ork in
which he had no heart. This theory is not only entirely groundless,
but entirely unnecessary; because the action which he took on this
question can readily be explained by a reference to convictions he had
held all his life, and to circumstances which seemed to him to call
for their assertion.

He had been a Voluntary ever since he had begun to think on such
questions. His father, in the days of his boyhood, had subscribed,
along with a neighbour, for the _Voluntary Church Magazine_, and the
subject had often been discussed in the cottage at Dunglass. It will
be remembered that during his first session at the University he was
an eager disputant with his classmates on the Voluntary side, and that
towards the close of his course, after a memorable debate in the
Diagnostic Society, he secured a victory for the policy of severing
the connection between Church and State. These views he had never
abandoned, and in a lecture on Disestablishment delivered in Edinburgh
in 1872 he re-stated them. While admitting, as the United Presbyterian
Synod had done in adopting the "Articles of Agreement," that the State
ought to frame its policy on Christian lines, he denied that it was
its duty or within its competence to establish and endow the Church.
This is, to quote his own words, "an overstraining of its province,--a
forgetfulness that its great work is civil and not spiritual,--and an
encroachment without necessity or call, and indeed, as I believe, in
the face of direct Divine arrangements, on the work of the Christian
Church."

These, then, being his views, what led him to seek to make them
operative by taking part in a Disestablishment campaign? Two things
especially. One of these was the activity at that time of a Broad
Church party within the Established Church. He maintained that this
was no mere domestic concern of that Church, and claimed the right as
a citizen to deal with it. In a national institution views were held
and taught of which he could not approve, and which he considered
compromised him as a member of the nation. He felt he must protest,
and he protested thus.

The other ground of his action was the conviction, which recent
events had very much strengthened, that the continued existence of
an Established Church was the great obstacle to Presbyterian Union
in Scotland. It is true that there was nothing in the nature of things
to prevent the Free and United Presbyterian Churches coming together
in pre