envy, the impatience which poverty has so powerful a tendency to breed, it, for the most part, fatally counterworks all better influences, and eats all true nobleness out of the soul. And who does not know that the poverty which is so perilous is a relative term? Poverty may be not a whit less pinching or less oppressive though it wears no rags, and does not beg in the streets. The kind of it, indeed, which is the hardest to bear is that which utters no complaint, and hides itself beneath the semblance of needing nothing. I believe there is poverty of this silently suffering kind in many a Free Church manse, and in the homes of many ministers in almost every branch of the Christian Church. Yes! little do those whose cup is full and running over-who have all and abound -know or consider the straits in the midst of which many a minister's family, in the very church to which they themselves belong, are passing their careworn lives. When the head of such a straitened family hardly knows how the children that are growing up around him are to be fed and clothed, and still less how they are to be suitably educated and sent out into the world; or how, in struggling to acquit himself of these parental responsibilities, he is to get the two ends of his income and of his pecuniary obligations to meet; how can it be that, under the weight of such incessant and depressing anxieties, his mind should be in good case for either his pulpit or his pastoral work!

There may be, and no doubt there are, individual men, whom God enables by His graces and gifts, not only to bear up under such harassing circumstances, but, in spite of them, to make full proof of their ministry, so that, as in the case of the Apostle Paul, their very trials and sufferings contribute to the furtherance of the gospel. But such cases are the exceptions only, and not the rule. In a poor church, and in troublous times like those of the gospel age, it might be warrantable to ask and to expect such things. But in a church, and in times like ours -dwelling in our ceiled houses, and sitting every man under his vine and under his fig-tree-to look for such things is simply to expect God to connive at our selfish unwillingness to do our duty. There are laws in the moral universe which cause men's sins to find them out, and their iniquities to correct them, as fixed and certain in their working as the laws of material nature itself. The great Head of the Church has said, "Let him that is taught in the Word communicate to him that teacheth in all good things." He has said, "The labourer"-the labourer that is in the spiritual vineyard of the Church-" is worthy of his hire." He has not only said, but "ordained that they who preach the gospel should live of the gospel." If these explicit commands of His be either altogether disregarded or but grudgingly or sparingly fulfilled, it will be found in the long run that this neglect of duty will bring down its own punishment. That which is so little appreciated will, by and by, so degenerate as to become really little worth. The starving of the ministry will gradually bring on a spiritual dearth, the souls of the people will be poorly fed, and there will be a famine, in the end, of the bread of life.

And here, Moderator, let me express the earnest hope that I may not be misunderstood in speaking as I have now done. Both the reason and the necessity for so speaking will sufficiently appear before I close. But, meanwhile, let it not be for a moment supposed that I am meaning to cast any special reflection, or to bring any special charge, against the

people of the Free Church, as if they had peculiarly failed in the great duty to which my observations have referred. Far from me be both the folly and the ingratitude which the making of so undeserved an imputation would involve. On the contrary, I, in my conscience, firmly believe, and am prepared, anywhere, confidently to affirm, that since those primeval times, when, in the first freshness and fulness of their love to the Lord that bought them, "they that believed were together, and had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need," there never has been a nobler outburst of joyful, self-denying, large-hearted, loving liberality to God's cause than was exhibited by this Church of ours in the ever-memorable 1843. Oh! it was a blessed time; truly a time of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power. Would that the windows of heaven were again opened, and that we were again baptized in that cloud and in that sea! Though nearly the quarter of a century has passed away since that marvellous time, who that had any part in it can look back upon it, even now, without feeling as if no other words could adequately describe it but those of the 68th Psalm :-"O God, when thou wentest forth before thy people, when thou didst march through the wilderness, the earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel. Thou, O God, didst send a plenteous rain, whereby thou didst confirm thine inheritance, when it was weary. Thy congregation hath dwelt therein thou, O God, hast prepared of thy goodness for the poor. The Lord gave the word; great was the company of them that published it." Never can we be sufficiently thankful for the blessing we then received, and which, through us, was more or less shared in by many other churches both at home and abroad. Its results among ourselves it will tax the powers of some future Church historian to sum up and to describe :-Nearly a thousand churches built, and almost as many manses and schools; nearly a thousand congregations formed, and as many ministers and missionaries sustained all over the length and breadth of the land;-in a word, the whole equipment of a Christian Church set up and provided for, with its theological halls for the training of candidates for the ministry, its missions to the heathen and to the Jew, and to our own expatriated countrymen in every quarter of the world. In view of all this, not we ourselves only, but onlookers outside of us, have been constrained to say-What hath God wrought!

