h in England and our own country, among
the non-Presbyterian Dissenters who laboured to do well, and were
exceedingly in earnest; but no such type of minister will ever be
found influential in Scotland, either in extending the limits of a
Church, or in benefiting the more intelligent classes of the
people. And the two circumstances of acquirement and remuneration
will be found indissolubly connected. A Church of under-paid
ministers, however fairly it may start, will, in the lapse of a
generation, become a Church of under-taught and under-bred ministers
also. Nor is there any chance that the evil, once begun, will ever
cure itself, for the under-bred and the under-taught will be sure
to continue the under-paid. That animating spirit of a Church,
without which wealth and learning avail but little, money now, as
of old, cannot buy; but the secular will be ever found to depend on
the secular,--the general rate of secular acquirement on the
general rate of secular remuneration; and unless both be pitched
at a level very considerably above that of the labouring laity,
which constitutes the great bulk of congregations, even the better
ministers of a Church need not expect to escape _fine-bodyism_. And
once infected with this fatal indisposition, they must be content to
suffer, among other evils, the evil of being permitted to lay
whatever claim to status they may choose, without challenge or
contradiction. 'Oh yes,' it will be said, should they assert that
their Church is the Church of the nation, and that it is they
themselves, and not the ministers of the Establishment, who are on
the true constitutional ground,--'Oh yes, Church of the nation, or, if
ye will, Church of the whole world, or, in short, anything you please;
for you are _fine bodies_.' Chalmers exercised all his sagacity
when he demanded of the Court of Teinds 'to be raised, and that as
speedily as possible, above the imputation of being a _fine body_.'
And what Chalmers demanded of the Court of Teinds, every minister of
the Free Church ought to ask of the Sustentation Fund.

But how is the demand to be effectually made? It is well known to
statesmen, who, when they once get a tax imposed by Parliament, can
employ all the machinery of the police and the standing army--of
fines, confiscations, and prisons--in exacting it, that yet,
notwithstanding, in the arithmetic of finance two and two do not
always make four. There are certain pre-existing laws to be
studie