should cherish the same loyal and peaceful sentiments as men fostered and protected by the law. Nor was it to be expected that the people should be indifferent to the fate of ministers whom they had hitherto loved and revered. It was to be expected that if the outed ministers preached, their old parishioners would flock to hear them; and that sermons preached on the hillside would not be so full of submission as sermons preached in the parish church. The persecution begun against Nonconformity increased the bitterness already felt against the bishops and their curates. They were regarded as the cause of every fine that was exacted, and of every execution that took place. And truly enough was done in this way to make Episcopacy be detested to the tenth generation. Upwards of five hundred were slain at Rullion Green, Drumclog, Bothwell Bridge, and Airsmoss. Probably a hundred and fifty were executed by the sentence of the Justiciary or Circuit Courts; and at least as many more shot down by the military in the fields with no form of law at all. The multitude who suffered imprisonment or exile no man can number. The fines which were extorted from the gentry and farmers amounted to upwards of £300,000 sterling; 2 and that at a period when the whole revenue 1 It is difficult to form a correct estimate of the numbers who lost their lives for their adherence to Presbytery. Sir George Mackenzie declares that not one was put to death solely for religion; and it is easy to understand how he makes out his point. Laws were made against the performance of the Presbyterian worship; and then the advocate argues that the victims of his cruelty were put to death for their violations of law, and not for their religion. In a paper attached to his "Vindication, are acknowledged to have been condemned by Justiciary Courts, but some of these were reprieved. De Foe says that upwards of 18,000 suffered for their religion in one way or other. He calculates that 1700 were banished as slaves; and 750 sent to remote districts of Scotland; that 800 were outlawed; 3600 imprisoned; 560 killed in battle; 7000 driven into voluntary exile; 400 killed by the soldiers; 360 by the hangman, &c. I have no hesitation in thinking these numbers exaggerated. The numbers who imprisoned, fined, and made fugitive were undoubtedly very great. Wodrow gives us a proscription roll, in which there are nearly 2000 names. But I am inclined to think that the chroniclers of those days have preserved the names of most of those who suffered death, and that we have them now in Naphtali, the Cloud of Witnesses, Wodrow, &c. Religious chroniclers have ever been very careful to preserve the memory of the martyrs. The numbers I have hazarded to mention are considerably greater than the aggregate of all the names on record. were 200 ? Wodrow, in his Preface to the Second Volume of his History, gives a list of fines, amounting to £3, 174,819, 18s. 8d. Scots; and he states that his list is very defective, a great many parishes being altogether omitted for want of information. derived by government from the country did not exceed £50,000 a year. Perhaps the license and extortions of the military were the greatest inflictions of all. These cruelties could not be perpetrated without exciting virulent animosities. Men could not see themselves ruined, their daughters insulted, their relatives hanged, and still regard with complacency a Church polity under the broad shadow of which those things were done. Being pricked, they bled; being hanged, they died, but their kinsmen lived to remember it; being wronged, they sought their revenge. At the Restoration the Presbyterians were divided into Resolutioners and Protesters; their common sufferings drew them together; but the Indulgence was no sooner offered by the government, and accepted by a number of the ministers, than they were divided once more into two parties. The majority appear to have exhibited moderation of sentiment, and anxiety for compromise; the minority were made more and more tenacious of their principles by the cruelties to which they were exposed. Their principles even assumed a fuller development, and at length resulted in the Queensferry, Sanquhar, and Apologetic Declarations. They disowned the Stewarts as a perjured race. They sought after a commonwealth governed by the Mosaic law. Their Presbyterian brethren who had accepted the Indulgence, or in any way recognised the government, they would have no communion with. They were to be regarded as men who having put their hand to the plough had turned back. They held the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumbling-block before the children of Israel. They were no better than the Nicolaitans, for whose sake the Church of Pergamos was rebuked. They were only fit to be spewed out of the mouth. The followers of Cameron, Cargill, and Renwick went still farther, and held they were entitled to meet force by force—to murder those who sought to murder them. Yet these men were the true offspring of the Covenant. In a time of universal backsliding and defection they held fast by its distinctive principles; in the midst of tribulation, as in the midst of triumph, they maintained it was their sacred duty to extirpate Popery, Prelacy, and Sectarianism. When tormented and tortured, they never weakly cried out for toleration; on the contrary, they lifted up their voice against it. They boldly maintained that liberty of conscience was but a liberty of error; it was the putting a sword into a madman's hand giving a cup of poison to a child, letting loose foxes with firebrands at their tails, appointing a city of refuge in men's hearts for the devil to flee to, proclaiming liberty to the wolves to come into Christ's fold and prey upon the lambs, a legalizing of soul-murder, for which damned souls in hell would accurse men upon earth.1 To every one who studies the documents of that period, it becomes obvious that the piety of these high-handed Covenanters was not the piety which would be esteemed most amiable in our day. But this is little more than to say that the virtues of peace are not the virtues of war. Their peculiar piety was the natural growth of the circumstances in which they were placed. The preachers harped upon the themes