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Rh and kirk-sessions' perpetuity of right, in spite of their refusal to implement the obligation under which they were laid. And if such an answer cannot be returned to our question, the denunciation of the measure of Queen Anne, as an unconstitutional statute, must be held to pass away as idle as the autumnal wind.

One word more in reference to the Free Church Disruption, before we have done with it.

Do the Free Church ministers imagine that, when they abandoned their livings, they saved their independent spiritual jurisdiction, and carried it with them, like household gods from the sack of Troy? Alas, what trifling is here! The only question worth raising, worth fighting about, was whether supreme spiritual authority could be held by an Established church. There could be no doubt that it was compatible with the existence of a church not endowed by the state—compatible with it, that is, in so far as its own members were concerned. Yet this latter point was all that the Free Churchmen established by abandoning their livings. They established what no human being ever dreamt of calling in question—and this they call vindicating and preserving their supreme spiritual jurisdiction. Such a proceeding saved and vindicated absolutely nothing. The other point was worth trying; and if they had made out, as we think they might have done, that they were the state, they would undoubtedly have gained it. But they evaded it,—and how? By disfranchising themselves of their right of property—a proceeding which was just one step short of disfranchising themselves of their right of life. The clergyman who can admit that his property becomes forfeit when he obeys his conscience rather than the laws of the land, must be bound, by the same logic, to acknowledge that his life also would become forfeit, should the state demand it, and should he persist in obeying his conscience rather than the law. But what man would admit this? We would all admit that our lives might be taken; but certainly none of us would admit that they could be forfeited. Did our martyr Wishart—did English Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, acknowledge that they had forfeited their lives? No! Yet our Scottish martyrs of the Free Church admitted that they had forfeited their livings! Surely that was a blunder. But, in justice to these men, let us add, that whatever their errors may have been,