drawing nigh, . . . she called one morning upon one of my elders, and put into his hands a crown piece (5s.), saying, There, tak' this, John; I have been makin' an eedol o't [making an idol of it]. That's hansel to your new kirk.' . . . It is almost unnecessary to say she has been contributing since with distinguished liberality in proportion to her means-giving very much in the spirit of her who gave her two mites; and she says she was never better off than since she has been doing so.'*

Mr. Murray, at Newburgh, in Fife, says: "Margaret was a saving, thrifty woman. As her former minister was a Moderate, and she rarely ever saw a newspaper, she knew nothing of the Disruption till it took place; but when it came it stirred her whole soul, and, as in many other cases, it opened her heart. Her new minister, having recently come to her neighbourhood, knew at first but little of her. One day he saw an elderly woman without her bonnet, with a white cap and a black ribbon round it, coming towards his house. She had her apron drawn together as if containing something rather heavy. He could not guess what her errand would be. On sitting down, she opened out her apron, and there were twenty pounds, seven in one-pound notes and thirteen in silver-the gatherings of many a day's, or rather of many a year's, winding of pirns-all which she now offered to the Lord, to be divided among the schemes of the Church. It was all her living." †

At Dundee, Mr. Lewis, after mentioning some of the higher contributions, states: "The largest in the eye of Christ was one offered by an aged woman, little removed from pauperism, who, at one of my ministerial visits, produced from its many wrappings a piece of gold which she had received recently from America. I thought to refuse it, but remembered that Christ would not have denied her the pleasure of contributing to His cause out of her poverty, 'more than they all.' Her name

-the only one by which she was known in the congregationwas Betty."+

* Dis. Mss. xv. p. 5.

+ Parker Mss., Mr. Murray, of Newburgh.

Ibid. Rev. G. Lewis, Dundee, p. 18.

It was thus that people of all ranks, rich and poor, showed their earnestness on behalf of the cause which they had at heart; and when this spirit was abroad there was little cause to wonder at the way in which the money was provided. Already, in February, 1843-three months before the Disruption-Dr. Chalmers speaks of it as coming in "like a set rain at the rate of a thousand pounds a-day." *

* Witness Newspaper, 18th February, 1843.

XVIII. A CONFIRMATION.

ONE of the most striking confirmations of Free Church principles was given in 1843 by the General Assembly of the Establishment itself. On the 18th May, as we saw, Dr. Welsh read from the chair a solemn Protest, formally stating the grounds on which the constitution of the Establishment was held to have been fatally vitiated. When in the act of retiring, he laid that Protest on the table, and left it lying openly there for all who remained behind to answer it if they could.

To do the Moderate party justice, the challenge was accepted bravely enough. When they found themselves masters of the situation, and had taken the Established Church into their hands, Dr. Cook, their leader, brought the subject formally before the House, "It will be proper," he said, "that an examination of the minutest kind should be made of this Protest, that a formal answer to it should be drawn up, which should be widely circulated through the country." A committee of Assembly was accordingly appointed, who, no doubt, after doing their best, reported to a subsequent diet. It appeared that three separate forms of answer had been prepared, but after due consideration, the House had no difficulty in coming to a unanimous decision: These answers would not do.

On this, Mr. Robertson, of Ellon, afterwards Professor Robertson, of Edinburgh, proposed a resolution (a most reasonable one in the circumstances), to the effect that "a paper so important as the Protest under consideration requires to be answered with greater care, and with fuller leisure for mature deliberation, than it was found possible to give it during the pressure of business, that the General Assembly recommit the whole case for the further consideration of their committee, and instruct them accordingly to report on the whole case to

the Commission in August." This proposal was supported by Dr. Cook, who suggested that "the best wisdom of the House" should be given to the matter, and in order to secure this the committee was enlarged.

The challenge, then, had been publicly accepted, and the Established Assembly had pledged themselves to answer the Protest. Nearly three months were allowed for mature deliberation, the best wisdom of the House was engaged, and what was the result? Will it be believed that the whole ended in failure? The more the committee looked at the Protest, the less they seem to have liked it. The appointed time came, the meeting of Commission in August was duly held, other business was disposed of, and a separate diet was fixed for hearing the answer to the Protest. But no House was made, and nothing more was ever heard of the subject, either in the Commission or the Assembly. After bravely pledging themselves to frame a reply which was to be "circulated widely through the country," engaging "the best wisdom of the House," and taking time "for mature deliberation," the whole thing collapsed. Not even the strongest supporters of the Establishment could feel surprised if, in these circumstances, men very generally drew the inference that THE PROTEST WAS LEFT UNANSWERED, BECAUSE IT WAS FOUND TO BE UNANSWERABLE.

The truth is, that the proceedings of that Assembly itself in 1843 had made it an exceedingly awkward thing even to attempt an answer. It would never have done to go before the public without claiming for the Established Church some kind of spiritual independence and freedom. But there lay the difficulty. The Assembly had resolved after consideration not to repeal the Veto Law, not to rescind the Act admitting quoad sacra ministers, nor to take off the sentence of deposition solemnly pronounced by the Church on the ministers of Strathbogie, but to hold that all this had been effectually done for them already by the civil judges-the Court of Session. If the Church had herself passed a rescissory Act there might have been some semblance of a claim to spiritual independence and freedom-she might have frankly avowed a change of opinion, and proceeded herself to undo what had been done.

But instead of this, she simply abdicated her own spiritual functions, and sat down at the feet of the Court of Session. There was no need to reverse her decisions-the Civil Courts had reversed them for her. Everything she had done was null, and had been null all along, because the civil judges so decreed. Without reserve, the Church seemed to have taken on herself the badge of Erastian servitude.

What made all this the more serious was the manifestly spiritual nature of the functions so surrendered. The case of the quoad sacra ministers affected the power of a pastor, in conjunction with his elders, to take the spiritual oversight of his flock. The Auchterarder and other cases affected the formation of the pastoral tie by the sacred act of ordination, while the cases of deposition came in contact with one of the most delicate and solemn acts in the whole range of the Church's sacred functions. If the Established Church gave over such matters into the hands of the Civil Courts, and allowed them THE RIGHT OF EXPUNGING her sentences, was it not plain that her whole spiritual independence was gone-she had yielded up the rule and discipline of Christ's house into the hands of secular judges.

It may well have been the consciousness of this which formed the real difficulty-found to be insuperable-in the way of answering the Protest. But it is a far more serious consideration for the members of the Establishment that the whole series of these precedents have been so homologated that they must be held to be now in full force, and to have settled the constitution of the Church on what is obviously an Erastian basis. In any case, it must be allowed that the members of the Free Church have had good reason to view such proceedings as affording a signal confirmation of the soundness of the course which they followed.