yteries or assemblies, true lovers of
their country and of their species, whether of the Established or of
the Free Churches, will come forward and do their duty as Scotchmen on
the political platform. In neither body does the attitude assumed by
the ecclesiastical element in this question, so far as has yet been
indicated, appear of a kind which plain, simple-minded laymen will
delight to contemplate. The Established Church courts are taking up
the ground that the teaching in their parish schools has been all
along religious, and at least one great source from which has sprung
the vitalities of the country's faith. And who does not know that to
be a poor, unsolid fiction,--a weak and hollow sham? And, on the other
hand, some of our Free Churchmen are asserting that they are not
_morally_ bound to their forlorn teachers for the meagre and
altogether inadequate salaries held out to them in prospect, when they
were set down in their humble schools, divorced from all other means
of support, to regulate their very limited expenditure by the
specified incomes. Further, they virtually tell us that we cannot
possibly take our stand as Scotchmen on this matter, in the only
practical position, without being untrue to our common Christianity,
and enemies to our Church. It has been urged against our educational
articles, that we have failed to take into account the fall of man: he
would surely be an incorrigible sceptic, we reply, who could look upon
statements such as these, and yet doggedly persist in doubting that
man has fallen. But, alas! it is not a matter on which to congratulate
ourselves, that when the Established Church is coming forward to
arrest the progress of national education with her strange equivocal
caveat, the Free Church--the Church of the Disruption--should be also
coming forward with a caveat which at least _seems_ scarce less
equivocal; and that, like the twin giants of Guildhall--huge,
monstrous, unreal--both alike should be turning deaf and wooden ears
to the great clock of destiny, as it strikes the hours of doom to
their distracted and sinking country. O for an hour of the great, the
noble-minded Chalmers! Ultimately, however, the good cause is secure.
It is a cause worth struggling and suffering for. We know a little
boy, not yet much of a reader, who has learned to bring a copy of
Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_, which now opens of itself at the
battle of Bannockburn, to a little girl, his sister, som