If he votes with them, he votes for persecuting what he himself believes to be the truth. He holds out to the members of his own Church lures to tempt them to renounce that Church, and to join themselves to a Church which he considers as less pure. We may differ as to the propriety of imposing penalties and disabilities on heretics. But surely we shall agree in thinking that we ought not to punish men for orthodoxy.

I know, Sir, that there are many gentlemen who dislike innovation merely as innovation, and would be glad always to keep things as they are now. Even to this class of persons 1 will venture to appeal. I assure them that we are not the innovators. I assure them that our object is to keep things as they are and as they have long been. In form, I own, we are proposing a change; but in truth we are resisting a change. The question really is, not whether we shall remove old tests, but whether we shall impose new ones. The law which we seek to repeal has long been obsolete. So completely have the tests been disused that, only the other day, the right honorable Baronet, the Secretary for the Home Department, when speaking in favour of the Irish Colleges Bill, told us that the Government was not making a rash experiment. "Our plan," he said, "has already been tried at Edinburgh and has succeeded. At Edinburgh the tests have been disused near a hundred years." As to Glasgow the gentlemen opposite can give us full information from their own experience. For there are at least three members of the Cabinet who have been Lords Rectors; the First Lord of the Treasury, and the Secretaries for the Home Department and the Colonial Department. They never took the test. They probably would not have taken it; for they are all Episcopalians. In fact they belong to the very class which the test was especially meant to exclude. The test was not meant to exclude Presbyterian dissenters; for the Presbyterian Church was not yet rent by any serious schism. Nor was the test meant to exclude the Roman Catholics; for against the Roman Catholics there was already abundant security. The Protestant Episcopalian was the enemy against whom it was, in 1707, thought peculiarly necessary to take precautions. That those precautions have long been disused the three members of the Cabinet whom I mentioned can certify.

On a sudden the law, which had long slept a deep sleep, has been awakened, stirred up, and put into vigorous action.

These obsolete tests are now, it seems, to be exacted with severity. And why? Simply because an event has taken. place which makes them ten times as unjust and oppressive as they would have been formerly. They were not required while the Established Church was the Church of the majority. They are to be required solely because a secession has taken place which has made the Established Church the Church of the minority. While they could have done little mischief' they were suffered to lie neglected. They are now to be used, because a time has come at which they cannot be used without fatal consequences.

It is impossible for me to speak without indignation of those who have taken the lead in the work of persecution. Yet I must give them credit for courage. They have selected as their object of attack no less a man than Sir David Brewster, Principal of the University of Saint Andrews. I hold in my hand the libel, as it is technically called, in which a Presbytery of the Established Church demands that Sir David, for the crime of adhering to that ecclesiastical polity which was guaranteed to his country by the Act of Union, shall be “removed from his office, and visited with such other censure or punishment as the laws of the Church enjoin, for the glory of God, the safety of the Church, and the prosperity of the University, and to deter others holding the same important office from committing the like offence in all time coming, but that others may hear and fear the danger and detriment of following divisive courses." Yes; for the glory of God, the safety of the Church, and the prosperity of the University. What right, Sir, have the authors of such an instrument as this to raise their voices against the insolence and intolerance of the Vatican? The glory of God! As to that, I will only say that this is not the first occasion on which the glory of God has been made a pretext for the injustice of man. The safety of the Church! Sir, if, which God forbid, that Church is really possessed by the evil spirit which actuates this Presbytery; if that Church, having recently lost hundreds of able ministers and hundreds of thousands of devout hearers, shall, instead of endeavouring, by meekness, and by redoubled diligence, to regain those whom she has estranged, give them new provocation! if she shall sharpen against them an old law the edge of which has long rusted off, and which, when it was first made, was made not for her defence, but for theirs ; then I pronounce the days of that Church numbered. As to the prosperity of the University, is there a corner of Europe

