The writer who could at such a critical position produce a pamphlet of this nature was, of course, a marked man. The leaders of the Evangelical party of the Church in Edinburgh had been engaged in a scheme for the starting of a paper. From the press of the capital, and from such provincial organs as _The Aberdeen Herald_ and _The Constitutional_, as edited by Mr. Adam and Mr. Joseph Robertson, the 'travelled thane Athenian Aberdeen' who drifted into the Crimean War later on, and who drifted with the Parliament House party in a reactionary ecclesiastical policy at this time, had been content to draw such scanty information as he ever possessed on the real issues at stake in the Church of Scotland. Indeed, his lordship had gone so far as to taunt the Evangelical Party as composed but of the intellectual _débris_ of the country, and of the 'wild men' in the Church. Sir Robert Peel, who really knew nothing of the intricacies of the question, was content to believe that there was a conspiracy to defeat the law and to rend the constitution. But the ignorance of the Premier and the taunt of Lord Aberdeen came but with an ill grace from them when flung against such men as Sir David Brewster, Chalmers, Welsh, Guthrie, Bonar, Duff, and Miller, and the whole intellectual force of the country at large. Indeed, to the very last, the indecision and the ignorance as to the state of the country shown by Lord Aberdeen were but the natural results of his holding his ecclesiastical conscience in fee from such men as Robertson of Ellon, Paull of Tullynessle, and Pirie of Dyce--these bucolic personages, 'like full-blown peony-roses glistening after a shower,' whose triple and conjunct capacity, joined to that of their master, might have been cut, to borrow the eulogy of Sir James Mackintosh upon Burke, out of the humblest of their rivals and never have been missed. It was really high time that something should be done, when Lord Medwyn could pose as an ecclesiastical scholar by a few garbled quotations from Beza, professing to set in their true light the views held by the Reformers upon patronage; and when these very extracts, together with the copious errors of the press, had been worked up by Robertson of Ellon to be quoted by Lord Aberdeen third-hand as an embodiment of oracular learning and wisdom!