y principle. If the other
workmen were reckoned, statistically at least, adherents of the
Establishment, it was not because they either benefited by it or cared
for it, but only somewhat in the way that, according to the popular
English belief, persons born at sea are held to belong to the parish of
Stepney. Further, I did not in the least like the sort of company into
which the Voluntary controversy had introduced the good men on both
sides; it gave a common cause to the Voluntary and the Infidel, and drew
them cordially together; and, on the other hand, placed side by side, on
terms portentously friendly, the pious asserter of endowments and the
irreligious old Tory. There was religion on both sides of the
controversy, but a religious controversy it was not.

The position of my grandmother's family, including of course Uncles
James and Sandy, was a sort of midway one between the Secession and the
Establishment. My grandmother had quitted the family of Donald Roy long
ere he had been compelled, very unwillingly, to leave the Church; and as
no forced settlements had taken place in the parish into which she had
removed, and as its ministers had been all men of the right stamp, she
had done what Donald himself had been so desirous to do--remained an
attached member of the Establishment. One of her sisters had, however,
married in Nigg; and she and her husband, following Donald into the
ranks of the Secession, had reared one of their boys to the ministry,
who became, in course of time, the respected minister of the
congregation which his great-grandfather had founded. And, as the
contemporary and first cousin of my uncles, the minister used to call
upon them every time he came to town; and my uncle James, in turn (Uncle
Sandy very rarely went to the country), never missed, when in Nigg or
its neighbourhood, to repay his visits. There was thus a good deal of
intercourse kept up between the families, not without effect. Most of
the books of modern theology which my uncles read were Secession books,
recommended by their cousin; and the religious magazine for which they
subscribed was a Secession magazine. The latter bore, I remember, the
name of the "Christian Magazine, or Evangelical Repository." It was not
one of the brightest of periodicals, but a sound and solid one, with, as
my uncles held, a good deal of the old unction about it; and there was,
in especial, one of the contributors whose papers they used to pick out
as o