ingly important was truly practicable, and to indicate one at least of the methods by which it might be actually attained, these labours would not have been in vain, in reference to some of the best and noblest interests of the Free Church of Scotland.

It might be premature as yet, after only three years' operation of the system, and would at any rate be on many accounts inexpedient, to be singling out for mention the names of recent holders of College Scholarships who have already begun to distinguish themselves in different spheres. It is enough to say, that your Sub-Committee regard their progress with interest and satisfaction, and entertain no doubt of being able by and by to satisfy the Church, by reference to actual facts and instances, of the utility of a scheme, which undoubtedly derives its highest honour and its chief recommendation from having contributed materially to their advancement.

The present holders of Scholarships still continue to justify the decision and award of the Examiners by the position in several cases a position of distinguished eminence-occupied by them in their respective classes. It is hoped that their standing in connection with your Committee will become still more conspicuously honourable, as one purely Literary and Academical, when the invitation contained in the recently issued programme of the terms of competition for next occasion shall have had time to produce its effect. The invitation alluded to proceeds upon the fact, that the principle upon which your Scholarships are awarded renders them essentially of the nature of ACADEMICAL HONOURS; it calls accordingly on all the students of the several years to join in the competition, and take literary rank, whatever may be their professional views, and whether they may choose or not to accept the emoluments attached to the Scholarships. These emoluments can of course be enjoyed only by such of the successful candidates as are bona fide looking forward to the ministry of the Free Church, and have complied with all the other conditions exacted of such.

The Sub-Committee cannot close their Report without again pointedly drawing the attention of the Church to a statement anxiously submitted to them by this Committee last year,namely, that the period for which our present scholarships were originally contributed, has in several instances already

expired, and that one session more, the immediately approaching one, will literally exhaust our tenure of every one of them. The Sub-Committee would again, therefore, in nearly the same terms as then employed by them, very earnestly press upon the attention of the Church, the high expediency of taking seasonable and sure precaution against the expiry of any one of these, without, at the very least, equal resources being provided, to carry forward uninterruptedly the same valuable object, the steady and systematic upholding, namely, of the standard of literary and theological attainment. Although the present funds of this Scheme were not only to be continued, but to be still further enlarged, it must be kept in mind, that the immediate and strictly proper aim of the Scheme being to elevate the attainments, rather than, directly at least, to augment the numbers, of candidates for the ministry, although the former of these objects-the maintenance of a proper standard--were sufficiently secured, the necessity would not thereby be in any degree superseded (it might even be somewhat increased), of distinct means and a separate machinery being adopted for keeping up the numbers of our theological students. The management, however, of any system of means, and the administration of any funds, destined specifically for this latter purpose, the Committee need scarcely remark, would require to be entrusted to some body entirely distinct from the present Sub-Committee on Scholarships ;-and that for many obvious reasons :--in particular, because the Sub-Committee on Scholarships are regulated in their awards by the element of literary qualification chiefly, or rather exclusively; and because, in any distribution of funds that should proceed on principles more mixed and less definite, the Professors, at least, could hardly take part with any propriety. The mere numbers of our theological students ought not, of course, to be allowed at any time to fall, if possible, below the full measure of the Church's demands for ministerial labourers, both to supply all her present congregations, and to be still farther extending her boundaries. But the special and appropriate method of insuring such a full supply-or at least one method of doing so— would seem to be by the influence of individuals, and the efforts of Congregations, Presbyteries, and Synods, selecting severally for their special patronage and support, and sending forward to

our Colleges for ministerial training, those individuals of whose personal piety they are respectively well assured, and in whose personal progress and speedy employment in the sacred cause they each feel a more peculiar interest. The particular object of upholding a high standard of intellectual qualification and scholarship might then be left,-and with always the greater security, the greater the number of our students looking forward to the ministry should become,-to the sure though indirect operation of the Scholarship Scheme acting silently upon the entire mass of candidates. The Sub-Committee, therefore, cannot refrain from expressing their most anxious wish and ardent hope, that both the objects which they have just adverted to may be promptly taken up and prosecuted by the Church at large, as well as by many individual lovers of her cause and welfare, with an energy and a determination proportioned to the manifest importance of their bearing upon some of her highest and most precious interests.

APPENDIX.

