been much maligned and misrepresented in England, and consequently, I fear, not a little misunderstood and distrusted by the Evangelical clergy of the Church of England.

V. Not by the Evangelical clergy as a party, witness M'Neile's able and hearty defence of your position at the time of the Secession. I know of but two of our clergy who at all favoured your opponents. One of these, Baptist Noel, has recently shown his unfitness to judge in the matter, and the other, whose name, I believe, is Trench, has no weight whatever. In fact, any clergyman of the English Church, who espouses the side of the Free Church, lays himself open at once to the charge of remarkable ignorance or remarkable dishonesty. In approving of the Free Church, he of course condemns the Church of Scotland, and a fortiori passes sentence of condemnation on his own Church, which, whether for good or evil in these days, is surely far more closely interwoven with, and trammelled by the State, than yours.

S. M. Very true. If we are "traitors to Christ," for such, as you are aware, were the terms applied to us, in what light are we to regard Mr. Trench or any clergyman of the English Establishment, approving of the Secession of 1843, yet retaining his position? I am therefore willing to believe that the really well-informed and sound Evangelical men of the English Church, from the Archbishop of Canterbury downwards, regard our position as the constitutional and scriptural one. Still, you must admit that they have shown towards us a coldness or indifference which might be explicable enough in Tractarians, but which, from them, I cannot account for.

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V. The true explanation I believe to be simply this-the assumption and monopoly by the Seceders of the title of "Evangelical," and the success of their attempt to gild their proceedings with the venerated name of the large-minded and large-hearted Chalmers. Proclaiming themselves in England as the Evangelical party, that is, as the only men who held forth in Scotland the pure Reformation doctrines of the Gospel, they were too readily taken at their word. The modern use of the term "Evangelical" commenced, I believe, in England, and the word has there a well-defined and well-understood meaning. was not a little astonished, therefore, when in a low, ill-natured publication, entitled "the Wheat and the Chaff," which fell under my eye the other day, I found the epithet "Evangelical" coolly applied to designate the holding of certain democratic and seemingly popular views on the subject of the election of ministers, combined with a theory almost identical with that of Rome on the connection of Church and State, while the title of "non-evangelical" is as deliberately and uniformly applied to the holders of the opposite opinions. Some of the latter, however, as I can now aver from personal experience, are as truly evangelical as any, and more so, I should think, than some of their opponents. That Scotchmen should employ English terms is natural enough, but when they do so to convey information or impressions in England, it seems but common honesty to use them in the sense in which they are there understood. As for myself, it is only since my arrival in Scotland that I became fully awake to the imposi

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tion to which we in England had been subjected by the Free Church abuse of the term in question, and judging of others by myself, I am convinced, that in so far as the coldness and distrust you complain of has existed, it is to be ascribed to this abuse. The fact stands simply thus. The Evangelical party, although, of course, they could not but approve your ecclesiastical views and position, had nevertheless been too easily persuaded that the Free Church, however scripturally and constitutionally in error, had carried off all the truth and life of the Church. This error I rejoice in being now able to dispel, and I again repeat it, I am truly thankful to God that the steadfast adherents of external order are, so far as I have seen, firm and clear-headed believers, and earnest preachers of the truth. I am, you well know, no admirer, but the reverse, of your Presbyterian polity, but I regard the cause of your Church as inseparably identified with the cause of social order and of religious truth in Scotland.

S. M.-"In quietness and confidence has been our strength." We committed our way to that just and gracious God, who is "the Author of peace and not of confusion;" and He is now bringing forth “our judgment as the light, and our righteousness as the noon-day." Your testimony, on your return to England, that you have found our services so uniformly edifying, will help to dispel the cloud of unmerited distrust in which our adversaries, by a dishonest use of language, as it appears, contrived for a time to envelope us.

V. I will certainly, as I am able to do with truth, testify to the soundness in the faith and the fidelity of the Ministers of the Church of Scotland, even at the risk of a little abuse from my High Church friends, for so far forgetting myself as to worship in your Presbyterian assemblies. I have not yet had an opportunity of hearing any minister of the Free Church, but I shall certainly hear some of them before leaving Scotland. This, however, I can already say with confidence, that in the sense which the word "Evangelical" bears in England, and as I humbly conceive in the English language, no Free Churchman can be more truly Evangelical_than those of your Clergy whom it has been my privilege to hear. You must permit me, however, to correct a mistake into which you have fallen, as to the amount of my testimony in favour. I said that I had found your sermons edifying, not your your services. As for the latter, after making all reasonable deduction for habit or prejudice on my own part, I am compelled deliberately to regard them as framed on erroneous principles, as not serving efficiently the great ends of devotion, and as in some respects seriously defective. S. M. Of course you are not reconciled to our long extempore prayers or to the extreme simplicity of our Presbyterian worship.

