locking their machinery into cohesion. For vainly would they have sought
to defeat the patron's right of presenting, unless through this sudden
pause and interdict imposed upon the _latter_ acts in the process of
induction, under the pretext that these were acts competent only to a
spiritual jurisdiction. This plea, by its tendency, rounded and secured
all that they had yet advanced in the way of claim. But, at the same tine,
though indispensable negatively, positively it stretched so much further
than any necessity or interest inherent in their present innovations, that
not improbably they faltered and shrank back at first from the
immeasurable field of consequences upon which it opened. Thy would
willingly have accepted less. But, unfortunately, it sometimes happens,
that, to gain as much as is needful in one direction, you must take a
great deal more than you wish for in another. Any principle, which _could_
carry them over the immediate difficulty, would, by mere necessity, carry
them incalculably beyond it. For if every act bearing in any one direction
a spiritual aspect, showing at any angle a relation to spiritual things,
is therefore to be held spiritual in a sense excluding the interference of
the civil power, there falls to the ground at once the whole fabric of
civil authority in any independent form. Accordingly, we are satisfied
that the claim to a spiritual jurisdiction, in collision with the claims
of the state, would not probably have offered itself to the ambition of
the agitators, otherwise than as a measure ancillary to their earlier
pretension of appointing virtually all parish clergymen. The one claim was
found to be the integration or _sine qua non_ complement of the other. In
order to sustain the power of appointment in their own courts, it was
necessary that they should defeat the patron's power; and, in order to
defeat the patron's power, ranging itself (as sooner or later it would)
under the law of the Land, it was necessary that they should decline that
struggle, by attempting to take the question out of all secular
jurisdictions whatever.

In this way grew up that twofold revolution which has been convulsing the
Scottish church since 1834; first, the audacious attempt to disturb the
settled mode of appointing the parish clergy, through a silent robbery
perpetrated on the crown and great landed aristocracy, secondly, and in
prosecution of that primary purpose, the far more frantic attempt to r