the position of ecclesiastical parties. Ireland has permitted the church of a minority to become the Church of Ireland. But we greatly mistake the temper of our countrymen, if Scotchmen would continue any longer to tolerate an establishment so vastly outnumbered by a single dissenting communion, as in the event of such a fusion the Church of Scotland would inevitably become. The zeal with which certain eminent statesmen have flung themselves into the movement for the union of the Free and the United Presbyterian churches, foreshadows the hour when the present Erastian institution will be disesta

blished, her revenues secularized for educational purposes, religion liberated from all state-control, and Scotland enjoying an educational system surpassing the most ardent dreams of the most sanguine educational reformers.

11

CHAPTER XV.

HERO-WORSHIP.

"THE worship of great men is now the only possible religion," is the oracular utterance of one of the leading lights of our day. Multitudes not yet perhaps prepared to subscribe his formula, hold substantially his faith. There is a something about the creed that synchronizes with "the spirit of the age." It has nothing of the dogmatic narrowness that belonged to what in other times " was most surely believed among us." With the hero-worshipper, devotion to a principle as such is bigotry. Men of the most opposite convictions, and the most conflicting practices, receive from him the same meed of approbation. The mission of Mahomet and the mission of Moses are looked upon with equal favour. Moral excellence is forgotten in mere energy of character. That an ethical theory so bald and so palpably unsound should ever have gathered around it any disciples worthy of the name, is not a little surprising. With its votaries, sincerity is the primordial and crowning virtue of man.

Like most other errors, the now fashionable faith has seized a fragment of the truth, and it is that fragment which floats it. Sincerity as a basis of all true nobility of character is unquestionably indispensable. In every age of the world's history, hollow-heartedness has been held in nearly equal abhorrence. The hero-worshipper has not therefore discovered any latent excellence in this virtue not formerly perceived by man. All he has done has been simply to exaggerate it into an importance not its own, making its shadow fall upon every other grace and every other virtue of the soul. In acting thus it has forgotten, that sincerity, to be really worthy of our homage, must be guided by another power than its own, and in itself considered, is blind. Men of the most diverse sentiments and the most antagonistic practices, may be equally sincere. This creed, therefore, requires qualification, limitation. It is only the man whose earnestness is under the guidance of just principles, whom we can truly venerate. Earnestness is a noble quality when nobly directed; directed otherwise, it may be terrible, but noble it cannot be. John Graham of Claverhouse, and John Brown of Priesthill, were both earnest men, but whether do the accents of heavenly resignation which fall from the lips of the doomed Covenanter, or the fiendish execrations of the brutal cavalier, sound sweetest in the ear; or shall we admire both, simply because both were equally sincere?

The scourges of the earth, who have waded through slaughter to thrones, were no doubt earnest men, but are not their deeds the severest satire on the virtue which forms the life's essence of this pretentious moral code?

It is scarcely possible even to think of hero-worship, without the name of Thomas Carlyle spontaneously suggesting itself. Nor, while dissenting from much he may have taught on the subject, can any lover of England's great ones withhold a tribute, however feeble, to the superlative service he has rendered their memories. His biography of Cromwell solved the mystery which, from the days of the English Commonwealth to our own days, hung around the character of the Protector. And it is with something like proud satisfaction we reflect, that while British statesmen, in the genuine spirit of flunkeyism, were refusing England's greatest sovereign a niche in the new palace of Westminster, a countryman of our own should have been quietly and unostentatiously, in his modest mansion at Chelsea, laboriously building up from out "the authentic utterances of the man Oliver," a monument more enduring than ought the sculptor's utmost art could bestow. In the depth and comprehensiveness of his intellectual insight into the real essence of the Cromwellian era, Carlyle stands unequalled and unapproached.

Other writers are, indeed, quite as eulogistic, but