th and great zeal, who are
already building their schools, in the hope of unprotestantizing their
poor lapsed country, spiritually ruined by the Reformation. The
liberality that might in part enable the Free Church Education
Committee to discharge its obligations at the rate of twenty shillings
per pound, would be a wonderful godsend to them; seeing that they
would have little else to do, under a scheme so liberal, than simply
to erect schoolhouses on the widespread domains of their husbands or
fathers, and immediately commence perverting the children of the
nation at the national cost. It would be no less advantageous to the
Society of the Propaganda, and would enable it to spare its own
purse, by opening to it that of the people. The Socinian, the
Combeite, the semi-Socialist--none of them very much disposed to
liberality themselves--would all share in that of the Government; and
their zeal, no longer tied down to inactivity by the dread of
pecuniary sacrifice or obligation, would find wings and come abroad.
Surely, with such consequences in prospect, our Free Church readers
would do well to ponder the nature and demands of the crisis at which
they have now arrived. Our country and our Church have in reality but
one set of interests; and a man cannot be a bad Scot without being a
bad Free Churchman too. Let them decide in this matter, not under the
guidance of an oblique eye, squinted on little temporary difficulties
or hypothetical denominational advantages, but influenced by
considerations of the permanent welfare of their country, and of their
abiding obligations to their God.

But why, it may be asked of the writer, if you be thus sensible of
the immense superiority of a territorial scheme of educational
endowments over a denominational scheme of educational grants,--why
did you yourself urge, some three years ago, that the Free Church
should avail herself of these very grants? Our reply is sufficiently
simple. The denominational scheme of grants was the only scheme
before us at the time; these grants were, we saw, in danger of being
rejected by the Free Church on what we deemed an unsound and
perilous principle, which was in itself in no degree Free Church;
and last, not least, we saw further, that if the Church did not
avail herself of these grants, there awaited on her Educational
Scheme--ominously devoid of that direct divine mandate which all her
other schemes possessed--inevitable and disastrous bankruptcy.