angement
can be obviated by the votes of Synods or Assemblies? or that,
with an intelligent laity to judge in the matter, the 'end of
this order' can be other than unhappy? The schools of the Free
Church have already, it is said, done much good. We would, we
reply, be without excuse, in taking up our present position--a
position in which we have painfully to differ from so many of the
friends in whose behalf for the last ten years we deemed it at
once a privilege and an honour to contend--did we believe that
more than six hundred Protestant schools _could_ exist in
Scotland without doing _much_ good. Of nothing, however, are
we more convinced, than that the good which they have done has
been accomplished by them in their character as _schools_, not in
their character as _denominational_. We know a little regarding
this matter; for in our journeyings of many thousand miles over
Scotland, especially in the Highlands and the northern counties,
we have made some use of both our eyes and ears. We have seen,
and sickened to see, hordes of schoolboys of ten and twelve years
bandying as nicknames, with boys whose parents belonged to the
Establishment, the terms of polemic controversy. 'Moderate'
has become in juvenile mouths as much a term of hatred and
reproach in extensive districts of our country, as we remember
'Frenchman' used to be during the great revolutionary war. Our
children bid fair to get, in their state of denominational
separatism, at least religion enough heartily to hate their
neighbours; and, we are afraid, not much more. Now, it may be
thought that the Editor of the _Witness_, himself long engaged
in semi-theological warfare, ought to be silent in a matter of
this kind. Be it remembered, we reply, that it was _men_, not
children, whom the Editor of the _Witness_ made it his business
to address; and that when, in what he deemed a good cause, he
appealed to the understandings of his adult country-folk, he
besought them in every instance to test and examine ere they
judged and decided. He did not contemplate a phase of the
controversy in which unthinking children should come from
their schools to contend with other children, in the spirit
of those little ones of Bethel who 'came forth out of their
city' to mock and to jeer; or tha