loss of an
election, for the solemn deliverance of a Church of Christ. With
respect to his reported statement, to the effect that the _Witness_
'contained many articles which had done great harm to the Free
Church,' the report may, we think, be quite correct. The _Witness_
contained a good many articles on the special occasion when the Free
Churchmen of Edinburgh conspired--'ungratefully and dishonourably,' as
Mr. Maule must have deemed it--to eject a Whig Minister, and to place
in his seat, as their representative, a shrewd citizen and honest
man.

And these lucubrations accomplished, we daresay, their modicum of
harm. With regard, however, to the articles of the _Witness_ in
general, we think we can confidently appeal in their behalf to such
of our readers as perused them, not as they were garbled, misquoted,
interpolated, and mis-represented by unscrupulous enemies, but as
they were first given to the public from the pen of the Editor. Among
these readers we reckon men of all classes, from the peer to the
peasant--Conservative landowners, magistrates, merchants, ministers of
the gospel. Dr. Chalmers was a reader of the _Witness_ from its
first commencement to his death; and he, perusing its editorial
articles as they were originally written--not as they were garbled or
interpolated in other prints--saw in them very little to blame.

Not but that some of our sentences look sufficiently formidable in
extracts when twisted from their original meaning; and this, just as
the Decalogue itself might be instanced as a code of licentiousness,
violence, and immorality, were it to be exhibited in garbled
quotations, divested of all the _nots_. In the _Edinburgh Advertiser_
of yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:--'It [_The
Witness_] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French
Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the
"bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets
of Paris." It has reminded them of the time when a "grey discrowned
head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;" insinuating that,
if they persisted in opposing the claims of the Free Church, a like
fate might overtake the reigning dynasty of our time.'

When, asks the reader, did these most atrocious threats appear in the
_Witness_?

They never, we reply, appeared in the _Witness_ as threats at all. The
one passage, almost in the language of Chateaubriand, was employed in
an arti