The minister of the Barony--henceforth for many years commonly called ‘young Norman’ to distinguish him from his father--was a shining exception to the prevailing type of the Established clergy, if not the rising hope of those who looked for the rebuilding of the National Zion. The Free Church, popular from the first, was going on prospering and to prosper,--her tabernacles set up everywhere cheek by jowl with the parish kirks. Now was the true gospel heard in the land. As to the ‘bond’ Establishment, inhabited by a godless residuum, seekers of the fleece, worldlings and slaves, the only wonder was that it kept up the pretence of being a Church, when it was visibly tottering to its fall. Gradually the religious public heard of this Norman Macleod, a minister of the Auld Kirk, who outdid the new evangelists on their own ground. In the movement for a world-wide federation of Protestants his enthusiasm went far beyond theirs; he was as much devoted as they were to the cause of foreign missions; in pulpit unction he surpassed them: if their voices quivered, his shook; if their eyelashes were wet, his cheeks streamed with tears. Than Macleod, when he left Dalkeith, no pastor was ever better equipped for such a charge as the Barony. The parish consists, along with some rural territory, of large districts scattered far and wide over the city, and contained, in 1851, a population of 87,000, for whom, besides attending to his own vast congregation, the minister had religious ordinances to provide. Most of the inhabitants belonged to the working class. Now Macleod had persuasive eloquence and a captivating personality; to make Christians of the common people, whom he loved for their virtues and their hardships, had been his ‘one aim, one business, one desire,’ both in Loudoun and Dalkeith; and the Barony, as a sphere of ministerial service, presented no problem which his experience had not prepared him to encounter. The preceding incumbent, when dying, had recommended him as the one man fitted for the post, and the congregation, to whom ‘young Norman’ had been known from his Loudoun days, were eager for his appointment.