bound to adhere to that Constitution as explained by the Civil Courts of the country."

He tried also, with ingenious amiability, to have it taken for granted that they had really, in the silence of their consciences, appealed to the Head of the Church against the sentence of suspension before disregarding it. But the keen eye of Mr. Dunlop discovered in their own statement an awkward comment on this view of their position. "After being suspended," they had themselves avowed, "they discharged no duties till after the decision of the Civil Court" cancelling the sentence of their ecclesiastical superiors. Fear of the Civil Power, and not a conviction that the Church was breaking Christ's law, had been their motive. In short, they had obeyed the State, in direct contravention of the commands of the Church; that was a palpable fact; and if the Crown Rights of the Redeemer had any meaning in the creed of the Church of Scotland, this was to set those Crown Rights at nought. The Assembly voted with Chalmers and Cunningham, against Cook and Robertson, by 222 against 125. That same night the sentence of deposition upon the seven Strathbogie ministers was solemnly pronounced by Dr. Chalmers.

"Ratified in heaven" was most assuredly the comment upon all this, which, if not by word of lip, then by swelling of breast and tears of solemn joy, passed from group to group of patriot Presbyterians throughout Scotland. But the austerity of the Church added immensely to her difficulties. Easy-going, good-natured statesmen were offended and vaguely alarmed. Soft-hearted people wavered. There is a logic of the feelings as well as of

the intellect that influences events. The Strathbogie seven might be utterly indefensible, but they had been weak rather than wicked. They would have acted as heroes if they could, and to many it seemed hard to depose them from the ministry and put the brand of sin upon them for not deciding heroically between Church and State.

Dr. Buchanan mentions, somewhat curtly, that the Rev. Mr. Clark, of Inverness, supported by Mr. Brodie, of Monimail, came forward at the last moment, before the motion for deposition was made by Chalmers, and urged that the sentence should be suspension for an indefinite time. Mr. Clark had been an Evangelical of unsullied record, and was distinguished in private life by sympathy, gentleness, and kindness. No one could better represent than he the logic of the heart. By adopting his suggestion, which was not listened to, a golden bridge might have been left for the return of the banished, and the Moderates and their allies in Parliament might have felt that the Church was in a placable mood. But who could now wish that half-measures had been adopted?

CHAPTER XXVI.

Guthrie.

AMONG the supporters of Cunningham in his direct

assault upon patronage, and in his terrible argument against the mutineers of Strathbogie, was Thomas Guthrie. A very noticeable figure, he, among the fathers and founders of the Free Church. In the bloom of early manhood, six feet three in height, eager for battle as the war-horse in Job, but inspired only by the ambitions of the army of Christ, he had lately been discovered in a country parish and almost dragged to Edinburgh and fame. Less completely cased in the panoply of theological system than Cunningham, less brilliant and dazzlingly quick in his intellectual action than Candlish, and therefore less powerful than they in dealing with cultured and critical audiences, he could sway a common crowd more absolutely than either. If theirs was more close, formal, invulnerable logic, he had more of varying colour and of fascinating pleasantness. And as we look backward across the intervening years, we perceive that neither of those two rose subsequently so conspicuously above his Disruption renown as Guthrie, or had, at the

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time of his death, so unmistakably the whole Englishspeaking race for admirers and onlookers. Even Dr. Duff lived to see that Guthrie's fame had filled the world,that no Scotchman's, and "assuredly no Free Churchman's, since the death of Dr. Chalmers, bulked so largely as his." The eloquence that had charmed the simple parishioners of Arbirlot proved potent to move great audiences in Manchester and London. Florid as a careless ordered garden," or a picturesque forest avenue, festooned with tendrils and loosely hung with draperies of eglantine and the mountain rose, exhaustless in anecdote, rich in broad innocent fun, and with pathos welling up straight from the heart,-the oratory of Guthrie was separated by a hair's-breadth from turgid and tawdry bombast, but yet was so absolutely sincere, so racy, so much in keeping with the aspect and enunciation of the man, that it was always and magnificently successful.

It would be wrong to infer that the perfect sincerity of the orator implied in every case that his anecdotes and illustrations were literal transcripts of fact. Or rather, we may say that, except in cases of arithmetical statement, his imaginative genius, perhaps without his knowing it, cast a light, a colour, an indefinable addition upon the naked fact. The eye sees what it brings with it the faculty to see, and the imaginative artist always obeys Turner's rule of painting his impressions. He gives the truth, but he has a way of putting it which is his own. The glance of Guthrie's eye made a thing more piquant than it found it. An illustration of our meaning, trivial in itself, occurs in one of his own illustrations, derived from his recollections of a stroll through London. We have all

seen those collections of naturally hostile animals, forced to live in one cage, and suspend their natural instincts, whose listless and torpid repose belies too sadly their description as a “happy family." Guthrie saw one such family, and this is his account of it: "I saw the mavis asleep under the wing of a hawk; and an old, grave, reverend owl looking down most complacently on a little mouse; and, with the restless activity of his species, I saw the monkey sitting on a perch, scratching his head for an idea, I presume, and then reach down his long arm to seize a big rat by the tail, and, lifting it to his breast, dandle it like a baby!" The hawk, the mavis, the owl, the mouse, the monkey, the rat, were doubtless all there. Guthrie stated with veracity the impression they made upon him. But it is scarcely conceivable that their attitudes and avocations should have been so hyper - idyllic as he depicts them. Thus, however, it was that the flash of his genius, so full of humour and quaint feeling, lit up with a comicality, a pathos, a graphic vividness, circumstances which, to a common observer, might have been merely commonplace.

At other times, however, we are reminded, by a selfevidencing literalness of detail, that no rule can be laid down for the operations of descriptive genius. An indubitable literalness pertains to Guthrie's description of the proceedings of his large Scotch dog, Bob, which had been sent fifteen miles away in disgrace for worrying cats, and had come back of his own accord. "On going to the manse," says Guthrie, "I found Bob outside the gate, as flat, prostrate, and motionless as if he had been stone dead. It was plain he knew as well as I did that he