to reason metaphysically regarding _his_
degree of responsibility for either what the devil got, or what the
Government gave the devil. Not he. He received God's part, and in
applying it wisely and honestly to God's service, wished it more; but
as for the rest, like a man of broad strong sense as he assuredly was,
he left the devil and the Privy Council to divide the responsibility
between them. And the large-minded Chalmers entertained exactly the
same views,--views which, if not in thorough harmony with the idle
fictions which dialecticians employ when they treat of Governments, at
least entirely accord with the real condition of things. The official
character of a representative Legislature must, as we have shown,
resemble that of the constituency which it represents. In order to
alter it permanently for the better, it is essentially necessary, as a
first step in the process, that the worse parts of the constituencies
on which it rests be so altered.

Now, for altering constituencies for the better, schools and churches
were the machinery of Knox and of Chalmers; and if the funds for the
support of either came honestly to them, unclogged with conditions
unworthy of the object, they at once received them as given on God's
behalf, however idolatrously the givers--whether individuals or
Governments--might be employing money drawn from the same purse in
other directions. 'Ought I,' said Chalmers in reference to the
Educational question, 'ought I not to use, on teetotal principles, the
water of the public pump, because another man mixes it with his
toddy?' It was not because Popery was established in the colonies, or
seemed in danger of being established in Ireland, that the Free Church
resigned its hold of the temporalities of the Scottish Establishment.
Such endowment, instead of forming an argument for resignation, would
form, on the contrary, an argument for keeping faster hold, in behalf
of Protestantism, of the fortalice of the Establishment; just as if an
invading army had possessed itself of the Castle of Dumbarton, with
the strongholds of Fort-Augustus and Fort-William, the argument would
be all the stronger for the national forces defending with renewed
determination the Castles of Stirling and of Edinburgh, and the
magnificent defences of Fort-George.

_February 9, 1848._

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CRIMEAN WAR.

The war now happily concluded was characterized by some very
remarkable features. It was