hey were poor people, they used sometimes to
say, but their souls were as precious as those of richer folk, and they
were surely as well entitled to have their just rights as the English
people--axioms which, I believe, no one in the other congregation
disputed, or even canvassed at all. We were, however, all roused one
morning to consider the case, by learning that on the previous day the
minister of the Gaelic chapel had petitioned the Presbytery of the
district, either to be assigned a parish within the bounds of the parish
of Cromarty, or to have the charge erected into a collegiate one, and
his half of it, of course, rendered coordinate with Mr. Stewart's.

The English people were at once very angry, and very much alarmed. As
the two congregations were scattered all over the same piece of
territory, it would be impossible to cut it up into two parishes,
without separating between a portion of Mr. Stewart's people and their
minister, and making them the parishioners of a man whom they had not
yet learned to like; and, on the other hand, by erecting the charge into
a collegiate one, the minister whom they had not yet learned to like
would acquire as real a jurisdiction over them as that possessed by the
minister of their choice. Or--as the case was somewhat quaintly stated
by one of themselves--by the one alternative "the Gaelic man would
become whole minister to the half of them, and by the other, half
minister to the whole of them." And so they determined on making a
vigorous resistance. Mr. Stewart himself, too, liked the move of his
neighbour the Gaelic minister exceedingly ill. He was not desirous, he
said, to have a colleague thrust upon him in his charge, to keep him
right on Moderate principles--a benefit for which he had not bargained
when he accepted the presentation; nor yet, as the other alternative,
did he wish to see his living child, the parish, divided into two, and
the half of it given to the strange claimant that was not its parent.
There was another account, too, on which he disliked the movement: the
two great parties in the Church were equally represented at this time in
the Presbytery;--they had their three members apiece; and he, of
course, saw that the introduction of the Gaelic minister into it would
have the effect of casting the balance in favour of Moderatism. And so,
as both minister and people were equally in earnest, counter petitions
were soon got up, praying the Presbytery, as a first