e
sure there is popular talent in the pulpit, and that the clergyman who
officiates there does not find it a very easy matter to compose his
sermons. Nay, dear as the distinctive principles of the Free Church
are to the people of Scotland, with superior pulpit talent in the
Establishment on the one hand, and in the ranks of the disendowed
body, on the other, a goodly supply of those youthful ministers who
boast that they either never write their sermons, or write them at a
short sitting, we would by no means guarantee to our Church a ten
years' vigorous existence. These may not be palatable truths, but we
trust they are wholesome ones; and we know that the time peculiarly
requires them. It is, however, not mainly with the Establishment that
the Free Church has to contend.

We ask the reader whether he has not marked, within the last few
years, the _debut_ of another and more formidable antagonist, with
which all Christian Churches may be soon called on to grapple?

Our newly-instituted athenaeums and philosophical associations form one
of the novel features of the time,--institutions in which at least the
second-class men of the age--Emersons, and Morells, and Combes--with
much that is interesting in science and fascinating in literature,
blend sentiments and opinions at direct variance with the great
doctrinal truths embodied in our standards. The press, not less
formidable now than ever, is an old antagonist; but, with all its
appliances and powers, it lacked the charm of the living voice. That
peculiar charm, however, the new combatant possesses. The pulpit, met
by its own weapons and in its own field, will have to a certainty to
measure its strength against it; and the standard of pulpit
accomplishment and of theological education, instead of being lowered,
must in consequence be greatly elevated. The Church of this country,
which in the earlier periods of her history, when Knox was her leader,
and Buchanan the moderator of her General Assembly, stood far in
advance of the age in popular eloquence, solid learning, and elegant
accomplishment, and which, in the person of Chalmers in our own days,
was vested in the more advanced views and the more profound policy of
a full century hence, must not be suffered to lag behind the age now.
Her troops must not be permitted to fall into confusion, and to use as
arms the rude, unsightly bludgeons of an untaught and undisciplined
mob, when the enemy, glittering in harness, an