But while I most gladly bear this testimony to what Christian liberality, in this Church of ours, has achieved, is there not too much cause to fear that we have been falling away from our first love and from our first works? We have not, now, churches, or manses, or schools, or colleges to build, on anything approaching to the scale of Disruption times. And yet, with demands so much lessened and resources so largely set free, how little advance has been made in the amount of our mission and education funds, and especially of that great fund of which it is my more special province and purpose at this time to speak. Four-andtwenty years ago we set out with the resolution to provide, from that Central Fund, a minimum stipend for all our ministers of £150. To this hour that purpose remains unaccomplished. What I have come before you this day, by God's help to do, is to arrest the attention of this

House, and of this whole Church, on that discreditable fact. In 1843, with the great and heart-stirring sight before us of 500 ministers voluntarily surrendering their earthly all in order to uphold the spiritual rights and liberties of their people, and the crown rights of Zion's King, we solemnly and deliberately gave it out that, at least to the extent I have specified, we would make up what they had thus sacrificed, for Christ's and for conscience' sake. Almost a whole generation has passed away, and that pledge is still unredeemed. It is true we have now several hundreds of more ministers to maintain than we had at the beginuing of our career as a disestablished Church; but it is also true that we have now much more wealth and many more people. If, for example, in the Presbytery of Glasgow, to which I belong, we had only thirty-two ministers to support at the date of the Assembly of 1844, whereas, at the date of the Assembly of 1866, we had fifty-nine ministers; let it be also borne in mind that, while at the former period the annual contributions of that Presbytery to the Sustentation Fund amounted to only £7161, they amounted, at the latter period, to £14,942. In reality, therefore, we have been doing little more than keeping up to the old original rate of giving to this great central fund of our Church. Certain it is, that instead of reaching at once the goal we had set before us, we have not fully reached it even after the lapse of four-and-twenty years. And what I want to get this Assembly and the Church at large to look at is, the obvious and undeniable fact that we cannot, either creditably or safely, do as we have been doing. If we do, we may shut our eyes to the consequences if we please, but that will not hinder these consequences from surely and steadily developing themselves, and in a form most disastrous to our Church and to religion in this land.

The value, scanty and limited as it was, considered as the means of supporting a minister and his family, which £150 represented in 1843, is not represented by it in 1867. The object, accordingly, of the first resolution embodied in the proposal which I have laid on the table of the Assembly, is to get the House to affirm this proposition-that the sum in question "is no longer sufficient for the purpose contemplated," and that "the time has fully come for making a fresh appeal" on the subject to the congregations of the Church. It is not, however, with a mere negative declaration that I mean to content myself. What I further ask the House to commit itself to is the affirmation of the positive statement contained in the following words :-"That having respect to the greatly increased cost of living, to the immense additions that have been made to the wealth of the country, and to the extensive rise in the remuneration of service in all other departments of human labour which have taken place since 1843, the minimum stipend for her ministers at which the Church should now aim ought not to be less than £200.” From the words now quoted, it will be seen that the broad ground on which I ask the Assembly, and the whole Church, to embark in this movement is substantially this-that the sum of £150, fixed on as the minimum stipend for our ministers in 1843, even had it been sufficient then, has ceased to be sufficient now.

