Would he, then, have held that liberty to be now restored, and the way to an honourable, safe, and beneficial alliance reopened? We doubt it. He would certainly have seen that, in point of fact, the Established Church now enjoys a degree of liberty that enables her to discharge the ordinary functions of a Christian church without obstruction, and in particular to continue with great success that very enterprise of church extension for which he thought that she would be able to do nothing. But he could not have failed to see that this liberty was an indirect fruit of the Disruption, and that it was quietly conceded to the Established Church in order that she might stand practically on the same platform of liberty with the nonconformist churches, and especially her great rival the Free Church. He would have found no concession of principle, no acknowledgment by the state or by the civil courts of an essential difference between a Christian church and a civil corporation, and no acknowledgment that the church, as the creation of Christ, enjoyed privileges from Him independent of any state. He would have found no repudiation of the dictum of the then Lord President that the Established Church had no jurisdiction whatever in the country except what had been conferred by the state; and he would have found no security that if a new collision should occur between church and state, between the worldly and the spiritual power, the state would repudiate her old principles and policy. Further, the contention of Chalmers in his London lectures and in his latest deliverance (see p. 148) always was, that the state ought to support religion, not merely because people wished it, but because the religion was true. Would he, then, have found in the members of the present Parliament any such value for revealed truth, as such, as would have given him confidence in them as its guardians? A Parliament that numbered Agnostics, Jews, Roman Catholics, Unitarians, and what not among its members—how could such a body be a nursing-father or a nursing-mother to the Christian church? Such a Parliament could not safely be intrusted with its guardianship. It was a very different condition of things when the Scottish church allied itself to the Scottish Parliament, all or nearly all being members of the church. Nor could he have found any cause for believing that at any future time, within reasonable distance, the nursing of the church could be safely committed to parliamentary hands.