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ible in some quarters to desert the good old mother church and adopt a form of worship with the double recommendation of ceremonial show and fashionable connections, the heart of the nation is now as stanch in its democratic form of church government as it was in the days when Robert Burns wrote:

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The solemn league and covenant

Cost Scotland blood, cost Scotland tears,
But it sealed Freedom's sacred cause;

If thou'rt a slave indulge thy sneers!"

Of which loyalty to the good old cause a striking proof was given a year or two ago, when a tablet was put up in the old cathedral of St. Giles, in Edinburgh, in memory of the outburst of pious patriotism in the month of July, 1637, which took the shape of a four-legged stool thrown at the head of the intrusive dean by a stout Presbyterian dame, known in local tradition as "Jenny Geddes ;" and what renders this recognition of the national revolt against state-made religion more important is the fact that the inscription on the tablet was made by the highest legal authority in Scotland, the right honorable the President of the Court of Session, John Inglis, son of the Rev. Dr. Inglis, the well-known leader of the Moderate party of the church in the early decades of the present century.

"Constant oral tradition affirms that near this spot a brave Scotchwoman, Janet Geddes, on the 23d July, 1637, struck the first blow in the great struggle for freedom of conscience, which, after a conflict of half a century, ended in the establishment of civil and religious liberty."

It ought to be mentioned at the same time that, following on the track of the late Dr. Robert Lee, Dr. Cameron Lees, Professor Story, and other leading men in the Presbyterian Church, wisely conscious of the strong temptation in not a few minds to leave the church of their fathers from the seductions of a more rich æsthetical accompaniment, have set themselves to adopt as much of the mere external grace and decoration of the Episcopal service as might add a charm to the Presbyterian worship without infringing on the integrity of Presbyterian principles.

So much for the outward presentment of religion in Scotland at the present day. A more important matter is the change that

has come over the spirit of the people in reference both to theological doctrines and religious observances. Except in the districts of Inverness, Dingwall, and other remote Highland regions, the severe, or, as it was sarcastically termed, "bitter," observance of the Sabbath exists no longer. Not that we have in any wise rebounded into the other extreme of looseness and dissipation, but we have become ashamed of the pharisaic sourfacedness and rigid formalism which so often rendered a Scottish Sunday an ugly memory to native children, and a butt of ridicule to the intelligent stranger. We may now congratulate ourselves, in the matter of Sabbath.observance, that we have learned to be devout without being grim, and to be pleasant without being frivolous.

More important than the relaxation of the severe bonds of Sabbath observance is the greater breadth of view and the more quick sympathy with non-clerical humanity now everywhere making itself felt in our pulpit addresses. Doctrinal sermons, all grimly fenced round with the orthodox points of the Synod of Dort, are now never heard, unless it be exceptionally in some awful corner of the Free Church in the northwest Highlands; and Thomas Boston, once in the van-guard of Presbyterian theology, is now "respectable" only on the tombstone of Ettrick churchyard, where his bones lie. To men of large intellectual sympathies like Dr. Chalmers, grand human hilarity like Norman Macleod, and rich poetic faculty like Dr. Guthrie, Scotland is indebted for that marked change in the range and tone of her pulpit eloquence which was absolutely necessary to bring the church into harmony with the age. No theology can exercise any vital power over a people whose intellectual and moral atmosphere is pervaded by antagonistic tendencies; and the formal orthodoxy of the schools will beat the Sunday pulpit in vain, when all sorts of philosophical, scientific, and aesthetical heresies are ventilated on a hundred platforms on the other six days of the week. No doubt, the inculcators of religion in the parochial schools, and not a few sturdy D.D.'s, still adhere to the Shorter Catechism, and are willing to subscribe to every section of the Westminster Confession; but a skeleton of doctrines, however curiously jointed, loses all efficacy when not translated

into fact by the pulse of a living faith; and the rising young men of all the churches, even the Free Church, which is more conservative of hereditary narrowness, are daily refusing more and more to be bound by formulas which clog the movements they ought to spur and strangle the breath they were meant to inspire.

