under which they were formed,
when the temperature all around them has altered. The ice-floes and
the obsolete Church may be alike successful for a time in keeping
up the ancient state of things within their own lessening limits,
but both are eventually absorbed and disappear. While the more
versatile ecclesiastical body, tossed by the cross currents and
eddies of novel and uncertain change, loses its true course and makes
shipwreck, the rigidly immoveable one, anchored over the worn-out
peculiarities of bygone days, is borne down by the irresistible rush
of the stream, and founders at its moorings.

The Free Church, as a body, is, we trust, not greatly in danger from
either extreme. They are the extremes, however, which in the present
day constitute her true Scylla and Charybdis; and it were perhaps well
that she should keep the fact steadily before her, by laying them down
as such on their chart. Not from the gross and earthy fires of
political movement in the present day, or from the cold grey ashes of
movement semi-political in some uninspired age of the past, must that
pillar of flame now ascend which is to marshal her on her pilgrimage
through the wilderness, at once reviving her by its heat and guiding
her by its effulgence. The light borrowed from the one would but
flicker idly before her, a wandering and delusive meteor; the other
would furnish her with but an unlighted torch, unsuited to cast across
her way a single beam of direction and guidance. Her light must be
derived from an antiquity more remote than that of the uninspired
ages, and her heat from a source more permanent than that of present
excitement, social or political: the one direct from the unerring
record of those times when God walked the earth in the flesh; the
other from that living spirit without whose influence energy the most
untiring can be influential in but the production of evil, and
earnestness the most intense may be profession, but cannot be revival.
Strength must be sought by her, not in the turmoil of evanescent
agitation, nor in the worn-out modes of an age the fashion of which
has perished, but in the perennial verities of the everlasting gospel.
While so far adapting herself to the times as to present an armed
front to every form of error, she must preach to her people as if the
prisoner of Patmos had but just completed the record of Revelation.

There is one special error regarding this the most important portion
of her prope