ously cripple the energies of the Church, and if she wishes seriously to cripple her energies, let her lend her aid to the overthrow of the holy Sabbath day. Thus, at all times and under all circumstances, while carefully refraining from interference with each other's functions-the Church never tampering with the duties of the State and never pandering to the passions of a political partisanship, the State never laying unholy hands upon the ark of Godthey should still sympathize with and lend their influence in furthering the prosperity of each other, and thus work harmoniously together for the public weal. IV. THE CONFLICT. AVING at the outset introduced the reader to the revolutionary outburst at St. Giles, that first great explosion of the pent-up antagonisms between Presbyterianism on the one hand and despotism on the other, and having sketched an outline of legitimate ecclesiastical government, and the proper relations between it and the State, we will now trace the rise and progress of that fierce conflict in which Presbyterianism fought with despotism and conquered, and then point out some of the fruits of the victory. But let us introduce the war by an inspection of the battle-field. THE BATTLE-FIELD. Immediately after the close of the apostolic age corruptions in doctrine and practice, which had long before shown a vicious impatience with the constraints of primitive zeal and piety, set in with a tide that soon buried almost the whole Church 191 in a deluge that arose higher than fifteen cubits above the tops of the mountains. The great awakening in the sixteenth century found Scotland a field where the beast shook his many heads, brandished his horns and stamped his iron feet without let or hindrance. Remote from the great centres and highways of civilization, the public mind and manners were hardly reached by those forces that played in more favoured lands to soften and subdue and prepare for the coming of the white horse and his rider (Rev. vi. 2). The public character wore, therefore, a peculiar sternness of feature, and retained not a few traces of a hardly-waning barbarism. This condition of things was prolonged by the anarchical confusion of civil affairs. In other countries the system of feudal anarchy, which forbade anything like national unity, leaving the king little more than a powerful baron among scores of others, some of them at times more powerful than himself, impatient of control, following the monarch when they pleased, and deserting his armies upon any freak and at every pique, had yielded to an ever-growing centralization of power, and anarchy had passed reluctantly but surely into the fixed forms of rigid despotism, with its standing armies at the bidding |