a lay-preacher, and visited several districts of the country, addressing immense multitudes of people, and awakening much spiritual interest by his fervent evangelical discourses. Mr. Robert Haldane promoted the same cause by the erection of suitable places of worship, the support of preachers in them, and the institution of a seminary for the training of ministers. Rowland Hill, Matthew Wilks, and others, came from England to their assistance. Crowds attended wherever they preached, so that they had often to meet in the open air, and sometimes as many as from fifteen to twenty thousand persons were computed to be present. This drew upon them the antagonism of some of the other denominations, notably the Established Church and the Anti-Burgher and Relief Synods, and their independent position was in a manner forced upon them. by this lack of wisdom in the older bodies. Their success is thus accounted for by Dr. Alexander in a passage which I quote, not only for its bearing on the matter in hand, but also because it incidentally corroborates from another point of view some of the statements which I have made in other connections:

"In the National Church the long reign of Moderatism had done much to extrude all vital godliness,

and to reduce the Christianity of both pastors and people to the lowest degree of attenuation compatible with the retention of the name. The majority of the ministers were avowedly Arminian, if not Pelagian, in their doctrinal views; not a few of them were Crypto - Socinians, and it was even insinuated that some holding no mean place in the Church were more than imbued with the scepticism of Hume. A few noble spirits still held aloft the banner of Evangelical orthodoxy, and stood valiantly by it, but they formed so slender a proportion of the whole that their efforts could do comparatively little towards counteracting the unwholesome influence of the majority. In the dissenting churches the state of things was undoubtedly greatly better, for in them no toleration was given to unsound doctrine, and the tone of religious sentiment and feeling was much higher than in the Establishment. Still there was but little of energetic piety even among them; little of aggressive activity in the propagation of the Gospel; little of what Shaftesbury derisively and yet most truly called 'the heroic passion of saving souls;' and along with this there was a much too prevalent disposition to set the mere apparatus of ecclesiastical order

above the great ends for which such alone is valuable. And as religion shared in the general apathy amid which the eighteenth century was advancing to its close, so it shared, also, in that sudden awakening which the startling events in the neighboring country [i.e., France] had produced. Men roused out of their long repose became painfully aware of necessities which craved immediate relief. They felt that hunger of soul for suitable spiritual food which naturally follows a long period of spiritual destitution or inadequate supply. And as the existing ecclesiastical bodies were not sufficiently elastic-did not quickly enough expand-to meet the new and enlarged capacities and wants of the people, the latter impetuously rushed forth to find elsewhere what was denied them at home. Hence the crowds that followed Messrs. Haldane and Aikman on their first tours of preaching through Scotland. Hence the thousands upon thousands that covered the slopes of the Calton Hill to listen to the preachers from England; and hence the almost instantaneous rise into considerable strength of a new religious body hitherto nearly unknown in Scotland, and for which, as subsequent events proved, the Scottish mind was not in reality cordial

ly prepared. The new wine could not be stayed in the old bottles, and so when it burst forth it was caught and kept by those who alone at the time were prepared to receive it." *

As the remark of Alexander near the close of the above extract confesses, Congregationalism has not grown into great proportions in Scotland, though for the year 1886-1887 I find one hundred churches returned; but no review of the Scottish Pulpit can afford to leave out the denomination which numbered among its preachers such men as Wardlaw and Alexander.

In the wake of the Revival out of which Congregationalism arose in Scotland a Baptist controversy sprung up, and in many of the towns Baptist churches were formed; but although some of the preachers of that denomination have attained to honorable place, it cannot be said that the denomination, at least until very recently, has greatly flourished in Scotland. In many places its members evinced a disposition to dispute over little matters, which led to divisions and subdivisions, while

* "Memoir of Ralph Wardlaw,” ubi sup., pp. 43, 44.

some of them adopted views opposed to the payment of pastors and the education of the ministry, which led among them to a "small-meeting-ism" not unlike that of the Plymouth Brethren in England. The Baptist Union of Scotland reported, however, in 1884 an aggregate of eighty-nine churches, and that organization is becoming a worthy sister of its English namesake.

The Evangelical Union had its origin in the Atonement controversy which shook the United Secession Church for years in the fifth decade of this century, and in the very hottest stage of which James Morison, now so widely known as one of our greatest New Testament exegetes, was deposed from the ministry for holding opinions on the extent of the Atonement, the Divine decrees, and the work of the Holy Spirit, akin to those of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church of America. He was joined by some ministers of the Secession Church who sympathized with his views, and by fifteen students who had been expelled from the Congregational Theological Seminary for maintaining the same doctrines. This new organization speedily instituted a theological seminary, and now it numbers about a hun