but what was in the highest degree popular; nothing but self-denial, and a desire to sacrifice name and fame, and all but honour, to my country, could have kept me in the Assembly. There was one feature of the Assembly which I shall never forget, and that was the _fever_ of secession, the restless, nervous desire to fly to the Free Church.’ In the course of one of his speeches in the rump Assembly he exclaimed: ‘We shall endeavour to extinguish the fire which has been kindled, and every fire but the light of the glorious gospel, which we shall, I hope, fan into a brighter flame. And the beautiful spectacle which was presented to us on Sabbath evening, in the dense crowd assembled here to ask the blessing of God on our beloved Church, enabled me to distinguish amid the flames the old motto flashing out, _Nec tamen consumebatur_. We shall try to bring our ship safe to harbour, and if we haul down the one flag, “Retract: no, never,” we shall hoist another, “Despair: no, never.” And if I live to come to this Assembly an old man, I am confident that a grateful posterity will vindicate our present position, in endeavouring through good report and bad report to preserve this great national institution as a blessing to them and to their children’s children.’ The Free Church was always in his eyes ‘just an outburst of presbyterian Puseyism,’ and undoubtedly its rise was marked by a clerical reign of terror. Mr. Skelton testifies: ‘The air of Edinburgh is generally bitter with Calvinism, and in 1843 it was particularly inclement. The Free Kirk, having just made a heroic sacrifice, were naturally rather out of temper. Cakes and ale, consequently, were quite at a discount. The re-enactment of the old sumptuary laws of the Puritans began to be talked of again. The national beverage was interdicted. Young professors could not be permitted to indulge in promiscuous dancing. The presbytery thundered hoarsely against the profanation of the Sabbath as practised on Leith Pier, or round Arthur’s Seat. The slightest sign of independent vitality, intellectual or religious, was sourly repressed by a party in which the secular intolerance of the democracy was curiously combined with the spiritual pretensions of the hierarchy.’ ‘A gloomy fanaticism,’ writes the father of Norman Macleod, ‘followed the breaking up of the Established Church, and perhaps in no part of the country did this bitterness exist more strongly than in the Western Islands. In Skye, especially, it led to dividing families, and separating man from man, and altogether engendered strife which I fear it will take years to calm down.’