t variance in matters of
principle or on points of detail.

It is of mighty importance that men should look at things as they
really are. Let us remember that it is not for the emergencies of
yesterday that we are now called on to provide, but for the
necessities of to-day,--not for Scotland in the year 1592, nor yet
in the year 1700, but for Scotland in the year 1850. What might be
the best possible course in these bygone ages, may be, and is, wholly
an impracticable course now. _Church_ at both these earlier dates
meant not only an orthodox communion, but also that preponderating
majority of the nation which reckoned up as its own the great bulk of
both the rulers and the ruled, and at once owned the best and
longest swords, and wore the strongest armour; whereas it now
means, _legally_ at least, merely two Erastianized Establishments,
and _politically_, all the Christian denominations that possess
votes and return members to Parliament. The prism seizes on a single
white ray, and decomposes it into a definitely proportioned
spectrum, gorgeous with the primary colours. The representative
principle of a Government such as ours takes up, as if by a reverse
process, those diverse hues of the denominational spectrum that
vary the face of society, and compounds them in the Legislature into
a blank. Save for the existence of the two Establishments--strong on
other than religious grounds--and the peculiar tinge which they cast
on the institutions of the country, the blank would be still more
perfect than it is; and this fact--a direct result of the strongly
marked hues of the denominational spectrum, operated upon by the
representative principle--we can no more change than we can the
optical law. Let there be but the colour of one religion in the
national spectrum, and the Legislature will wear but one religious
colour: let it consist of half-a-dozen colours, and the Legislature
will be of none. 'O for an hour of Knox!' it has been said by a
good and able man, from whom, however, in this question we greatly
differ,--'O for an hour of Knox to defend the national religious
education which he was raised up to institute!' Knox, be it
remembered, was wise, prudent, sagacious, in accordance with the
demands of his time. A Knox of the exact fashion of the sixteenth
century, raised up in the middle of the nineteenth, would be but a
slim, long-bearded effigy of a Knox, grotesquely attired in a
Geneva cloak and cap, and with the str