resence
Kindles the crown upon thy brow?

O no! to me earth must be lonelier,
Wanting thy voice, thy hand, thy love;
Yet dost thou dawn a star of promise,
Mild beacon to the world above.

CHAPTER XXV.

"All for the church, and a little less for the State."--BELHAVEN.

I had taken no very deep interest in the Voluntary controversy. There
was, I thought, a good deal of over-statement and exaggeration on both
sides. On the one hand, the Voluntaries failed to convince me that a
State endowment for ecclesiastical purposes is in itself in any degree a
bad thing. I had direct experience to the contrary. I had evidence the
most unequivocal that in various parts of the country it was a very
excellent thing indeed. It had been a very excellent thing, for
instance, in the parish of Cromarty, ever since the Revolution, down to
the death of Mr. Smith--in reality a valuable patrimony of the people
there; for it had supplied the parish, free of cost, with a series of
popular and excellent ministers, whom otherwise the parishioners would
have had to pay for themselves. And it had now given us my friend Mr.
Stewart, one of the ablest and honestest ministers in Scotland, or
elsewhere, whether Established or Dissenting. And these facts, which
were but specimens of a numerous class, had a tangibility and solidity
about them which influenced me more than all the theoretic reasonings
pressed on my attention about the mischief done to the Church by the
over-kindness of Constantine, or the corrupting effects of State favour.
But then I could as little agree with some of my friends on the
endowment side, that the Establishment, even in Scotland, was everywhere
of value, as with some of the Voluntaries that it was nowhere of any. I
had resided for months together in various parts of the country, where
it would have mattered not a farthing to any one save the minister and
his family, though the Establishment had been struck down at a blow.
Religion and morals would have no more suffered by the annihilation of
the minister's stipend, than by the suppression of the pension of some
retired supervisor or superannuated officer of customs. Nor could I
forget, that the only religion, or appearance of religion, that existed
in parties of workmen among which I had been employed (as in the south
of Scotland, for instance), was to be found among their Dissenters--most
of them, at the time, asserters of the Voluntar