25.-The Assembly proceeded to the consideration of the overtures respecting the union of offices of professorships in universities with parochial charges, upon which subject there were seventeen overtures now on the table of the House.

Mr P. Macfarlan opened the debate in support of the overtures, by a long and eloquent speech.

Dr Chalmers.-It could no longer be said that we had no power to put an arrest upon this mischief, unless we have a specific case before us. It lay with this venerable Assembly to put down every plurality which might happen to be obnoxious to it. Sitting as a court of conscience for the good of mankind, they could at any time by their single fiat arrest, in their judícial capacity, the individual mischief, by enacting against a universal one. This was his own view of the presiding authority with which this court was invested, and in the exercise of which he held it competent for them to make a de cision upon every particular case; but they did not think so themselves; and this was what made him desirous now for a general law. He would be thankful for the benefit in any shape. He would wish to have, in place of the specific finding, the generic formula, that would envelope all future possibilities, and secure lasting benefits to all future generations. Now, all that was wanted for this purpose, was just an extension of the act 1817, viz. that the holding of professorships in any of our universities should be incompatible with the charge of a town, as it was now with that of a country parish. They had already shut out, in their establishment, professorships from a country charge, and

what now remained to complete the reformation was, that they shut them out from the charges of towns where universities are situated. He believed, in upwards of nine hundred of their parishes, the mischiefs of pluralities were completely provided against; but there were still forty-six parishes which had been left untouched by the act of 1817; and here, upon a rapid view of the subject, it might appear, that now that the evil had been reduced to so insignificant a fraction of what it was, there was nothing for the zeal of future reformers to sweep away. But it may be said to have left the whole untouched-to have left the whole length and breadth of the land between acknowledged pluralities. He would hold up his face and tell them, that by the act 1817, the mischief was not half done away-for, alas! how did the matter stand?-The whole number of professorships, including even those regius professorships, which form no part of the faculty in any of the colleges, is just 84-and this was just at all times the maximum of pluralities that could be formed. The proportion formerly was as 956 to 46, but the proportion now was of 84 to 46, owing to the act 1817; and yet does not that shut out 38 pluralities, and leave 46 still open? Taking the most simple arithmetical view, one half of the reformation was still unaccomplished. Even previous to the act of 1817, there were still seven churches that lay much in the way of professors; and still there were city ministers who stood the foremost of all their brethren in the competition for collegiate vacancies-that field was still open which, even under a system of general looseness, would have accommodated the greater number of our pluralists. In the 46 parochial charges which were closely situated around their universities, there were

still temptations enough left to dilute the Christian ministry of these crowded vicinities. It may be thought that the law of 1817 put an end to this mischief; and such, he was free to confess, was his impression from the first blush and aspect of the matter. The act of 1817 cut off the country parochial charges from all connexion with the universities, and it might be thought the mischief was greatly lessened; but it left the evil in the town in full force. At all events, the existing condition of their law was, that 46 pluralities could be secured as formerly. In university towns there were more professors than clergymen, and a great deal more of the former than the latter in St Andrews and Aberdeen. There were 13 to 3 in St Andrews; it was therefore possible that all the pulpits of all university towns, might be filled by professors; and indeed the two last mentioned towns were liable to be overwhelmed by the competition arising from such a disproportion. The pulpits of the two last stand peculiarly exposed to this. He was not speaking of the effect of these pluralities as extenuating the work of the professors, but as they mar and deteriorate the work of the city clergymen. When he looked to this act, it would have been better for the interest of the Church, that the law of 1817 had been reversed; that it had laid an interdict upon the university charges of the town, and permitted those of the country. It would have been better that the feeble exhibitions of the pluralist should have been transferred to the retirement of obscure parishes, than that the high places of the land should be exposed to their influence-better that they should have been given to the wilderness and to its bleak and barren scenes, where insipidity might perish unseen, wasting its sweetness on the desert air, than that it should

