seen in these other events. But the question of the Headship still awaits us. On the accession of William, the shattered remnants of the kirk were gathered together by Carstares after twenty-eight years of persecution: _nec tamen consumebatur_. Perhaps, in the circumstances under which both king and country found themselves, no other compromise could so well have been come to as that of 1690. The election was left in the hands of elders and the heritors, to be approved of by the people, leaving an appeal to the Presbytery. At the Union, Scotland seeing the danger to which she was exposed by her scanty band of forty-five members being swamped in the English or Tory phalanx--a danger to which every year subsequent has added but too evident a commentary--had exacted the most strenuous obligations for the unalterable preservation of her ecclesiastical system. But five years witnessed the most shameless breach of public faith, by an Act which had the most ruinous effects, political and religious, upon the people. The Tories had come into power on the crest of the Sacheverel wave, and in 1712 Bolingbroke proceeded to carry out his scheme of altering the succession and securing the return of the Pretender. An Act of Toleration was passed for the Episcopalian dissenting sect in Scotland, and an oath of abjuration sought to be imposed upon the Scottish Church for the sake of exciting confusion. An Act restoring patronage was rushed through the House by the Tory squires, who composed five-sixths of the House of Commons. Against this the Whigs and Carstares protested vigorously, and appealed to the Treaty of Union, but appeal was lost upon the ignorant class, who were not overdrawn in the Squire Western of Fielding's novel. For a hundred years this Act bore evil fruits. The nobility of the land were only too ready to seize upon the poor spoils of the national endowment in order to renew their waning power in the country, and in so doing they managed to set themselves and their descendants in hereditary opposition to the great mass of the people. The English peerage has done much for the English people. In Scotland, it may be asked, which of the four Scottish Universities has had a farthing of the money of the nobility, and what have they done for the Church in any one of her branches? In Miller's _Letter to Brougham_ this cardinal point of 1712 is made clear:--