Closely connected with the ecclesiastical is the educational organization of the social fabric: two departments, indeed, which in every Christian country are bound to stand and to work together harmoniously, as heart and brain do in the human body. In this region we find that the Scotland of to-day, though she has done something to prove herself not unworthy of the grand intellectual inheritance which her people received from John Knox, has, on the whole, shown herself more ambitious to regulate the points in which she was strong than to build up those in which she was deficient. In other words, she has applied red tape, and a notable machinery of central superintendence and local inspection, compulsory attendance and measurable rewards, to her primary schools; while her weak point, the decay of her intermediate schools, with the consequent degradation of her university teaching, remains where it was. Here we see the leveling influences of a one-sided democratic temper, which, in its anxiety to provide elementary education for the meanest of the people, forgets to provide the higher intellectual equipment necessary for the educator. All higher culture demands a certain platform of dignified leisure, from which streams of invigorating thought may descend to the inferior strata of the community. To the want of this leisure, both in the scholastic and in the ecclesiastical organization of Scotland, must be attributed the lamentable fact that scholarship of a high order is more and more dying out of the country; even the clergy, who have a professional interest in the study of the learned languages, possessing generally only as much Greek as may enable them to make use of the original books of historical research and philological criticism produced in the rich laboratories of German thought and the clear wells of English scholarship. To compensate for this beggarly account of empty boxes in the domain of erudite research, the universities of Scotland have to

boast in later years some notable additions to their hereditary complement of academical chairs; though here also, when contrasted with Germany, except in the medical school of Edinburgh, the equipment is extremely meager, while the rigid routine of the curriculum of arts is a standing proof alike of the poverty of intellectual resources in the universities and the stagnation of intellectual life in the country.

A word now on politics. The London "Times" some years ago gave prominence to the marked difference between political sentiment in England and that which prevails north of the Tweed, by asking the question, Why is Scotland Liberal? The fact of Scottish Liberalism is certain, and the causes are not far to seek. In the first place, it is plain, as we have stated, that our whole ecclesiastical and scholastic machinery is democratic, and has been so continuously for three centuries. Church and school have been acting potently in impressing an essentially popular and democratic stamp on the Scottish mind; and the crop came as naturally from the seed sown as Highland honey from heather braes and Highland rivers from granite wells. A people who deem it a religious duty to interpret their own bibles, and hold for a divine right the election of their own clergy, and who, further, cannot look on an ecclesiastical assembly as rightly constituted unless the clerical is well seasoned with the lay element, can never be anything but democratic in its political action. But there were economic causes, also, of great force, acting along with church and school to stamp the normal Scot strongly with the impress of democracy. The kindly connection between landlord and tenant, which contributes so much to the toryism of the English counties, received a severe check in Scotland, first, from the enormous size of many of the properties, rendering intercourse between the tenant and the laird difficult or impossible, and substituting the harsh rule of a legal factor for the kindly tendance by a father of his people; then, again, the union of the two kingdoms in 1707, and the permanent fixation of public business in the capital of the south division of the empire, tended to reduce Scotland more and more to the condition of an outlying province of England, and to make the gentry less prominent as the sources of social life in

the district over which God had made them overseers, than as splendid adjuncts of court life and notable leaders of fashion in the English metropolis. After this came the extraordinary facilities for locomotion afforded in these latter times by steamboats, railways, and such like miraculous feeders of all great centers of social vitality. Considering all this, we see how the landholder, unless he was an exceptionally wise man, would become less and less intimately connected with the people from whom he drew his rents; nay, in some cases, would seem to have exchanged the kindly authority of the head of the clan for a vulgar mercantile traffic in the deer and grouse and salmon that peopled the gigantic sweep of his bens and the windings of his mighty mountain streams. All this substitution of mercantile-minded absenteeism for kindly personal care became in due season, as was to be expected, a hot-bed of popular discontent, soon to grow into political Liberalism. Simultaneously with this Liberalism of the discontented classes in the counties there rose in gigantic proportions the two great phenomena of modern life, the growth of large towns and the ferment of industrial individualism of which they are the nurses. From Glasgow to Hawick, Selkirk, Galashiels, and Tillicoultry, every manufacturing town in Scotland is the natural cradle of democratic sentiment and the systematic trainer of a race of men predetermined to look with a jealous eye on all institutions, corporations, or privileged bodies which have merely the authority of centuries or the prestige of hereditary respectability to recommend them.

In conclusion, I am sorry to state my conviction, founded on pretty large intercourse with my countrymen, that the spirit of national self-esteem, for which they have been noted, is suffering under a sensible decline. The causes of this lamentable process of self-obliteration have been already hinted at. The powerful central attraction of the huge metropolis to which by the Union we are attached; the Anglification of our nobility and upper ten thousand by the pomp of London residence and the glittering seductions of London life; the spread of Episcopacy among the same classes, not so much always from religious conviction as from the double bribe which it offers of aristocratic connection and æsthetical luxury; and, more than all, the neglect of her

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