ng them.

It is a curious change which has taken place in this country during the
last hundred years. Up till the times of the Rebellion of 1745, and a
little later, it was its remoter provinces that formed its dangerous
portions; and the effective strongholds from which its advance-guards of
civilisation and good order gradually gained upon old anarchy and
barbarism, were its great towns. We are told by ecclesiastical
historians, that in Rome, after the age of Constantine, the term
villager (_Pagus_) came to be regarded as synonymous with heathen, from
the circumstance that the worshippers of the gods were then chiefly to
be found in remote country places; and we know that in Scotland the
Reformation pursued a course exactly resembling that of Christianity
itself in the old Roman world: it began in the larger and more
influential towns; and it was in the remoter country districts that the
displaced religion lingered longest, and found its most efficient
champions and allies. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, St. Andrews, Dundee,
were all Protestant, and sent out their well-taught burghers to serve in
the army of the Lords of the Congregation, when Huntly and Hamilton were
arming their vassals to contend for the obsolete faith. In a later age
the accessible Lowlands were imbued with an evangelistic
Presbyterianism, when the more mountainous and inaccessible provinces of
the country were still in a condition to furnish, in what was known as
the Highland Host, a dire instrument of persecution. Even as late as the
middle of the last century, "Sabbath," according to a popular writer,
"never got aboon the Pass of Killicrankie;" and the Stuarts, exiled for
their adherence to Popery, continued to found almost their sole hopes of
restoration on the swords of their co-religionists the Highlanders.
During the last hundred years, however, this old condition of matters
has been strangely reversed; and it is in the great towns that
_Paganism_ now chiefly prevails. In at least their lapsed classes--a
rapidly increasing proportion of their population--it is those cities of
our country which first caught the light of religion and learning, that
have become preeminently its dark parts; just, if I may employ the
comparison, as it is those portions of the moon which earliest receive
the light when she is in her increscent state, and shine like a thread
of silver in the deep blue of the heavens, that first become dark when
she falls into the wane