Some rumours of an intended communion having got abroad, the sheriff-depute was ordered by the bishop to prevent or disperse the meeting. He accordingly sent a party to apprehend the minister; but he not knowing the spot, directed them to proceed to his house at Alness, naturally supposing the meeting would be there. The soldiers, upon finding the nest empty, attacked the orchard—a much more pleasant amusement, that detained them till the forenoon’s service was over at Obsdale, where, before they arrived, Mr M’Gilligan had got notice, and was under hiding, which, when they found, they retired without disturbing the congregation; and the sacred solemnities proceeded without any further interruption. Mr M’Gilligan, however, was obliged to abscond; and one of his neighbours, Mr Thomas Ross, being apprehended at Tain for a similar offence, was sent to the Bass.
Civil tyranny is always so interwoven with ecclesiastical persecution, that it is seldom we are able to separate the two. But the sufferings of Sir Patrick Home of Polwart, although they undoubtedly originated from his religion, were ultimately effected through the medium of his patriotism: he legally, by a bill of suspension before the Court of Session, resisted a wanton stretch of power in the privy council, and endeavoured to rouse the opposition of the gentry of Berwickshire towards an oppressive, unjust tax for planting garrisons among them in time of peace; and for this undoubted exercise of his right, was committed, by order of the king, prisoner to Stirling Castle, and declared incapable of holding any place of trust; and the heritors succumbed, although the other fines extorted from the shire this year amounted to nearly twenty-seven thousand pounds Scots.
Nor were the indulged suffered to enjoy their limited and precarious pardon quietly; their stipends were withheld or tardily paid, and that only upon their producing certificates from the sheriffs that they had kept no conventicles for the last twelve-month; but their most vexatious trials were the natural consequences of their acknowledging the power of the civil magistrate in ecclesiastical affairs, and owning his warrant, rather than the authority of Christ, as the rule in their ministerial labours. Complaints were brought against them, and they were summoned before the council for not celebrating the communion on the same day in all their parishes—for irregular baptisms—and for having preached in churchyards and other places than the kirks; but, above all, for having presumed to authorize young men to preach the gospel, and ordained others to the work of the ministry; and, at a time when a long tract of unseasonable weather seemed to threaten a famine, they had usurped a power which belonged to majesty alone, or his delegates, and had appointed a fast in their several congregations! Through the interest of Lord Stair, however, these grievances were not pushed to extremities this year.
[1676.] Whatever circumstances might induce any occasional relaxation in the severity of the persecution, the spirit remained the same; and no opportunity was suffered to escape by which the preaching of the gospel might be put down by men calling themselves Christian bishops. The soldiers in the garrisons were their willing instruments, and as they shared in the plunder, were active in the pursuit; yet meetings for hearing the word continued to increase, and the ordinances of religion were administered with a solemnity and power, often at midnight, which rendered them the general topics of interest and conversation among the people, and still more the objects of aversion to the prelates. Finings for “conventicles” were therefore inflicted by the council with unmitigated rigour. Durham of Largo, for offences of this nature, and harbouring that “notour traitor,” John Welsh, was early in the year mulcted of nearly four thousand pounds Scots; Colonel Kerr, several ladies, and some citizens of Edinburgh, were legally plundered in various sums each, of five hundred merks, two hundred pounds, and one hundred pounds Scots, for being at house conventicles within the city; but the magistrates having also suffered for these “enormities,” being soused for not preventing what they had never previously heard of, they were allowed to reimburse themselves by fining the culprits, who were thus punished twice for one crime.
A more revolting case of wanton cruelty was, about the same time, exercised towards some poor men who had been guilty of attending sermon in the fields near Stirling. Towards the end of 1674, they had been seized in the act and carried to jail; eight, by some means or other, had got out—and the remaining seven sent the following affecting petition to the council in the month of February:—“The petitioners, being prisoners in the tolbooth of Stirling, these fifteen months by-past, some of us being poor decrepit bodies, and all of us poor creatures with wives and families, we have been many times at the point of starving, and had long ere now died for want, if we had not been supplied with the charity of other people: The truth whereof is notour to all who live near Stirling, and which the magistrates have testified by a report under their hands: Wherefore, it is humbly desired that your lordships would compassionate our pitiful and deplorable condition, and that of our poor starving wives and children, and order us liberty, we being willing to enact ourselves to compear and answer before your lordships whenever we should be called.” Of those who signed, one, Charles Campbell, was upwards of sixty, and one John Adam, near seventy years of age; the others were labouring under severe bodily indisposition. Yet, instead of being moved by the pitiful tale of these harmless, aged, and sickly prisoners, the council, with an inhumanity which it would not be easy to designate properly, ordered them to be turned over as recruits! to one of Lauderdale’s minions, a Captain Maitland, then an officer in the French service; and on Friday, February 18, at midnight, they were delivered to a party of soldiers, fettered and tied together, and marched off without any previous warning. But they went cheerfully away, although they knew not whither; for they knew the master whom they served would never leave them naked to their enemies in their old age.
