persons trained, by education and habit, to the effectual performance of the pastoral duties. That loss--though not without signal difficulty, from the abruptness of the summons--will be supplied. But there is a greater evil which cannot be healed--the breach of unity in the church. The scandal, the offence, the occasion of unhappy constructions upon the doctrinal soundness of the church, which have been thus ministered to the fickle amongst her own children--to the malicious amongst her enemies, are such as centuries do not easily furnish, and centuries do not remove. In all Christian churches alike, the conscientiousness which is the earliest product of heartfelt religion, has suggested this principle, that schism, for any cause, is a perilous approach to sin; and that, unless in behalf of the weightiest interests or of capital truths, it is inevitably criminal. And in connexion with this consideration, there arise two scruples to all intelligent men upon this crisis in the Scottish church, and they are scruples which at this moment, we are satisfied, must harass the minds of the best men amongst the seceders--viz. First, whether the new points contended for, waiving all controversy upon their abstract doctrinal truth, are really such, in _practical_ virtue, that it could be worth purchasing them at the cost of schism? Secondly, supposing a good man to have decided this question in the affirmative for a young society of Christians, for a church in its infancy, which, as yet, might not have much to lose in credit or authentic influence--whether the same free license of rupture and final secession _could_ belong to an ancient church, which had received eminent proofs of Divine favour through a long course of spiritual prosperity almost unexampled? Indeed, this last question might suggest another paramount to the other two--viz. not whether the points at issue were weighty enough to justify schism and hostile separation, but whether those points could even be safe as mere speculative _credenda_, which, through so long a period of trial, and by so memorable a harvest of national services, had been shown to be unnecessary?