irtuous companion of the great, and a generous consolation to all
the sickness and poverty around him." These, Moderator, appear to me
to be the terms peculiarly descriptive of the appropriate character
of a clergyman, and they serve to mark the place which he ought to
occupy; but take away the importance and leave only the worth, and
what do you make of him? What is the descriptive term applied to him
now? Precisely the term which I often find applied to many of my
brethren, and which galls me to the very bone every moment I hear
it--"_a fine body_"--a being whom you may like, but whom I defy
you to esteem--a mere object of endearment--a being whom the great
may at times honour with the condescension of a dinner, but whom
they will never admit as a respectable addition to their society. Now,
all that I demand from the Court of Teinds is to be raised, and that
as speedily as possible, above the imputation of being "_a fine
body_;" that they would add importance to my worth, and give
splendour and efficacy to those exertions which have for their object
the most exalted interests of the species.'

The Free Church has for ever closed her connection with the Court of
Teinds; but her danger from _fine-bodyism_ is in consequence all
the greater, not the less. The Sustentation Fund is her Court of
Teinds now; and it is to it that she has in the first instance to
look for protection from the all-potent but insidious and vastly
under-estimated evil under which no Church ever throve. The outed
ministers are comparatively safe. Unless prudence be altogether
wanting, and the wolf comes to the door, not, as in the child's
story-book, in the disguise of a soft-voiced girl, but in that of a
gruff sheriff's officer, they will continue to bear through life the
old status of the Establishment, heightened by the _eclat_ of the
Disruption. But our younger men of subsequent appointment stand
on no such platform, nor will any of their contemporaries or
successors step upon it as a matter of course when the heroes of the
conflict have dropped away, and they come to occupy their vacant
places. Their status will be found to depend on two circumstances,
neither of them derived from the men of a former time--on their
ability to maintain a respectable place among the middle classes, and
on their scholastic acquirements and general manners. A half-paid,
half-taught, half-bred minister of religion may be a very excellent
man; we have seen such, bot