own, whether in the character of judges or appellants. It was in vain that Dr. Chalmers remonstrated by letter with the originator of this strange measure: the bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill, was now the ultimatum; and, as might be expected, it was rejected in the General Assembly by a majority of nearly two to one. The unfortunate bill was in consequence withdrawn, while its disappointed author characterized Dr. Chalmers, in the House of Lords, as "a reverend gentleman, a great leader in the Assembly, who, having brought the church into a state of jeopardy and peril, had left it to find its way out of the difficulty as well as it could." This was not the only instance in which the doctor and his coadjutors were thus calumniated from the same quarter, so that he was obliged to publish a pamphlet on the principles of the church question, and a reply to the charges with which its advocates had been vilified. "It is as a blow struck," he wrote, "at the corner-stone, when the moral integrity of clergymen is assailed; and when not in any secret or obscure whispering-place, but on the very house-tops of the nation, we behold, and without a single expression of remonstrance or regret from the assembled peerage of the empire, one nobleman sending forth his wrathful fulmination against the honesty and truth of ministers of religion, and another laughing it off in his own characteristic way with a good-natured jeer as a thing of nought—we cannot but lament the accident by which a question of so grave a nature, and of such portentous consequences to society as the character of its most sacred functionaries, should have come even for a moment under the treatment of such hands."
Events had now ripened for decisive action. The Church could not, and the State would not yield, and those deeds successively and rapidly occurred that terminated in the disruption. As these, however, were so open, and are so well known, a brief recapitulation of the leading ones is all that is necessary. The seven suspended ministers of Strathbogie, regardless of the sentence of the Assembly, by which they were rendered incapable of officiating in their ministerial character, resolved to ordain and admit Mr. Edwards, the rejected presentee, to the pastoral charge of Marnoch, at the command and by the authority of the Court of Session alone, which had by its sentence commissioned them to that effect. This portentous deed was done on the 21st of January, 1841, and Scotland looked on with as much astonishment as if the Stuarts had risen from the dead. "May Heaven at length open the eyes of those infatuated men," exclaimed Dr. Chalmers, "who are now doing so much to hasten on a crisis which they will be the first to deplore!" For an act of daring rebellion, so unparalleled in the history of the Church, it was necessary that its perpetrators should be deposed; and for this Dr. Chalmers boldly moved at the next meeting of Assembly. The question was no longer whether these men were animated by pure and conscientious though mistaken motives, to act as they had done: of this fact Dr. Chalmers declared that he knew nothing. "But I do know," he added, "that when forbidden by their ecclesiastical superiors to proceed any further with Mr. Edwards, they took him upon trials; and when suspended from the functions of the sacred ministry by a commission of the General Assembly, they continued to preach and to dispense the sacraments; that they called in the aid of the civil power to back them in the exclusion from their respective parishes of clergymen appointed by the only competent court to fulfil the office which they were no longer competent to discharge; and lastly, as if to crown and consummate this whole disobedience—as if to place the topstone on the Babel of their proud and rebellious defiance, I know that,
