on me at this period. My cousin and some of his elders were
mourning--very sincerely, I cannot doubt--over the decay of religion
among them: they were falling far short, they said, of the attainments
of their fathers; there were no Donald Roys among them now; and yet they
felt it to be a satisfaction, though a sad one, that the little religion
which there was in the district seemed to be all among themselves. And
now here was there exactly the same sort of conviction, equally strong,
on the other side. But with all that liberally-expressed charity which
forms one of the distinctive features of the present time, and is in
reality one of its best things, there is still a vast amount of
appreciation of this partial kind. Friends are seen in the Christian
aspect; opponents in the polemic one; and it is too often forgotten that
the friends have a polemic aspect to their opponents, and the opponents
a Christian aspect to their friends. And not only in the present, but at
all former periods, the case seems to have been the same. I am sometimes
half disposed to think, that either the Prophet Elijah, or the seven
thousand honest men who had not bowed the knee to Baal, must have been
dissenters. Had the Prophet been entirely at one in his views with the
seven thousand, it is not easy to conceive how he could have been wholly
ignorant of their existence.

With all these latitudinarian convictions, however, I was thoroughly an
Establishment man. The revenues of the Scottish Church I regarded, as I
have said, as the patrimony of the Scottish people; and I looked forward
to a time when that unwarrantable appropriation of them, through which
the aristocracy had sought to extend its influence, but which had served
only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come to an end.
What I specially wanted, in short, was, not the confiscation of the
people's patrimony, but simply its restoration from the Moderates and
the lairds. And in the enactment of the Veto law I saw the process of
restoration fairly begun. I would have much preferred seeing a good
broad anti-patronage agitation raised on the part of the Church. As
shrewdly shown at the time by the late Dr. M'Crie, such a course would
have been at once wiser and safer. But for such an agitation even the
Church's better ministers were not in the least prepared. From 1712 to
1784--a period of seventy-two years--the General Assembly had yearly
raised its voice against the enactment o