on the eve of her disestablishment, after many an
intervening metamorphosis, exactly, in character and lineament, the
Church which had been established by the State nearly three centuries
before. She went out as she had come in. There was a peculiar
sobriety, too, in all her actings. Her sufferings and sacrifices
were direct consequents of the invasion of her province by the civil
magistrate.

But she did not on that account cease to recognise the magistrate in
his own proper walk as the minister of God.

Her aggrieved members never once forgot that they were Scotchmen and
Britons as certainly as Presbyterians, and that they had a country as
certainly as a Church to which they owed service, and which it was
unequivocally their duty to defend.

They retreated from the Establishment, and gave up all its advantages
when the post had become so untenable that these could be no longer
retained with honour--or we should perhaps rather say, retained
compatibly with right principle; but they did not in wholesale
desperation give up other posts which could still be conscientiously
maintained.

The educational establishment of the country, for instance, was not
abandoned, though the ecclesiastical one was.

The Principal of the United College of Saint Salvador and Saint
Leonard's signed the Deed of Demission in his capacity as an elder of
the Church, but in his capacity of Principal he returned to his
College, and in that post fought what was virtually the battle of his
country, and fought it so bravely and well that he is Principal of the
College still. And the parish schoolmasters who adhered to the Free
Church fought an exactly similar battle, though unfortunately with a
less happy issue; but that issue gives at least prominence to the fact
that they did not resign their charges, but were thrust from them.
The other functionaries of the Assembly, uninfluenced by any wild
Cameronian notion, held by their various secular offices, civil and
military. Soldiers retained their commissions--magistrates their seats
on the bench--members of Parliament their representative status. Nor
did a single member of the Protesting Church possessed of the
franchise resign, in consequence of the Disruption, a single political
right or privilege. The entire transaction bore, we repeat, the stamp
of perfect sobriety. It was in all its details the act of men in their
right minds.

Now the principles held by the Church at the Disruption, and no