Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask.

  • William Keith Leask
Date:
[pref. 1896]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hugh Miller / by W. Keith Leask. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    86/168 page 82
    unalterable preservation of her ecclesiastical system. But five years witnessed the most shameless breach of public faith, by an Act which had the most ruinous effects, political and religious, upon the people. The Tories had come into power on the crest of the Sacheverel wave, and in 1712 Bolingbroke proceeded to carry out his scheme of altering the succession and securing the return of the Pretender. An Act of Toleration was passed for the Episcopalian dissenting sect in Scotland, and an oath of abjuration sought to be imposed upon the Scottish Church for the sake of exciting confusion. An Act restoring patronage was rushed through the House by the Tory squires, who composed five-sixths of the House of Commons. Against this the Whigs and Carstares protested vigor- ously, and appealed to the Treaty of Union, but appeal was lost upon the ignorant class, who were not over- drawn in the Squire Western of Fielding’s novel. For a hundred years this Act bore evil fruits. The nobility of the land were only too ready to seize upon the poor spoils of the national endowment in order to renew their waning power in the country, and in so doing they managed to set themselves and their descendants in hereditary opposition to the great mass of the people. The English peerage has done much for the English people. In Scotland, it may be asked, which of the four Scottish Universities has had a farthing of the money of the nobility, and what have they done for the Church in any one of her branches ?
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