privative; that he might appoint meetings if he chose; but, if he did not, that they were not the less entitled to meet by their authority derived from the King Jesus. When the Commissioner had done speaking, the Moderator therefore rose and asked if the Assembly were dissolved without naming a day for another. "His Majesty will appoint another in due time," said his Grace, "of which you will be timeously advertised." "Shall I be heard a few words ?" asked the Moderator. "I cannot hear you as the Moderator," said the Commissioner, "but as a private person you may speak." Upon this the Moderator said, that though they were under the greatest obligations to his Majesty, and ready to obey his lawful commands in all things, they must declare that the office-bearers in the Church had an intrinsic power to meet about its affairs, and that this dissolution of the Assembly without indicting a new one was not to prevent their yearly General Assemblies, granted by the laws of the kingdom. Having said this, the Moderator was about to close the Assembly by prayer, but the members called upon him to mention a day for their next meeting. The Moderator, accordingly, before pronouncing the blessing, named the third Wednesday of August 1693 as the day to which the Assembly adjourned, which was received with applause.1 The contest which the Church had waged with James VI. was thus renewed with William III., a less tyrannical monarch, but a much more dangerous man to meddle with. There was angry feeling on both sides-the king inveighing against the insolence of the Church, and the Church inveighing against the Erastianism of the king.2

But these feelings were, for a time at least, lost in the horror and indignation which filled the country at the massacre which had just been perpetrated in the wild pass of Glencoe. The Highland clans had not yet learned submission to regular government. They still retained their loyalty to the Stewarts, and their fondness for plunder and war. They had fought

with Dundee at Killiecrankie, they continued in arms after his death. William offered an indemnity to all who would take the oaths; and more than once ¡prolonged the period appointed for doing so. The 31st day of December 1691 was finally fixed as the last day for submission, and it was declared

1 See Principal Lee's Proceedings of this Assembly. Also Stewart of Pardovan's Collections, book i. title xv.

2 Testimony Bearing Exemplified, pp. 283, 284. Burnet's History, vol. iii. p. 96.

that all who had not submitted then would be exposed to military execution. Macdonald of Glencoe held out to the very last, but on the 31st of December he presented himself before the Governor of Fort William, and offered to take the oaths. The governor, being merely a military man, declined to take them; and, as the snow was deep on the ground, four or five days elapsed before Macdonald could present himself to the sheriff at Inverary; but when he did present himself, after some hesitation, the oaths were regularly administered and taken. In the February following, a party of soldiers were quartered in the glen. The inhabitants believing that their chief had made his peace with the government, felt no alarm. For twelve days they entertained their guests with highland hospitality. The chief himself was daily with the officers; he drank with them, played at cards with them, and spent the last evening of his life with them. But a horrid butchery had been projected. In the darkness of the night the word was given, and the work was begun. Macdonald was shot down while dressing to receive the lieutenant who had knocked at his door as a friend; men and women were dragged from their beds to be murdered on the floor; boys were stabbed when clinging to the soldiers' knees and crying for mercy. About forty were thus massacred, and a miserable remnant fled to the hills, where many of them perished from hunger and cold. The majority of the doomed Macdonalds escaped, but it was only through mismanagement that a single soul was left alive.1

A thrill of horror went over the country as this fearful story was told. It spread beyond the country, and was repeated on the Continent. It gave new hopes to the Jacobites, and inspired the Highland clans with a hatred of William which they had not felt before. His friends tried to excuse him. They said he had signed the instructions not knowing their nature; that he had been kept in ignorance of the submission of the chief; that Breadalbane and the Master of Stair were the authors of the diabolical deed. The country felt then, as it does still, that the monarch was responsible in a large measure for the great crime. It lessened a popularity which had never been great, and cast a dark shade over his many virtues and his great services to the country and the Church.

1 Report of the Commission given by his Majesty for inquiring into the slaughter of the men of Glencoe, subscribed at Holyrood House the 20th day of June 1693-to be found in Carstares's State Papers, pp. 236-54See also Macaulay's History.

In April 1693 the Scottish parliament met. Its first act appointed the third Thursday of every month to be observed as a fast on account of the war which William was waging with France-a tax upon time which a less idle generation could hardly afford. The next act which had an influence upon ecclesiastical affairs was regarding the oaths to be taken to government. The country was kept in a state of perpetual uneasiness by the dread of Jacobite insurrections and invasions. It was known that many of the gentry, and almost all the Episcopal clergy, still fondly cherished an attachment to the exiled dynasty, and clung to the hope of seeing it restored. Yet many of these had taken the Oath of Allegiance. It was. suspected that in taking it they meant merely to acknowledge the fact that William reigned, without recognising his right to reign. The Oath of Assurance was therefore devised, in which the swearer declared William to be king, de jure as well as de facto; and the parliament required the oath to be taken by all holding office, and, among others, by the clergy, both Episcopal and Presbyterian.

