affections the sweetest atmosphere and the purest light, has a sanction and makes a demand upon the individual and collective conscience of man, which dwarf into entire insignificance all such appeals for support as are based upon merely dogmatic or external claims, whether these come to us in the guise of the Divine right of Presbytery, or in that of the supernatural virtues of Apostolical Succession. Our Divine Master has given us a very simple test by which to discriminate between rival pretensions to authority in the words-' by their fruits ye shall know them; but it is He also who in this matter moved for us the previous question,' and warned against expecting good fruit if the root be not good also. Men do not gather grapes of thorns, or figs from thistles. But the figure can never square with the fact; else, as Coleridge long ago remarked, similitude would be sameness. And in speaking of Presbyterianism, as in speaking of any other system, one should always be careful to discriminate between the conscious dogmatism and the unconscious trust in a perfect righteousness which underlies it, and which if made explicit to the dogmatic believer, he might be ready to exclaim that it was a thing 'which

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he could not bear.' Conscious Calvinism is inevitably and intensely Pharisaic and damnatory. The unconscious trust beneath it laid down the outward life for the liberties of the world. Now, as my subject to-night is the consideration of the claims of Presbyterianism, we have these two questions addressed to us : What has Presbyterianism done in the past? that is, what have been its fruits? and the second is, what are its roots or fundamental principles? Let me, however, just say, in one word, that I will not enter at all here into the mere question of Church governmentwhether it is better on the whole that, as in the Presbyterian system, all beneficed clergymen should hold equally the same rank-should simply be presbyters or elder brethren-the laity as elder brethren also coming in for their full share of influence in the congregation, the presbytery, the synod, and the general assembly; or whether it is better that, as in the army and navy and elsewhere, there should be a subordination of ranks. That is a matter of altogether secondary moment. All orders which aim at securing fidelity and loyalty to a common supreme and elevating interest are holy orders, by whatever name they are designated; and, generally speaking, somehow, in most

Churches the best men, the best scholars, the best preachers, the best administrators do come to the front. Only now it is a Scotchman, Archibald Campbell Tait, who is head of the Episcopalian Establishment, and the other day it was another great Scotchman, Thomas Chalmers, who was the chief personality in the Northern Presbyterian Establishment and both assuredly, thank God, good men whom Walter Scott would have honoured. It is not the mere polity or external organisation that is going to occupy us, but the far profounder subject, the truths which Presbyterianism and Anglicanism respectively proclaim as fundamental.

First of all, however, we have to speak of the fruits of Presbyterianism, and for these let us turn to Scotland. No doubt we have had Presbyterianism elsewhere. It was the established religion of England itself for a few years in the seventeenth century, but the genius of England refused to be tied and bound by the chains of the Solemn League and Covenant, signed though it was in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, in 1643, and by the grim decrees of the Westminster Confession of Faith. England preferred the sweet reasonableness, the profound and wide philosophy

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of Richard Hooker in his great work, the 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' to the dogmatic fanaticism of Thomas Cartwright, the Presbyterian Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and, until a better order was restored, elected to abide by the liberty of conscience which was the watchword of Oliver Cromwell's policy, rather than by the relentless intolerance of the Presbyterians; for, as Milton put it, 'new presbyter was but old priest writ large.' And again, Geneva was, as it is still, Presbyterian, and she has immortally linked with her name that of John Calvin. But of this remarkable Frenchman let these few words be spoken here. His theology is enshrined, as one day, no doubt, it will be entombed, in the Westminster Confession of Faith-the inexorable theology of the letter which killeth welded together by the logical faculty which is the great characteristic of the Frenchman. But, as a man, Calvin was intrinsically noble. Entering Geneva an exile and a stranger, he found it a kind of pandemonium of sensuality. He converted it into a city of saints, driving the unclean population from its precincts, as well as into a kind of Pharos of spiritual liberty for all distressed ecclesiastical mariners; while his share in the death of Servetus

has been all but universally misrepresented. Calvin was not in possession of supreme power when Servetus was put to death. He had warned the unhappy speculator against coming to Geneva. He wrote to him that, lying as he did under the ban of the old Roman Church, from whose Inquisition prison at Vienne he had effected his escape, Geneva would not be more tolerant of heresy than Rome; and when, in spite of Calvin's advice, he adventured into Geneva, he was seized and thrown into prison. Day by day, however, Calvin visited him, striving, but all in vain, to convince him of the exceeding great foolishness of his creed. Unretracting, he was condemned to die, and Calvin had no objection to the sentence. But, with the single exception of the Reformer Castalio, there was hardly a public teacher who did not believe that orthodoxy gave one absolute right to kill the body of the man who was bold enough to question its affirmations. For the doctrine of toleration was still waiting to be declared, notwithstanding that it stands written so grandly in the pages of the New Testament. It was first fully uttered in the early part of the seventeenth century by the great Dutchman Grotius. Cromwell fought for it with his sword and the whole