But it may well be asked, do we put ourselves into a likelier position for success by taking up the ground of anti-patronage? Not certainly if we look singly to the existing dispositions of our legislators; nor am I at all sanguine that these will be much influenced or operated on through the medium of the Scottish population. On that population-I mean the best and most religious part of them-we are gaining every day; and if Conservatives, on the one hand, have not scrupled to avail themselves of Radicals and political dissenters in opposition to the Church, we, on the other, might most legitimately rejoice in the accessions made to our strength from the truly Christian and conscientious dissenters who will swell our ranks on the event of that disruption to which many of us are now looking forward, and for which I am happy to say that a most hopeful preparation is now going on. It is our duty to do all we can for the averting of such a catastrophe, but it is also our duty to be in readiness for the worst ; and though I have a great dislike to all agitation when there is no practical call for it, yet, in present circumstances, I must confess that I do look with the most benignant complacency on the Defense Associations, which are multiplying so fast in various parts of our country. They will form a ready-made apparatus for the support of a Church in full possession of that spiritual independence which had not been permitted to us within the pale of the national endowments. I trust it may be so well supported and extended as that we shall be enabled, in perfect freedom from the interdicts and tracasseries both of courts and of heritors, to impart without let or hinderance the blessings of Christian instruction to those many thousands who hitherto have been utter strangers to the habits and decencies of a Christian land. Heaven grant that, in this spirit of true charity and Christian patriotism, our ministers might be enabled, in return for their sufferings and their cares, to render this best of services to the commonwealth; and, by saving the country from that sorest of all distempers, a profligate and irreligious common people, to

save our now blind and infatuated aristocracy from themselves.

I have written with all the heaviness of an invalid, and am now rusticating in the country for the benefit of my health. But I could not leave your able and interesting letters any longer unreplied to. I shall rejoice at all times to hear from you, and promise never to inflict so long an epistle upon you in future. It would suit my strength and my engagements better to write not at length on the general subject, but shortly, and on single points of it at a time. Let me earnestly recommend as the object of your attention what may be called the human nature of our question, now that you have acquitted yourself in a style so masterly on the law of the question. I should rejoice if you were to make a study of the workings of this one system and that other throughout the country at large, and among the people who live in it. I feel assured it would convince you not of the innocence only, but the positive good of having our Church more popularized. It would dissipate the association so extensively prevalent between a popular system in the Church and democracy in the state, and land you in a conclusion the very reverse of that which is the all but universal faith of those of your own order. THOMAS CHALMERS.

No. CCCV.-To LORD LORNE.

EDINBURGH, 15th March, 1842. MY DEAR LORD LORNE-I received your last letter some days ago. It, in conjunction with your lordship's truly admirable preface to the second edition of your work, convinces me that substantially we are far more at one than appears to be upon the surface. The most material difference respects the time in which the Church should have simplified the object of her endeavors, and openly announced what many of us have all along felt. Her optimum is the abolition of patronage. It was the hopelessness of this att nment which restrained her from framing an expression ner; and it is

now her hopelessness of any effectual security against the evils of patronage which convinces her that the time has now come for attempting the entire removal of it. Had your lordship been aware of the whole of our correspondence with men in power, and of the treatment we have received at their hands, I feel confident that you would not think we had become hopeless too soon. I shall only instance the last of a long series of disappointments, in that Sir James Graham held out the prospect of an amicable settlement, provided that we did not agitate the country; and professes now, that had he understood our object of gaining the liberum arbitrium, he never would have entered into negotiation with us at all. Our confidence in public men is now completely shaken; and it is too much in them to expect that we shall lend ourselves any further to the objects of their policy by neglecting to avail ourselves any longer of the only human help which remains to us-the friendship of the people—until hostile statesmen shall have finished their last work upon us, and we thrown off by the one party shall have made new provision in the support of the other party, for a refuge to fall back upon.

Meanwhile, can any thing be fairer than the warning now given to the men in power? They know that the duke's bill would bring us all into a state of quiescence; and they also know that the passing of their own favorite measure would be gall and wormwood to the great majority of the Church. They are able to avert the consequence of this if they choose; and if they do not, whether that consequence shall be the abolition of the patronage or the ruin of the Establishment, this is a result which must be laid in either case, not at our door, but at that of our opponents.

There is one thing, however, which I believe they do not know, and which, perhaps, it were well they did, for it is a matter on which they seem to be absolutely incredulous; and that is the perfect determination on the part, I believe, of hundreds of our clergy rather to be driven from their places than to surrender the spiritual independence of the Church.

I this morning received a printed sketch of what will soon be circulated among the Non-intrusionist clergy, and which will show what the prospects are which they now cherish, and what the provision is which they are now planning to meet the possibilities that are before them. I can not think it wrong to send my copy to your lordship; and indeed I think it but fair and desirous that even our worst enemies should be apprised of what is really going forward, &c.

THOMAS CHALMERS.

P.S.-I have this day seen a Highland minister who assures me that the whole of his synod (Glenelg) are in readiness to quit the Establishment rather than submit to a civil supremacy over the Church.

T. C.

No. CCCVI. TO WILLIAM LAMONT, JUN., ESQ., GLASGOW. EDINBURGH, 9th April, 1842.

DEAR SIR-I regret that I can not attend a meeting, the spirit and the objects of which I so thoroughly approve.

It is cheering to observe the progress of our great cause; and that while, on the one hand, the ministers of our Church, in spite of every effort to shake or to seduce them, remain an unshrinking and undiminished majority in defense of her violated liberties, on the other hand, the public are becoming more alive every day to a sense of her wrongs. So that, between a resolved clergy and an attached and confiding people, let us hope, with the blessing of God, that the best and greatest of our national institutes will yet stand its ground against all the attempts which have been made, and are still making, whether to vitiate or to destroy it.

I feel that I can not estimate too highly the labors of your important association; and do hope that, under your influence and within the sphere of your operations, many others will arise in your own likeness, and be instruments in the hand of Providence for the diffusion of sound information and right views of our question, both in the West and throughout the whole of Scotland.

On the subject of patronage, I had long been in the habit of regarding it as practicable to harmonize her initiative voice in the appointment of a minister with the sacred prerogatives of conscience, and the deference I have ever held due to the collective voice of every honest and religious, however humble a congregation. The experience of so many fruitless and fatiguing negotiations have now wearied me out, and forced both myself and many others to desist from this as a vain and hopeless enterprise. The reported attempts of patrons to tamper with the principles of our young licentiates on their entrance into the ministry, and so instill a deadly poison into the very fountain-heads of the nation's morality, have now completed my antipathy to the whole system, and led me to the conviction that it were best, both for the Church and the country of Scotland, if it were conclusively put an end to. I have the honor to be, dear sir, yours most truly, THOMAS CHALMERS.

No. CCCVII.-TO ALEX. CAMPBELL, ESQ., M.P.

DUNKELD, 23d April, 1842. replied sooner to your kind Be assured that the delay

MY DEAR SIR-I should have note of more than a week ago. does not proceed from any indifference to your proposed movement, in which I earnestly pray that God may speed and prosper you; and I further hope that you will put the right interpretation on my non-appearance in London at this time. I stand much in need of repose, and I have come here to recruit between the labors of my class and the meeting of the General Assembly.

You are aware that Lord Lorne dislikes the anti-patronage movement that is now afloat, and seemed to regret it as a disturbing force in the way of his father's bill. Now, were I a legislator instead of an ecclesiastic, and disliked the method of popular election, I should be disposed to reason thus: The passing of such a bill, it is needless to disguise, would slacken, if not arrest, the Anti-patronage movement, even as the