error, which is not even now presented by the cumbrous fabric of gold and silver, of iron and clay.

With all due respect to our northern establishment, so celebrated for poverty and good works, we must take the liberty of saying, that diversity of private belief and uniformity of public profession has been, and continues to be one of her distinguishing features. Orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and no-doxy at all, have found favour in her high and low places. The history of the proceedings which gave rise to the Secession, is rife with instances, from the contests about 'the marrow,' to the 'errors of Professors Simson and Campbell.' If such contradictory sentiments under the shield and sanction of a party banner, constitute a too common blemish of state churches, the reason is obvious, when we consider the bribe to enter them which such institutions offer to those who profess but do not in honesty hold the parliamentary creed, and the culpable carelessness they have often betrayed regarding the soundness and purity of pulpit ministrations.

In the rise and progress of the Secession, there was in effect a testimony borne in behalf of common honesty among churchmen in the subscription of articles. Had the Secession done no more it would have rendered an important service to the cause of public morality by the strenuous practical exhibition of this great principle. Recommended by the sophistry of Paley, and seconded by the dictates of self-interest, the practice of qualifying for office and emolument, by professing what men do not believe, is such a violation of the most obvious maxims of moral integrity, as nothing but a morbid condition of the national mind could save from instant reprobation and disgust. There is something rotten at the core when such things are not only tolerated but sanctioned by common practice, and patronized by distinguished names. Is it to be supposed, that men may vow falsely for a fellowship at Oxford, and subscribe with a lie for a chair or a living on the north of the Tweed, and, that as a thing of course, it may be winked at indulgently, without the practice tending to sap the very foundation of public morals? The conscience of England is debauched on the threshold of her national universities, at the time it most requires to be braced to the highest and purest tone of truth, probity, and honour. If such things are too bad and require to be amended, is it not among persons in public station, and most of all among those who are appointed to train their fellowmen to piety and virtue, that the community may reasonably expect and have a right to require an example of high-principled conduct and good faith? If the contrary appear in the lives of churchmen and of the guardians of youth. the effect will either be to blunt the moral sense of the pec

or to call forth an indignant protest against official profligacy. We verily believe that the national sin of easy swearing in certain departments of political and civil life, is in no small degree attributable to the examples of an accommodating conscience which have but too flagrantly occurred among reverend men, and in ecclesiastical places.

Burnet states as one fruitful cause of atheism in 'his own times,' the gross prevarication of numbers of the English clergy who took the oath of allegiance to William and Mary, on the worse than Jesuitical quirk, of a de jure and de facto king. And has it not also on the same ground been deplored by many of the most eminent and estimable men of modern times, that the long established test of subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, on admission to the English universities, has had no other tendency than to ensnare the consciences of inexperienced youths; and that, if a fence at all, it has been so only as fitted to exclude the intelligent and the honest, and to shield the entrance of the false and uninformed?

At a time when men were occupying the pulpits of the Scottish establishment, who subscribed her confession and contradicted her creed,-when thus within the pale of the church itself there was seen, what was worse than buying and selling, a leaven at work which tended to loosen and dissolve the ties that bind men together in honourable and in christian fellowship; it was good service done to truth and honesty that a movement arose, which in some of its aspects presented the character of a practical protest against such portentous delinquencies.

Yet it is manifest throughout the whole history of the movement, that one of the most characteristic features of the original secession, was the vindication of the principle, that the right of choosing their pastors is, by the dictates of sound reason and by the grant of God, inherent in the christian people. In the view of the seceders the rights of the people were annihilated, by the patronage-law, and the tyrannical mode of enforcing it. It indecd appears, that at no former period in the history of the church of Scotland, had the privilege of absolutely free election been conceded to the body of the people. In truth, the unfettered right of choice seems, for the most part, to have been regarded by the church courts with jealousy. Instead of the popular will being left to its own exercise, nomination by heritors and elders, or by the church courts themselves, formed the initiative; and if the presentce was not acceptable to the parish, the people were required to state and to sustain their objections. Of the validity of these, the presbytery was empowered to judge; and the consequence was, that the mind of the people might be, and was disregarded, when their ecclesiastical superiors thought fit to exercise their right of control.

The privilege possessed by the people, in the carlier times of Scottish ecclesiastical history, was in fact little more than the liberty of consenting to the nomination of a pastor-the liberty of accepting what was offered them-the liberty of taking what they could get. That church courts were required to shew respect to the feelings and wishes of the people, is at once admitted; but the necessity laid upon the people if dissatisfied, to bring forward their objections to the candidate, and the power of the presbytery to sit in judgment on the grounds of refusal, were conditions plainly at variance with the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.'

To the Sccession movement belongs the high honour, the enviable distinction, of giving to the winds the scheme of ccclesiastical checks and limited concession, founded neither in generous views of popular right, nor of the real interests of the christian people; and of substituting in room of all half-way measures, the avowal of a principle-that of the right of the members of the church, a right founded on christian law, to elect their spiritual teachers under no restriction but their duty to conscience and to God. As contrasted with the cautions, and modifications, and mincing policy of the church procedure, in former times, and still more in our own-the principle on which the seceders took their ground had something tangible in point of advantage-was clear and definite as a rule of procedurc-consistent in what it gave to the people, and in what it reserved to the courts of the church-bold in its simplicity, and scriptural in its sanction.