which divided them from the court and the Church, and the people brooded upon these till they acquired an undue ascendency in their minds. The very sufferings which they endured generated the idea that merit was thereby acquired, and that they stood above all others as the chosen people of God. With this feeling there were mingled those human passions which oppression always begets, and which gave to their fanaticism, in some instances, a dark and deadly hue. But we owe much to their stern struggles; and had their religion been of a milder kind, it is probable they would not have struggled so bravely and so long. In their darkest hours they never despaired, they hoped against hope, not so much from their knowledge of the intrigues that were going on at the Hague, as because their faith in Divine Providence was firm. Might not God, as of old, make the walls of Jericho to fall down at the blast of a ram's horn blown by a feeble priest? It The partiality for the Old Testament, which began immediately after the Reformation, still continued, and was very characteristic of all the Covenanters.2 It gave a tone to their talk, which has frequently been made the subject of ridicule. gave a sternness to their sentiments, which the mild spirit of Christianity should have taught them to correct. The cloquence of their preachers had its own peculiar cast. Every 1 See Testimony by Renwick, already referred to, printed at the end of the Cloud of Witnesses, p. 485. The figures here used are borrowed from it. 2 I have had the curiosity to go over the Scripture references in a wellknown pamphlet belonging to the century (1622), entitled: "Issachar's Ass braying under a double burden ;" and I find that eighty-four of these are to the Old Testament, and fifteen to the New. A similar proportion holds in regard to almost all the religious writings and sayings of the period subject which they handled they divided and subdivided into an interminable number of heads and particulars, lessons, applications, and improvements; but this was the fault of the age, and was common alike to Episcopal and Presbyterian divines. They were frequently homely, and sometimes coarse; but refinement of thought and language was not to be expected in that rude age from every rural pastor-much less from men who were chased from society and compelled to herd with outlaws among the hills. They must have had a power of touching the hearts of their hearers, and that is the end of oratory. "Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," is a book which non-juring squires, not overburdened with religion, have hugely enjoyed; it contains some things which are true, and others which are like the truth; but all in all it is a gross caricature of the men and the times it pretends to delineate. For twenty-five years the Presbyterians had been a persecuted people in the land of their birth; but the day of their deliverance drew near. Had James been of the Protestant faith, and protected the English hierarchy, as his brother had done, he would have been left to do his worst against the Scotch Presbyterians, and in a few years more they must have been exterminated. But his Romish faith alarmed both kingdoms; his dispensing with the Test Acts, in England as well as in Scotland, gave rise to the well-grounded suspicion that every office in the country would soon be in possession of the Papists; and his putting forth his hand on the English Church made divines, who had hitherto preached passive obedience, turn round and curse him to his face. William, Prince of Orange, who had married the king's eldest daughter, had long watched the state of affairs in our island; he had long been ambitious of adding to the dignity of Stadtholder of Holland the lustre of three crowns. The malcontents on both sides of the Tweed had been in communication with him. It was evident that the country was ripe for a revolution. With a wellappointed fleet, attended with transports having fourteen thousand troops on board, he set sail from the Dutch shores, and on the 5th of November 1688 landed at Torbay. Six weeks afterwards James was a fugitive, and the country was free. CHAPTER XXI. So soon as it was known in Scotland that William of Orange had landed at Torbay; that he was slowly advancing toward London; that the English nobility were flocking to him; that the royal army was deserting to him; that the bewildered James had attempted to flee the country, the people began to show how ready they were to concur with the prince in shaking off the burdens under which they had groaned. A few days after the landing at Torbay, the Scotch Privy Council issued an order forbidding any one to receive or circulate the prince's Declaration ; but it nevertheless found its way into the country, and was publicly proclaimed by the populace at Glasgow, Ayr, Irvine, and several other burghs in the west. It alluded to the sufferings to which the people had been subjected because of their religion; it declared that the object of the expedition was to free the country of Popery and arbitrary power; but it gave no pledge for the re-establishment of Presbytery.1 The students in Glasgow University showed the spirit which possessed them by burning the effigy of the Pope, in company with those of the Archbishops of Glasgow and St Andrews.2 Toward the middle of December, Edinburgh began to show a disposition to riot. A chapel had been fitted up in Holyrood House for the Popish worship, and this was an abomination not to be suffered. The mob gathered, and, assisted by the city train-bands, forced the palace, killed a number of the soldiers who defended it, and soon rifled the shrine which had excited their rage. They carried the images in triumphal procession through the streets, and then solemnly burned them. Not satisfied with this, they proceeded to search the houses of the Roman Catholics in the city, and to carry off their books, beads, and crucifixes, that they might commit them to the flames. Thieves followed in the wake of the crowd, and while the students and apprentices were showing their zeal for Protestantism, they were exhibiting their love for plunder, by pillaging every house they could manage to 2 Ibid. p. 472. enter.3 1 Wodrow's History, vol. iv. pp. 470-72. |