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Principal was naturally and very speedily drawn into the ordinary routine of his university and public life, and resumed his interrupted duties with renewed zest, leaving in abeyance for the moment those heroic schemes of study which were little compatible with the all-enveloping coil of everyday affairs which winds itself around a man in office when he returns after a long interval to daily work and the necessities of common life.

By this time, however, it becomes necessary to leave the easier strain of his private and professional affairs—which, I am obliged to confess, is more within my own range and sympathies than the other—and to indicate something of the course of events in Scotland, and especially in the Church of Scotland, which soon claimed his warmest attention, and led him more and more into the excitements and commotions of public life.

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CHAPTER VIII.

THE RENAISSANCE OF THE SCOTCH CHURCH.

THE Church of Scotland, in which Principal Tulloch was ordained at a moment of much depression and confusion-the Disruption having just carried away a large body of her ablest ministers, and many of those whose names had been representative of her highest life—had undergone a very great and momentous change during the twenty years which had elapsed since that extraordinary event. No Church has ever sustained a greater blow; and there was some justification for the hope entertained by those who abandoned her communion, that she would fail utterly in this tremendous emergency, and that their own claims to be the real Church in Scotland would then be fully vindicated, as well as the gibe and nickname of "Residuary" flung at the old organisation by the new.

But such anticipations are never infallible, and a very short time sufficed to show that the Free Church was not destined to take the place of the Mother, but, on the contrary, that the new departure had only added a powerful new party to the ranks of Dissent, and acted as an equally powerful stimulant on a new generation full of genius, courage, and high spirit within the Established Church. In such a case success is in reality the only test. Had the Free Church crushed the "Residuary," her action would have been

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justified; as she did not, there remains upon her head the painful responsibility of having filled the country with a universal opposition, putting up rival organisations in every parish, and tearing asunder a once almost unanimous nation. As things turned out, from the rent that was thus made and from the severe blow that for a moment almost paralysed the National Church, she arose in the remarkable and unexpected way, by which the Christian Church in all its developments has over and over again vindicated itself in the face of enemies and misfortunes. It would perhaps be over bold to say in respect to the Church of Scotland what has been said with great effect of the Church of Rome, that the "gates of hell have not prevailed against her." It has not been the gates of hell: such instrumentality is more easy to meet and more hopeful to conquer. The division which makes an army of good men and true Christians, to whom it would be a failure of charity to impute evil motives, yet who devoutly believe it their mission to annihilate her- the Church's enemies-is more painful and miserable than any assault of malignant principalities and powers. But every Church of Christ seems somehow to inherit a share of this promise. Her intimate foes, who were her own children, did not in this case prevail. What seemed the deathblow of the Church of Scotland became her new birth; and in twenty years it is not too much to say, that her national importance had become again, notwithstanding the presence of the Free Church by her side, as marked and great as in her best times.

This rending asunder of the Church had, however, produced a very remarkable effect unprecedented in Scotland. Since the Reformation, with the exception of an individual here and there, the inspiration of Scotch Churchmen had been invariably found in those fathers and symbols of the faith which have flourished since the sixteenth century. Before Knox, no one-a blank of Popery and superstition-has been what the most liberal minds have seen in looking back; nor

have there been any authorities, especially in Church matters, referred to or conceived of before the days of the First Covenant. One might almost think from many utterances, even of the most pious and enlightened minds, that to mark their divergence from the devotees of apostolical succession, the Presbyters of Scotland had cut themselves off from all parentage, and disowned all laws of lineage and succession before a certain date. In this faith the Free Church went her way, reckoning no other progenitors, and thinking of no other channel of thought or feeling than that formed for her by the convictions of the Reformation age.

But strangely enough, and I have not knowledge sufficient to determine how, the new troops that gradually poured into the abandoned cadres of the deserted camp, took an altogether new departure. For the first time a longing for freer air and an expanded atmosphere came with the quick growth of the renewed existence. It awoke in the open, liberal, and dispassionate mind of Principal Tulloch, in one department of thought and life; in the large, fervent, sympathetic nature of Norman Macleod in another; and in the precise and keen intellect of Robert Lee in a third. All of them were roused by one impulse-seized by a longing after a communion more extended than that which was confined within the limits of a scientific system of doctrine and a certain number of centuries. They bethought themselves simultaneously that the Apostles' Creed was older and wider and simpler than the Westminster Confession; that the laws of God had been revealed before ever the Reformers were thought of, and that prayer and praise had not been invented in the sixteenth century. These men were not without prejudice. They were all ready enough to vituperate Popish superstition, and call heaven and earth to witness how dark and benighted were other lands, and how inferior to their own; they had their own kind of bigotry, like most men. They were even somewhat illiberal in respect, for instance, to

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Episcopalians in Scotland, whose assumptions of superior authority exercised, and not unnaturally, an irritating influence upon them. But with all this their minds had taken a new turn, unprecedented in Scottish ways. A longing for something "more Catholic, more magnanimous," as Irving had said in a previous generation, came upon them. They remembered that, in their acknowledged descent from the original fathers of the faith, no leap had been made, no such wonderful bound as from St Paul to John Knox, which had been somehow the idea encouraged in Scotland; but that all the old saints, both great and small, were in their spiritual genealogy too, and that all the old ways of the Christian world, tender traditions of everything that was lovely and of good report belonged to them also-the hymn of Ambrose as well as the "The Lord's my shepherd." This, there is no doubt, was very new in the Scotch Church. The dogmatists of the "Free" were more faithful in their rigid traditionalism to that handful of great men to whom they limited their progeniture. It had never been known in Scotland, except perhaps in such a benignant individuality as that of Archbishop Leighton, that the Church should serve herself heir to all Christianity, and recognise a pedigree reaching further back than Geneva. And yet there could be no doubt that every Christian practice and custom as well as instinct and hope were hers, as they were the inheritance of all Christians.

When leaders are named, a certain strength of followers is always understood. Young Scotch ministers who had travelled, who had seen other countries at their devotions, and had learned to be ashamed of the hasty conclusion that they themselves were the holy seed, and that all the world lay in wickedness, had come throughout the country in many quiet corners to the same conclusion. The reader has already seen how to Tulloch in his wanderings the still sanctity of the open cathedral, the subdued atmosphere of