PAMPHLET. 287 



" For wherever he went, he was 'ware of a sound, 

 Now heard in the distance, now gathering round, 

 And it irked him much that that sound should be, 

 But the soul of the cause of it well guessed he." 



I yet further complain of the part acted by Dr Candlish 

 in the Edinburgh Presbytery, when he stood up to say 

 he had detected a sophism in an article of mine on com- 

 munion with the slave-having Churches. Did the 

 Doctor really imagine that, by casting the Witness as a 

 tub to the whale on that occasion, he could neutralize the 

 bitter hostility evinced by the Establishment and the 

 Voluntaries on the slave-having question, to the Free 

 Church ? Alas ! the hostility lies too deep. I build 

 nothing on the fact that, for the article to which Dr 

 Candlish so pointedly and so publicly referred, I had al- 

 ready received, in an exceedingly kind note, the thanks 

 of Dr Chalmers ; and that he, in consequence of seeing 

 either worse or better than the critic, had failed to detect 

 the sophism. Nor did it in the least move me that the 

 criticism should have furnished Mr M'Beth of Glasgow 

 with a text on which to deliver himself, in a pamphlet, 

 of a little of his superfluous nonsense. The article did, 

 perhaps, contain a sophism, though I have yet failed to 

 see or Dr Candlish to show that it did. I shall, how- 

 ever, take the liberty of asking the Doctor whether it 

 was wise, I shall not say friendly, to strike thus, as if 

 from behind, at a humble but devoted man-at-arms, en- 

 gaged in fighting in the same front of battle with him- 

 self against the same common enemy ? I ask him, 

 further, if he thinks it was from a sense of fear, or from 

 a lack of materials for criticism in his productions, spoken 

 or written, or from any other cause than simply a 

 sincere regard to the interests of the Free Church, that 

 I made no reprisals ? This I shall dare say, that were 



