tes were
turbulent and unsteady, he had, after bearing a good deal, been
compelled to quit. Like our foreman, he was a strict Seceder, in full
communion with his Church. Though merely a common labourer, with not
more than half the wages of our skilled workmen, I had observed, ere our
acquaintance began, that no mason in the squad was more comfortably
attired on week-days than he, or wore a better suit on Sunday; and so I
had set him down, from the circumstance, as a decent man. I now found
that, like my uncle Sandy, he was a great reader of good books--an
admirer even of the same old authors--deeply read like him, in Durham
and Rutherford--and entertaining, too, a high respect for Baxter,
Boston, old John Brown, and the Erskines. In one respect, however, he
differed from both my uncles: he had begun to question the excellence of
religious Establishments; nay, to hold that the country might be none
the worse were its ecclesiastical endowments taken away--a view which
our foreman also entertained; whereas both Uncles Sandy and James were
as little averse as the old divines themselves to a State-paid ministry,
and desiderated only that it should be a good one. There were two other
Seceders engaged as masons at the work--more of the polemical and less
of the devout type than the foreman or my new comrade the labourer; and
they also used occasionally to speak, not merely of the doubtful
usefulness, but--as they were stronger in their language than their more
self-denying and more consistent co-religionists--of the positive
worthlessness of Establishments. The Voluntary controversy did not break
out until about nine years after this time, when the Reform Bill gave
vent to many a pent-up opinion and humour among that class to which it
extended the franchise; but the materials of the war were evidently
already accumulating among the intelligent Dissenters of Scotland; and
from what I now saw, its first appearance in a somewhat formidable
aspect failed to take me by surprise. I must in justice add, that all
the religion of our party was to be found among its Seceders. Our other
workmen were really wild fellows, most of whom never entered a church. A
decided reaction had already commenced within the Establishment, on the
cold, elegant, unpopular Moderatism of the previous period--that
Moderatism which had been so adequately represented in the Scottish
capital by the theology of Blair and the ecclesiastical policy of
Robertson; but