From these able disquisitions, and from other prognostics, it is quite evident that sounder principles of political economy and accurate experience of human life show that much of the old Scottish hospital system was quite wrong and must be changed.  Changes are certainly going on, which seem to indicate that the very hard Presbyterian views of some points connected with Church matters are in transition.  I have elsewhere spoken of a past sabbatarian strictness, and I have lately received an account of a strictness in observing the national fast-day, or day appointed for preparation in celebrating Holy Communion, which has in some measure passed away.  The anecdote adduced the example of two drovers who were going on very quietly together.  They had to pass through a district whereof one was a parishioner, and during their progress through it the one whistled with all his might, the other screwed up his mouth without emitting a single sound.  When they came to a burn, the silent one, on then crossing the stream, gave a skip, and began whistling with all his might, exclaiming with great triumph to his companion, “I’m beyond the parish of Forfar now, and I’ll whistle as muckle as I like.”  It happened to be the Forfar parish fast-day.  But a still stricter observance was shown by a native of Kirkcaldy, who, when asked by his companion drover in the south of Scotland “why he didna whistle,” quietly answered, “I canna, man; it’s our fast-day in Kirkcaldy.”  I have an instance of a very grim assertion of extreme sabbatarian zeal.  A maid-servant had come to a new place, and on her mistress quietly asking her on Sunday evening to wash up some dishes, she indignantly replied, “Mem, I hae dune mony sins, and hae mony sins to answer for; but, thank God, I hae never been sae far left to mysell as to wash up dishes on the Sabbath day.”

I hope it will not for a moment be supposed we would willingly throw any ridicule or discouragement on the Scottish national tendencies on the subject, or that we are not proud of Scotland’s example of a sacred observance of the fourth commandment in the letter and the spirit.  We refer now to injudicious extremes, such, indeed, as our Lord condemned, and which seem a fair subject for notice amongst Scottish peculiarities.  But the philosophy of the question is curious.  Scotland has ever made her boast of the simplest form of worship, and a worship free from ceremonial, more even than the Church of England, which is received as, in doctrine and ritual, the Church of the Reformation.  In some respects, therefore, may you truly say the only standing recognised observance in the ceremonial part of Presbyterian worship is the Sabbath day—­an observance which has been pushed in times past even beyond the extreme of a spirit of Judaism, as if the sabbatical ceremonial were made a substitute for all other ceremony.  In this, as well as in other matters which we have pointed out, what changes have taken place, what changes