Connected with this office, at least in the majority of instances, there are humiliations to which no lad of spirit would submit for the sake of the present emolument. The hope, and generally the stipulation, of the tutor is, that his patron shall, when he has drudged and degraded himself for the requisite number of years, “bless him with a kirk;” and this abasement,--this bowing down before the patron, in order that they may, in due time, rise to the living, is one of the chief reasons why the Scotch parsons have swerved from that independence of feeling and of action, of which the example was set them by John Knox, and become as willing and obsequious worshippers at the feet even of delegated power, or of unmerited place, as imagination can picture to itself. If it were not that they are strained through this filter, we should never have had them declaring, ex cathedrâ, that the National Monument, a piece of gratuitous foolery, or vanity, or political patchwork, was “a most suitable and appropriate expression of gratitude to the Lord of Hosts.” If they had not been studying somewhere else than in their bibles, their answer would have been-- “The Being, whom we profess to worship, and under whose protection we certainly are, cannot be propitiated by votive offerings of stone and lime; and the gallant deeds of our brave countrymen, however gracefully they might be chiselled on the frieze of the ‘restored Parthenon,’ could not, in the slightest degree, redound to his glory, although they might, to a certain extent, flatter the vanity of men. The offerings which He requires are not swelling columns and fretted architraves: they are _deeds_--deeds of justice, beneficence, and mercy, done to our fellow men. After He has enumerated the most costly and splendid sacrifices-just for the purpose of declaring that in his sight they avail nothing--He delivers this simple but heavenly commandment, ‘Offer to God _thanksgiving_.’ To propose the erection of _any edifice_, therefore, as ‘a most suitable and appropriate expression of gratitude to the Lord of Hosts,’ savours little of the knowledge and still less of the spirit of Christianity; and if no edifice whatever could be such an expression, far less could a temple which had been erected for the worship of dead and useless idols.” The filtration, or winnowing, or whatever process it may be called, which has separated and set apart the more flexible portion of the educated peasantry of Scotland for the peculiar service of the kirk, has been in an eminent degree favourable for the schools, which have thus reserved to them the most independent and generally also the most enthusiastically devoted to learning.