bears date January 1840, and two other pamphlets, in
the form of Dialogues, which bear date April 1843. The Sermon and the
Dialogues discuss exactly the same topics. They are written in exactly
the same style. They exhibit, in the same set phrases, the same large
amount of somewhat obtrusive sanctimoniousness. They are equally
strong in the same confidence of representing, on their respective
subjects, the true mind of Deity. They solicit the same circle of
readers; they seem to have employed the same fount of types; they have
emanated from the same publishers. They are liker, in short, than the
twin brothers in Shakespeare's _Comedy of Errors_; and the only
material dissimilarity which we have been yet able to discover is,
that whereas the Sermon is a thorough-going and uncompromising defence
of our Evangelical majority in the Church, the Dialogues form an
equally thorough-going and uncompromising attack upon them. This,
however, compared with the numerous points of verisimilitude, the
reader will, we are sure, deem but a trifle, especially when he has
learned further that they represent the same mind, and have employed
the same pen--that the Sermon was published by the Rev. Alexander
Clark of Inverness in 1840, and the Dialogues by the Rev. Alexander
Clark of Inverness in 1843.

We spent an hour at the close of twilight a few evenings ago, in running
over the Sermon and the Dialogues, and in comparing them, as we went
along, paragraph by paragraph, and sentence by sentence. We had
before us also one of Mr. Clark's earlier publications, his _Rights of
Members of the Church of Scotland_, and a complete collection of his
anti-patronage speeches for a series of years, as recorded in _The
Church Patronage Reporter_, with his speech 'anent lay patronage' in
the General Assembly, when in 1833 he led the debate on the popular
side. The publications, in all, extended over a period of fourteen
years. They exhibited Mr. Clark, and what Mr. Clark had held, in 1829,
in 1831, in 1832, in 1836, in 1840, and in 1843. We found that we could
dip down upon him, as we went along, like a sailor taking soundings in
the reaches of some inland frith or some navigable river, and ascertain
by year and day the exact state of his opinions, and whether they were
rising or falling at the time. And our task, if a melancholy, was
certainly no uninteresting one. We succeeded in bringing to the surface,
from out of the oblivion that had closed over th