For three years John Black remained a member of this congregation, and his family were very anxious that he should study for the ministry in connection with the Associate Church. He was unable to accept all the views of the Church, however, and this kept him for some time in grave doubt. The Associate Church held that the Scottish covenants were binding on the Church in later times. It will be remembered that these covenants of 1638 and 1643 represent one of the grandest periods in Scottish history. Nobles and people alike, in Greyfriars churchyard, Edinburgh, and elsewhere in Scotland, signed, in some cases with pens dipped in their own blood, the covenant or pledge to oppose prelacy and popery, and to keep the Church of Scotland pure and true. John Black loved and admired the martyrs and Covenanters who fought so nobly for liberty, but he was not sure that two centuries after those stirring times it was still necessary to subscribe these notable documents. The Associate Church required of those who entered its ministry to declare adhesion to "public covenanting," and this threw an obstacle in the way of the young candidate. His thought was then turned to Princeton College, the seminary of the Old School Presbyterian Church, as it was then called. Some five or six years before this time the Presbyterian Church of the United States had been rent by doctrinal differences, and perhaps more especially by the question of negro slavery. Princeton College would have satisfied the young aspirant to the ministry, but belonging, as it did, to the body which seemed unsound on the slavery question, John Black, like all of British blood, was horrified at the thought of being connected in any way with so hideous and cruel a thing as slavery, and so he could not conscientiously join the Old School. He still kept up correspondence with Scotland, and his love was strong for the Scottish Church. At this time, too, a great religious movement was going on in Scotland, which led to the Disruption in 1843, and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland. After this event the young student in Bovina began to turn his attention to Canada, where the Church was strongly Scottish in its character and customs.