and divines abroad, had noticed how the ideal doctrine of Cartesius and his followers had led to imagery and idolatry. He also criticises Locke with considerable skill. "There seems nothing more common in the experience of mankind than that a man who hath the greatest stock of habitual knowledge and understanding relating to many truths, yet while his body sleeps, or his mind is in a muse about other things, he perceives none of these truths." So "I see no greater absurdity in saying one may have a stock of seminal or habitual knowledge, though he have no actual knowledge, than to say one may have a stock of senses, though he hath no actual sensation, or consciousness of the acts or exercise of any of his senses, as a child not born or a man in a deep sleep; or a natural store of affections subjectively in him, and yet affected with nothing till occasions and objects appear. One may have a good pair of eyes, and yet see nothing till light be given and objects be presented. Nor is it an improper way of speaking to say a man hath not his eyes or sight, though he be not actually seeing. And as little is it improper to say a man hath understanding and knowledge, though he be not actually knowing or perceiving the truths he has the impress of in his understanding." This is a wonderfully clear statement of the distinctions between the seminal capacity and the actual ideas, between a laid-up stock and occasions, by which philosophers have sought to overthrow the theory of Locke. In regard to the special question discussed, Mr. Robe had quoted the received rule, "Oportet intelligentem phantasmata speculari." Erskine quotes against him Hieroboord, “Mens non indiget semper phantasmata ad suas perceptiones." "The object of that idea is only corporeal things as corporeal; but the object of rational knowledge is not only corporeal things, but spiritual and corporeal things, not as corporeal, but as intelligible." "It is reason, and not sense, that is the only help to attain the natural knowledge of God and his perfections." Above reason he places faith. "True faith differs as much from, and is as far above, mere intellectual ideas as intellectual ideas are above corporeal and imaginary ideas; yea, much farther than human reason is above sense; even as far as what is above human and supernatural, is above merely natural." It is evident that there are curious questions started, though not precisely settled, as to the place which the phantasm has in thought, and the imagination in religion. We feel that we are in the society of men of reflection and of reading. The evangelical and the seceding ministers of these days are quite as erudite as the academic men who despised them, and are holding firmly by old truths which the new philosophy is overlooking.

He was a pupil of Professor Simson's, in Glasgow, and became minister of Tarbert in Stirlingshire. I have been able to collect few notices of him. He is worthy of being mentioned, as having had played upon him one of the basest tricks mentioned in literary history. He wrote a treatise on

"Moral Virtue," and sent it up to London to his friend, Alexander Innes, D.D., assistant at St. Margaret's, Westminster, to have it published; and Innes published it in his own name, with the date, Tothill Fields, Jan. 20, 1727-28. In 1730, Campbell went to London and exposed Innes's imposture. It seems that the Lord Chancellor, believing that Innes was the author of the work, presented him to a living. The Chancellor, being convinced of the deceit, sought to make amends by offering a living to Campbell, who declined the offer, saying that he preferred his own country; and he becomes professor of ecclesiastical history in St. Andrews. In 1733, he published the work in his own name, dating it St. Andrews, and disowning the "Prefatory Introduction" and "some little marginal notes of | Innes." "An Inquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue, wherein is shown, against the Author of the Fable of the Bees, that Virtue is founded in the Nature of Things, is unalterable and eternal, and the great Means of Private and Public Happiness, with some Reflections on a late Book entitled 'An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue.'" Hutcheson, whom he thus assailed, spoke of him as no better than a disciple of Epicurus. His system is the baldest form of self-love. "Human nature is originally formed to pleasure and pain." "There is, indeed, a distinction of goodness into natural and moral, but the latter as well as the former lies wholly in pleasure." "God and all mankind are governed by one common principle, viz., self-love." "They can favor or esteem no other beings but as they gratify this principle." "The affections and actions that correspond to the self-love of our own species are likewise agreeable to the self-love of the Deity." "From self-love we desire the love and esteem of other intelligent beings." There is a passage in which there is an anticipation of Smith's theory of sympathy: "Whatever tenderness we conceive in favor of other people, it comes from putting ourselves in their circumstances, and must therefore be resolved into self-love." He also wrote a treatise on the "Necessity of Revelation," 1739; and another, "Oratio de Vanitate Luminis Naturæ." He thinks it impossible that mankind, left to themselves, should 'discover' the great truths and articles of natural religion, or should be capable of giving a system to natural religion." He died in April, 1756. A posthumous work, "The Authenticity of the Gospel History," was published 1759. He was opposed by

ALEXANDER MONCRIEFF of Culfergie in the parish of Abernethy was educated at the grammar school of Perth and St. Andrews University, and became minister of his native parish. He was favorable to the Marrow school of divinity, and took part with the Erskines in defending the popular rights and in seceding from the Church of Scotland, being one of the four fathers of the secession. In 1724, he was made their professor of divinity. He 1 "Memorials of Alexander Moncrieff and James Fisher," by Dr. Young and Dr. Brown.

died in 1761. He wrote "An Inquiry into the Principle, Rule, and End of Moral Actions, wherein the Scheme of Selfish Love laid down by Mr. Archibald Campbell . . . is examined, and the received Doctrine vindicated." To quote the summary supplied by his biographers, he establishes the following propositions: "(1) To show that self-love is not, or ought not to be, the leading principle of moral virtue; (2) That self-interest or pleasure is not the only standard by which we can and should judge of the virtue of our own and others' actions, or that actions are not to be called virtuous on account of their correspondency to self-interest; (3) That self-love, as it exerts itself in the desire of universal, unlimited esteem, ought not to be the great remaining motive to virtuous actions," &c.