These severities were followed up by a fresh proclamation against conventicles, in which, with the most hypocritical falsehood, after lauding the king’s princely care and zeal for the interests of the Protestant reformed religion and the church, and lamenting the sad and sensible decay religion had suffered, and the great and dangerous increase of profaneness, through the most unreasonable and schismatical separation of many from the public and established worship, and the frequent and open conventicles, both in houses and fields—magistrates were required rigorously to apprehend all who were intercommuned, and to expel their families from the burghs, together with such preachers and their families as did not regularly attend public worship—to enforce the acts against conventicles and separation, under a penalty of five hundred merks if they did not annually report their proceedings, and five hundred or upwards additional, for every conventicle that shall have been held within their jurisdictions, besides whatever other fine the council might choose to inflict. All noblemen, gentlemen, and burgesses were forbid to entertain any chaplin, tutor, or schoolmaster, under penalties proportioned to their rank, from six hundred to three thousand merks; and informers were, according to the system of the times, by the same proclamation, encouraged and rewarded by a share of the fines. Committees were also appointed to investigate and punish transgressors, who fined and imprisoned many of the most respectable heritors and gentlemen, particularly in the west, and outlawed others who had declined answering their summons.
Enemies to the gospel of Christ, the prelatic rulers did not confine their opposition to the preaching of the “outted” ministers, the indulged were at the same time subjected to greater burdens. It was evidently one of their main objects to produce division among the Presbyterian ministers; and as we have seen the indulgence was admirably calculated to effect this, yet the breach being neither so wide nor so violent as they wished, “instructions” were issued to them by the council. Assuming that they had accepted of liberty to preach under conditions, the council accused them of violating their engagements by baptizing without the necessary certificates, and preaching in other places than their own kirk, without any license from the bishop; and they added this injunction, that they should not employ or allow any of their brethren to preach for them who had not also obtained similar liberty. The indulged eluded the charges, by alleging that they accepted of the indulgence as a boon from government, not upon conditions, but as a favour granted; and the instructions they considered as orders upon which they were to act at their peril. But this neither satisfied the council nor their brethren, both of whom concurred in thinking it an evasion rather than an honest justification of their conduct. With the injunction they appear to have complied also—a very unsatisfactory procedure—which induced some, particularly of the younger unindulged preachers, to visit the boundaries of their parishes, and led to heart-burnings and mutual accusations between those who thought they might yield a little to the pressure of the times, and those who in nothing would recede from their avouched principles. These differences, which afterwards unhappily led to coldness and estrangement among the friends of “the good cause,” did not produce their most mischievous effects till the oldest, stanch, tried worthies were removed from the field. Meanwhile, the dispersion of the ministers, who, when they were scattered abroad, went every where preaching the word, was eminently blessed to promote that gospel it was intended to destroy, and conventicles multiplied on every side both in houses and fields.
Of the period from 1673 to 1679, Shiels gives this animating picture on reviewing it many years after, when the holy excitement had subsided, and temporal prosperity had began to diffuse its seductive influence over the revolution-church:—“When by persecution many ministers had been chased away by illegal law sentences, many had been banished away, and, by their ensnaring indulgences, many had been drawn away from their duty; and others were now sentenced with confinements and restraints if they should not choose and fix their residence where they could not keep their quiet and conscience both—they were forced to wander and disperse through the country; and the people being tired of the cold and dead curates, and wanting long the ministry of their old pastors, so longed and hungered after the word, that they behoved to have it at any rate, cost what it would; which made them entertain the dispersed ministers more earnestly, and encouraged them more to their duty; by whose endeavours—through the mighty power and presence of God, and the light of his countenance now shining through the cloud, after so fatal and fearful a darkness that had overclouded the land for a while, that it made their enemies gnash their teeth for pain, and dazzled the eyes of all onlookers—the word of God grew exceedingly, and went through at least the southern borders like lightning; or, like the sun in its meridian beauty, discovering so the wonders of God’s law, the mysteries of his gospel, and the secrets of his covenant, and the sins and duties of that day, that a numerous issue was begotten to Christ, and his conquest was glorious, captivating poor slaves of Satan and bringing them from his power unto God, and from darkness to light.
“O! who can remember the glory of that day, without a melting heart in reflecting upon what we have lost, and let go, and sinned away by our misimprovement—a day of such power that it made the people, even the bulk and body of the people, willing to come out and venture upon the greatest of hardships, and the greatest of hazards, in pursuing after the gospel, through mosses, and muirs, and inaccessible mountains, summer and winter, through excess of heat and extremity of cold, many days’ and nights’ journeys, even when they could not have a probable expectation of escaping the sword of the wilderness. But this was a day of such power, that nothing could daunt them from their duty that had tasted once the sweetness of the Lord’s presence at these persecuted meetings.
“Then we had such humiliation-days for personal and public defections, such communion-days even in the open fields, and such Sabbath-solemnities, that the places where they were kept might have been called Bethel, or Peniel, or Bochim, and all of them Jehovah-Shammah, wherein many were truly converted, more convinced, and generally all reformed from their former immoralities; that even robbers, thieves, and profane men, were some of them brought to a saving subjection to Christ, and generally under such restraint, that all the severities of heading and hanging in a great many years could not make such a civil reformation as a few days of the gospel in these formerly the devil’s territories, now Christ’s quarters, where his kingly standard was displayed. I have not language to lay out the inexpressible glory of that day; but I doubt if ever there were greater days of the Son of Man upon the earth, than we enjoyed for the space of seven years at that time.”[[81]]