[THE subjoined observations on the subject of Scholarships,-thé last ever penned by the late Dr Chalmers, and intended by him to have been submitted, as a prominent part of his College Report, to the General Assembly of May 1847, on the morning of that memorable day on which his death took place, having been read to the Assembly by J. M. Hog, Esq., Convener of the Sub-Committee on Scholarships, were ordered by the Assembly to be printed, and appended to this year's College Report.]

"It is now high time to make our special appeal on the subject of Bursaries,-a sort of endowment which has been held indispensable to the prosperity and endurance of all Collegiate institutions, and without which all attempts to foster them into a state of productiveness and health have proved in a great measure abortive. It is to such endowments, in fact, that all the seminaries of our higher literature have been indebted for their strength and their well-being; and we instance more par

ticularly those higher Colleges of England whose glory has filled the world. Like almost all the other seats of learning, whether at home or abroad, which have either given birth to the greatest names in science and theology, or have sent forth the largest number of well-educated ministers for the supply of our churches, they have been based on endowments, either direct or prospective, that is, direct, as in the shape of bursaries for the immediate support of students during their attendance upon the classes; or prospective, as when the anticipation of settlements in a well-endowed Church will of itself encourage many, upon their own resources alone, to incur the outlay of an expensive preparation. Even our dissenting friends in England, with all their antipathy to the latter sort of endowment, -the endowment of Churches, do not carry their Voluntaryism so far as to undervalue the importance of such an endowment in Colleges as we are now pleading for. The truth is, that in the absence of a prospective endowment, a direct or immediate endowment is all the more essential. If Churches are not endowed, it is all the more necessary that Colleges should. We shall not get many to brave the hazard and expense of a long and laborious education for the ministry, with no other landing-place in the perspective before them than the precarious and slender provision which is all that can be looked for in our unendowed Churches. For the adequate supply of these, therefore, with ecclesiastical labourers, it seems indispensable that we should draw on the piety and talent of those many hundreds in society, who, themselves without the means for defraying the charges of a College education, must be helped forward by bursaries. Even when, without offence to our principles, we could abide in the endowed and established Church of Scotland, we hailed the accession of every new bursary to any of her universities, as an addition to the cause of learning. We need not therefore say how much more cordially we should welcome every such accession to the Free Church of Scotland, newly embarked, and without any other resource than in the Christian liberality of its friends, on a field of vast extent and usefulness, of which it may truly be said, that the harvest is plenteous, while the labourers are comparatively few.

"We are fully aware of the abuse to which such endowments have been perverted; and that, in the hand of careless patrons and sordid presentees, they have often, as to any benefit which

has accrued from them, whether for the encouragement of learning or of piety, been worse than thrown away. And some have reasoned, in consequence, against the policy of such artificial helps or encouragements. Nay, the violence, so characteristic of our modern reformers, would prompt many to the instant demolition of all such institutes, whether in the form of endowed Churches or endowed Colleges ;-and this because of the unworthy hands to which, for the time being, there may have been committed the administration of them. We confess our antipathy to all such violence. Nor can we perceive the reason why, because a good machine has been inefficiently or even mischievously worked, we should therefore wreak our vengeance on the mechanism, instead of directing our care to the object of having it supplied with faithful and able workmen in all time coming. Such is the constant tendency of those who know of no other method by which to rid them of abuses, than not to mend or to purify, but simply to destroy. They make war upon the apparatus itself, instead of directing their hostility against the carelessness or corruption of those into whose hands it may have unfortunately fallen, and who have acquitted themselves ill of their allotted task, to guide and regulate its movements. Like the French philosopher Turgot, who, in his Essai sur les Fondations, wrote and reasoned against endowments, or rather like the economists of his school, who, to fulfil the views of their master, ushered in the French Revolution by heading and directing the indiscriminate enemies of all that was established,-they make no distinction between the goodness of an institution, and the badness of the men who work it; and so their only method by which to expiate the sins of an unprincipled patronage, is to lift their exterminating blow against all which patronage or power have ever had to do with. They are the machine-breaking reformers of our day, whom nothing will satisfy but a work of unsparing demolition, in the prosecution and final outgoings of which we have so often witnessed those sweeping anarchies,-those moral tempests or hurricanes, of which history records so many examples, when once the wild spirit of havoc and desolation have gone abroad over the face of society.

"The Free Church of Scotland has hitherto kept free, and we trust ever will, of such extreme and outrageous Voluntary