to the great clock of destiny, as it strikes the hours of doom to their distracted and sinking country. O for an hour of the great, the noble-minded Chalmers! Ultimately, however, the good cause is secure. It is a cause worth struggling and suffering for. We know a little boy, not yet much of a reader, who has learned to bring a copy of Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_, which now opens of itself at the battle of Bannockburn, to a little girl, his sister, somewhat more in advance, that she may read to him, for the hundredth time, of Wallace and the Black Douglas, and how the good King Robert struck down Sir Henry Bohun with a single blow, full in the sight of both armies. And after drinking in the narrative, he tells that, when grown to be a big man, he too is to be a soldier like Robert the Bruce, and to 'fight in the battle of Scotland.' And then he asks his father when the battle of Scotland is to begin! Laymen of the Free Church, the battle of Scotland has already begun; and 'tis a battle better worth fighting than any other which has arisen within the political arena since the times of the Reform Bill. Your country has still claims upon you: the Disruption may have dissolved the tie which bound you to party; but that which binds you to Scotland still remains entire. The parental right is not dissolved by any traditionary requirements of the altar; nor can we urge with impunity to our country,--'It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me.' ----- {16} There are about one thousand one hundred parish schoolmasters in Scotland: of these, not more than eighty (strictly, we believe, seventy-seven) adhered to the Free Church at the Disruption.