f peculiar excellence, and not unfrequently read a second time. They
bore the somewhat Greek-looking signature of _Leumas_, as if the writer
had been a brother or cousin-german of some of the old Christians to
whom Paul used to notify kind regards and good wishes at the end of his
epistles; but it was soon discovered that _Leumas_ was merely the proper
name Samuel reversed, though who the special Samuel was who turned his
signature to the right about, placing the wrong end foremost, and wrote
with all the concise weight and gravity of the old divines, my uncles
never knew. They had both passed away ere, in perusing the "Second
Gallery of Literary Portraits," I found myself introduced to worthy old
_Leumas_, also a denizen of the unseen world at the time, as the father
of the writer of that brilliant work--the Rev. George Gilfillan of
Dundee. This kind of writing had, of course, its proper effect on my
uncles, and, through them, on the family: it kept up our respect for the
Secession. The Established Church, too, was in those days a tolerably
faulty institution. My uncles took an interest in missions; and the
Church had none: nay, its deliberate decision against them--that of
1796--remained still unreversed. It had had, besides, its forced
settlements in our immediate neighbourhood; and Moderatism, wise and
politic in its generation, had perpetrated them by the hands of some of
the better ministers of the district, who had learned to do what they
themselves believed to be very wicked things, when their Church bade
them--a sort of professional license which my uncles could not in the
least understand. In short, the Secession better pleased them, in the
main, than the Establishment, though to the Establishment they continued
to adhere, and failed to see on what Seceder principle their old friends
were becoming Voluntaries. On the breaking out of the controversy, I
remembered all this; and, when told by good men of the Established
Church that well-nigh all the vital religion of the country was on our
side, and that it had left the Voluntary Seceders, though the good men
themselves honestly believed what they said, I could not. Further, the
heads of a conversation which I had overheard in my cousin the Seceder
minister's house when I was a very young boy, and to which it could have
been little suspected that I was listening--for I was playing at the
time on the floor--had taken a strong hold of my memory, and often
returned up