When the subject was discussed in parliamentary committee, hints were thrown out that even the Presbyterians might scruple at such an oath, but such fears were deemed to be visionary. It was affirmed that some of the ministers had been sounded, and that not one of them would object; and their great patron, the Earl of Crawford, gave his influence and vote in favour of the act.1 When, however, the act was passed and canvassed out of doors, it was found that the Presbyterian ministers were almost unanimously opposed to the taking of the oath. It was argued that the act obliged them dogmatically to define and determine, under the sacred seal of an oath, points which in themselves were doubtful and disputable; that it asked them to lay aside their reason and deliver themselves up, bound hand and heel, as a sacrifice upon every revolution; nay, that it required them to make a precedent by which the Church should be miserably enslaved, and ministers. necessitated to juggle with Almighty God, by oath, for which all generations should hold them in abhorrence. "Where is. there a point," it was asked, "that hath been more earnestly and obstinately disputed than the doctrine of deposing kings. and magistrates? Are there not arguments brought from the Holy Scriptures, from the nature of magistracy, from the peace See Secretary Johnstone's Letters to Carstares in Carstares's State Papers.

of society, from the dreadful consequences, the vast deluges of blood, the lamentable dissolution of kingdoms, which have followed such undertakings, whereby many learned and pious men have endeavoured, at all times, to overthrow that kingdethroning power, which never can be practised without greater effusion of blood and violation of all rights than the greatest tyrants have ever occasioned. And why, then, should parliament, at this time of day, impose a yoke upon the Church, which neither we nor our fathers were made sensible of before? Amidst all the past struggles about controverted titles to the crown, the Church was never bound by oath to either of the contending parties, and why should a party oath be imposed upon it now?"1 By such general reasonings as these, in regard to the origin of government, the Presbyterians were disinclined to the Oath of Assurance; as the Episcopalians were by a positive belief that James and not William was king by right.

But the act which had the most immediate influence upon ecclesiastical affairs was entitled, "An Act for Settling the Quiet and Peace of the Church." In this act their Majesties were requested to call a meeting of the General Assembly for ordering the affairs of the Church, and more especially for admitting to a share in the government of the Church all the Episcopal ministers who should take the Oaths of Allegiance and Assurance, subscribe the Confession of Faith, and acknowledge the Presbyterian government as the only government of the Church in Scotland. It was farther declared in this act that all who should not qualify themselves might be deposed, and that all who did qualify themselves would be protected in their churches and livings till they were regularly received into the ecclesiastical judicatories.2

There was a reason besides that stated in the act for the Estates addressing their Majesties to summon a General Assembly. The Commissioner had dissolved the last Assembly in anger without fixing a day for a future one. The Assembly had appointed a day of its own, and that day was now rapidly approaching. The ministers talked as if they were determined to meet; and the government felt that if they did so, the dignity of the crown would be compromised, and one of its prerogatives surrendered to violence. William either did not

1 Letter of the English Presbyterians to their brethren in Scotland. See M'Cormick's Life of Carstares, pp. 54-57.

2 Tarbet's Acts of the Scottish Parliament.

feel himself strong enough, or was not arbitrary enough, to do as Cromwell did-surround the Assembly-house with soldiery, and march out the members. The expedient was therefore fallen upon of the Estates addressing their Majesties to call a meeting of the Assembly, not upon the very day fixed by itself, but upon a day not far off.i In this way, the honour both of the king and the Church was saved, in the point upon which they were equally sensitive.

The Presbyterian ministers thought that the terms upon which the Episcopalians were to be admitted to a share in the government of the Church were too easy; the most of the Episcopalians declared that they were so hard that they could not accept of them. How could they take the Oath of Assurance, they said, when even the Presbyterians refused it? There were articles in the Westminster Confession which they could not in conscience subscribe. There were points in the Presbyterian discipline to which they could not in conscience submit. And when such was the case, was it not too bad, they said, that they should be turned out of their parishes, reduced to beggary, and even prevented from exercising in private their sacred functions? They had educated themselves for the ministry, and had entered the Church when Episcopacy was established by law; they had grown gray in ministering at the altar; their parishioners were attached to them, and wished no change; and why, then, should the sacred bond be broken? 2 If an ecclesiastical revolution were occurring in our day, such considerations as these would undoubtedly have weight; but notions about the necessity of protecting existing interests were little known in the seventeenth century. As there was a time under Mussulman rule when pachas turned out of office were necessarily bowstrung, so there has been a time in our Church's history when Episcopalians and Presbyterians, as they in turn came into power, thought it necessary to ruin their predecessors. The Popish incumbents were more kindly dealt with by the Protestants: they had two-thirds of their benefices secured to them so long as they lived.

The General Assembly had been summoned to meet on the 29th of March 1694. In the meantime, the Presbyterian ministers made an application to the Privy Council to be re

1 Secretary Johnstone managed to bring this about. See his letter to Carstares, in Carstares's Papers, p. 160.

2 Case of the Episcopal Clergy in Scotland. Somers's Tracts, vol. iii. coll. iv. pp. 135-37.