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24 disapproved of. But here the question of amenability recurs. If the General Assembly is not amenable—that is to say, if it is itself the state acting in a peculiar capacity—then it cannot forfeit, under any circumstances, its property to the state. It may be forcibly dispossessed, but it cannot forfeit, and therefore ought never to resign. In short, this step was an admission that the General Assembly was not the state. But if it be not the state, we at once abandon its defence.

Supposing the General Assembly, however, to be the state, what course would we have recommended it to pursue, when the Veto-voters had the ascendency? We are of opinion that they should have clung, at all hazards, to their temporalities, not from interested motives, but as the only course which could have given them a chance of ultimately obtaining for their great measure the sanction of the nation. No doubt refractory presbyteries, who continued to give effect to the Veto Act, would have been subjected to fines, imprisonments, and actions of damages. But, to say nothing of its being the duty of Christian teachers, to endure all kinds of persecution for conscience' sake, the General Assembly should have considered that these persecutions could not have been persisted in for any great length of time. The legislature, we are convinced, would ere long have afforded them relief, and the hands of the civil authority would have been stayed. When that happened, their triumph would have been complete; for we are of opinion that, however far the civil power might have carried its severity, it could not legally have gone the length of absolutely disendowing the ministers, so long as they refused pertinaciously, and under every aggravation, to part with their benefices. Had the General Assembly, and those over whom it exercised authority, acted in this way, it is more than probable that the ministers of the Free Church might at this day have been ministers of the Establishment, and the Veto Law in full operation.

In taking this view of the subject, and in chalking out this course of procedure, we have of course taken it for granted that the General Assembly was to be consistent with itself for a certain number of years, that it was to continue to uphold and give effect to the Veto Law with unrelaxing assiduity. But can this be taken for granted? No. The Free Church ministers could not