nd houses
which the old philosophers had frequented or inhabited, and recollect
the reverence which every nation, civil and barbarous, has paid to the
ground where merit has been buried, I am afraid to declare against the
general voice of mankind, and am inclined to believe that this regard
which we involuntarily pay to the meanest relique of a man great and
illustrious, is intended as an incitement to labour, and an
encouragement to expect the same renown if it be sought by the same
virtues.' We find nearly the same sentiment eloquently expounded in
the Doctor's famous passage on Iona. But there exists a grand
distinction between natural feelings proper in their own place, and
natural feelings permitted to enter the religious field, and vitiate
the integrity of revelation. It is from the natural alone in such
cases that danger is to be apprehended; seeing that what is not
according to the mental constitution of man, is of necessity at once
unproductive and shortlived. Let due weight be given to the
associative feeling, in its proper sphere,--let it dispose us to
invest with a quiet decency our places of worship,--let us, at all
events, not convert them into secular counting-rooms or twopenny
show-boxes; but let us also remember that natural association is not
divine truth--that there attaches no holiness to slated roofs or stone
walls--that under the New Testament dispensation men do not worship in
temples, which, like the altar of old, sanctified the gift, but in
mere places of shelter, that confer no sacredness on their services;
and that the 'hour has come, and now is, when they that worship the
Father must worship Him in spirit and in truth.'

_April 15, 1846._

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{1} See _First Impressions of England and its People_, ch.
II.--ED.

THE LATE REV. ALEXANDER STEWART.

Our last conveyed to our readers the mournful intelligence of the
illness and death of the Rev. Alexander Stewart of Cromarty,--a man
less known, perhaps, than any other of nearly equal calibre, or of a
resembling exquisitiveness of mental faculty, which his country has
ever produced, but whose sudden removal has, we find, created an
impression far beyond the circle of even his occasional hearers, that
the spirit which has passed away was one of the high cast which nature
rarely produces, and that the consequent blank created in the existing
phalanx of intellect is one which cannot be filled up. Comparatively
little as the dece