Meanwhile, however, there had been an immense rally to him of the younger clergy and of the less conservative among the laity. The main current of Scottish popular thought and life had ever since the Reformation flowed in an ecclesiastical channel; and even nowadays, when Scotland is rapidly becoming Anglicised, a theological or ecclesiastical question excites a wider and keener interest there than a similar question would do in England. So in Scotland for four years "the Robertson Smith case" was the chief topic of discussion outside as well as inside the Free Church. The sympathy felt for the accused was heightened by the ingenuity, energy, and courage with which he defended his position, showing a power of argument and repartee which made it plain that he would have held a distinguished place in any assembly whatever. If his debating had a fault, it was that of being almost too dialectically cogent, so that his antagonists felt that they were being foiled on the form of the argument before they could get to the issues they sought to raise. But while he was an accomplished lawyer in matters of form, he was no less an accomplished theologian in matters of substance. Although the party of repression triumphed so far as to deprive him of his chair, the victory virtually remained with him, not only because he had shown that the Scottish Presbyterian standards did not condemn the views he held, but also because his defence and the discussions which it occasioned had, in bringing those views to the knowledge of a great number of thoughtful laymen, led such persons to reconsider their own position. Some of them found themselves forced to agree with Smith. Others, who distrusted their capacity for arriving at a conclusion, came at least to think that the questions involved did not affect the essentials of faith, and must be settled by the ordinary canons of historical and philological criticism. Thus the trial proved to be a turning-point for the Scottish Churches, much as the _Essays and Reviews_ case had been for the Church of England eighteen years earlier. Opinions formerly proscribed were thereafter freely expressed. Nearly all the doctrinal prosecutions subsequently attempted in the Scottish Presbyterian Churches have failed. Much feeling has been excited, but the result has been to secure a greater latitude than was dreamt of forty years ago. At first the rigidly orthodox section of the Free Church, now almost confined to the Highlands, thought of seceding from the main body on the ground that tolerance was passing into indifference or unbelief. But the new ideas continued to grow, and the sentiment in favour of letting clergymen as well as lay church members put a lax construction on the doctrinal standards drawn up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has spread as widely in Scotland as in England. The Presbyterian Churches in America and the Roman Catholic Church now stand almost alone among the larger Christian bodies in retaining something of the ancient rigidity. Even the Roman Church begins to feel the solvent power of these researches. It may be conjectured that as the process of adjusting the letter of Scripture to the conclusions of science which Galileo was not permitted to apply in the field of astronomy has now been generally applied in the fields of geology and biology, so all the churches will presently reconcile themselves to the conclusions of historical and linguistic criticism, now that such criticism has become truly scientific in its methods.