burial, may serve to convince us that the
melancholy reflection of one of our later poets on this subject is by
no means a fanciful one:

'My heart has sighed in secret, when I thought
That the dark tide of time might one day close,
England, o'er thee, as long since it has closed
On Egypt and on Tyre,--that ages hence,
From the Pacific's billowy loneliness,
Whose tract thy daring search revealed, some isle
Might rise, in green-haired beauty eminent,
And like a goddess glittering from the deep,
Hereafter sway the sceptre of domain
From pole to pole; and such as now thou art,
Perhaps New Zealand be. For who can say
What the Omnipotent Eternal One,
That made the world, hath purposed?'

_June 16, 1847._

FINE-BODYISM.

Of all the dangers to which the Free Church is at present exposed, we
deem the danger of _fine-bodyism_ at once the least dreaded and the
most imminent. And the evil is in itself no light one: it marks,
better than any of the other _isms_--even the heresies themselves--the
sinking of a Church that is never to rise again. Churches have been
affected by dangerous heresies both of the hot and the cold kinds, and
have yet shaken them off and recovered. The Presbyterians of
Ireland, now so sound in their creed, were extensively affected,
little more than half a century ago, by Arian error and the
semi-infidelity of Socinus; and the Church that in 1843 had become
vigorous enough to dare the Disruption, recorded in the year 1796 its
vote against missions, and framed in the year 1798 its law against
church extension. But we know of no Church that ever recovered from
_fine-bodyism_ when the disease had once fairly settled into its
confirmed and chronic state. In at least this age and country it
exists as the atrophy of a cureless decline. It were well, however,
that we should say what it is we mean by _fine-bodyism_; and we
find we cannot do better than quote our definition from the first
speech ever delivered by Chalmers in the General Assembly. 'It is
quite ridiculous to say,' remarked this most sagacious of men,
'that the worth of the clergy will suffice to keep them up in the
estimation of society. This worth must be combined with importance.
Give both worth and importance to the same individual, and what
are the terms employed in describing him? "A distinguished member
of society, the ornament of a most respectable profession, the
v