be brought into the pulpits of the city, to demean and to degrade the Christian ministrations among the haunts of polished society, and among the beautiful abodes of lofty and cultivated intellect. If there were any one place where Christianity should appear clothed in the majesty of reason, and armed with a moral power to convince and overawe; if there were any one place where its ministers ought to stand forth in the full panoply of their order; where they should bring, Sabbath after Sabbath, the whole force and richness of divine truth to bear on one quarter more than another; if there were any quarter in the land where the religion of the New Testament stood more in need than another of its able and most accomplished expositors; and where a clergyman should give his undivided strength to his work-it was that field of consecrated ground which is given to pluralists, but which the act of 1817 ought to have protected. They had now recalled this mischief in such a way as to make it lodge in by far the most precious part of the building. They had consecrated this blasting mildew in that part of the field where the harvest yielded by far the most prolific produce, and these were the places that were polluted most cruelly with it, and were blighted under this mischief, which the act ought not to have diverted but to have destroyed. The leprosy is confined to and condensed in that quarter where it will give the fullest demonstration of its power-the deadly virus is permitted to walk abroad, spreading its malignity, and casting forth contagion throughout those haunts of the land that are most hurried and alive with the activity of a crowded population. It would sound very fractional to say, that there were 13 chairs in St Andrews, and they were exposed to the invasion of three pluralists. But it was to not a fraction, but to a full con

summation of mischief that the church was exposed. One of the charges is collegiate, and the other charges are exposed to pluralists from the university. He brought this as an example, and he begged them to observe that the same might happen in all university towns. It was clear that all labour of this nature must be of a deteriorated kind, if there was any truth in Dr Smith's great principle of the division of labour. There were no doubt great and splendid exceptions; but they did not legislate for exceptions. It was not to the evil of such deterioration in towns, but it was to the evil in university towns that he looked, that the ears of the students might not be confounded with meagre effusions from the pulpit, whether the result of haste or carelessness; and of all places they should secure their college churches from attempts of this nature. It was cruel to trifle in embryo with the happiness of succeeding generations, to injure these moral nurseries of our youth, and to crush the frail seed that enveloped the eternal interests of the Scottish Church. It was not well that in their schools they should be exercised in views of science, and that what they heard on Sabbath should not be in sacred accordance with what they heard during the week. It was not well that, after having been engaged in the play of a generous intellect during the week, the Sabbath should bring round to them the most childish imbecility of common-places; it was far from well that they should contrast the aspect of religion with the aspect of philosophy, that they should hear a lecture every day on the great principles of science, and that in the church on Sabbath they should be dosed by a narcotic into listlessness and insufferable apathy. Give me, said Archimedes, a place where to stand, and I will move the

world. Now, such a place was a college pulpit. He that was there was an Archimedes; he would require to have the strength of an Archimedes; he held a lever in his hand, which he could depress or elevate at pleasure: it was impossible for that man to work this lever who was a pluralist. The character of a university preacher was higher far than that of a parish minister he was a national preacher— the half of Scotland were assembled round his pulpit, and it was not possible to withdraw him from the hearts and from the happiness of his people. He had great indulgence for cases of common fraud; there were certain delinquencies where the good done the criminal was equal to the loss of the victim; there were others of a deeper dye, to which he gave the name of atrocities, where the loss sustained by one party was indefinite. It was thus that the fraud of a seedsman was reckoned a greater enormity than that of any ordinary tradesman; and a dealer in any article of immediate consumption, who impregnated it with deleterious mixtures, was an object of keener execration. They must see the application of this principle to the question before them; for, suppose that you lopt off the ulterior branches, and purified the lower waters, you still poison the remotest streams and fountain heads. I have, Moderator, (continued the Reverend Professor) confined myself to the mischiefs of this system on the interests of Christianity; I shall now confine myself to a few short observations on the mischief done to the system of learning. But before I enter on this, I may be permitted shortly to condense what I have already said, as to the interpretation of the act 1817, and its having left untouched those places of the land that stand the highest. At the end of your reformation, you have diverted the mischief you intended to destroy.

You have stopt, it is true, the egress of corruption through the country; but it has fallen back on the churches and town. You have pursued a strange mode of spiritual husbandry; you have placed your keepers and your scarecrows to prevent the pigeons and jackdaws from lighting on your potatoe fields, while in your garden culture you have established nurseries of deleterious weeds, and spread the seed plants all over the face of your territory; and thus you have taken care to provide for a wholesale deterioration of your own precious hopes and eternal interests.-(Applause, hear, hear.) The sting of this mischief you have not extracted; the wound is now out of sight, but it is at work on the vitals-the outward injury appears to be closed up, but the patient still continues to languish under the operation of a general decay. With regard to the pluralists, with all of whom, or the most part of whom, I have the honour to be acquainted, I have equally a private esteem, and a private kindness for them all. But really, sir, this subject of the act of 1817, has created an irresistible association in my mind that I cannot get rid of-of pluralists with pigeons and jackdaws, though I should be sorry, were I asked to characterise them as individuals, to compare them to either the one or other. One of them lately lighted in Glasgow; Aberdeen got its share; and St Andrews, poor St Andrews, was overspread with a whole covey of them-(Loud laughing)-to the whole extent of its capacity; and they are even found in this your intellectual city-this very garden of the Hesperides. But there is another and distinct injury done to our universities; and here it is necessary to go back to our numbers again. The law of 1817 has done some good, because out of 84 professorships, only 46 can now be occupied by pluralists. But remember,

