England to enter sympathetically into the feelings of the Scottish people in contemplating this exhibition. If it requires a surgical operation to get a joke into the heads of the countrymen of Scott, Burns, Professor Wilson, and Carlyle, it requires an operation of tenfold difficulty to cut a way into the skull of an ordinary Englishman for the conception of a clergyman of an Established Church who is not a priest, and who is a cordial friend of the people. But every intelligent man and woman in Scotland was capable of seeing in those clergymen, who were called from their parishes and reprimanded by the Court of Session, sufferers in the cause of the people, representatives of that ancient league in which the Church and people of Scotland had stood side by side in defence of religion and of liberty. That those clergymen, in obeying conscience and Christ, had disobeyed the law as interpreted by the Court of Session, admits of no dispute. But if modern Englishmen could find leisure to cast back a glance upon their own history three hundred years ago, they would see that law has been gloriously defied in England in the name of justice, freedom, and God.

It is, as we remarked before, only by having recourse to analogy that one has a chance of getting an honest, average John Bull, who, idolising law, hates injustice, to see how, by the action of the Court of Session, wrong was done in the Lethendy case. Suppose the Court of Queen's Bench were to forbid the College of Physicians to appoint to a district a medical practitioner whom they believed to be capable, from his being acceptable to the inhabitants, of doing them a maximum of

good, and to command them to appoint instead a practitioner who, from the aversion to him of the inhabitants, could do them only a minimum of good, and might do them positive harm; and suppose the College of Physicians, proving refractory, were fined, reprimanded, and threatened with imprisonment for their conduct, then the situation would closely correspond to that presented in Scotland by the Lethendy case. In England, under these circumstances, there would be an outburst of public surprise, a storm in the newspapers; a conspicuous disregard, it might be, of theories upon the subject, but a unanimous cry of amazement and protest at the pedantic spectacle of lawyers ordering and instructing physicians to do their professional duty. The peculiar element that intensified to painfulness the interest with which onlookers in Scotland contemplated the treatment of Mr. Stirling and his brethren, lay in the fact that they were wounded, not merely in their professional point of honour, but in conscience, for they had vowed to obey, in all spiritual concerns, not the Court of Session, but the Church.

It was one of the minor complications of this Lethendy case, that the Crown, as represented by the Government of the day, actually stood on the same side with the Church and the people against the Court of Session armed with the omnipotent letter of a statute. Mr. Clark, the presentee whom the people had rejected, and whom therefore the Church put aside, owed his presentation to the Crown. But the Government had made it a point, in the exercise of the Crown patronage, to defer to the Church, and to proceed upon the assumption

that the Veto Act was legal. Accordingly, Mr. Clark, the presentee in question, found himself dropped by the Government. Crown, Church, and people united in support of Mr. Kessen. This was the position of affairs, until the Dean of Faculty may be presumed to have favoured Mr. Clark with a hint that the legality of the Veto Act had been denied, and that therefore all the proceedings by which his presentation had been cancelled were null and void. At all events, it was under the auspices of the Dean that Mr. Clark brought his action, and to the Dean that he owed his victory. By the incantations of this wizard such curious confusion was wrought, that the Crown appeared in the case on both sides, as patron of Mr. Clark by grace of the Dean, as patron of Mr. Kessen by grace of the Church and the people. Unquestionably supreme in the civil province, the Crown was in effect reprimanded by its own Court of Session for being an accomplice with the Established Church in the ordination of a pastor in the parish of Lethendy.

One word more, and we need linger no longer on the illustrative aspects of the Lethendy case. Mr. Stirling and his brethren were cast in expenses to the amount of £346,-a virtual fine. But this was not enough for

The former brought a new

Mr. Clark and his counsel. action, on the ground of the pecuniary loss occasioned to him by the obstruction placed in the way to his entering upon the living, and "obtained a decree for damages to the extent of several thousand pounds." And when at last obstruction vanished from the path of the man whom the people had rejected and the Dean had

backed up, when the obsequious Establishment had hurried the Veto Act into oblivion-when the triumphant Dean had thrust Chalmers, Cunningham, and Candlish into the wilderness, and he and Mr. Clark could congratulate each other on the Disruption,-what then was the result as affecting the personal merits and character of the Court of Session's minister ? Alas! that his Presbytery were compelled to libel him for drunkenness, and, in legal phrase, strike his name from the roll! The instinct of the people had been right. He was not the man to be the shepherd and bishop of their souls. And it was for barring his intrusion upon them that a company of quiet country pastors, not rich in worldly goods, but exemplary in simple graces and virtues, and having it as their life-work to make the light of Christ shine in their parishes, "were threatened with the terrors of imprisonment, and harassed with fines heavy enough, had not the burden been borne by the Church at large, to have consigned some at least of its members, and their families along with them, to beggary and ruin.”

Such were the results of the attempt of the Dean to absorb the jurisdiction of the Church into that of the Court of Session, in an instance in which the clergy elected to obey the Church rather than the Court. But, as we have seen, it was a possible, nay a probable event that some of the clergy, having been taught to plume themselves on their State connection, having thought it a kind of duty to fling scorn into the eyes of unattached Presbyterians, and being possessed with a vague sense of the awfulness of resisting the law of the land, should prefer to obey the Court of Session rather than the Church.

CHAPTER XXI.

Lam and Gospel-The Reef of Bogie.

THE probability became a fact when Mr. Edwards, pre

sented in 1837 by the patron to the pastoral charge of Marnoch, was vetoed by an overwhelming majority of the congregation. The Church ordered the local Presbytery, to wit, Strathbogie, to reject him. The majority of the Presbyters are understood to have done so with the utmost reluctance, but they obeyed. Things then took their usual course. Mr. Edwards applied to the Court of Session, and the Court of Session granted him a virtual command to the Presbytery of Strathbogie to ordain him pastor of Marnoch. The Court of Session said, Ordain. The Church by its Commission of Assembly said, Reject. Which was to be obeyed? The Presbytery of Strathbogie consisted of twelve ministers. Seven were Moderates, five were Evangelicals. But one of these last, an able man, zealous on the side of Church and people, happened to be Moderator of the Presbytery. The seven Moderates had hitherto obeyed the Church in so far as they could do so without offending the Civil Court, and when they found that Mr.