this great problem, can have a chance of permanence. The natural
revenge which we may promise ourselves is--that the lunacies of the
free-trader, when acted upon, as too surely they will be, may prove
equally fugitive. Meantime, it is not by provisional acts, or acts of
sudden emergency, that we estimate the service of a senate. It is the
solemn and deliberate laws, those which are calculated for the wear
and tear of centuries, which hold up a mirror to the legislative
spirit of the times.

Of laws bearing this character, if we except the inaugural essays at
improving the law of libel, and at founding a system of national
education, of which the latter has failed for the present in a way
fitted to cause some despondency, the last session offers us no
conspicuous example, beyond the one act of Lord Aberdeen for healing
and tranquillizing the wounds of the Scottish church. Self-inflicted
these wounds undeniably were; but they were not the less severe on
that account, nor was the contagion of spontaneous martyrdom on that
account the less likely to spread. In reality, the late astonishing
schism in the Scottish church (astonishing because abrupt) is, in one
respect, without precedent. Every body has heard of persecutions that
were courted; but in such a case, at least, the spirit of persecution
must have had a local existence, and to some extent must have uttered
menaces--or how should those menaces have been defied? Now, the
"persecutions," before which a large section of the Scottish church
has fallen by an act of spontaneous martyrdom, were not merely
needlessly defied, but were originally self-created; they were evoked,
like phantoms and shadows, by the martyrs themselves, out of blank
negations. Without provocation _ab extra_, without warning on their
own part, suddenly they place themselves in an attitude of desperate
defiance to the known law of the land. The law firmly and tranquilly
vindicates itself; the whole series of appeals is threaded; the
original judgment, as a matter of course, is finally re-affirmed--and
this is the persecution insinuated; whilst the necessity of complying
with that decision, which does not express any novelty even to the
extent of a new law, but simply the ordinary enforcement of an old
one, is the kind of martyrdom resulting. The least evil of this
fantastic martyrdom, is the exit from the pastoral office of so many
persons trained, by education and habit, to the effectual performanc