halk boundary be
overstepped for ever.

Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race--the most
perverse and melancholy in man's annals--this will seem only a figure of
much that is typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the
Forth--a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers for
a caricature. We are wonderful patient haters for conscience' sake up
here in the North. I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the
Parliaments of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can hear
each other singing psalms across the street. There is but a street
between them in space, but a shadow between them in principle; and yet
there they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each
other's growth in grace. It would be well if there were no more than
two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the
chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of many private
homes. Edinburgh is a city of churches, as though it were a place of
pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast at the head of the
West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors; some are empty like monuments;
and yet you will ever find new ones in the building. Hence that
surprising clamour of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the
Sabbath morning, from Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on the
borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of Oxford playing their
symphony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. But
in Edinburgh all manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one
swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes another, and now
lags behind it; now five or six all strike on the pained tympanum at the
same punctual instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of
discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired to hold their
peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than
that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin;
the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against
"right-hand extremes and left-hand defections." And surely there are few
worse extremes than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable
defections than this disloyalty to Christian love. Shakespeare wrote a
comedy of "Much Ado about Nothing." The Scottish nation made a fantastic
tragedy on the same subject. And it is