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genial was the fellowship between the Established Church and the old non-jurors in that day. The Apostolical succession gave warmth to their own bosoms, let us hope, but imparted no ecclesiastical arrogance to those old native bishops and clergy who recognised the minister as a brother, and whose agency disturbed no parochial peace. No militant Directorship, or presumption of higher authority, was among such kindly old Scotsmen, Scotch of the Scotch, as John Skinner; neither was it known at a much later date, among men represented by Dean Ramsay, one of the last of those native and kindly priests. Intolerance came in with the new development, which made the old Scotch Episcopal chapel into “the English church,” so-called in Scotland, and filled it with a new class of missionaries in partibus infidelium, contemptuous of the forms of faith which they did not know, and asserting strongly their own superior claims.

The fact that Archbishop Tait, for instance, was perfectly calm amid the uproar, so strangely foolish we cannot but think, which raged in the Church of England over such a practically harmless measure as the Burials Bill, was no doubt due to the fact that his forefathers had slept peaceably side by side with the “dourest” Presbyterians in the old kirkyard at Langside, and that no opposition had ever arisen to that natural and touching amity of the grave. So much as there was of change in his belief, or at least in the outward garments in which that faith was dressed, occurred on the verge of manhood when he came to Balliol, and his steadfast adherence to his principles was always conspicuous. Seven years after, when he was already tutor of his college, the tempting opening of a Glasgow professorship, with its high fees and much leisure, had a great fascination for him; but notwithstanding the example of various other English Churchmen who had cheerfully swallowed the Westminster Confession, then a necessary formula for any occupant of a professor’s chair in Scotland, Tait steadfastly declined to compromise his truth and honour by thus professing a nominal acceptance of standards under which he could not fight. “I have nothing to do with judging other people, but it seems to me that a man who, intending to remain an Episcopalian, sets his hand to such an unqualified declaration, does neither more nor less than write one thing and mean another.” There was enough of that in another direction in those stirring days in Oxford. Either on one side or another the young don would have none of it.

It is curious to find how in the very soberness of his mind, deeply imbued as he was with a Scotch dislike of gush, and sensitive to the absurdity of overestimates of all kinds, the young scholar of Balliol (a personage not generally likely to make light of his own claims or think small-beer of himself) declares himself sick of letters of congratulation on the subject of his scholarship—“Written in as high-flown style as if I had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury at once, or been invited by the Poles, on account of my extraordinary merits, to accept the sovereignty of their kingdom. I am sure when these letters are published in my Memoirs they will be found a thousand times more bombastical than those which I receive when promoted to the first named of these dignities.” This was no doubt said lightly enough and in jest, in the serene com-