were orthodox, his learning sufficient, his life moral, was nevertheless spiritually lifeless, or at all events unedifying to the congregation. The Veto Act did not lay a finger on the temporal benefits of the incumbency; and, of course, the patron, finding one presentee unacceptable, might present another until a suitable one was found.

BY

CHAPTER IX.

The Chapel Ministers.

Y the Veto Act the great body of the people were restored to their true place in the Church. This was the most conspicuous achievement hitherto realised by the party of Reform.

It was marvellously adapted

to quicken the interest of the people in the Church, and to warm the attachment with which they regarded their pastors. But another and correspondent change, by which the pastorate itself should be brought into accordance with the original model, from which it had largely fallen, was necessary to the complete restoration aimed at by the movement party.

The pastor, it need hardly be said, is an eminently important figure in the Catholic Church, reformed on the Presbyterian pattern. The real presence of Christ is His presence in the breast of every Christian, and the ideal pastor is the man in a parish who glows most visibly with the presence of Christ, and in whom his flock can see a present Christ. He has a variety of duties, and perhaps it would not be easy to convey a more lucid or more comprehensive idea of these than

Andrew Melville, New Testament in hand, furnishes us with, in a passage that has doubtless been often quoted but will bear quoting again. Melville adopts the view that the variety of names applied in Scripture to pastors is an index to their varieties of duty. "Sometimes," he says, "they are called pastors, because they feed the congregation; sometimes episcopi or bishops, because they watch over their flock; sometimes ministers, by reason of their service and office; and sometimes also presbyters or seniors, for the gravity in manners which they ought to have in taking care of the spiritual government which ought to be most dear unto them."

This was the ideal of the parish minister, which Andrew Melville believed himself able to draw from Scripture. It speaks well for the practical sense, as well as for the sound Christianity, of Melville, that so little is said in his summary about pulpit fluency and oratorical effulgence. Neither the philosopher explaining abstract truth to an illuminated coterie, nor the pulpit rhetorician moving a polite audience to delicious tears of sentiment, or playing upon them in sunny ripples of hope and joy, seems to have entered largely into Melville's conception of that representative of Christ and of the Church in a parish, who was to share in the whole life of his congregation, to execute discipline as well as preach, to be, in doing as well as in speaking, the brother-servant and leader-friend of his flock. Whatever might be the varieties of the pastoral name, it was in vehement opposition to the genius of Presbyterianism, as found by Melville in the New Testament, that the pastor of one parish should not be in a position of equal

and perfect brotherhood with the pastors of other parishes. To deny him his share in any business or concern of Church-session, Presbytery, Synod, or General Assembly, was to outrage the fundamental principles of Christian brotherhood.

During the Moderate ascendancy, however, in the century of religious indifference and spiritual somnolence, -this life-principle had been violated, and a dangerous and schismatical deviation had taken place from the parity of the pastorate. Circumstances had favoured the rise within the pale of the Establishment of what may be called an alien and accidental congregationalism, retaining the Presbyterian name though really nondescript. It was due mainly to hindrances and complications arising from the State-connection. That connection had in its incipiency been friendly and loyal on both sides. The Church had recognised the authority of the State; the State, often demurring, had on the whole respected the spiritual independence of the Church, co-operating with her in the work of benefiting the nation. A visible Church, exactly as a visible human spirit, must have food and raiment; and the regulating principle of the arrangement between Church and State in Scotland-the regulating principle, observe, which might or might not be adhered to with mathematical accuracy in detail-was that the State should supply the food and raiment, the Church the animating spirit. The alliance between Church and State was based on the mutual recognition of co-ordinate jurisdiction.

The Church was not required to sell her spiritual birthright for a mess of pottage; but it must be admitted

that, whatever they did or did not sell for it, the mess of pottage allotted to the pastors of the Reformed Church in Scotland was a pitifully small one. Very different from the butter, in a lordly dish, which the Church of England, less sensitive as to her birthright of spiritual jurisdiction, managed to carry off! The Scottish barons, turbulent and rapacious, had kept their sovereign on starvation wages; and they were the last of men to take due care, when they divided among themselves the splendid properties of the ancient Church, that, in addition to the wretched provision for the then existing clergy of the Reformed Church, there should be adequate or approximately adequate means provided to supply the spiritual wants of the population as it gradually increased.

The matter was not, however, absolutely overlooked. Not to cumber ourselves with detail, we find that, by the arrangement ultimately decided on, when the population of any parish had outgrown the supply of Church ordinances, the Church and the Court of Session, co-operating with each other, were empowered to erect and endow a new charge. But the action, both of the Presbytery and of the Court of Session, was made conditional upon the preliminary consent of landowners "possessing at least three-fourths of the valued rent of the parish." He must take a highly rose-coloured view of the spiritual qualities of landowners, who does not see that this would prove to be a retarding stipulation. Can we fail to realise that, when heritors and clerical gentlemen, lapped in the sweet somnolence of Moderatism, solaced each other