Becoming preparations having been made, and the King having been furnished with a perspective sketch of the church, and a written programme of the service, it was agreed that the Very Reverend David Lamont, D.D., Moderator and Spiritual Head upon Earth of the Kirk of Scotland, should preach before him, in the name and stead of all his willing and worshipping brethren, while the “men,” the “leaders,” and the people, should demean themselves with that decorum, which the day, the service, and the occasion required. When the services of the Scottish kirk are performed in a becoming manner, there is a feeling, a sublimity, and a heavenliness about them, of which one who considers only their simple and unadorned structure could form no adequate idea; and when I observed the still and unbroken solemnity of the service, and the effect which it obviously had, not only upon those who are accustomed to it, but upon those strangers who, in whatever predilection they had for one religion more than another, were wedded to the more artificial and gaudy ritual of another church--a church which had been at enmity with the Scottish kirk from the beginning, and which, in dislike to the system of sober equality among the Scottish clergy, and the democratic nature of their church establishment, have attempted to hold up their form of worship as cold, meagre, incapable of stirring up devotion in the hearts of men, and, by consequence, not so gratifying to the Almighty as the more costly and complicated ceremonial of others,--I could not help believing that, of all forms of religion, the simplest is decidedly the best, and that if the object of the propagators of Christianity was nothing but the cultivation of the minds and the improvement of the morals of society, they would carefully avoid all artifice and all show. Those, indeed, who have considered the correspondence that exists between the forms of religious worship, and the intellectual culture of the great body of the people, cannot have failed to observe, that pompous shows and gaudy ceremonies have ever been the concomitants of general ignorance and superstition, and that a plain and unadorned system of worship, has uniformly been characteristic of an intelligent people.