I trust, have been taught to put their trust in the Lord. Hitherto we have met together to worship in the field, and we have no prospect at present of a site for church or manse from our noble proprietor. My feelings, and that of my family, on leaving the manse, after a happy residence of thirty-one years, I can not easily describe. Though painful in some respects, yet I trust it was a willing sacrifice. The cause is good; Jehovah-jireh is a strong tower. While we have had cause to sow in tears, may we reap in joy. My wife was born in the same manse she lately left empty, left two of our children's dust behind, and, accompanied by six, all hitherto unprovided for, to sojourn among strangers, has displayed a moral heroism which is soothing to my feelings. My dear and honored sir, yours very truly, WM. FINDLATER. The Rev. Dr. Chalmers, Edinburgh.]

No. CCCXVII.-TO THE REV. WILLIAM FINDLATER.

EDINBURGH, 30th July, 1843.

MY VERY DEAR SIR-I received your deeply interesting, and let me add, affecting letter on Friday, and the same day made its contents known to Mr. Dunlop, who is Convener of the Distributing Committee, and who feels on the subject of your application precisely as I do; even that it is a case which must be instantly attended to and met. I hope you will suffer no inconvenience from the delay of a few days, as the committee does not meet till Friday next, when I am sure that your proposal will on the instant be acceded to and acted on.

Though such matters do not fall within my official range, (mine being the ingathering rather than the outgiving department), yet I beg that you will not let that restrain any future communications which you might wish to make to me; for I shall feel it quite a privilege and a pleasure to attend to them.

Tell dear Mrs. Findlater how my heart bled at the representation of the departure from Durness, and from the house in which she had lived from her birth. May she, and you, and all your family richly experience the Savior's promise, that though in the world we shall have tribulation, in Him we shall have peace. May we learn to sit loose to a world that is so fast loosening from our hold; and may the Giver

of all grace fit and prepare us for living together in that city which hath foundations, and where sin, and sorrow, and separation are unknown.

You will be pleased to hear that our cause is progressing rapidly. Indeed, our chief pressure now arises from the rapidly increasing number of our adhering congregations. Nevertheless, I retain the unshaken confidence, that with God's blessing we shall be enabled to build up all and provide for all.

Give my kindest regards to Mrs. Findlater, and with earnest prayers for Heaven's best blessings upon you and yours, ever believe me, my dear sir, yours most cordially and truly, THOMAS CHALMERS.

No. CCCXVIII. TO PROFESSOR SEDGWICK, OF CAMBRIDGE. EDINBURGH, 16th March, 1844.

MY DEAR SIR—I take it exceedingly kind that you should have bestowed the attentions and courtesies which you have done on Dr. Candlish.

It appears very clearly to me, from your letter, that very strange exaggerations have been practiced on the credulity. of those at a distance from us respecting the violence and asperity of our Free Churchmen. I live in the very thick of the controversy, and can give you my solemn assurance that I do not know of more than one or two instances which require to be at all defended, and even those are of a character in no way outrageous. I observe, from the report of the London meeting, that I myself have been made the subject of one of those misrepresentations, and may therefore be regarded as an evidence at first hand on the question of its justness and truth; and I am confident you will give me credit when I tell that both the meaning and the spirit of the expression which has been imputed to me have been altogether misunderstood and perverted. The truth is, that we are far too busy, too much engrossed with our own weighty affairs, to say much, or even to think much of our residuary friends. I am

well-nigh overborne with matters which engross all my at

tention and time, having had no less than two hundred and ten students at our theological seminary, and of these a number of first-year attendants, three times greater than I had last year in the University of Edinburgh. Such is the impulse which our movement has given to the ecclesiastical profession, that the number of theological students preparing for the Free Church in Edinburgh alone is very nearly double the number preparing for the Establishment in all the four universities of Scotland. We are aware all the while that there is a world of calumny abroad against us, and our best way is to let it spend its force, and not trouble ourselves either with the authors who originate or with the newspapers which give it circulation. We are doing a great work, and why should we come down to them?"

