its new Thermopyla against the invasive Church of Scotland, there thus remains but one. To play the part of this Leonidas, we may elect Lord Mackenzie, who held that the Church in her attempts, persisted in for upwards of a century, even under Moderate domination, to maintain the call after the passing of the Queen Anne's Act, had perpetrated "a piece of resistance to the Legislature." Or we may prefer Lord Corehouse, who told the Court that Pope Gelasius, so long ago as A.D. 493, had settled the matter on the side of intrusion, though his Lordship's quotation from Gelasius seems to tell rather the other way, for it recognises the fact of opposition to the settlement of a minister being made by the people, and gives no hint of power on the part of a patron to overrule them, but only of the duty of the clergy to "compel" them "by assiduous admonitions," that is to say, by moral suasion, "to give their consent." Or we can content ourselves with Lord Cunningham, the youngest of the judges, who may be supposed to have been partly influenced by the novelty of his position in concurring with the majority. At all events, if either of these is excluded, we have reduced the majority to a numerical equality with the minority. And this we may expect all candid persons to admit,— that, if the views and sentiments of the three were fairly representative of those of the majority in general, then these judges of the Court of Session, in adjudicating on the Church of Scotland as an Establishment, evinced signal indifference to any aims, objects, ambitions she might entertain, any characteristics she might possess, or any uses she might subserve, as a Christian Church.

The five Lords of Session who repudiated the judgment of the majority were men who knew the history of Scotland, and the part which the Church had played in that history. If the State had created the Church, or even the Establishment, they did not forget that there had been a purpose in the creation, and that this purpose had not been to promote the dignity or influence of patrons, but to bring home the gospel of Christ to parishioners. Had they been deciding a case in connection with the medical profession, they would have considered it germane to the business to keep in view the healing of bodies; and in deciding on a case connected with a Church, they held it right to recollect that a Church is an institute for the healing of souls. Some of these judges of the minority have shed unfading lustre on their country, and are honourably known wherever Scotch common sense and clear-headedness have made themselves a name.

Such were Jeffrey and Cockburn. Until the Biography of Macaulay and the Reminiscences of Carlyle appeared, the world did not know what cordial humour, dramatic versatility, and treasures of true-hearted friendship dwelt in Jeffrey. In his passionate hatred of mawkishness and tea-drinking goody-goody-ism, and of every form of affectation, he was too arid to Wordsworth; but all the world now agrees with him that there is in Wordsworth, with all his merit, a tea-drinking didacticism that "will never do." It was not of the Prelude, be it remembered, which has in it the crimsons of Wordsworth's beaming sunrise, but of the Excursion, which has in it the pearl-blue and somewhat slumbrous

azure of his afternoon, that Jeffrey uttered those famous words. If, however, Jeffrey lacked the melodiousness that goes to the making of a supreme critic, he was pre-eminently fitted by his combination of practical sense with intellectual clearness to be a good lawyer and a sagacious judge. He put aside by a few precise words, carrying with them their own evidence, the vague and grandiose pretensions put forward as to the allcomprehending jurisdiction of the Court of Session. "It has no proper jurisdiction," he said, "except in civilibus. With a few exceptions, not affecting the principle, it has no jurisdiction in crimes, and with no exceptions at all, it has no jurisdiction whatever in matters properly ecclesiastical; and especially none as to the examination, ordination, or admission of ministers, which are not only in their own proper nature ecclesiastical proceedings, but are expressly declared by the Acts of 1567 and 1592 to be exclusively for the Church judicatures." Too well acquainted with the history of his Church to be liable to any mystification as to her having been from the beginning a Church of the people, he treated the view, that the call had been paralysed by the touch of law into a hollow form, as absolutely untenable. Along with Lord Moncreiff and Lord Fullerton, he maintained that even Queen Anne's Act, though it transferred the presentation from the elders and heritors to the patron, did not destroy the ancient right of the people to have no minister settled against their consent.

Lord Cockburn, another man who thoroughly understood the character both of the Church and the people of Scotland, also exclaimed against the idea that the call had

been legally turned into a mockery. "I could not have been more surprised," he said, " on being told that Presbytery was not the Church of this country, than I have been by learning that calls, except as forms, are no part of our Presbytery; they seem to me to be absolutely imbedded in the constitution and in the practice of the Church."

The Court decided that the Presbytery of Auchterarder, in rejecting Mr. Young because "a majority of the male heads of families, communicants in the said parish, have dissented, without any reason assigned, from his admission as minister," had acted "illegally and in violation of their duty." This judgment was signed on the 10th of March 1838, and the least imaginative reader will feel that this lent a greatly enhanced interest to the proceedings of the General Assembly which met in Edinburgh in the following May. In the bare words of the Court of Session's judgment, viewed negatively, it was possible enough that no fateful import should lie. But if it were taken to imply that the Court required and commanded the Presbytery to ordain a man whom the Church, by her law, pronounced it sinful to ordain, then the inference became irresistible that the spiritual freedom of the Church was called in question. Ordination is a spiritual act, if there is such an act in existence.

THE

CHAPTER XIII.

Preparing for the Fray.

HE General Assembly of May 1838 followed quick upon the signing of the judgment in the Auchterarder case in March. The interest of the occasion, for thinking persons and students of history, is great, for it places before us the two traditional parties taking up their respective positions, in view of the sombre and perilous future. The subject-matter requires nice attention and careful discrimination, but does not lend itself to dramatic effects or yield harvest of sensational incidents.

Chalmers was not a member of this Assembly, although, as it is hardly necessary to say, the action of the Reforming party was exactly conformed to his sentiments. The position taken up by the Evangelicals was defined by Mr. Robert Buchanan in that lucid, expressive, and dignified language which befits so well his own authoritative and noble work on the Conflict. The case tried by the Court of Session had, he explained, risen out of the Veto Act. "The object of that Act was to give full force and effect to the fundamental law of the Church, that no pastor be intruded