reduced to poverty or broken in spirit, all in
religion that consoles and ennobles. Sabbath-days came round with
their humanizing influences; and, under the teachings of the gospel,
the poor and oppressed looked longingly forward to a future scene of
being, in which there is no poverty and no oppression. They still
possessed, amid their misery, something positively good, of which it
was possible to deprive them; and hence the ability derived to the
present lord of Sutherland, of deepening and rendering more signal the
ruin accomplished by his predecessor.

Napoleon, when on the eve of re-establishing Popery in France,
showed his conviction of the importance of national religions, by
remarking that, did there exist no ready-made religion to serve
his turn, he would be under the necessity of making one on purpose.
And his remark, though perhaps thrown into this form merely to give
it point, and render it striking, has been instanced as a proof that
he could not have considered the matter very profoundly. It has been
said, and said truly, that religions of stamina enough to be even
politically useful cannot be _made_: that it is comparatively easy
to gain great battles, and frame important laws; but that to create
belief lay beyond the power of even a Napoleon. France, instead of
crediting his manufactured religion, would have laughed at both him
and it. The Duke of Sutherland has, however, taken upon himself a
harder task than the one to which Napoleon could refer, probably in
joke. His aim seems to be, not the comparatively simple one of
making a new religion where no religion existed before, but of
making men already firm in their religious convictions believe that
to be a religion which they believe to be no such thing. His
undertaking involves a _discharging_ as certainly as an _injecting_
process,--the erasure of an existing belief, as certainly as the
infusion of an antagonistic belief that has no existence. We have
shown how evangelism took root and grew in Sutherland, as the only
form of Christianity which its people could recognise; how the
antagonist principle of Moderatism they failed to recognise as
Christianity at all; and how, when the latter was obtruded into
their pulpits, they withdrew from the churches in which their
fathers had worshipped, for they could regard them as churches no
longer, and held their prayer and fellowship meetings in their own
homes, or travelled far to attend the ministrations of