its immediate publication; and the manuscript
was accordingly put into the hands of Mr. Johnstone, the well-known
Church bookseller. Dr. Candlish had been one of a party of ministers and
elders of the Evangelical majority who had met in Edinburgh shortly
before, to take measures for the establishment of a newspaper. All the
Edinburgh press, with the exception of one newspaper, had declared
against the ecclesiastical party; and even that one rather received
articles and paragraphs in their behalf through the friendship of the
proprietor, than was itself on their side. There had been a larger
infusion of Whiggism among the Edinburgh Churchmen than in any other
part of the kingdom. They had seen very much, in consequence, that the
line taken by the Conservative portion of their friends, in addressing
the people through the press, had not been an efficient one;--their
friends had set themselves to make the people both good Conservatives
and good Churchmen, and of course had never got over the first point,
and never would; and what they now proposed was, to establish a paper
that, without supporting any of the old parties in the State, should be
as Liberal in its politics as in its Churchmanship. But there was a
preliminary point which they also could not get over. All the
ready-made editors of the kingdom, if I may so speak, had declared
against them; and for want of an editor, their meeting had succeeded in
originating, not the intended newspaper, but merely a formal
recognition, in a few resolutions, of its desirableness and importance.
On reading my pamphlet in manuscript, however, Dr. Candlish at once
concluded that the desiderated want was to be supplied by its writer.
Here, he said, is the editor we have been looking for. Meanwhile, my
little work issued from the press, and was successful. It ran rapidly
through four editions of a thousand copies each--the number, as I
subsequently ascertained, of a popular non-intrusion pamphlet that would
fairly _sell_--and was read pretty extensively by men who were not
Non-Intrusionists. Among these there were several members of the
Ministry of the time, including the late Lord Melbourne, who at first
regarded it, as I have been informed, as the composition, under a
popular form and a _nom de guerre_, of some of the Non-Intrusion leaders
in Edinburgh; and by the late Mr. O'Connell, who had no such suspicions,
and who, though he lacked sympathy, as he said, with the ecclesiastical
v