to me, and forgive me for all wherein I
have failed you." And they did not meet again till that
never-to-be-forgotten sederunt of the Free Kirk Presbytery of Muirtown,
when the minister of Kilbogie accused the minister of Drumtochty of
teaching the Linlathen heresy of the Fatherhood of God in a sermon
before the Sacrament.

Among all the institutions of the North a Presbytery is the most
characteristic, and affords a standing illustration of the
contradictions of a supremely logical people. It is so anti-clerical a
court that for every clergyman there must be a layman--country
ministers promising to bring in their elder for great occasions, and
instructing him audibly how to vote--and so fiercely clerical that if
the most pious and intelligent elder dared to administer a sacrament he
would be at once tried and censured for sacrilege. So careful is a
Presbytery to prevent the beginnings of Papacy that it insists upon
each of its members occupying the chair in turn, and dismisses him
again into private life as soon as he has mastered his duties, but so
imbued is it with the idea of authority that whatever decision may be
given by some lad of twenty-five in the chair--duly instructed,
however, by the clerk below--will be rigidly obeyed. When a Presbytery
has nothing else to do, it dearly loves to pass a general condemnation
on sacerdotalism, in which the tyranny of prelates and the foolishness
of vestments will be fully exposed; but a Presbytery wields a power at
which a bishop's hair would stand on end, and Doctor Dowbiggin once
made Carmichael leave the Communion Table and go into the vestry to put
on his bands.

When a Presbytery is in its lighter moods, it gives itself to points of
order with a skill and relish beyond the Southern imagination. It did
not matter how harmless, even infantile, might be the proposal placed
before the court by such a man as MacWheep of Pitscowrie; he has hardly
got past an apology for his presumption in venturing to speak at all
before a member of Presbytery--who had reduced his congregation to an
irreducible minimum by the woodenness of his preaching--inquires
whether the speech of "our esteemed brother is not _ultra vires_," or
something else as awful. MacWheep at once sits down with the air of
one taken red-handed in arson, and the court debates the point till
every authority has taken his fill, when the clerk submits to the
moderator, with a fine blend of deference and infallibi