V. I see no necessity for styling your worship Presbyterian. Your form of government, and your mode of worship, have no natural or neThe Reformed Churches on the Continent, which cessary connection. are Presbyterian, have a mode of worship which, although defective, is, I think, much superior to yours. Neither do I quarrel with simplicity, which is the term by which I find you and your brethren are fond of characterizing your public devotional services. You must however excuse my saying, that I think the term strangely

misapplied; the public prayers I have heard in Scotland, being, with few exceptions, the very reverse of simple. Some, indeed most, of these prayers, were highly elaborate and rhetorical; others historically or scholastically theological, and some, although simple as compared with the rest, were ill conceived, negligently expressed and trailing. In all of them, the meaning could have been better expressed in half the words, and half the time employed. In several, the object of the minister, or at all events the effect of his performance, for that is the most truly descriptive term, appeared to be rather to present ideas and recommend truths to the minds of the congregation, than to implore supplies of grace, mercy, and peace from God; just as one sometimes addresses himself to one party, while his speech is intended for another who is standing by. Those of your ministers whose prayers I refer to, were in form speaking to God, while in fact they were speaking at their hearers. Now this, I humbly conceive, is the business of preaching, not of prayer. I must, however, to my great regret, confess that so far as I could see, the people "love to have it so," although there can be no doubt, that what is wrong in their views and tastes, must be ascribed to the clergy, not indeed of the present, but of a former period. I have read Knox's Liturgy, republished by Dr. Cumming of London, and although it is far from perfect, I am at a loss to conceive how the style of prayer in Scotland has been so decidedly altered for the worse. In returning from the Church, at which, as I said, I was present during the Communion Services, upon the Saturday, I overheard an intelligent farmer say to another, "What a grand prayer Mr.

gave us, there was every thing in it?" Exactly so! thought I, "gave you," not "offered up to God." "Every thing in it" too! that there was certainly!-every thing but what there ought to have been, simple, earnest supplication. The prayer in question, which lasted about twenty-five minutes, was a composition displaying considerable talent certainly, and acquaintance with the language of Scripture, but it was any thing but a prayer. I was going to describe it as an epitome, but it was truly an amplification, (with proofs from the more abstruse figurative language of the Old Testament prophecies) of your doctrinal standards. The amount of prayer was but small. Now, in listening to such exercises, and indeed, I must confess, to any extempore prayers, unless the language and arrangement of ideas be extremely natural, my own consciousness is, that I cannot myself be said to pray; and from what I have witnessed, I am firmly convinced that your people listen to the prayers, when they do follow them throughout, very much in the same attitude of mind as they listen to the sermon; that they are looking for and receiving ideas, perhaps also, unconsciously, judging of the truth of the sentiment, or correctness of the expression, or of the ability or earnestness of the officiating minister; that they are experiencing a succession of emotions of approval or the reverse, not, as ought to be the case, sending up, through the minister's words, their own fervent aspirations to the throne of grace. My idea, and I believe the true one, is that as the prayer does not consist in the words or propositions, but in the desires of which they are but the channel, there ought to be nothing if possible, in the structure of the channel itself,