XI. RISE OF THE ABERDEEN BRANCH.

THE north-east of Scotland, -embracing Aberdeen, Banff, Murray, Mearns, and a large portion of Angus, though now very much amalgamated with the rest of Scotland, had a character of its own in the seventeenth century. The people had a large Scandinavian element in their composition, had a shrill intonation, and a marked idiom, and a harder aspect (though probably with quite as much feeling within) than the people of the south and west. When Samuel Johnson lumbered through the region in 1773, and visited Lord Monboddo, he found it miserably bare of trees; but, had he travelled a century or two earlier, he would have had to pass through wide-spread forests. These were cut down in the seventeenth century; and in the stead of the deer and wild animals a more industrious people substituted sheep and cattle, ranging over high mountains and large undulating plains, on which you would have seen patches of oats or bear here and there around the clay or turf dwellings of the tenants, but few fences or enclosures of any kind, except in the immediate neighborhood of the proprietors, whose castles and gardens, on the French model, relieved the wildness of the scene. On to the eighteenth century the rural population consisted of landlords, with rather small farmers absolutely dependent on them, and who paid their rent in the service, on certain occasions, of men and horses, and in such articles as oats, bear, mutton, salmon, geese, poultry, and peats. In these regions the peasantry had not been taught to think and act for themselves, as they had been in the south-west by the plough

ing up of the soil effected by the great covenanting movement. But in some of the towns, particularly in Aberdeen, which was looked up to as a capital by a considerably wide district, there was not a little refinement, which spread its influence over the landlords, the ministers of religion, and the other professional men in particular, there had been in the city named a gifted. painter, Jameson, a disciple of Rubens; and a very superior printer, Raban, who put in type the works of the Aberdeen doctors. The two universities, King's and Marischal's, trained and sent forth a large body of educated men, some of whom found their proper field on the Continent; while the great body of them remaining at home, were the special instruments — as teachers, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, or country gentlemen — of spreading a civilizing influence in these regions. For ten years after the Restoration, seventy students entered annually at King's, and a considerable number, though not so large, at Marischal : some of these rose to eminence, and all of them helped to create a taste for learning and an appreciation for it, on the southern slope of the Grampians, and in the wide region lying north of that range of mountains, which was never crossed by the Roman legions, but was now conquered by the Roman literature.

The Calvinistic and covenanting principles which had determined the Scottish character in the south and west, and so far north as Fife, Perth, and some parts of Angus, had not generally permeated the region beyond. No doubt, the common people in the northern counties gladly listened to the evangelical preachers from the west, when they had the opportunity; and some of the covenanting ministers, banished in the times of persecution from their own people in the south, gathered around them in the places of their exile-as Samuel Rutherford in Aberdeen, David Dickson in Turriff - bodies of devoted adherents attached to the Presbyterian preaching and organization. Still these were as yet merely fermenting, but leavening, centres in the midst of influences which were resisting their extension. In the wide country held by the Gordon family, the Roman Catholic religion still held its sway. In the other parts, the landlords, the college regents, and the clergy were mostly Cavalier in politics and High Church in religion; and the mass of the people had not learned to claim the pre

When a

rogative of thinking and acting for themselves. deputation from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland-consisting of Alexander Henderson, Samuel Rutherford, and Andrew Cant-went north to Aberdeen to proclaim the Covenant in 1638, they were met by "Replies and Duplies" on the part of the Aberdeen doctors, and the landlords discouraged their tenantry from following the new zeal imported from the south. The divines of Aberdeen, during that century, such as Baron and John Forbes (author of "Irenicum "), were adherents of Episcopacy; their studies were in the later fathers of the church, and their sympathies with the Laudean divines of England; and like them they wrote against Popery on the one hand, and Puritanism on the other. It was years after the Revolution before the Presbyterian Church could put its legal rights in execution in the north-east of Scotland. Almost all the old Presbyterian ministers had disappeared; and, in 1694, the Synod of Aberdeen consisted of six clerical members, most of them brought from the south. It was not till 1703 that John Willison was settled as first Presbyterian minister at Brechin in Angus; it was not till 1708 that he was in a position to dispense the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. When he intimated that he was to do so next Lord's day, Mr. Skinner, the Episcopalian minister who preached in the same church in the after part of the day, announced that he would dispense the communion on the same day in the afternoon to his supporters; and the ecclesiastical records report that 1500 communicated with Mr. Skinner. When Mr. Gray was appointed minister of Edzell, in the same district, the Presbytery had to conduct the services at his ordination in a neighboring parish; and they then passed into the parish to "lay hands on him" and return immediately; and, on the following sabbath when he rode to Edzell for the purpose of preaching, the people, hounded on by the landlords, took him off his horse, flung him into the West Water, and kept him there till he was nearly drowned, "to their eternal disgrace," as he causes it to be written in the parish records. During the Rebellion of 1715 the Presbyterian ministers were rabbled from their churches, which were occupied by the nonjuring clergy praying for the Pretender. A considerable body of the students in both the Aberdeen colleges sympathized.