I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part, he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever, especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get inside the English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with every considerable nation. They work out their own political and spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of those times can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to wound without intending it.