g, will little avail
her, if their findings fail to recommend themselves to the good
sense of her people, or are palpably unsuited to the emergencies of
the time. A powerful writer of the present age employs, in one of
his illustrations, the bold figure of a ship's crew, that, with
the difficulties of Cape Horn full before them, content themselves
with instituting aboard their vessel a constitutional system of
voting, and who find delight in contemplating the unanimity which
prevails on matters in general, both above decks and below. 'But
your ship,' says Carlyle, 'cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent
plans of voting: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of
conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour, by
the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you
vote. If you can by voting, or without voting, ascertain these
conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the
Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again;
the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy councillors from Chaos, will nudge
you with most chaotic admonition; you will be flung half-frozen on
the Patagonian cliffs, or jostled into shivers by your iceberg
councillors, and will never get round Cape Horn at all.' Now there
is much meaning couched in this quaint figure, and meaning which the
Free Church would do well to ponder. There are many questions on
which she could perhaps secure a majority, which yet that majority
would utterly fail to carry. On the question of College Extension,
for instance, she might be able to vote, if she but selected her
elders with some little care, that there should be full staffs of
theological professors at Glasgow and Aberdeen. But what would her
votes succeed in achieving? Not, assuredly, the doubling of the Cape;
but the certainty of shivering her all-important Educational
Institute on three inexorable icebergs. In the first place, her
magnificent metropolitan College, like that huge long boat, famous
in story, which Robinson Crusoe was able to build, but wholly unable
to launch, would change from being what it now is--a trophy of her
liberality and wisdom--into a magnificent monument of her folly. In
the second place, she would have to break faith with her existing
professors, and to argue, mayhap, when they were becoming thin and
seedy, and getting into debt, that she was not morally bound to
them for their salaries. And, in the third and last p