moralising, giving a polite go-by to all the mysteries of the inner life and the celestial outlook, gained the ascendant in the Church of Scotland, in like proportion did the people become dissatisfied with her ministrations, congregation after congregation, sometimes in single instances, sometimes in groups of two, or three, or five, receding from her communion, and coming gradually together again, not to set up a new form of creed or constitution, but to realise for themselves a Presbyterian Church more loyal, as they believed, to the original ideal, as portrayed in the New Testament and restored in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With these seceders a party in the Established Church continued to cherish the warmest sympathy; but they considered it their own duty to maintain the conflict with the Moderates within the Church, standing by the fundamental principles of her Constitution, and, like the Republican party of America in its long struggle with the slaveholders antecedent to the great Civil War, looking forward to the day when they, rising into the ascendant, might cause the face of the Church again to shine as in the glories of her dawn. This party was nicknamed by its opponents The Highflyers, and adopted as its own badge the term Evangelical. Mr. Taylor Innes, in his learned work on Creeds in Scotland, gives it the appropriate name of the High Presbyterian party.

CHAPTER IV.

The Evangelical Revival—“Tamson's Men.'

IN

N the early part of the present century, the Evangelical Revival was still among those things which had on them the dew and the promise of dawn,-the dew to symbolise the tears for the failures of the night and its distresses, the light to symbolise the hope of future achievement and of promised reward. It had begun in England, in the Established Church, in those University rooms and halls where the Wesleys and Whitfield brought with them airs from the heaven of Christian homes. But it quickly caught on among the people, and the Church of the baronial bishops soon proved too narrow to hold it, although it found response in many a simple, childlike, honest soul, many a Grimshaw, Romaine, Toplady, within the Anglican pale. Once more it turned out that the broad stratum of the English population was prone to religion; and once more, as in the days of Wycliffe, and in the days of Cranmer, and in the days of Bunyan, it held good that the religion taken to its heart by the great body of the English people was the religion, not of priests, nor of philosophers, nor of

professors, but the religion boldly inscribed, and discernible at the first honest glance, upon the Bible.

In our own day we have been impressively told by Matthew Arnold, how much nobler the simple Bible is than the Bible commented on, the Bible touched up, or watered down, by the typical German professor. In 'the Protestant faculties of theology" in Germany, “a body of specialists," says Matthew Arnold, "is at work, who take as the business of their lives a class of inquiries like the question about the Canon of the Gospels. They are eternally reading its literature, reading the theories of their colleagues about it; their personal reputation is made by emitting, on the muchcanvassed subject, a new theory of their own. The want of variety and of balance in their life and occupations, impairs the balance of their judgment in general." "If you choose to obey your Bibles," says Mr. Ruskin with happy shrewdness, "you will never care who attacks them." Specialism has its uses. "Of Biblical learning," Arnold justly adds, we have not enough." But it is not criticism that reveals to us the glow and grandeur of the Homeric poems, or opens our ear to the glorious and wonderful hum in them of the glad fightings and busy industries of the early world. It is not criticism that lays bare to us the true mystery and magic of Hamlet. And it is, to quote again from Matthew Arnold, "a truth never to be lost sight of, that in the domain of religion, as in the domain of poetry, the whole apparatus of learning is but secondary, and that we always go wrong with our learning when we suffer ourselves to forget this."

We should convey a misleading impression if we said that Matthew Arnold entertained the same idea of the Bible as has been entertained, first and last, by the great Bible party of England and Scotland. But the Evangelicals, whatever else they held, have seen in the Bible a revelation of the God of righteousness; and Matthew Arnold gives his weighty opinion that, "reading the Bible with this idea to govern us, we have here the elements for a religion more serious, potent, awe-inspiring, and profound, than any which the world has yet seen."1 The work that has been done by the Evangelical party, both in its beautiful and melodious dawn under the Wesleys and Toplady, for in both of these, spite of their cobweb differences of dogma, there was the note of a true inspiration of sacred song,-and in its more recent manifestations, attests the truth of these words.

The Evangelical party had never died out in Scotland, and when the wave of the new gospel tide came flowing into the inlets of the Scottish coast, it met with no organised obstruction. The old mills, shall we say,venturing on an audaciously modern figure, proved to be workable by the new electricity. Wilberforce, whose slave-trade reputation was preceded by his Evangelical fame, recognised in the minority of the General Assembly his true brethren in religious sentiments, and avowed himself piously scandalised to behold Robertson, a leader in the Church, standing on terms of amicable relation with Gibbon. We shall hope that it is no treason to the later developments of Evangelicalism to 1 God and the Bible.

be less severe upon Robertson for being so audaciously tolerant.

It was, however, in the nineteenth century, in its first quarter, so full of all kinds of thrilling excitement, in war, in politics, in poetry, that the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland, now thoroughly awake, began to come decisively to the front. In the brilliant Edinburgh of those years, the Edinburgh which still attracted to its University such future statesmen as Palmerston and Lord John Russell, the Edinburgh of Scott, of Wilson, of Jeffrey, of young Carlyle, the Evangelicals of the Church of Scotland began to play a part of more importance, a part more keenly influencing and agitating the Scottish people, than they had enacted for upwards of a hundred years.

They were led by a man whose name represents more perhaps than any other, to all who are really acquainted with the history of Scotland during those years, the beginnings of Evangelical ascendancy in the Church after the long reign of Moderatism. Andrew Thomson's life has not been written, but his name and memory are indelibly inscribed on the mind of his countrymen. He was exactly the man to take away the reproach from what had been called the narrow, the pietistic, the fanatical party. As minister of St. George's, the principal charge in Edinburgh, he preached clear, well-reasoned, tersely-written discourses, strongly Evangelical, which might fail to convince every one, but could be despised by none. In society, assisted by a fine person, a voice remarkable for compass and harmony, a quick and vigorous intellect, a social talent aided by a