temperaments might have been found, compromises both safe and honorable, had the minority built less of their reversionary hopes upon the policy of a fanciful martyrdom. Martyrs they insisted upon becoming: and that they _might_ be martyrs, it was necessary for them to secede. That Europe thinks at present with less reverence of Protestant institutions than it did ten years ago, is due to one of these institutions in particular; viz. to the Scottish kirk, and specifically to the minority in that body. They it was who spurned all mutual toleration, all brotherly indulgence from either side to what it regarded as error in the other. Consequently upon _their_ consciences lies the responsibility of having weakened the pillars of the reformed churches throughout Christendom. Had those abuses been really such, which the Seceders denounced, were it possible that a primary law of pure Christianity had been set aside for generations, how came it that evils so gross had stirred no whispers of reproach before 1834? How came it that no aurora of early light, no prelusive murmurs of scrupulosity even from themselves, had run before this wild levanter of change? Heretofore or now there must have been huge error on their own showing. Heretofore they must have been traitorously below their duty, or now mutinously beyond it. Such conclusions are irresistible and upon any path, seceding or not seceding, they menace the worldly credit of ecclesiastical bodies. That evil is now past remedy. As for the other evil, that which acts upon church establishments, not through simple failure in the guarantees of public opinion, but through their own internal vices of composition; here undeniably we see a chasm traversing the Scottish church from the very gates to the centre. And unhappily the same chasm, which marks a division of the church internally, is a link connecting it externally with the Seceders. For how stands the case? Did the Scottish kirk, at the late crisis, divide broadly into two mutually excluding sections? Was there one of these bisections which said _Yes_, whilst the other responded _No_? Was the affirmative and negative shared between them as between the black chessmen and the white? Not so; and unhappily not so. The two extremes there were, but these shaded off into each other. Many were the _nuances_; multiplied the combinations. Here stood a section that had voted for all the changes, with two or three exceptions; there stood another that went the _whole_ length as to this change, but no part of the way as to that; between these sections arose others that had voted arbitrarily, or _eclectically_, that is, by no law generally recognised. And behind this eclectic school were grouped others who had voted for all novelties up to a certain day, but after _that_ had refused to go further with a movement party whose tendencies they had begun to distrust. In this last case, therefore, the divisional line fell upon no principle, but upon the accident of