For a few seconds the true Mr. Clark seemed as if struck dumb by the intelligence. 'Ah! fast anchored!' he at length ejaculated. 'Fairly tethered to the Establishment by a stake of fifteen hundred pounds. Demas, happy man, had a silver mine to draw him aside--a positive silver mine. The West Church is merely a negative one. Were it to get into the hands of the Moderates, it would become waterlogged to a certainty, and not a single ounce of the precious metal would ever be fished out of it; whereas you think there is still some little chance of recovery when you remain to ply the pump yourself. Most disinterested man!--let your statement of the case be but fairly printed, and it will serve you not only as an apology, but as an advertisement to boot.' 'Printed!' said the conjurer; 'I have already printed it in English, and Mr. M'Donald the schoolmaster is translating it into Gaelic.' But we have far exceeded our limits, and have yet given scarce a tithe of the controversy. We found ourselves sitting all alone in front of our own quiet fire long ere it was half completed; and we recommend such of our readers as are desirous to see the rest of it in the originals, to possess themselves of the Rev. Mr. Clark's _Sermon_, and the Rev. Mr. Clark's _Dialogues_. They form, when bound up together, one of the extremest, and at the same time one of the most tangible, specimens of inconsistency and self-contradiction that controversy has yet exhibited; and enable us to anticipate the character and standing of the evangelic minority in the Erastian Church. 'If the salt has lost its savour, wherewithal shall it be salted?' _April 12, 1843._ PULPIT DUTIES NOT SECONDARY. There are two antagonist perils to which all evangelical Churches, whether established or unendowed, are exposed in an age in which men's minds are so stirred by the fluctuations of opinion, that though there may not be much progress, there is at least much motion. They lie open, on the one hand, to the danger of getting afloat on the tide of innovation, and so drifting from the fixed position in which Churches, as exponents of the mind of Christ, possess an authoritative voice, into the giddy vortices of some revolving eddy of speculation, in which they can at best assume but the character of mere advocates of untried experiment; or, on the other hand, they are liable to fall into the opposite mistake of obstinately resisting all change--however excellent in itself, and however much a consequence of the onward march of the species--and this not from any direct regard to those divine laws, of which one jot or tittle cannot pass away, but simply out of respect to certain peculiar views and opinions entertained by their ancestors in ages considerably less wise than the times which have succeeded them.