of reformers, confessors, martyrs, and ministers of the
truth, from the days of Melville and of Henderson, down to those of
the Erskines and of Chalmers. He would at least not fail to ask himself
whether that to which what was so unequivocally _substance_ was to be
sacrificed, was in itself _substance_ or _shadow_.

Let us next remark, that the Scottish national schools, while they
thus could not fail to be essentially sound on the territorial
scheme--just because Scotland is itself essentially sound as a
nation--might, and would in very many instances, be essentially
unsound on a denominational one. There is no form of religious error
which may not, in the present state of things, have, as we have said,
its schools supported in part by a Government grant, and which may not
have its pupil-teachers trained up to disseminate deadly error at the
public expense among the youthhead of the future. Edinburgh, for
instance, has its one Popish street--the Cowgate; but it has no Popish
parish: it has got very little Popery in George Square and its
neighbourhood,--very little at the Bristo Port,--very little in
Broughton Street; and yet in all these localities, territorially
Protestant, Papists have got their religion-teaching schools, in which
pupil-teachers, paid by the State, are in the course of being duly
qualified for carrying on the work of perversion and proselytism. St.
Patrick's school, in which, as our readers were so lately shown, boys
may spend four years without acquiring even the simple accomplishment
of reading, has no fewer than five of these embryo perverters
supported by the Government. Puseyism has, in the same way, no
territorial standing on the northern shores of the Frith of Forth; and
yet at least one Free Church minister, located in one of the towns
which stud that coast, could tell of a well-equipped Puseyite school
in his immediate neighbourhood, supported in part by the Government
grant, that, by the superiority of the secular education which it
supplies, is drawing away Presbyterian, nay, even Free Church
children, from the other schools of the locality. On the territorial
principle, we repeat, schools such as these, which rest on the
denominational basis alone, could not possibly receive the support and
countenance of the Legislature. And let the reader remark, that should
the Free Church succeed in getting rid of the anomalous religious
certificate, and yet continue to hold by the denominational bas