Every one indeed knows that in naming, at the date of the Disruption, so small a sum for the income of the great body of our ministers, it was our poverty and not our will that consented to it. With so much to do, and to

do all at once, in meeting the great emergency that had arisen, we did not feel that we could venture at that period to name any higher amount; and to their unspeakable honour, even the country ministers, who had given up the larger parochial benefices, cheerfully acquiesced in that truly modest and stinted provision. But though we had a reasonable excuse for acting as we did twenty-four years ago, we shall be altogether inexcusable if, at the present day, we allow that state of things to continue. In the first place, we are now, as a Church, far more favourably situated for making an effort to provide a more adequate stipend for our ministers than at the time of the Disruption. Other demands on our pecuniary resources are not nearly so great and pressing now as they were then. In the next place, the value of money has very considerably fallen, and therefore the necessity for making such an effort is more urgent than ever, if our ministers are not to be left for the future in a still worse position, as to their temporal (support, than that in which they have hitherto stood. A hundred and fifty pounds, as every housekeeper well knows, will not go nearly as far in meeting the wants of a family in 1867 as it did in 1843. The truth of this statement is too obvious and undeniable, to need that either evidence or argument should be adduced in confirmation of it. But this is not all. There is another fact mentioned in the resolution to which I am now calling the attention of the Assembly, which has a most important bearing on this proposed movement, and to which we must take special care not to shut our eyes, if we really mean either to do justice to the claims of the Christian ministry, or to avert from our Church the greatest of all the calamities that could befall her the want of an adequate supply of fitting men to occupy her pulpits, and to take the spiritual oversight of her people. I refer to the statement the resolution makes as to "the extensive rise in the remuneration of service in all other departments of human labour which has taken place since 1843." During the long interval which has elapsed since that year, the remuneration of the great body of our ministers has been standing still. As already mentioned, it has not even yet reached that low point with which we proposed to begin a quarter of a century ago.

In

If, indeed, all other kinds of employment had been in the same position-if the various occupations in which the members of the Church themselves are engaged, had been passing through the very same sort of experience; if the common labourer, if the skilled artisan, if those employed in the multifarious branches of trade and commerce, if men engaged in the secular professions, were now, in 1867, getting just the wages, or receiving just the salaries, or making just the gains of 1843, the argument I am about to use would have little or no force. that case the ministry would be simply sharing in a state of things common to all other classes and to all other pursuits. But what I am prepared not merely to assert, but to demonstrate, is that the state of things now spoken of exists in the case of the ministry alone. For the ministry in our own Church, and in unendowed Churches generally, nay, to a considerable extent even in the Established Churches themselves remuneration has been left to stand at the old low level, while in all other departments of service, with scarcely a single exception, it has been steadily and largely on the rise. The fact now stated is, in fact, so notorious, that I do not believe there is a member of this House,

or a man of ordinary intelligence anywhere, who would think of calling it in question. At the same time, I am fully persuaded that, though in a vague and general way, its truth will be admitted by every one, there are comparatively few who are aware of the extent and the universality of its truth; and that there are fewer far who have ever thoughtfully and seriously looked at the fact itself, in its bearing on the great duty to which I am so earnestly desirous to stir up this Assembly and this Church. The statistics on this subject, which I am now about to present, might have been multiplied to almost any extent. To have increased their number, however, would only have been to encroach needlessly on the time and patience of the House. Those to which I now ask the attention of the Assembly have been carefully prepared, and are thoroughly reliable. I have arranged them under the following heads, viz. :-1. Wages of common and agricultural labour; 2. Wages of skilled labour; 3. Salaries and other emoluments of persons employed in various departments of trade and commerce, and in other similar pursuits.

I-WAGES OF COMMON AND AGRICultural Labour PER DAY IN DIFFERENT COUNTIES. 1. Common Labour.

The rise in ploughmen's wages between 1846 and 1866 equals 20 per cent. and

upwards.

II. WAGES OF SKILLED LABOUR IN GLASGOW PER WEEK.