It is no small enhancement of the honour which the founders of the secession claim at our hands, that the principle which they espoused and pleaded for was maintained by them amidst mockery and reproach. It was run down as a novel and dangerous power to place in the hands of the people; derided as a fanatical absurdity, to suppose that the sheep could choose the shepherd; and deprecated as a fruitful source of discord and dissension. In short, the people were spoken of as a herd of irrational creatures; and their spiritual interests being unsafe in their own incapable hands, were to be cared for by graceless squires, titled swearers, or prelatical ministers of state. The same insolent ribaldry, worse indeed because scoffing in its spirit, which in these days has been poured forth so profusely against the admission of the many to the right of political citizenship, used to be the favourite cant of church conservatives in the peculiar affairs of their vocation. His Grace of Newcastle, and their worships of Old Sarum, had many a worthy prototype in the generation of railers, who vented their spleen or took their joke at the ecclesiastical whiggery of the Secession. In their privileged bigotry they were blind to the arrogance of making

the rich, however graceless-men who cared not for their own souls-scoffers, perhaps, at all care of the kind, the only qualified persons to choose the spiritual guardians of the people. Men who were themselves ignorant of the question, as one of religion and of scripture, constituted property the test of fitness to choose the pastor of the parish; not withdrawing from the sheep the choice of the shepherd, but giving that choice, it might be, to the most worthless and imbecile of his kind;-an absurdity this, surpassing that of making church membership or visible saintship the only qualification for civil rights—the right to practice physic, or to choose one's physician; the right to follow a trade, and to choose what trade to follow; the right to vote for an M.P., and to support the man of our choice.

To the political philosopher and the public journalist it ought to be no uninteresting task to trace the progress of those principles which emerged into full light during the rise and early struggles of the Secession. Sacred as in their nature they are and must ever be regarded, the influence which they exert touches other departments of the social system, and is already extensively felt. Principal Robertson, who, in the courts of the establishment, trode with ruthless foot on the expiring embers of the popular cause, has remarked, if we remember rightly, that in all probability the example of representation and of popular influence in the synods and councils of the primitive church planted the germ of political liberty in the various states of Europe. All modern experience coincides with the idea. It is in those portions of the community which are ecclesiastically free that the attachment to public liberty is strongest. Toryism and exclusiveness have little influence among presbyterian and congregational dissenters; within the Scottish church this influence used to be mitigated on one side by the comparatively liberal views entertained of the rights of the people; on the anti-popular side of the church, liberalism in politics has long been extinct; and among the clerical oligarchy of the methodist body, it is dead or dying. These things are ominous; and we find the lesson progressively illustrated and confirmed by the struggles of the Secession.

We have accomplished our object, at least for the present, in tracing the rise of the SECESSION, and the consolidation of the cause, in the formation of a denominational body contending for the purity of evangelical doctrine against Pelagian and Arminian errors; and assuming clear and decided ground in the defence of popular rights. We have purposely waived going into detail on the doctrinal merits of the Secession controversy, important as those are, and have dwelt on the principles of religious liberty which this nonconformist struggle involved

-our object being to view the progress of the Secession movement in its character of a protest against high-church domination, and in its bearing both immediate and remote on the rights of conscience and the privileges of the Christian people.

That consequences were depending on the struggle which the fathers of the Secession did not distinctly foresee; and that principles were involved, which, in their native breadth and in their various bearings, these good men did not appreciate, is no more than was to be expected in their circumstances, or than may be acknowledged without disparagement to their memory.

The sequel of the Secession history is replete with interest, and conveys lessons which, though sometimes chequered, are richly instructive. Differing in the interpretation of an oath administered in certain burgh towns on the admission of burgesses, in which were expressions which some considered incompatible with Secession principles, the contention became so sharp that the synod, in 1747, divided into two bodies, each claiming to itself the name and powers of the Associate Synod. Both sections, however, remained true to the banner of the Secession; held fast the form of sound words;' and exerted themselves, not without success, to convey the gospel, for which they suffered, beyond the borders of their native land.

At a subsequent period, a discussion arose in both synods on the subject of the magistrate's power in religious matters. This question terminated in the separation from each synod of a portion of their number, who adhered to the stringent doctrine of the Westminster Confession, on the right and duty of the civil power' to take order' in the christian church. This controversy at the time was regarded by the world of onlookers as an acrimonious, petty feud; whereas it was the agitation of great principles, the fruits of which in Scotland the Secession church is now reaping in those high and generous views of Christian liberty which the great body of seceders entertain and zealously contend for in the movements of the present day.

One of the happiest events in the modern history of the church was the reunion of the two leading bodies of seceders in 1820, under the designation of the United Secession Church, since which period the cause has advanced with accelerated speed. The congregations of the united body at the present date amount to nearly 400, comprising about 130,000 communicants, with a population computed at more than 260,000 souls. The missionary operations of the Secession extend to Canada and the West Indies; in the former field there is a missionary presbyterian synod in connection with the body; and in Jamaica and Trinidad there are nine missionaries, besides cate