In the years 1824-5, Parliament had passed acts 'for building additional places of worship in the highlands and islands of Scotland.' These acts may be looked upon as one section in that general extension of religious machinery which the British people, by their government and their legislature, have for many years been promoting. Not, as is ordinarily said, that the weight of this duty had grown upon them simply through their own treacherous neglect of it during the latter half of the eighteenth century; but that no reasonable attention to that duty _could_ have kept pace with the scale upon which the claims of a new manufacturing population had increased. In mere equity we must admit--not that the British nation had fallen behind its duties, (though naturally it might have done so under the religious torpor prevalent at the original era of manufacturing extension,) but that the duties had outstripped all human power of overtaking them. The efforts, however, have been prodigious in this direction for many years. Amongst those applied to Scotland, it had been settled by Parliament that forty-two new churches should be raised in the highlands, with an endowment from the government of [pound symbol]120 annually for each incumbent. There were besides more than two hundred chapels of ease to be founded; and towards this scheme the Scottish public subscribed largely. The money was intrusted to the clergy. _That_ was right, but mark what followed. It had been expressly provided by Parliament--that any district or circumjacent territory, allotted to such parliamentary churches as the range within which the incumbent was to exercise his spiritual ministration, should _not_ be separate parishes for any civil or legal effects. Here surely the intentions and directions of the legislature were plain enough, and decisive enough.