er, lasted quite long enough to lead
curious minds to inquire how or on what principle a body so divided as
the Established Church could possibly have either vehicle or organ.

If the organ, it was said, adequately represent Dr. Muir, it cannot
fail very grievously to misrepresent Dr. Bryce; and if the vehicle
be adapted to give public airings to the thoughts and opinions of
the bluff old Moderates, those of Dr. Leishman and the Forty must
travel out into the wind and the sunlight by an opposition conveyance.
One organ or one vehicle will be no more competent to serve a
deliberative ecclesiastical body, diverse in its components, than one
organ or vehicle will be able to serve a deliberative political body
broken into factions. Single parties, as such--whether secular or
ecclesiastical--may have their single organ apiece; but it seems as
little possible that a Presbyterian General Assembly should have only
one organ representative of the whole, as that a _House of Lords_ or a
_House of Commons_ should have one organ representative of the
whole. An organ of the Establishment in its present state of
disunion, if at all adequately representative, could not fail to
resemble Montgomery's strange personification of war: 'A deformed
genius, with two heads, which, unlike those of Janus, were placed
front to front; innumerable arms, branching out all around his
shoulders, sides, and chest; and with thighs and legs as multitudinous
as his arms. His twin faces,' continues the poet, 'were frightfully
distorted: they glared, they grinned, they spat, they railed, and
hissed, and roared; they gnashed their teeth, and bit, and butted with
their foreheads at each other; his arms, wielding swords and spears,
were fighting pell-mell together; his legs, in like manner, were
indefatigably at variance, striding contrary ways, and trampling on
each other's toes, or kicking each other's shins, as if by mutual
consent.' Such would be the true representative of an organ that
adequately represented the Establishment.

We are led into this vein on the present occasion by a recent
discussion in high quarters on the organship of the Free Church,--a
Presbyterian body, be it remarked, as purely deliberative in its
courts as the Parliament of the country, and at least sufficiently
affected by the spirit of the age to include within its pale a
considerable diversity of opinion. It is as impossible, from this
cause alone, that the Free Church should be