d that they _might_ be martyrs, it was necessary
for them to secede. That Europe thinks at present with less reverence of
Protestant institutions than it did ten years ago, is due to one of these
institutions in particular; viz. to the Scottish kirk, and specifically to
the minority in that body. They it was who spurned all mutual toleration,
all brotherly indulgence from either side to what it regarded as error in
the other. Consequently upon _their_ consciences lies the responsibility
of having weakened the pillars of the Reformed churches throughout
Christendom.

Had those abuses been really such, which the Seceders denounced, were it
possible that a primary law of pure Christianity had been set aside for
generations, how came it that evils so gross had stirred no whispers of
reproach before 1834? How came it that no aurora of early light, no
prelusive murmurs of scrupulosity even from themselves, had run before
this wild levanter of change? Heretofore or now there must have been huge
error on their own showing. Heretofore they must have been traitorously
below their duty, or now mutinously beyond it.

Such conclusions are irresistible; and upon any path, seceding or not
seceding, they menace the worldly credit of ecclesiastical bodies. That
evil is now past remedy. As for the other evil, that which acts upon
church establishments, not through simple failure in the guarantees of
public opinion, but through their own internal vices of composition; here
undeniably we see a chasm traversing the Scottish church from the very
gates to the centre. And unhappily the same chasm, which marks a division
of the church internally, is a link connecting it externally with the
Seceders. For how stands the case? Did the Scottish Kirk, at the last
crisis, divide broadly into two mutually excluding sections? Was there one
of these bisections which said _Yes_, whilst the other responded _No_? Was
the affirmative and negative shared between them as between the black
chessmen and the white? Not so; and unhappily not so. The two extremes
there were, but these shaded off into each other. Many were the _nuances_;
multiplied the combinations. Here stood a section that had voted for all
the changes, with two or three exceptions; there stood another that went
the _whole_ length as to this change, but no part of the way as to that;
between these sections arose others that had voted arbitrarily, or
_eclectically_, that is, by no law generally re