rights; and if we may credit the indirect report of the contemporary literature, all apostolic or missionary zeal for the extension of religion, was in those days a thing unknown. It may seem unaccountable to many, that the same state of things should have spread in those days to Scotland; but this is no more than the analogies of all experience entitled us to expect. Thus we know that the instincts of religious reformation ripened every where at the same period of the sixteenth century from one end of Europe to the other; although between most of the European kingdoms there was nothing like so much intercourse as between England and Scotland in the eighteenth century. In both countries, a cold and lifeless state of public religion prevailed up to the American and French Revolutions. These great events gave a shock every where to the meditative, and, consequently, to the religious impulses of men. And, in the mean time, an irregular channel had been already opened to these impulses by the two founders of Methodism. A century has now passed since Wesley and Whitfield organized a more spiritual machinery of preaching than could then be found in England, for the benefit of the poor and labouring classes. These Methodist institutions prospered, as they were sure of doing, amongst the poor and the neglected at any time, much more when contrasted with the deep slumbers of the Established church. And another ground of prosperity soon arose out of the now expanding manufacturing system. Vast multitudes of men grew up under that system--humble enough by the quality of their education to accept with thankfulness the ministrations of Methodism, and rich enough to react, upon that beneficent institution, by continued endowments in money. Gradually, even the church herself, that mighty establishment, under the cold shade of which Methodism had grown up as a neglected weed, began to acknowledge the power of an extending Methodistic influence, which originally she had haughtily despised. First, she murmured; then she grew anxious or fearful; and finally, she began to find herself invaded or modified from within, by influences springing up from Methodism. This last effect became more conspicuously evident after the French Revolution. The church of Scotland, which, as a whole, had exhibited, with much unobtrusive piety, the same outward torpor as the church of England during the eighteenth century, betrayed a corresponding resuscitation about the same time. At the opening of this present century, both of these national churches began to show a marked rekindling of religious fervour. In what extent this change in the Scottish church had been due, mediately or immediately, to Methodism, we do not pretend to calculate; that is, we do not pretend to settle the proportions. But _mediately_ the Scottish church must have been affected, because she was greatly affected by her intercourse with the English church, (as, e.g., in