288 EDITOR. 



I disposed to make sport to the Philistines, I could find 

 in the recorded thinking of Dr Candlish not a few mag- 

 nificent immaturities with which to amuse them. There 

 are some minds that, from a certain structural idiosyn- 

 crasy, lie peculiarly open to animadversion ; and were I 

 as regardless of general as of personal consequences, of 

 my Church as of myself, I might perhaps find exercise 

 for ingenuity in the dissection of one special intellect of 

 this character, that, like a summer in the higher lati- 

 tudes, produces much, but ripens little, that is content 

 often to acquiesce in its first hasty conclusions, without 

 waiting for what the second cogitations may produce, 

 and that bears on its incessant stream of thought, ever 

 copious and sparkling, many a fragile air-bell, that, 

 though it reflects the rainbow hues of heaven on its 

 surface, owes all its dancing buoyancy to a lack of 

 weight, and is singularly hollow within. 



' Of the more elaborate articles on the Sabbath 

 question which lately appeared in the Witness, three 

 were of my writing, and the others by the Assistant- 

 Editor, Mr Wylie. I may mention, that Sir Andrew 

 Agnew, in writing to the office, deemed them at least 

 worthy of thanks ; and that immediately on the appear- 

 ance of my first paper, the one with the reference to 

 Bishop Gillis, I was requested by Mr Hanna, son-in- 

 law of Dr Chalmers, to furnish him with an article on 

 Sabbath Observance, "more in its social than its 

 peculiarly religious aspect," for the North British Review. 

 Now, on these articles Dr Candlish founds one of his 

 urgent reasons for my retirement from the Editorship of 

 the Witness. " The damage done," he says, " to the 

 Sabbath cause by certain recent articles is incalculable ;" 

 and I have learned from Edinburgh,* through more 



* This letter was written in Cromarty. 



