A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 93 



gravitation operative in such cases, the poor incumbent be- 

 came utterly scandalous, and was libelled for drunkenness be- 

 fore the General Assembly ; but as the island of Eigg lies 

 remote from observation, evidence was difficult to procure ; 

 and, had not the infatuated man got senselessly drunk one 

 evening, when in Edinburgh on his trial, and staggered, of 

 all places in the world, into the General Assembly, he would 

 probably have died minister of Eigg. As the event happen- 

 ed, however, the testimony thus unwittingly furnished in the 

 face of the Court that tried him was deemed conclusive ; 

 he was summarily deposed from his office, and my friend suc- 

 ceeded him. Presbyterianism without the animating life is 

 a poor shrunken thing : it never lies in state when it is dead ; 

 for it has no body of fine forms, or trapping of imposing cere- 

 monies, to give it bulk or adornment : without the vitality 

 of evangelism it is nothing ; and in this low and abject state 

 my friend found the Presbyterianism of Eigg. His prede- 

 cessor had done it only mischief; nor had it been by any 

 means vigorous before. Rum is one of the four islands of the 

 parish ; and all my readers must be familiar with Dr John- 

 son's celebrated account of the conversion to Protestantism 

 of the people of Rum. " The inhabitants," says the Doctor, 

 in his " Journey to the Western Islands," " are fifty-eight 

 families, who continued Papists for some time after the laird 

 became a Protestant. Their adherence to their old religion 

 was strengthened by the countenance of the laird's sister, a 

 zealous Romanist ; till one Sunday, as they were going to 

 mass under the conduct of their patroness, Maclean met them 

 on the way, gave one of them a blow on the head with a yel- 

 low stick, I suppose a cane, for which the Earse had no 

 name, and drove them to the kirk, from which they have 

 never departed. Since the use of this method of conversion, 

 the inhabitants of Eigg and Canna who continue Papists call 

 the Protestantism of Rum the religion of the yellow stick." 



