Let us next mark how entirely the circumstances of the country have changed since the days of the First Book of Discipline. With the exception of the clergy, a few lay proprietors, and a sprinkling of the inhabitants of the larger towns, Scotland was altogether, in the earlier period, an uneducated nation. Even for more than a century after, there were landed gentlemen of the northern counties unable, as shown by old deeds, to sign their names. If the Church had not taken upon herself the education of the people in those ages, who else was there to teach them? Not one. Save for her exertions, the divine command, 'Search the Scriptures,' would have remained to at least nine-tenths of the nation a dead letter. But how entirely different the circumstances of Scotland in the present time! The country has its lapsed masses,--men in very much the circumstances, educationally, of the great bulk of the population in the age of Knox; and we at once grant that, unless the Churches of the country deal with these as Knox dealt with the whole, there is but little chance of their ever being restored to society or the humanizing influences of religion, let Government make for them what provision it may.{18} But such is not the condition of the membership of at least the evangelical Churches. Such is palpably not the condition of the membership of the Free Church, consisting as it does of parents taken solemnly bound, in their baptismal engagements, to bring up their children in the 'nurture and admonition of the Lord,' and of the children for whom they have been thus taken bound. Save in a few exceptional cases, _their_ education is secure, let the Church exert herself as little as she may. She is but exhausting herself in vain efforts to do what would be done better without her. She has all along contemplated, we are told, merely the education of her own members; and these form exactly that portion of the people which--unless, indeed, the solemn engagements which she has deliberately laid upon them mean as little as excise affidavits or Bow Street oaths--may be safely left to a broad national scheme, wisely based on a principle of parental responsibility.