SEAT RENTS IN CHURCHES.

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seats in places of public worship. The congregation said their prayers on their knees on the bare pavement, and when called on to listen to the harangue of a preacher, they heard him standing, or in case of infirmity, sat on low seats carried to church for the purpose. This was possibly a rude and inconvenient arrangement, but it had its good points. It allowed a perfect mixture of rich and poor, and placed all on an equality. The reformation finished this system. The chief part of the new mode of worship consisting of preaching, and that too for hours at a time, the areas of the churches had to be covered with fixed benches. The erection of seats, though in itself innocent, put all appearance of equality to flight, and was a serious injury to the rights of the poor. These seats were reared by the heritors, who appropriated certain pews to their own use, and distributed others to their tenants and residents in the parish. So thin is still the population in landward parishes, and such is the quantity of dis sent, that in the kirks in these places, there is still a sufficiency of free seating for parishioners.

In most of the royal burghs and cities, a somewhat similar mode was adopted of filling the churches with seats, but unfortunately it was clogged with a contrivance, which has turned out to be very detrimental. In some towns, the heritors were the erectors of the seats, and in others they only put up a certain portion, leaving the magistracy and certain incorporations to rear additional seats and galleries, which thence became their own property. Many of those seats erected by heritors, became by traditionary right, like places of burial in church-yards, the property of house proprietors and families in the burgh towns, and their de scendants or assigns still possess them; in this matter, a right of sale having actually been countenanced. Those seats erected by magistracy from town funds, and those erected by corporations, are used partly by the members of those bodies, and partly let as a source of revenue. In the scheme of division, the public at large have been altogether forgot, and the poor have

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only in some instances been provided with free sittings to a limited extent. In no case are the seats in the areas of the churches in Scotland opened to the free immission of the working classes, or indeed any class, as in England. Whatsoever may have been the line of procedure in erecting and appropriating seats, the result is, that in all the town, and especially the city, churches, in which the magistrates have become nearly sole proprietors of seats, a system prevails, whereby neither the poor, nor that part of the community which is indifferently provided for, have free seats.

In Edinburgh and Glasgow, this has become a monstrous evil. Notwithstanding that the metropolitan clergy are sustained by assessments and endowments, the very householders who pay the stipends, are taxed for sittings, to an extent as heavy as if the ministers had to depend for their salaries on the amount drawn as the annual rent of the pews. It is a cause of just surprise, that this palpable and inexcuseable evil should not long ago have excited the serious inquiry and clamour of a people who are proverbially alive to their own interests. The true way to remedy the mischievous perversion of the endowments, would be to oblige the magistrates of these cities, to abandon their mercenary curatorship of the churches, which is undeniably working a dreadful, and we are afraid, an almost incurable abandonment of every virtuous and religious principle among the lower orders. It is at least be seeched, that something be done in earnest to restore the rights of the poor, as far as is convenient; for independent of the injury sustained by this portion of the community, by being expelled from the churches, what a subject of triumph must our present procedure furnish, to the advocates of that communion put away by the reformation!

RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS CONCLUded.

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.

HAVING thus presented a sketch of the settlement and peculiarities of the established presbyterian kirk and its dissenters, we have now to introduce the stranger to a religious communion of an entirely different character: We mean the Episcopal Church of Scotland, which was deposed at the revolution for its adherence to the cause of the Stuarts. The history of this humble body of Christians for the last hundred and forty years, would furnish ample scope for a lengthened memoir, calculated to interest the feelings in no ordinary degree. From affluence and the support of the state, it was plunged into a series of misfortunes, almost as unsupportable as those visited upon the covenanters, which lasted till near the end of last century, and from which it is only now beginning to rear itself.

On the contumelious deposition of the bishops and their clergy, in the year 1690, they retired without any remonstrance to obscure chapels and houses in the cities and different parts of the country, where they carried on in quietness their religious occupations, and drew around them those persons who were disinclined to the revolution settlement. At this time, and for fifty years after, there was a numerous class of Jacobites in Scotland, principally among the higher classes, who, during all this period, had sanguine hopes of the restoration of the royal family. Many of them

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had witnessed the turmoils of the great rebellion and the commonwealth, with the subsequent restoration of the hereditary prince, and from thence flattered themselves with the idea, that in all likelihood the rebellion or revolution of 1688, would terminate after a few years in a similar manner. On this account, it was only after several unsuccessful attempts to restore the family of James, that the political hopes of a vast number of the Scotch and English were utterly extinguished. No class of the community was so decidedly possessed of these idle expectations, as the clergy of the Scottish Episcopal church. They took no active measures to further the views of the Jacobite party, but their actions shewed that they were well inclined to any change that could be made in favour of the Stuarts.

On being released from the thraldom of the prejudices of the people against the liturgical services, in order to assimilate themselves to the English church, they, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, introduced the Book of Common Prayer into their public worship; a circumstance which was also hastened, by the communion receiving a present of a number of these devotional works from a charitably disposed so ciety in England. In the course of their prayers, they however invariably forbore to mention the name of either William or his successors. They prayed for “the royal family," which was an expression so ambiguous, that each worshipper might interpret it in his own way.

Innocent as the measure may be now supposed, it is altogether inconceivable the ferment which was created in Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland, by the poor ejected Episcopalians introducing the liturgy into their private and public services. The nation, on hearing of the circumstance, was almost as much enraged, as if the book of common prayer had been read from the pulpits of the presbyterian kirks; and petitions were made to the Commission of the General Assembly, requesting that body to interfere to suppress the noxious liturgy, the introduction of which was supposed to savour of a too intimate connexion being about to be

formed between the English and Scottish episcopalians. This the Commission was not long in attending to, and the result was, an application by the spiritual courts to the civil power, craving its authority to render the delinquent clergy amenable to their jurisdiction. It seems the principal offender pitched on by the presbyterians, was an episcopal minister in Edinburgh, who was dragged by the magistrates from his humble meeting-house to the cross, and otherwise abused, merely because he had received his orders from a Scottish bishop, and read the English liturgy to his flock.

Among the alterations which took place in the situa tion of these deposed Episcopalians, or Nonjurors, as they came to be called in consequence of their reluctance to give their oaths of allegiance to William, there occurred many remarkable changes of circumstances, illustrative of the fickleness of all earthly things. Many of them became private chaplains to families of rank; but some of the bishops fared worse, and were made to depend for their existence on the proceeds of very limited and often poor congregations.

The mere circumstance of being obliged to depend on the voluntary contributions of their congregations, instead of the endowments for their support, and the humiliation to which they were subjected as a dissenting body, would not have formed a complication of evils worthy of remark. They were ordained to commence in a short time a series of more grievous trials. They were only permitted to exercise the functions of their office for about four years. Their chapels were described as being nurseries of sedition, and the government, in order to appease the popular clamour, caused a law to be passed, whereby the clergy were prohibited from baptizing children or solemnizing matrimony, under pain of imprisonment and banishment out of the kingdom. Why the law, on the same principle, did not reach the length of prohibiting the church service, is beyond our comprehension. It had, however, an effect of this nature, and many of the chapels were abandoned.