CHAPTER THE SECOND.
SCOTTISH RELIGIOUS FEELINGS AND OBSERVANCES.
Passing from these remarks on the Scottish Clergy of a past day, I would treat the more extensive subject of RELIGIOUS FEELINGS and RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES generally with the caution and deference due to such a question, and I would distinctly premise that there is in my mind no intention of entering, in this volume, upon those great questions which are connected with certain church movements amongst us, or with national peculiarities of faith and discipline.

It is impossible, however, to overlook entirely the fact of a gradual relaxation, which has gone on for some years, of the sterner features of the Calvinistic school of theology--at any rate, of keeping its theoretic peculiarities more in the background.

What we have to notice in these pages are changes in the feelings with regard to religion and religious observances, which have appeared upon the _exterior_ of society--the changes which belong to outward habits rather than to internal feelings.

Of such changes many have taken place within my own experience.

Scotland has ever borne the character of a moral and religious country; and the mass of the people are a more church-going race than the masses of English population.