glish congregation, the
Gaelic people had got a minister presented to them whom they would
scarcely have chosen for themselves, but who had, notwithstanding,
popular points about him. Though not of high talent, he was frank and
genial, and visited often, and conversed much; and at length the
Highlanders came to regard him as the very _beau-ideal_ of a minister.
He and Mr. Stewart belonged to the antagonist parties in the Church. Mr.
Stewart took his place in the old Presbyterian section, under Chalmers
and Thomson; while the Gaelic minister held by Drs. Inglis and Cook: and
so thoroughly were their respective congregations influenced by their
views, that at the Disruption in 1843, while considerably more than
nine-tenths of the English-speaking parishioners closed their connexion
with the State, and became Free Churchmen, at least an equal proportion
of the chapel Highlanders clung to the Establishment. Curiously enough,
however, there arose a controversy between the congregations at this
time, in which each seemed, in relation to the general question at
issue, to take the part proper to the other.

I do not think the English congregation were in any degree jealous of
the Gaelic one. The English contained the _elite_ of the place--all its
men of property and influence, from its merchants and heritors, down to
the humblest of the class that afterwards became its ten-pound
franchise-holders; whereas the Gaelic people were, as I have said,
simply poor labourers and weavers: and if the sense of superiority did
at times show itself on the more potent side, it was only among the
lowlier people of the English congregation. When, on a certain occasion,
a stranger fell asleep in the middle of one of Mr. Stewart's best
sermons, and snored louder than was seemly, an individual beside him was
heard muttering, in a low whisper, that the man ought to be sent up to
"_the Gaelic_," for he was not fit to be among them; and there might be
a few other similar manifestations; but the parties were not on a
sufficiently equal level to enact the part of those rival congregations
that are for ever bemoaning the shortcomings each of the other, and that
in their days of fasting and humiliation have the sins of their
neighbours at least as strongly before them as their own. But if the
English congregation were not jealous of the Gaelic one, the Gaelic one,
as was perhaps natural in their circumstances, were, I am afraid,
jealous of the English: t