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In my peregrinations through the Catholic districts of the west of Scotland I have often been struck with some interesting contrasts between them and similar regions in Ireland, where Catholic and Protestant live together. The Scottish priests have always seemed to me a better educated class and more men of the world than their brethren in Ireland. Students who have been trained abroad have their ideas widened and their manners polished, as is hardly possible in the case of those who leave their villages to be trained at Maynooth, whence they are sent to recommence village life as parish priests. Again, there has always appeared to me to be in the West Highlands far less of the antagonism which in Ireland separates Catholics and Protestants. They live together as good neighbours, and, unless you actually make enquiry, you cannot easily discriminate between them.

SCOTTISH PROTESTANT CLERGY

No feature in the social changes which Scotland has undergone stands out more conspicuously than the part played in these changes by the clergy since the Reformation. This clerical influence has been both beneficial and baneful. On the one hand, the clergy have unquestionably taken a large share in the intellectual development of the people, and in giving to the national character some of its most distinctive qualities. For many generations, in face of a lukewarm or even hostile nobility and government, they bore the burden of the parish schools, elaborating and improving a system of instruction which made their country for a long time the best educated community in Europe. They have held up the example of a high moral standard, and have laboured with the most unremitting care to train their flocks in the paths of righteousness.