e would find out reasons,
semi-theological at least, for all her positions, however hopeless,
and would continue fixed in these long after the battle had been
fought and lost, and when she ought to be engaged in retrieving her
disasters on other ground, and in a fresh and more promising quarrel.
But if the Free Church does enter into this battle, let her in the
meantime not forget, that after it has been fought, and at least
_possibly_ lost, another battle may have still to be begun; nor let
her attempt damaging, by doubtful theology, the position which a
preponderating majority of her own office-bearers and members may have
yet to take up. For, ultimately at least, the damage would be all
her own. Let her remark further, that should her people set their
hearts pretty strongly on those national seminaries, which in many
parts of the country would become, if opened up, wholly their own _de
facto_, and which are already their own _de jure_, they might not be
quite able to feel the cogency of the argument that, while it left
Socinians and Papists in the enjoyment of at once very liberal and very
flexible Government grants, challenged _their_ right to choose, on
their own responsibility, State-paid teachers for their children; and
which virtually assured them, that if they did not contribute largely
to the educational scheme of their own Church, she would be wholly
unable to maintain it as a sort of mid-impediment between them and
their just rights, the parish schools. They would be exceedingly apt,
too, to translate any very determined and general preference manifested
by our church courts for the scheme of educational grants, into some
such enunciation as the following:--'Give us to ourselves but a
moiety of one-third of the Scottish young, and we will frankly give up
the other two-thirds,--the one-half of them to be destroyed by gross
ignorance, and the other half by deadly error.'{11}

There is at least one point on which we think all Free Churchmen ought
to agree. It is necessary that the truth should be known respecting
the educational condition and resources of Scotland. It will, we
understand, be moved to-day [February 27th], in the Free Church
Presbytery of Edinburgh, as a thing good and desirable, that Government
should 'institute an inquiry into the educational destitution
confessedly existing in large towns, populous neighbourhoods, and
remote districts, with a view to the marking out of places where
elementary