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to arrest the thoughts, or to divert the upward flow of the desire to God-that, consequently, for all the perpetually recurring and unvarying wants of a Christian Congregation, the well formed, well known channel of a simple and familiar formula, along the course of which there is nothing of novelty to arrest the mere intellectual or aesthetic powers of the mind, is the best vehicle of petition. When I read, as I lately did, a recommendation to your young divines to study variety of arrangement and expression in their prayers, I am convinced that there is a radical difference between your idea of public prayer and ours. view is that the better known and the more beaten the path by which our aspirations travel heavenward the better. Variety in expression cannot render prayer more acceptable to God, who looks to the heart. It can only serve, as perhaps it does, to arrest the attention of the hearers-but attention to what ?-attention as I conceive, engaged in the apprehension and reception of ideas, not the earnestness which travels along the channel of the words, almost without observation of the channel itself, aloft to the Hearer and Answerer of prayer. Wherever there is due attention given during our English Liturgical Service, it may be regarded as praying earnestness. With you there may be much attention, but, after all, it may be, and I am afraid it is, often unavoidably of a receptive kind. Your people listen reverently during the prayers, and you and they are alike deceived with the idea that they are therefore praying. I am disposed also to feel very painfully, as a fellow-Christian and fellow-minister, for you ministers of a Non-Liturgical Church, -when I consider how much your own minds must unavoidably be diverted from the real work of prayer, while professedly engaged in it, by the attention which you are compelled to give to the mere choice of words and arrangement of propositions. You have to do the work not only of the theologian, but of the grammarian and rhetorician, while doing that of the suppliant. You are making and dressing the sacrifice with an eye to the approval of man, at the very time when you are offering it to God. This evil may, no doubt, be obviated by the use of forms of prayer pre-composed by yourselves, but unless these forms have been so frequently used as to have become perfectly familiar, there is only an anxious task of the memory substituted for the task of extemporaneous composition. I am not surprised to find, as I do, that all this has often occurred to many of your brethren. My surprise is that it has not occurred to them all.

S. M. It has occurred to myself, and, as I know, to many others also, more frequently and more painfully than is generally known. Not that we repine at the additional exertion of thought which the devotional services of the Church impose, but at finding this exercise of thought requisite at the time when we ourselves should be personally occupied and interested with our people in the very different mental work of supplication.

V. Has no attempt ever been made to lift the ministers of your Church out of this difficulty and to improve the condition of your people by the introduction, or rather revival, in the Church of liturgical forms? Considering that the evils of which we have spoken are but a small portion of those connected with an exclusively non-liturgical

worship, and, in particular, viewing the loss of your hold on the higher classes, which I agree with the Duke of Argyll in ascribing mainly to the faults of your public devotional system, or want of system, it appears to me extraordinary that none of your leading men have thought of or proposed a remedy.

S. M. Many have hinted broadly at the evil and at the only remedy for it, but no one as yet has openly proposed it for consideration. Among those who without, so far I know, ever speaking on the subject, must have felt most strongly the evils of which you speak, you will not be surprised when I mention the name of him whom you have truly termed the large-minded and large-hearted Chalmers. Chalmers, I believe, generally wrote his prayers, and I can allege that he not unfrequently even read them. I never saw him do so in church, but in his class-room, in Edinburgh, he frequently did so. The prayers of which I speak were very short collects, sometimes of majestic grasp, of great pith and concinnity, and of exquisite beauty. They bore closely on the subject of his lectures, and where a subject occupied him for several days, the same collect was repeated. I suspect his attention was never seriously directed to the evil effects of our worship as these respect the people. Had it been so, during his best days, he might, and judging from his own practice, would, I dare say, have done something towards reform in this direction.

V. Is it not possible he may have exercised a favourable influence on the Free Church, of which, though certainly not a leader, he was the idol, and the great, if not the exclusive, ornament?

S. M. None whatever. From what I hear, I think you will find their public devotions more faulty than ours, and, in addition, larded and spiced with not a little controversial allusion.

V. Very probably. Indeed, I expect to find them in this, as in other respects, glory in driving all that is faulty in your Scottish religious system-provided only it be characteristic-to an exaggerated extreme. From the little which I have read of their periodical literature, they appear to bear an amusingly close resemblance to our Tractarians. Their attempts to revive obsolete terms, and to identify themselves in the eye of the public with the coarse but stronger-headed worthies of the Covenant, have not done them much good. I have heard that after the Secession, certain of their few grave doctors, as well as of their many noisy young divines, displayed their persons in blue great coats, by way of establishing their claim of kindred to the "true blue Presbyterians" of the seventeenth century. I myself saw the advertisement of a trinket, entitled the "Free Church Brooch." Let us, however, return to our subject, or rather let me proceed to the point to which I wish to come, and which I have not yet even mentioned. Many and serious as I consider the evils of your system of prayer, there is another part of divine worship, absolutely essential, in my humble opinion, at least in a Protestant Church, which is almost universally omitted in your service, and the omission of which affected me very painfully indeed.

S. M. What can you mean?