They retreated from the Establishment, and gave up all its advantages when the post had become so untenable that these could be no longer retained with honour--or we should perhaps rather say, retained compatibly with right principle; but they did not in wholesale desperation give up other posts which could still be conscientiously maintained. The educational establishment of the country, for instance, was not abandoned, though the ecclesiastical one was. The Principal of the United College of Saint Salvador and Saint Leonard's signed the Deed of Demission in his capacity as an elder of the Church, but in his capacity of Principal he returned to his College, and in that post fought what was virtually the battle of his country, and fought it so bravely and well that he is Principal of the College still. And the parish schoolmasters who adhered to the Free Church fought an exactly similar battle, though unfortunately with a less happy issue; but that issue gives at least prominence to the fact that they did not resign their charges, but were thrust from them. The other functionaries of the Assembly, uninfluenced by any wild Cameronian notion, held by their various secular offices, civil and military. Soldiers retained their commissions--magistrates their seats on the bench--members of Parliament their representative status. Nor did a single member of the Protesting Church possessed of the franchise resign, in consequence of the Disruption, a single political right or privilege. The entire transaction bore, we repeat, the stamp of perfect sobriety. It was in all its details the act of men in their right minds. Now the principles held by the Church at the Disruption, and none other, whether Voluntary or Cameronian, are the principles of the Free Church. A powerful majority in a Presbyterian body, or in a country possessed of a representative government, are vested in at least the _power_ of making whatever laws they will to make, for not only themselves, but for the minority also. But _power_ is not _right_; and we would at once question the _right_ of even a preponderating majority in a Church such as ours to introduce new principles into her framework, and to impose them on the minority. We question, on this principle, the _right_ of that act of discipline which was exercised in the present century by a preponderating majority of the Antiburgher body in Scotland, when they deposed and excommunicated the late Dr. M'Crie for the ecclesiastical offence of holding in every particular by the original tenets of the fathers of the Secession.