Moderator, that of these 84, there are only 36 now appropriated to the business of that education, which is deeply essential to a clergyman. All the rest chiefly belong to the law and medical department. Dr Chalmers then commented on the nature of those different branches of university education, and ridiculed, with force and felicity, the apology made for pluralists, that one of their charges was rather a recreation than a task. Considering the relation in which he stood to the pluralists, to whom he was hostile on public grounds, though he had no private enmity, nor did he wish to hurt their feelings, he said that he had a peculiar and hazardous task to perform, and would require the dexterity and skill of the peasant who had to shoot at an apple on his child's head. He would wish that a stroke so feeble as his would be able to beat into powder the business of pluralism; but he did not desire to wound the feelings of persons. The whole amount of the suffering that he should like to bestow upon them would be-Shall I praise you in this thing? I praise you not. Dr Chalmers here compared the situation of England and Scotland, preferment going in the one country from the church to the college, and in the other from the college to the church, and concluded with expressing his conviction that the measure would ultimately triumph. He then moved that a committee should be appointed to prepare an overture and interim act, declaring the union of the parochial town charges with the professors" chairs to be in future incompatible; and farther, that the General Assembly should take into consideration the means of raising revenues for the better endowment of professors' chairs.

Mr J. Moncrieff seconded the motion.

Dr Forbes, of Old Machar, observed, that if the principle of these over

tures was correct, it must be carried to a much greater extent, and must also prevent every person having a parochial charge from taking upon himself any other office, or the performance of any other class of duties, except those he was strictly bound by his ministerial charge to do.

The Rev. Mr Hill observed, that the simple ground upon which he gave the overture his support was, that it was agreeable to the spirit and constitution of our ecclesiastical establish

ment.

Dr Bryce, of Aberdour, said he had been revolving in his mind the application of an allusion that had been made to the olden times. He thought he had hit it at last; and that it referred to none other than the great founder of the reformed churches of Europe, John Calvin; who, at the same time that he most zealously and faithfully performed the duties of the ministerial office, was himself the founder of an academy at Geneva, where he preached on theology to students from all Europe-" Ay, and from Scotland too."-(Laughter.) He would name another distinguished individual, famed for the strict and energetic discharge of his pastoral duties, who had favoured the world with two volumes of very excellent sermons; and whom it was surely no disparagement to place by the side of Calvin. He meant the good Sir Henry Moncrieff, collector of the widow's fund, and first minister of St Cuthbert's, a parish with a population of 50,000 souls. After these illustrious instances of pluralism, he should only add, that whatever they did in this case, he hoped it would be done with due regard for the memory of departed worth, and for the feelings of the living.

Principal Nicoll would submit to the Assembly the view that he took of the case, as it could be got from books.

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He thought he should be able to show, that in the practice complained of in the overtures on their table, there was nothing inconsistent with the genius and spirit of the Presbyterian Church with the laws and constitution of the church, or with its usages at the present period of its history. He might here remark, that there was a slight mistake with respect to the name pluralists." The overtures were against a union of offices. "Union of offices" was a correct term; but "pluralists" applied only to the junction of situations, to which was attached the cure of souls. In using the words "genius and spirit of the constitution," he meant to contend that there was nothing in the union of a professorship and a parochial charge, which was at all inconsistent with the immemorial practice of the church. He began with the oldest of the church standards. The first book of discipline, compiled by John Knox, but which had never received the sanction of Parliament, contained not a word on the subject, except what was found in a small paragraph, which said that ministers ought not to become curators, or engage in employments which would withdraw them from their ecclesiastical duties. This exception made in favour of Dr Nicoll's argument. John Knox, who had studied at St Andrews, where there were three professorships united with parochial charges, could not be ignorant of the practice, and, if it had been considered an abuse in those days, Knox, " who never feared the face of man," would not have hesitated to point them out. The mind of that great reformer was not against the practice, nor did he ever give an opinion on the subject. Calvin, (as had been noticed by a reverend doctor,) the founder of Presbyterianism, was himself a professor and a minister. Luther, though hardly an authority