lmost all the surrounding
parishes--in Resolis, Rosskeen, Urquhart under the late Dr.
M'Donald, Alness, Kiltearn, Kincardine, Kilmuir, etc. etc. etc.--in
similar cases similar results would follow; and if there are
preachers in that vast northern or north-western tract--which, with
the three northern counties, includes also almost the entire
Highlands--in which such results would _not_ follow, it would be
found that in most cases the fault lay rather with the ordained
suits of black, topped by the white neckcloths, than with the
people whom they failed to influence.

As for the religion or the religious teaching of the schools, we
hold it to be one of the advantages of the proposed scheme, that it
would really stir up both ministers and people to think seriously of
the matter, and to secure for the country truly religious teaching,
so far as it was found to be at once practicable and good. Previous to
the year 1843, when the parish schools lay fully within our power,
there was really nothing done to introduce religious teaching into
_them_; we had it all secure on written sheepskin, that their
teaching should and might be religious, for we had them all fast
bound to the Establishment; and, as if that were enough of itself,
ministers, backed by heritors and their factors, went on filling
these parish schools with men who stood the test of the Disruption
worse, in the proportion of at least five to one, than any other class
in the country, and who, if their religious teaching had but taken
effect on the people by bringing them to their own level, would have
rendered that Disruption wholly an impossibility.{16} And then, when
that great event occurred, we flung ourselves into an opposite
extreme,--eulogized our Educational Scheme as the best and most
important of all the Schemes of our Church, on, we suppose, the
principle so well understood by the old divines, that whereas the
other schemes were of God, and God-enjoined, this scheme was of
ourselves,--introduced, further, the design of '_inducting_' our
teachers, as if an idle ceremony could be any substitute for the
indispensable commission signed by the Sovereign, and could make the
non-commissioned by Him at least _half_ ecclesiastics.{17} And then,
after _teaching_ our schoolmasters to _teach_ religion, we sent
them abroad in shoals--some of them, no doubt, converted men, hundreds
of them unconverted, and religious but by certificate--to make the
children of the Fre