where men of science will not laugh when they hear that the prosperity of the University of Saint Andrews is to be promoted by expelling Sir David Brewster on account of a theological squabble? The Professors of Edinburgh know better than this Presbytery how the prosperity of a seat of learning is to be promoted. There the Academic Senate is almost unanimous in favour of the bill. And indeed it is quite certain that, unless this bill, or some similar bill, be passed, a new college will soon be founded and endowed with that munificence of which the history of the Free Church furnishes so many examples. From the day on which such an university arises, the old universities must decline. Now, they are practically national, and not sectarian, institutions. And yet, even now, the emoluments of a professorship are so much smaller than those which ability and industry can obtain in other ways, that it is difficult to find eminent men to fill the chairs. And if there be this difficulty now, when students of all religious persuasions attend the lectures, what is likely to happen when all the members of the Free Church go elsewhere for instruction? If there be this difficulty when you have all the world to choose professors from, what is likely to happen when your choice is narrowed to less than one half of Scotland? As the professorships become poorer, the professors will become less competent. As the professors become less competent, the classes will become thinner. As the classes become thinner, the professorships will again become poorer. The decline will become rapid and headlong. In a short time the lectures will be delivered to empty rooms: the grass will grow in the courts; and men not fit to be village dominies will occupy the chairs of Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart, of Reid and Black, of Playfair and Jamieson.

How do Her Majesty's Ministers like such a prospect as this? Already they have, whether by their fault or their misfortune I will not now inquire, secured for themselves an unenviable place in the history of Scotland. Their names are already inseparably associated with the disruption of her Church. Are those names to be as inseparably associated with the ruin of her Universities?

If the Government were consistent in error, some respect might be mingled with our disapprobation. But a Government which is guided by no principle; a Government which, on the gravest questions, does not know its own mind twentyfour hours together; a Government which is against tests at Cork, and for tests at Glasgow, against tests at Belfast, and

for tests at Edinburgh, against tests on the Monday for them on the Wednesday, against them again on the Thursday,how can such a Government command esteem or confidence? How can the Ministers wonder that their uncertain and capricious liberality fails to obtain the applause of the liberal party? What right have they to complain if they lose the confidence of half the nation without gaining the confidence of the other half?

But I do not speak to the Government. I speak to the House. I appeal to those who, on Monday last, voted with the Ministers against the test proposed by the honorable Baronet the Member for North Devon. I know what is due to party ties. But there is a mire so black and so deep that no leader has a right to drag his followers through it. It is only forty-eight hours since honorable gentlemen were brought down to the House to vote against requiring the professors in the Irish Colleges to make a declaration of belief in the Gospel: and now the same gentlemen are expected to come down and to vote that no man shall be a professor in a Scottish College who does not declare himself a Calvinist and a Presbyterian. Flagrant as is the injustice with which the Ministers have on this occasion treated Scotland, the injustice with which they have treated their own supporters is more flagrant still. I call on all who voted with the Government on Monday to consider whether they can consistently and honorably vote with the Government to-night: I call on all members of the Church of England to ponder well before they make it penal to be a member of the Church of England; and, lastly, I call on every man of every sect and party who loves science and letters, who is solicitous for the public tranquillity, who respects the public faith, to stand by us in this our hard struggle to avert the ruin which threatens the Universities of Scotland. I move that this bill be now read a second time.

A SPEECH

DELIVERED AT

EDINBURGH ON THE 2ND OF DECEMBER, 1845.

The following Speech was delivered at a public meeting held at Edinburgh on the second of December, 1845, for the purpose of petitioning Her Majesty to open the ports of the United Kingdom for the free admission of corn and other food.

MY LORD PROVOST AND GENTLEMEN,

You will, I hope, believe that I am deeply sensible of the kindness with which you have received me. I only beg that you will continue to extend your indulgence to me, if it should happen that my voice should fail me in the attempt to address you. I have thought it my duty to obey your summons, though I am hardly equal to the exertion of public speaking, and though I am so situated that I can pass only a few hours among you. But it seemed to me that this was not an ordinary meeting or an ordinary crisis. It seemed to me that a great era had arrived, and that, at such a conjuncture, you were entitled to know the opinions and intentions of one who has the honor of being your representative.

With respect to the past, gentlemen, I have perhaps a little to explain, but certainly nothing to repent or to retract. My opinions, from the day on which I entered public life, have never varied. I have always considered the principle of protection to agriculture as a vicious principle. I have always thought that this vicious principle took, in the Act of 1815, in the Act of 1828, and in the Act of 1842, a singularly vicious form. This I declared twelve years ago, when I stood for Leeds: this I declared in May, 1839, when I first presented myself before you; and when, a few months later, Lord Melbourne invited me to become a member of his Government, I distinctly told him that, in office or out of office, I must vote for the total repeal of the corn laws.