244 EDITOR. 



which upright men, of good intellectual parts, could occupy. 

 They would not grant that they yielded the fundamental 

 principle of spiritual independence as maintained by the 

 ancient Scottish Church. Even in respect of the right of 

 the people to have no ministers intruded on them, they 

 objected, not to the claims of congregations in themselves, 

 nor to the sympathy and co-operation of the Church with 

 the popular efforts to give those claims effect, but to the 

 means which the Church had taken to express her sym- 

 pathy and enforce her co-operation, to the want, to say 

 the least, of deference to the civil law evinced in the 

 enactment of the Veto and in the admission of the 

 chapel ministers to full Presbyterial powers. There was, 

 they argued, no intention on the part of the State to de- 

 prive the Church of the privileges recognized as hers in 

 the Treaty of Union ; but, in definitely bestowing, by the 

 Veto, a power upon congregations to set aside rights of 

 patrons which the State legally countenanced, and which 

 could not practically be distinguished from rights of 

 property, and in giving chapel ministers the status and 

 authority of parish ministers, the Church, they maintained, 

 had dealt arrogantly and domineeringly with the State, 

 and the natural consequence was that the State put its 

 back up against the Church. Accordingly the course 

 prescribed alike by sound policy and by Christian temper 

 was, they said, that the Church should rescind her ob- 

 noxious legislation, and take counsel with the allied 

 State, in a friendly spirit, as to how the fundamental 

 principles of her constitution could be carried out. 



The reply to these arguments might be satisfactory, 

 but it is impossible to deny that honest and able men 

 could use them. The majority might say that, since 

 the principles involved were confessedly fundamental, 

 since the Church had done no more than guard them 



