count upon having a majority in favour of their great measure in the Assembly of 1843, or at least in the Assemblies of immediately subsequent years: and hence they abandoned the Establishment. This is the only ground on which common sense can defend, or even understand, their relinquishment of the temporalities. But it is a ground which convicts, even out of their own mouths, the Veto Law of being a precipitate and ill-advised measure; for what are we to think of an enactment which such a body as the General Assembly can carry in one year and be prepared to rescind in the next? So that the resignation of their livings was not only a fatal blunder, viewed constitutionally as an admission that they were not the state; it moreover communicated an ugly look to the intrinsic merits of their case.
Having alluded to the merits of the Free Church controversy, there is another important constitutional point connected with that subject which we shall take this opportunity of delivering our sentiments upon. The plea to which we allude is the argument advanced by the Free Church ministry, that the Patronage Act of Queen Anne was an infringement of the Act of Security passed at the Union—was in fact a violation of the British constitution as established by that treaty; and therefore, afforded no valid or legitimate ground of opposition to their own enactment of the Veto Law. Upon this plea, if we mistake not, the Free Churchmen rested nearly the whole strength of their case, and therefore we must conclude that it was effectually rebutted at the time by the opposite party. But as we can find no traces of this refutation in any of the pamphlets which, of late, we have had an opportunity of consulting, and as we do not remember to to have heard the true history of the Patronage Act narrated in any of the interminable pleadings which took place during the Free Church commotion, we shall now publish what appears to us to be the correct version of the story. But in the first place, let us give the Free Church version of the enormity perpetrated by the anti-constitutional (for so some people consider it) measure of Queen Anne.
In the year 1690, during the reign of William III., an act of the Scottish Parliament was passed, which took patronages out of the hands of the patrons who had hitherto possessed them, and bestowed them upon the heritors and elders of each particular
