developed in some three centuries of the history of the Scottish Church, rather than in the lustre with which, in the enthusiasm of the hour, the conflict stood invested? Long, very long, had they themselves clung to the daydream that now fascinated their evangelical friends; and with the blinding mirage, which throughout a hundred years had veiled the stern facts of the case, just fallen from their eyes, it would have been too much to have expected they would do more than just endeavour to laugh those friends out of their delusion. Such a temper, it may be granted, was not the most Christian that might have been manifested in the cir cumstances. But while making this acknowledgment, a sense of justice compels us to add, that neither was the attitude of the leading advocates of the spiritual independence of the Church of Scotland towards Scottish Dissent, the attitude best fitted to evoke its brotherly kindness and charity. But, as it is altogether foreign to our purpose to revive the memory of mutual wrongs, perpetrated in the excitement of controversy, we refrain from any more specific allusion to the unseemly antagonism between evangelical churchism and evangelical dissent, too often manifested throughout the non-intrusion and voluntary controversies. Before, however, passing from this topic, a word, partly in vindication, and partly in reprehension of the Scotch Seceders, is necessary. There is no denying, it was one

of the delusions with which a newly-discovered principle is so often found to intoxicate its votaries, inat induced the Seceders to assert, "Popery is no longer Popery when it declares on the side of voluntaryism." There was just that infinitesimal amount of truth about the proposition which served to veil its hollowness and utter falsity from men panting to right all that was wrong whether in Church or State, and inspired with the conviction that society had only to be conditioned by their own narrow formula, and the mighty transformation was accomplished. Alas! the "mystery of iniquity" was too profound to be fully fathomed by unsophisticated Scottish voluntaries. The phase through which Roman Catholicism was then passing, rendered it politic for it to assume the garb, and echo the accents of an extreme liberalism. We need not say how very completely subsequent events have shown how miserable a phosphorescent meteoric light, gleaming its brief hour above the Pontine marshes, that was, the Dissenters of Scotland mistook for the godlike radiance of a star of heaven. The shallowness of the logic is now transparent, which induced Scotch Seceders to listen even for a mo ment to the syren song of liberty on the lips of representatives of a church, whose policy and whose ritual are a device against the civil and religious freedom of man. On this point, then, we freely concede, that the representatives of the Fishers and the Erskines amply merited

the censure Hugh Miller has meted out to them, in what may be regarded as the prolegomena of the Witness.

On the second count of their indictment, however, we cannot say Guilty. The light in which they looked upon the moderate party in the Establishment, does not seem to us open to rebuke. Making legitimate deduction for the asperities of controversy, the dispassionate reviewer of their position must pronounce them to have been here from the first, as they were proved at the last, right. It was made matter of bitter reproach, that they were honest enough to assert the moderates held the only position compatible with remaining an established church. Non-intrusionists indignantly resented the idea, that because connected with the state, they were thereby fettered. But did not the Disruption demonstrate the stern verity of that proposition, with a power transcending even mathematical certitude? The great truth with which that exodus of the élite of the clergy of the Church of Scotland is at this hour silently leavening their flocks, is precisely the truth for maintaining which Scotch Se'ceders were not unfrequently stigmatized as atheistical voluntaries.

But while asserting that the moderate party in the Scottish Church occupied the more logical position, the Seceders were under no delusion about which of the great sections of the Church of Scotland was inspired

with the nobler instincts; none knew better to whom they were indebted, within the pale of the Establishment, for that revival of evangelical religion by which a large portion of its ministry had latterly been distinguished. It was indeed felt to be a little irritating, and somewhat unfortunate, that the vision of these good men in the Scottish Church was generally so circumscribed, that they saw only the good themselves had done, and seldom remembered, in estimating the religious agency and religious influence at work upon the nation, to estimate aught else than the agency they employed and the influence they exerted. While ignoring a century of effort on the part of others, is it marvellous that those whose efforts were thus lightly esteemed should have failed to proclaim, as if from the house-tops, this new-born zeal? Veterans who had borne the burden and heat of the day in the Master's work, might be pardoned when pausing to discover, if from being as tumultuous, the zeal of these neophytes was likely to prove as evanescent, as the mountain torrent, which, leaping from ledge to ledge of the spray-clad rock, bounding over every barrier, and bearing down all opposition, is yet, at the terminus of its headlong and agonizing descent, found altogether lost in the sands of the valley.

But those slight deductions which Scotchmen who had renounced the establishment-principle might be

disposed to make, in their general estimate of Hugh Miller's acceptability as the editor of an ecclesiastical journal, arose out of tendencies and opinions which qualified him only all the more completely for the task he had assumed. A brief glance at the nature of that task, and at the circumstances in which it was entered upon, will enable us to form something like an adequate conception at once of the very critical position Hugh Miller was called to occupy, and the very great services he rendered to a cause with which his name must henceforth for ever remain so indissolubly associated. The first difficulty the Witness had to contend with, was the fact that, originated by a clerical conclave, it might not unnaturally be assumed to be a merely clerical organ. Scotchmen have ever cherished a jealous dread of ecclesiastical influence upon journalism. Nor have those portions of the press that have fallen under its control been at all calculated to dissipate that dislike, or lay their vigilance asleep. Abhorred for its truculence and mendacity, or pitied for its inanity and senility, the religious newspaper has been by turns detested or despised; but respected-never. We believe we shall not be contradicted in asserting, that the Witness is the only journal, avowedly originated to represent an ecclesiastical party, that has courageously kept itself aloof from the sin that so easily besets all ecclesiastical organs. It is no secret, that the main