question, is all that unanimity of voting could secure to the Church; unless, indeed, according to Carlyle, she voted in accordance with the 'set of conditions already voted for and fixed by the adamantine powers.' Nor does the question of Denominational Education, now that there is a national scheme in the field, furnish a more, but, on the contrary, a much less, hopeful subject for mere voting in our church courts, than the question of College Extension. It is _not_ to be carried by ecclesiastical majorities. Some of the most important facts in the 'Ten Years' Conflict' have perhaps still to be recorded; and it is one of these, that long after the Non-Intrusion party possessed majorities in the General Assembly, the laity looked on with exceedingly little interest, much possessed by the suspicion that the clergy were battling, not on the popular behalf, but on their own. Even in 1839, after the Auchterarder case had been decided in the House of Lords, the apathy seemed little disturbed; and the writer of these chapters, when engaged in doing his little all to dissipate it, could address a friend in Edinburgh, to whom he forwarded the MS. of a pamphlet thrown into the form of a letter to Lord Brougham, in the following terms:--'The question which at present agitates the Church is a vital one; and unless the people can be roused to take part in it (and they seem strangely uninformed and wofully indifferent as yet), the worst cause must inevitably prevail. They may perhaps listen to one of their own body, who combines the principles of the old with the opinions of the modern Whig, and who, though he feels strongly on the question, has no secular interest involved in it.' It was about this time that Dr. George Cook said--and, we have no doubt, said truly--that he could scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach without finding respectable men inveighing against the utter folly of the Non-Intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the church courts. For the opponents of the party were all active and awake at the time, and its incipient friends still indifferent or mistrustful. The history of Church petitions in Edinburgh during the ten eventful years of the war brings out this fact very significantly in the statistical form. From 1833, the year of the Veto Act, to 1839, the year of the Auchterarder decision, petitions to Parliament from Edinburgh on behalf of the struggling Church were usually signed by not more than from four to five thousand persons. In 1839 the number rose to six thousand. The people began gradually to awaken, and to trust. Speeches in church courts were found to have comparatively little influence in creating opinion, or ecclesiastical votes in securing confidence; and so there were other means of appealing to the public mind resorted to, mayhap not wholly without effect: for in 1840 the annual Church petition from Edinburgh bore attached to it thirteen thousand signatures; and to