I must not attempt in this letter to enter into detail on that very voluminous controversy to which you have adverted, but which, at the same time, if your engagements would allow of it, is altogether worthy of your studious and sustained attention, involving as it does great principles, and leading as it will do to the most momentous results. I shall undertake no more at present than fill up this sheet by as succinct and synoptical a statement as I can possibly give within such narrow limits of our Scottish Church question. For the sake of brevity, let me endeavor to present you with the leading points in numerical order:

1. The line of demarkation between the civil and the ecclesiastical was a great topic of contention between the Church and the State in Scotland during nearly the whole of the seventeenth century, which at length, after the persecutions and the martyrdoms of twenty-eight years of the reigns of Charles II. and James II., was terminated by the Revolution Settlement.

2. By this settlement, the relation in which the Church and the State stood to each other was distinctly and defin、itely laid down. It forms, in fact, the great charter of our

constitutional law and liberties, and was solemnly renewed and ratified by the articles of union between the two kingdoms.

3. By this charter it is provided that the government of the Church is distinct from that of the civil magistrate, and the final jurisdiction in things spiritual was vested in our ecclesiastical courts. But ours being an Established Church, questions occasionally arose which involve temporalities along with matters of purely ecclesiastical government; and so it was further provided that, where on those questions the decisions of the civil and ecclesiastical courts conflicted with each other, the civil decisions should infer only civil effects, and the ecclesiastical only ecclesiastical effects; and till with-, in these few years nothing was of more familiar occurrence than the decisions of the church courts taking effect as to all matters of discipline, and ordination, and church government, and the contrary decisions of the law courts taking effect by the forfeiture of the temporalities, and of consequence the separation of the emoluments from the duties of the pastoral office. This precluded the respective powers from ever coming into collision, while they operated powerfully and often wholesomely as a check upon each other.

4. In 1712, or twenty-two years after the Revolution Settlement, and five years after the union, the act of Queen Anne, for the restoration of patronage, was passed. But for more than a century after this, the great constitutional principle of the separate jurisdictions of the two sets of courtsthe civil and the ecclesiastical-and the confinement of each within their own proper sphere, was observed inviolable. Contrary decisions were sometimes given on the same question as before, but still the minister, when the ecclesiastical court admitted to any given cure, was charged with all its duties, though if, unfortunately, as it occasionally happened, the civil court gave a decision adverse to his civil rights as minister, he behooved to relinquish the temporalities of the office.

5. And not till within these three or four years has the

discovery been made that the act of Queen Anne did envelop a contradiction to the principles of the Revolution Settlement and the articles of union; a discovery which ran as counter to all the previous conceptions of the civilians as the ecclesiastics in this country-and upon which the civil courts now do what, for a hundred and fifty years, they had never offered to do-overrule the discipline, and ordinations, and all the other judgments of our ecclesiastical court; thus taking upon themselves the entire government of the Church of Scotland.

6. On this discovery being made, an application came from the Church to the Legislature-the object of which was to remodel that one law so as to bring it into union with that prior and original constitution, upon which our Church entered into union with the state in 1690, and Scotland entered into union with England in 1707. It was, in fact, asking of them nothing more than to rectify their own blunder, so as that no subsequent act of theirs should be suffered to violate the prior constitution which they themselves had ratified.

7. The application to Parliament was disregarded; and when the Church was thus defeated in her attempts to obtain redress on the ground of the British Constitution, she had no other choice than to fall back on the ground of her original principles, appeal to her own conscience, and submit these anew to the decision of her own conscience-that conscience which bore her honorably through the struggles of the seventeenth century, and at length won for her a constitution in which she could acquiesce, but in the violation of which she can not acquiesce; and so she relinquishes her connection with the state, rather than submit to the government of the civil power in those matters which she deemed to be sacredly and peculiarly her own.

Such is a very brief outline of our question, and I have it not in my power at present any farther to extend it. Let me only say, that so far from upholding such an establishment as that which I have renounced, I, in every pleading for the cause of national churches, made an express reservation in