I HAVE remarked, that among the people of Scotland, conversation turns much more frequently, and much more fervently, on the character and attainments of individual clergymen, than is at all usual with us in England. Nor does it seem to me that this is any just subject of astonishment, considering what the nature of the Ecclesiastical Establishment in Scotland really is. The disdain of those external formalities, by which elsewhere so great, and I think so proper an impression is made on the minds of the people—the absence of all those arts which elsewhere enlist the imagination and fancy of men, on the side of that Faith which rather subdues than satisfies our finite Reason—the plain austere simplicity with which the Presbyterian Church invests herself in all her addresses to the intellect of her adherents—all these things may in themselves be rather injudicious than otherwise, in the present state of our nature—but all these things contribute, I should suppose, and that neither feebly nor indistinctly, to the importance of the individual priests, into whose hands this church entrusts the administration of her unadorned and unimposing observances. Deprived of the greater part of those time-hallowed and majestic rites, with which the notions of profound piety are in other countries so intimately linked in the minds of mankind, and by which the feelings of piety are so powerfully stimulated and sustained—deprived of all those aids which devotion elsewhere borrows from the senses and the imagination—the Presbyterian Church possesses, in her formal and external constitution, very few of those elements which contribute most effectually to the welfare of the other churches in Christendom. But the most naked ritual cannot prevent the imaginations and the feelings of men from taking the chief part in their piety, and these, debarred from the species of nourishment elsewhere afforded, are here content to seek nourishment of another kind, in the contemplation not of Forms, but of Men.