It was not till near the end of the struggle that the minister of Loudoun turned his eyes upon the field. The thunder of the captains and the shouting had been long in his ears without stirring him to action. He was all in his vocation, the cure of souls,--the mystery of existence ever for him insurgent, whether he looked on life and death, or remembered his days upon the hills. ‘I wished,’ he said, ‘to keep out of this _row_, and to do my Master’s work and will in my dear, dear parish.’ Some clerics are listless in religion; but when a question of church politics is raised, alert as a horse at the sound of the trumpet. Macleod hated controversy, and said it was the worst way of doing good. Of the two parties in the Church he might have sung, ‘How happy could I be with _neither_!’ In him the opposing types were blended; he had all the humanism which marked the one,--the love of letters, the relish of things, the superiority to clerical prejudice,--with all the zeal of the other for the cause of the gospel. But, called to choose between extremes, he preferred ‘the cold gentlemanly Moderate’ to ‘the loud-speaking high professor.’ And the non-intrusionists were claiming to be the only true Christian ministers in the land, nay more, the chosen of Heaven. They declared that they were raised up by God, they called themselves the fitting instrument of the Lord. They invaded the parishes of the Moderate clergy, and preached, telling the people that now, for the first time, the gospel was in their ears. ‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ they said, ‘will have left the Church when we go.’ In a pamphlet written by Macleod, ‘A Crack about the Kirk for Kintra Folk,’ which had a large sale, _Saunders_ observes: ‘I ken mony that are foremost eneuch in this steer that in my opinion hae little o’ the meekness and gentleness o’ Christ.’ He must have been thinking of the minister who said that ‘the devil was preparing a cradle in hell for the opposition.’ Everything in the popular cause was exaggerated. Patronage was ‘earthly, sensual, devilish’; _vox populi, vox Dei_, and no mistake. The struggle against the civil courts was ‘one of the most illustrious conflicts for the spirituality and liberty of the Church of Christ of which any record can be found either in modern or in ancient times.’ What Macleod could least endure in the non-intrusionists was their sacerdotal temper. They insisted on remaining in an Established Church, while flying in the face of the law by which it was established. The Headship of Christ was bound up with the resolutions of the General Assembly, and to obey an order of the Court of Session was to crucify the Lord afresh.