The Free Church has for ever closed her connection with the Court of Teinds; but her danger from _fine-bodyism_ is in consequence all the greater, not the less. The Sustentation Fund is her Court of Teinds now; and it is to it that she has in the first instance to look for protection from the all-potent but insidious and vastly under-estimated evil under which no Church ever throve. The outed ministers are comparatively safe. Unless prudence be altogether wanting, and the wolf comes to the door, not, as in the child's story-book, in the disguise of a soft-voiced girl, but in that of a gruff sheriff's officer, they will continue to bear through life the old status of the Establishment, heightened by the _éclat_ of the Disruption. But our younger men of subsequent appointment stand on no such platform, nor will any of their contemporaries or successors step upon it as a matter of course when the heroes of the conflict have dropped away, and they come to occupy their vacant places. Their status will be found to depend on two circumstances, neither of them derived from the men of a former time--on their ability to maintain a respectable place among the middle classes, and on their scholastic acquirements and general manners. A half-paid, half-taught, half-bred minister of religion may be a very excellent man; we have seen such, both in England and our own country, among the non-Presbyterian Dissenters who laboured to do well, and were exceedingly in earnest; but no such type of minister will ever be found influential in Scotland, either in extending the limits of a Church, or in benefiting the more intelligent classes of the people. And the two circumstances of acquirement and remuneration will be found indissolubly connected. A Church of under-paid ministers, however fairly it may start, will, in the lapse of a generation, become a Church of under-taught and under-bred ministers also. Nor is there any chance that the evil, once begun, will ever cure itself, for the under-bred and the under-taught will be sure to continue the under-paid. That animating spirit of a Church, without which wealth and learning avail but little, money now, as of old, cannot buy; but the secular will be ever found to depend on the secular,--the general rate of secular acquirement on the general rate of secular remuneration; and unless both be pitched at a level very considerably above that of the labouring laity, which constitutes the great bulk of congregations, even the better ministers of a Church need not expect to escape _fine-bodyism_. And once infected with this fatal indisposition, they must be content to suffer, among other evils, the evil of being permitted to lay whatever claim to status they may choose, without challenge or contradiction. 'Oh yes,' it will be said, should they assert that their Church is the Church of the nation, and that it is they themselves, and not the ministers of the Establishment, who are on