With hatred of patronage was involved a zeal for Evangelical doctrine, which now began to take colour from other sources than Geneva, and to blur out beyond the rigid lines of Calvinistic logic. Early in the eighteenth century the Evangelical party got the name of Marrowmen, as rallying round a little book which, published in England, gained popularity north of the Tweed as the “Marrow” of Christian doctrine, when edited by Boston of the _Fourfold State_. The “Marrow” came to be condemned by a Moderate majority in the Assembly; then for teaching its doctrines and rebuking the general luke-warmness [Illustration: RIVER COE, GLENCOE, ARGYLLSHIRE] of the Church, the saintly Ebenezer Erskine was censured by his Presbytery, and finally suspended from the ministry, along with three sympathetic brethren, Alexander Moncrieff, William Wilson, and James Fisher. In 1733 these four suspended ministers formed themselves into the first Presbytery of the original Secession Church, with Fife as its focus and Erskine as its leading spirit, whose younger brother Ralph in some respects suggests himself as its Charles Wesley, giving scandal to severe members by his love of music and songs not David’s. The Seceders were, in fact, the Scottish Methodists, having an early ally in Whitfield, who, however, became a stumbling-block through his willingness to exercise Christian fellowship with the Erastian establishment; he professed it his duty to preach to “the devil’s people,” whereas the Seceders would monopolise him for “the Lord’s people.” Nay, more, if testifying scandal-mongers are to be credited, “that grand impostor” went so far as at Lisbon to “symbolise with Popery” by attending a Catholic Lenten service, where the Crucifixion was represented “in a most God-dishonouring, heaven-daring, ridiculous, and idolatrous manner.” About the same time as the Secession, rather earlier indeed, was formed the Glassite sect, still seated at Perth; but they went off upon a narrow side track, and may be neglected in a general view of Scottish religious life. A generation later Pennant reports the population of Perth as 11,000, of whom 9000 still belonged to the Kirk, the rest being Episcopalian, Non-jurors (these chiefly “venerable females”), Glassites, and Seceders. Independents, Baptists, and such like came later on from England, but these exotic congregations are still a mere scattering, hardly found outside of large towns. Carlyle might have remembered such exceptions, when he dogmatised that “all dissent in Scotland is merely a stricter adherence to the National Kirk in all points.”