prestige which might have attached to their name, had their introduction to the ministry been heralded forth as divine. Their constitutional status as the dischargers of a vocation which man alone had commissioned them to fulfil—this was far too narrow and insignificant a basis to have supported their extraordinary pretensions, had any such pretensions been set up. Most assuredly, the Reforming clergy never could have accomplished their end, had they put themselves forward, in an undue degree, as the representatives of the Christian commonwealth, in the assembly they were desirous of establishing. In point of fact, they never attempted to compass their end in that fashion. They meditated, and they achieved, a far grander aim. They took the whole believing community along with them, and, giving it a large representation in the legislature of ecclesiastical affairs, they actually succeeded in establishing the state in a capacity in which it had never before existed. Like an actor who plays two parts in the same piece, the state, under the management of the Reformers, and without ceasing to be the state, became the church—and its high court of Parliament, when it assumed this character, was the General Assembly.
No other theory than this will account for the extraordinary power which the General Assembly has wielded; for the extravagant pretensions which it has set up, (extravagant, we mean, upon any other hypothesis,) and for the toleration with which it was treated by Queen Mary, the regents, and James VI., not to speak of later times. Therefore it was that we applauded the Duke of Argyll's Essay as throwing light upon some of the darkest problems of our history. If the General Assembly had been merely a congregation of ministers met to deliberate for, and not with the nation, the historical anomalies we have adverted to would have been altogether incomprehensible. The national Parliament, had the General Assembly not been another national Parliament, would have swept them from the face of the earth in the twinkling of an eye. Just study the part they played in setting at defiance their national double in the days of Charles I. just consider how they bearded and overawed their elder brother. lion: just contemplate their efforts to force Presbyterianism on universal England, on the country of Laud then, and since of Dr Johnson just remember that they were within an ace of suc-
