and three Synods. These prayed the Assembly to take steps to secure to the call of the congregation its ancient and salutary force, and to prevent its being turned into an empty form by usurpation of all rights by patrons.

Dr. Robert Brown, of Aberdeen, speaking for the Evangelicals, proposed that a committee should be appointed to consider the overtures and report to the next Assembly. Principal Macfarlane, a leading Moderate, moved that the overtures should be dismissed as unnecessary and inexpedient." He was supported in an elaborate speech by the Right Hon. Justice-Clerk Boyle, the same whom we found so jauntily pooh-poohing Andrew Thomson's protest against State encroachment on the independence of the Church. He spoke with the vehemence natural to a high legal and Conservative functionary, who shuddered at that evil and perilous thing, the will of the people. The question was in his eyes of "gigantic importance." The drift of the overtures, he insisted, was to destroy the rights of patrons, and to introduce popular election with all its flood of evils. Universal confusion would cover the land, and there would be an end of the peace and harmony that had hitherto reigned. If this were indeed desired, the Assembly ought to go manfully to Parliament and ask for an alteration in the law.

To reply to this imposing display of aristocratic and forensic eloquence there arose, amid the questioning amazement of the Assembly, an exceedingly young man, with keen, bright, imperturbably self-confident face, whom the few who knew him named to their whispering neighbours as the Rev. James Begg, of Paisley. That a man of twenty-three, on his first appearance in the

Assembly, should take a prominent part in a leading debate, and should enter the lists against giants like Boyle and Macfarlane, was a thing unheard of. Experienced beholders anticipated doubtless that the bold speaker would blunder into self-effacement. But in this cause James Begg might claim to be a predestined champion. He first drew breath in the parish of New Monkland, on the banks of the Clyde, where the very breezes, as they swept over copse, and corn, and heather, might sing of Covenant wars and Presbyterian contendings. A band from the parish had marched to Bothwell Bridge, and the boy Begg had often looked with reverent admiration on the silken banner, emblazoned with Bible, crown, and thistle in gold, round which his fellowparishioners had fought and fallen. It was perhaps not so surprising, therefore, that he should have been audaciously eager for the fray when one of the essential principles of his ancestral Presbyterianism was at stake. Nor did he stammer or betray any tendency to nervous discomposure. Logic and lucidity, precision and a trace of sarcastic pungency, characterised his remarks, rather than festoons of flowery eloquence or exuberance of youthful sentiment. The prickly sharpness of some of his observations on the Moderate big - wigs won him the hearts of the students in the gallery, and Moderator Chalmers, who dearly loved a joke, forgot the awful solemnity of his seat, and actually clapped his hands and laughed.

But the most notable thing in James Begg's speech was the nice exactness with which he signalised the object to be aimed at by the Church as essential in

the matter of patronage. Total abolition, he admitted, could not be effected by the Church without intervention of Parliament. The indispensable point was that no pastor should be forced into a church against the will of the people. This, he maintained, had, since the Reformation, been a principle of the Church of Scotland, and she possessed power, dormant but sufficient, to give effect to it. What they wanted was Non-intrusion. "I have no fear," he said, "of civil interference. Indeed, if such interference were attempted, it would then become a question for every honest man to determine how long he could consistently remain a member of a Church thus rendered unable to enforce her most salutary laws."

The

Begg rose unknown, and sat down famous. fledgling orator who had put the Lord Justice-Clerk Boyle and Dr. Macfarlane to their mettle, whose fine hitting and cheery bumptiousness, and born Scottish sagacity, had made Chalmers forget his dignity in a boyish burst of sympathetic laughter, was henceforward a public man and leader of the people in Scotland. Moderates carried their point by a majority of forty-two. But from Begg's lip had fallen the word that became a watchword in the ranks of the party, and a chief popular blazon on its banner-NON-INTRUSION!

The

IN

CHAPTER VIII.

The Veto act.

the Assembly of 1833, Dr. Chalmers was not in the chair, but was all the more able, on that account, to influence the deliberations of the Court. The eleven inferior courts that had overtured the Assembly of 1832 on patronage were now in number forty-two. In the interval he had fully considered the question, and his views on the whole subject were provisionally made up. His preference was decisive for the plan of concurrent legislation on the part of the Church and the State, as compared with that of disposing of the difficulty by legislation on the part of the Church alone. On this point, however, he allowed himself to be overruled by Lord Moncreiff of the Court of Session, whose eminence as a lawyer and devoted loyalty to the Church of Scotland seemed to accredit him as practically infallible in pointing out a way by which the possibility of collision might be avoided. Lord Moncreiff was firmly convinced that the Church was constitutionally possessed of the power to deal conclusively with patronage, and thought she ought to do so at once. He, as well as Dr. Chalmers, was strenuously opposed to

the total abolition of patronage, but he had no doubt that the Church possessed jurisdiction sufficient to enable her to frame such a measure as should shred away the evils with which it had become associated.

Chalmers was not, in politics, ardently democratic. The ordinary man, the arithmetical unit of the population, did not impress him as particularly sublime. He had an unaffected horror of the electioneering charlatan, the patriotism made to sell, the village demagogy, the pothouse palaver, the sordid inspirations that with fatal facility transmute the masses into the worst, the most ravenous, the most bloodthirsty of classes. He had been, therefore, upon what good judges now generally esteem the wrong as well as the beaten side in the struggle for parliamentary reform.

But no one had a higher appreciation of man idealised on the model of Christ than he. No one cherished a firmer faith in the power of the most unlettered member of the Christian brotherhood to discern in another the lineaments of the King. He had a tragic feeling of the cruelty of inflicting a godless or uncongenial minister on godly parishioners. He thought with reverent admiration of the zeal of the old Church of Scotland in guarding the Christian people from having such forced upon them. "The great complaint of our more ancient Assemblies," he told the Assembly of 1833, "the great burden of Scottish indignation, the practical grievance which, of all others, has been hitherto felt the most intolerable and galling to the hearts of a free and religious people, is the violent intrusion of ministers upon parishes."