than the tyranny of the Stuarts or of the Vatican itself. It would have exterminated Papists and Baptists, sectaries' of all kinds, Quakers, Socinians. It would, in papal fashion, have made the State its vassal, have erected an imperium in imperio, transformed the holy Christian Sunday with all its bright and glowing associations, into a day of ultra-pharisaic gloom. The Church would have been anchored over the Calvinistic shibboleth of the past; no future could possibly be in store for her; any light she had must be the light of other days; and the individual, looking only back like Lot's wife, must have become a fossil, and at the same time a Pharisee-one who had no longer any need to pray for light or guidance amid the thousand complexities and perplexities of life, but only to thank God that he was not as other men.

If Robert Burns has given us the 'Cotter's Saturday Night,' he has also left for our meditation

Holy Willie's Prayer' and the Holy Fair,' and in these you will see that when Presbyterianism is not asserting its democratic individual rights against official tyranny, or is not caught up into the devout emotionalism of a Samuel Rutherfurd, it is apt to engender pharisaism and antinomianism of

the most extravagant and also the most grotesque type. And you will not be surprised at these results when I read to you one or two articles of the Creed, or Confession of Faith,' which every Scotch clergyman and every elder is bound to subscribe in the most unqualified way before he can be admitted to his office.

By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinate to everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death;' and again: The rest of mankind God was pleased, for the glory of his sovereign power over his creatures, to pass by (like a supreme priest or Levite), and (like a supreme Nero) to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin to the praise of his glorious justice.' Further it is stated in the Larger Catechism that 'the punishments of sin in the world to come are most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in Hell fire for ever.' Now, just as in some of Fra Angelico's pictures the sweetest faces of angels and redeemed souls look out on the spectator with serene contentment while the most terrible shapes of demons and of doomed men are grouped beneath in obvious agony, or hate, or despair, in like manner the piety of the Scottish

Kirk has revealed itself as clothed with the garments of praise,' while accepting the dogma, so dark, so destructive of all genuine or spontaneous worship of the heart and soul, that from a vast multitude of human beings, innocent infants-for there are 'elect infants dying in infancy'—as well as men of riper years, but these latter not necessarily in moral character defaulters above others, mercy is withheld, and for no diviner reason than the 'exhibition of sovereign justice'!

But modern Scottish piety has risen up not in 'revolt' merely, but in 'revolution,' against the grim decrees of the 'Confession of Faith;' and I would here remind you that this terrible piece of artillery was not of Scottish manufacture, there having been only six Scottish representatives present in the Westminster Assembly of Divines,' with liberty to deliberate, but not to vote. It was specially English in its construction, while all the more advanced ministers in the North seem now to be of opinion that to discharge it in modern spiritual warfare would be fraught, as in the case of the old Mons Meg,' with more peril to the artillerymen themselves than to their foes.

During the last five hundred years Scotland has passed through two great epochs, and she is now

fulfilling the conditions of a third one. The first of these is that of William Wallace. He secured for Scotland the result which Samuel achieved in the case of the Hebrew tribes, and our own Alfred accomplished among the Anglo-Saxons. He fused the warring provinces into a common nationality. John Knox gives name to the second period, and, as we have seen, he made Scotland a theocracy. But Scotland is now undergoing the experiences of what may be designated as a lay dispensation. David Hume, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott inaugurated an altogether new era, and the land of the Kirk and the Covenant had the great task committed to her of subjecting her hitherto inexorable theological formulas to the dialectic of a new philosophy and the inspiration of a new poetry. 'Caledonia stern and wild,' it might be alleged, took very little either of colour or form from the sceptic or from the poets. She continued to keep her Sabbaths,' and duly trained her children to the Shorter Catechism with its curiously combined doctrines of 'Redemption' and 'the pains of hell for ever,' and her ministers painfully ascended the pulpit stairs charged with the stereotyped message, though the shafts of the light-hearted Edinburgh Reviewers were flying thickly round their heads.

But all the same, Hume and Burns and Scott had made an appeal to the inmost thought and heart of their country, and this appeal was first responded to, in terms which Scotchmen will not soon willingly let die, by two laymen, Thomas Erskine and Thomas Carlyle. The latter came among us proclaiming that God is in history as inexorable law, and the former, Thomas Erskine, that God is in the human soul as inexorable love. Carlyle in his later writings speaks more in the accents of the Hebrew prophet than of a Christian Evangelist; but he was early careful to remind us, in his Signs of the Times,' that 'religion is no selfish mere mercenary wisdom, but a psalm rising from the heart of his children to the Infinite Father-the source of all truth, of all beauty, of all goodness—and that to enable us to clasp the true religion to our hearts, the religion which enables us to love the world even when it despises us, a greater than Zeno was needed, and He too was sent.' To the universal 'no' of David Hume, Carlyle opposed a 'yes' equally universal, pressing upon the minds of his contemporaries the forgotten truth that nature is a perennial miracle, and that the whole sphere of human life is ineffably sacred, because in it we have always to do with the living God. And

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