I attended worship in one of the Free Churches, as they are called, in which Dr. Candlish officiates.  In the course of his sermon, he read long portions of an address from the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, appointing the following Thursday as a day of fasting and prayer, on account of the peculiar circumstances of the time, and more especially the dangers flowing from the influence of popery, alluding to the grant of money lately made by parliament to the Roman Catholic College at Maynooth.  The address proposed no definite opposition, but protested against the measure in general, and, as it seemed to me, rather vague terms.  In the course of the address the title of National Church was claimed for the Free Church, notwithstanding its separation from the government, and the era of that separation was referred to in phrases similar to those in which we speak of our own declaration of national independence.  There were one or two allusions to the persecutions which the Free Church had suffered, and something was said about her children being hunted like partridges upon the mountains; but it is clear that if her ministers have been hunted, they have been hunted into fine churches; and if persecuted, they have been persecuted into comfortable livings.  This Free Church, as far as I can learn, is extremely prosperous.

Dr. Candlish is a fervid preacher, and his church was crowded.  In the afternoon I attended at one of the churches of the established or endowed Presbyterian Church, where a quiet kind of a preacher held forth, and the congregation was thin.

This Maynooth grant has occasioned great dissatisfaction in England and Scotland.  If the question had been left to be decided by the public opinion of these parts of the kingdom, the grant would never have been made.  An immense majority, of all classes and almost all denominations, disapprove of it.  A dissenting clergyman of one of the evangelical persuasions, as they are called, said to me—­“The dissenters claim nothing from the government; they hold that it is not the business of the state to interfere in religious matters, and they object to bestowing the public money upon the seminaries of any religious denomination.”  In a conversation which I had with an eminent man of letters, and a warm friend of the English Church, he said:  “The government is giving offense to many who have hitherto been its firmest supporters.  There was no necessity for the Maynooth grant; the Catholics would have been as well satisfied without it as they are with it; for you see they are already clamoring for the right to appoint through their Bishops the professors in the new Irish colleges.  The Catholics were already establishing their schools, and building their churches with their own means:  and this act of applying the money of the nation to the education of their priests is a gratuitous offense offered by the government to its best friends.”  In a sermon which I heard from the Dean of York, in the magnificent old minster of that city, he commended the liberality of the motives which had induced the government to make the grant, but spoke of the measure as one which the friends of the English Church viewed with apprehension and anxiety.