follower, and to the utmost extent of his great faculties a defender, of their cause. He was a soldier from love,--pure, heroic, chivalrous devotion soaring infinitely above the partisan. He saw that the Church of Scotland was the creator of the rights and privileges of the people of Scotland,--that she was the grand palladium of the country's liberties,--that while she stood an independent and free institution, the people stood an independent and free nation,--and that bonds to her meant slavery to them. Therefore did he gird on the sword when he saw peril gathering around her. The privileges,--the entire standing of the common people, as given them by the Reformation,--he saw to be in danger: he was "one of themselves;" and he felt and fought as if almost the quarrel had been a personal one, and the question at issue his own liberty or slavery. How richly equipped and nobly armed he came into the field, we need not here state. What fulness yet precision of ecclesiastical lore,--what strength and conclusiveness of argument,--what flashes of humor, wit, and sarcasm,--and in what a luminous yet profoundly philosophical light did he set the great principles involved in the controversy, making them patent in the very cottages of our land, and so fixing them in the understandings of the very humblest of our people, that they never afterwards could be either misunderstood or forgotten! It was thus that the way was prepared for the great result of the 18th of May, 1843.