Of all those who remained in the Establishment, none saw more clearly, or more deeply deplored, the havoc that had been made by the Disruption, than the minister of Dalkeith. He had started joyously upon his career, intent on proclaiming the gospel of brotherhood and love, and, behold, the Church rent asunder, those that were brethren at daggers drawn, and all over the land, even to the family altar, embittering divisions! To a mind like his it seemed horrible to stand for ecclesiastical principles at such cost to the kingdom of God in the heart. Never for a moment had he any misgivings as to the side which he had taken in the great controversy. Nay, he thought that, after all, the Establishment might have been in the end more irrevocably shattered had the High Church party remained within. He veered between angry lamentation over the coldness and indifference of the Moderates, and aversion from the faults of the new zealots--’vanity, pride, and haughtiness that would serve Mazarin or Richelieu, clothed in Quaker garb; church ambition and zeal and self-sacrifice that compete with Loyola; and in the Highlands specimens of fanaticism which Maynooth can alone equal.’ If the Establishment was a water-bucket, the Free Church was a firebrand. At the same time he perceived only too well what was good in the host that followed Chalmers. He was in full sympathy with them in their devotion to the evangelical cause, and groaned in spirit to think of forces, supposed to be in the service of the one Master, divided and hostile, all for what he called old clothes. He saw the seceders popular and victorious,--theirs all the energy, all the faith; while the Kirk was not only outwardly broken, but chill and listless within,--her ministers the old Erastians, or raw recruits suddenly promoted to posts they were unfit for and looking more to their stipends than their work. Among other instances of the prevailing torpor, he noted with particular dismay that the Church gave no sign when Peel proposed to endow Maynooth. Alone among the Established clergy he called a meeting and got up a petition against the bill. In his journal he wrote: ‘I declare solemnly I would leave my manse and glebe to-morrow if I could rescind that terrible vote for Maynooth. I cannot find words to express my deep conviction of the infatuation of the step. And all statesmen for it! Not one man to form a protestant party, not one! God have mercy on the country!’ On the question of policy it is probable that he changed his mind, but there is nothing plainer to the student of his journals than that to the last he had for Popery, and for every semblance of Popery, a perfect hatred. For him the Establishment was nothing if not a bulwark of Protestantism. ‘The Church of Scotland,’ he said as late as 1850, ‘is daily going down hill.’ Yet he felt certain that no voluntary association, for all its waving of banners and flourish of trumpets, was capable of grappling