The moving spirit of Presbyterianism has been a consciousness that Christianity claims to be something far higher than any human institution, the Court of Session, for instance, or even the British Constitution. Other countries seem more willing to make practical compromises between heaven and earth. One has heard of such a country, whose chief ambassadors of heaven are appointed with a ceremony in which the holiest influence is implored to direct a choice published weeks before in every newspaper as fixedly made by very mortal authorities, who may be notorious evil livers, open unbelievers, or what a sectarian journal has politely qualified as “non-co-religionists.” But a religiously minded Scot has too much logic, not to say sense of humour, to take part in such a farce. For him the Gospel did not dawn from the eyes of Boleyns and such like; he took his Scriptures as a law rather than a title for rulers. His watchword has all along been Christ’s headship of the Church, and his anathema the “Erastianism” that rendered to Cæsar what man owes to God alone. The later Stuarts were not Cæsars to wear any halo in his eyes; then all the more clearly he saw the futility of their lay Popedom. That “wisest fool in Christendom” was perhaps not so far out in his adage “no bishop, no king.” But Scotland held its faith by the same title as he his crown; and he and his successors found faith on the whole stronger than loyalty. The dogmas of that faith are not the question. It was sadly coloured by the struggles of its origin, by the character of the nation as well as the stern scenery of the land, by persecution and by congenial Calvinistic logic brought back from exile, and by the troubles of the time in which Puritan influences were exchanged across the Border. Scotsmen being, after all, but human, their serious and democratic view of religion was held with two different degrees of intensity, which took shape as the main parties of the Kirk. The one that came to be known as “Moderate” was hotly reproached with Erastianism, a less unwillingness to look on religion as a department of the Civil Service. The other had various nicknames, the “Wild Party,” the “High-fliers,” but we may as well call them the High Churchmen of Scotland, if it be borne in mind that they favoured Evangelical doctrine while clinging to a union of Church and State, in which the former was to be predominant. These were, in fact, the heirs of the Covenanters, who on strongly Protestant soil fought out the old quarrel between Pope and Emperor. And whereas the English High Church has been strongest among the priesthood, in the north, where presbyter is priest writ small, it is the laity that have rather fostered ecclesiastic zeal. To Buckle’s representation of Scotland as a priest-ridden people, Mr. H. G. Graham rightly objects how it would be nearer the truth to speak of a people-ridden clergy.