two hundred and forty-five new members. By the constitution of the
Scottish church, an equal number of lay elders (called ruling elders)
accompany the clerical elders. Consequently four hundred and ninety
new members were introduced at once into that particular class of
courts (presbyteries) which form the electoral bodies in relation to
the highest court of General Assembly. The effect of this change, made
in the very teeth of the law, was twofold. First, it threw into many
separate presbyteries a considerable accession of voters--_all owing
their appointments to the General Assembly_. This would at once give
a large bias favorable to their party views in every election for
members to serve in the Assembly. Even upon an Assembly numerically
limited, this innovation would have told most abusively. But the
Assembly was _not_ limited; and therefore the whole effect was, at the
same moment, greatly to extend the electors and the elected.

Here, then, was the machinery by which the faction worked. They drew
that power from Scotland rekindled into a temper of religious anxiety,
which they never could have drawn from Scotland lying torpid, as she
had lain through the eighteenth century. The new machinery (created
by Parliament in order to meet the wishes of the Scottish nation), the
money of that nation, the awakened zeal of that nation; all these were
employed, honorably in one sense, that is, not turned aside into private
channels for purposes of individuals, but factiously in the result,
as being for the benefit of a faction; honorably as regarded the open
mode of applying such influence--a mode which did not shrink from
exposure; but most dishonorably, in so far as privileges, which had
been conceded altogether for a spiritual object, were abusively
transferred to the furtherance of a temporal intrigue. Such were the
methods by which the new-born ambition of the clergy moved; and that
ambition had become active, simply because it had suddenly seemed to