e equivalent
be made. He is not himself a member--he exercises the same sort of
liberty which his people would so fain exercise; and to make amends
for daring to belong to another Church himself (that of England), he
has determined, if he can help it, that the people shall belong to no
other. He has resolved, it would seem, to compound for his own liberty
by depriving them of theirs.

How they are to stand out the winter on this exposed eastern coast, He
alone knows who never shuts His ear to the cry of the oppressed. One
thing is certain, they will never return to the Establishment. On this
Sabbath the congregation in the parish church did not, as we
afterwards learned, exceed a score; and the _quoad sacra_ chapel of
the district was locked up. Long before the Disruption the people had
well-nigh ceased attending the ministrations of the parish incumbent.
The Sutherland Highlanders are still a devout people; they like a bald
mediocre essay none the better for its being called a sermon, and read
on Sabbath. The noble Duke, their landlord, has said not a little in
his letters to them about the extreme slightness of the difference
which obtains between the Free and the Established Churches: it is a
difference so exceedingly slight, that his Grace fails to see it; and
he hopes that by and by, when winter shall have thickened the
atmosphere with its frost rime and its snows, his poor tenantry may
prove as unable to see it as himself. With them, however, the
difference is not mainly a doctrinal one. They believe with the old
Earls of Sutherland, who did much to foster the belief in this
northern county, that there is such a thing as personal piety,--that
of two clergymen holding nominally the same doctrines, and bound
ostensibly by the same standards, one may be a regenerate man,
earnestly bent on the conversion of others, and ready to lay down his
worldly possessions, and even life itself, for the cause of the
gospel; while the other may be an unregenerate man, so little desirous
of the conversion of others, that he would but decry and detest them
did he find them converted already, and so careless of the gospel,
that did not his living depend on professing to preach it, he would
neither be an advocate for it himself, nor yet come within earshot of
where it was advocated by others. The Highlanders of Sutherland hold
in deep seriousness a belief of this character. They believe, further,
that the ministers of their own mounta