testantism for which John Huss endured martyrdom on the Continent, and George Wishart in our own country. It was identically the same Presbyterianism for which Melville died in exile, and Guthrie on the scaffold. Is there no such well-marked identity of principle between the churchmen on whom the fires of Middleton and Lauderdale fell heaviest, and the churchmen exposed in the present conflict to the still more merciless exactions of the Court of Session? and would not such of our bitter opponents as profess a high respect for the fathers of our Church, do well to remember, that what has already occurred may possibly occur again, and that there once flourished a very respectable party, who, when busied in persecuting the prophets of their own times, were engaged also in building tombs to the memory of the prophets slain by their fathers ?"

In this preface to his great work, one knows not whether more to admire the calmness of statement, or the precision of definition by which it is distinguished. To some, indeed, it may seem in certain passages breathing only the egotism of the partisan, the sectary, and fanatic, ever ready to identify his own crotchet with a national cause. But that surely must be acknowledged to have been something nobler than a crotchet, which shook Scottish society to its foundations, brought a national Church into deadly antagonism with the highest courts of the realm, and ultimately, in obedience to the behests of a great truth, led hundreds of the noblest of the Scottish clergymen pre-eminent in learning, eloquence, and piety, to abandon the church of their fathers. A great logician has, we know, described the Disruptionists as "martyrs by mistake." Posterity, we suspect, will pronounce the

mistake to have been all on the right side. No student of Scottish ecclesiastical history can for a moinent fail to perceive, that the principles the party represented by the Witness asserted, were substantially the prin ciples for which "Melville died in exile and Guthrie on the scaffold." And had the logical position of that party, then the majority in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, been equally invulnerable with its historic position, the Disruption-ministers had this day been the Scottish Church. It was the flaw in the logical position of the evangelical, as opposed to the moderate party in the Establishment, that precipitated the crisis of 1843. In ascertaining the exact nature of that flaw, we shall best comprehend the somewhat anomalous position from which the descendants of the Erskines looked down upon the Ten Years' Conflict; and also discover how far the Scotch Seceders, on whom Hugh Miller has here cast a rather suspicious glance, and to whom he has assigned a somewhat questionable position, were justified in the attitude they assumed.

The founders of the Scottish Church, in common with the men of their time, had obviously but very ill-defined ideas of the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual powers. The sanguine anticipation, that Scotland "under an opened gospel" was immediately to become as one of the kingdoms of Messiah,

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naturally enough led the framers of the "First Book of Discipline" to assign to the civil magistrate "the conservation and purgation of religion." Should any doubt be entertained whether in the opinion of Knox such was the duty of that functionary, his "Letters from Geneva" will at once dissipate that doubt. these letters the Reformer distinctly states, that "to the civil magistrate specially appertains the ordering and reformation of religion." In the enunciation of such a sentiment, Knox may seem to some little less than the patron of a full-blown Erastianism. But those ready to leap to this conclusion forget a very fundamental distinction between the sentiments of Knox at this early epoch, and the sentiments of those who, to adopt the phraseology of a later period, sought to set "the power of the sword" above "the power of the keys." That distinction lies in the oft unremembered fact, that with Knox, as with Calvin, the idea of a Christian Church and a Christian Commonwealth were identical, each being commensurate with, and involving the other. The theocratic thought of the heroes of the Reformation has, unfortunately for the world, never been realised. Not until His coming whose right it is to reign, may men behold the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. But in the year of grace 1560, the year that gave to Scotland its First Book of Discipline, such a transformation was still with

the Reformers a glorious possibility. A quarter of a century of conflict between the spiritualism of these Christian confessors and the secularism of the Scottish aristocracy, sufficed to turn this bright hope, then robed in the most celestial light and putting forth its noblest blossoming, into darkness and dust.

The results of that mournful conflict are to be found embodied in the Second Book of Discipline. In that book the distinction between the ecclesiastical and the civil government is stated at length. In that statement we find the Church-the reformed Church of Scotland -entrenching itself behind positions which had served of old to set the tiara of the Roman pontiff above the crown of the Cæsars. In vindication of the leaders of the Scottish Church, it must, however, be borne in mind, they took refuge in these principles, not as Rome had taken refuge, in the interests of priestly caste and for the advancement of priestly ambition, but solely as a means through which to conserve the spirituality of the Church of Christ, perpetually menaced by those they had fondly dreamed would have been nursingfathers and nursing-mothers to the nascent reform. The exigencies of their position had taught the framers of the Second Book of Discipline, that the civil and the sacred powers were in their natures distinct. But the legitimate corollary to that proposition, viz., that things thus radically distinct in their natures could not

safely be incorporated, had not yet dawned upon them. Not even the fierce and prolonged persecution which so soon enwrapt the Church, brought near to her sons a conviction of this salutary truth. And, when persecution no longer raged-when the Revolution of 1688 was a fact accomplished, and the tyrant who had so "persecuted the Church of God and wasted it” had become a fugitive and a vagabond on the face of the earth-when all this was done, and when under another régime those encroachments of the civil powers were renewed, which separated the fathers of the Secession from the National Church, the calamity was attributed rather to accidental circumstances, than to any flaw in fundamental principles. A century's experience taught the descendants of the Erskines, that the combination of secular prestige and spiritual power their ancestors had sought in vain to realize in the Establishment, and to which the evangelical section of the Scottish Church still clung so tenaciously, was utterly incompatible. When, therefore, almost in the very hour this light dawned upon them, they found a formula of spiritual independence-the watchword of a martyr age, once again "in bannered bloom unfurled," was it wonderful that, undazzled by the glorious souvenirs under which the non-intrusion, now the dominant party in the Establishment, combated, they estimated its battle-cry by the light of the logic of events, as