[131]. Having in vain tried flattery, the Chancellor, in the council, said—“I was a vicious man.” I answered, “that while I was so, I had been acceptable to him; but now when otherwise it was not so.” In reply to another question, he said, “Ye know that youth is a folly, and in my younger days I was too much carried down with the speat of it: but that inexhaustible fountain of the goodness and grace of God, which is free and great, hath reclaimed me, and, as a firebrand, plucked me out of the claws of satan.”—Rathillet’s confession, Cloud of Witnesses.
A few days after, August 4th, several others were tried and condemned for having been with Cameron; and a general search was ordered to discover the outlawed attenders on field-preaching. It was conducted under the direction of Robert Cannon of Mardrogat, one of those miscreants who, having made a flaming profession, had become acquainted with their places of meeting, but afterwards apostatizing, now discovered the secret recesses of his former friends, and was usually consulted respecting the character of such persons as the soldiers seized, who were dismissed or detained as he directed.
Intensity of persecution had now almost extinguished field-preaching. Donald Cargill alone fearlessly preserved his station, and, in defiance of the sanguinary storm which swept over the moors and glens of his country, continued to proclaim with unfettered freedom the principles of the church of his fathers, and to assert the spiritual independence of her ministers, while almost all others had yielded to the tempest or deserted the land of their nativity. While hunted himself as a hart or a roe upon the mountains, he resolved upon the extraordinary measure of excommunicating those rulers of a covenanted land who had themselves sworn that sacred obligation, and professed themselves members of the church of Christ in Scotland.
Accordingly, in the month of September, at the Torwood, Stirlingshire, he lectured upon Ezekiel xxi. 25-27. “And thou, profane wicked prince of Israel, whose day is come,” &c., and preached from 1 Cor. v. 13. “Therefore, put away from among yourselves that wicked person.” He first explained the nature and ends of excommunication, affirming that he was not influenced by any private motive in this action, but constrained by conscience of duty and zeal to God, to stigmatize these his enemies that had so apostatized, rebelled against, mocked, despised, and defied the Lord, and to declare them, as they are none of his, to be none of ours. He then with great solemnity proceeded—“I being a minister of Jesus Christ, and having authority and power from him, do, in his name, and by his spirit, excommunicate, cast out of the true church, and deliver up to satan, Charles the Second, king, &c. upon these grounds:—1st, For his high mocking of God, in that after he had acknowledged his own sins, his father’s sins, his mother’s idolatry, yet had gone on more avowedly in the same than all before him. 2d, For his great perjury in breaking and burning the covenant. 3d, For his rescinding of laws for establishing the Reformation, and enacting laws contrary thereunto. 4th, For commanding of armies to destroy the Lord’s people. 5th, For his being an enemy to true protestants and helper of the papists, and hindering the execution of just laws against them. 6th, For his granting remission and pardon for murderers, which is in the power of no king to do, being expressly contrary to the law of God. 7th, For his adulteries, and dissembling with God and man.”
Next, by the same authority, and in the same name, he excommunicated James Duke of York, for his idolatry, and setting it up in Scotland, to defile the land, and encouraging others to do so; not mentioning any other sins but what he scandalously persisted in in Scotland. He pronounced a similar sentence against Lauderdale for his dreadful blasphemy, in saying to the late prelate of St Andrews, “Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool;” his apostacy from the covenant and reformation, and his persecuting thereof after he had been a professor, pleader for, and presser thereof; for his adulteries, his gaming on the Lord’s day, his ordinary cursing; and for his counselling and assisting the king in all his tyrannies, overturning and plotting against the true religion: and also included in the same censure, Rothes, Dalziel, and the Lord Advocate.
These proceedings have been condemned as plainly disagreeable to the rules of the church of Scotland. In ordinary times they might be so, but extraordinary times require extraordinary measures; and Mr Cargill was placed in a situation altogether unparalleled in the history of the church of Scotland. That he was persuaded in his own mind that he had acted with propriety, we know; for next Lord’s day, when preaching at Fallow-hill, in the parish of Livingstone, in the preface to his sermon, he thus defended his conduct:—“I know I am and will be condemned by many for excommunicating these wicked men; but condemn me who will, I know I am approved by God, and am persuaded that what I have done on earth is ratified in heaven; for if ever I knew the mind of God, and was clear in my call to any piece of my work, it was that. And I shall give you two signs that you may know I am in no delusion:—1st, If some of these men do not find that sentence binding upon them ere they go off the stage, and be obliged to confess it; and, 2dly, If they die the ordinary death of men;—then the Lord hath not spoken by me.”[[132]]
[132]. Whatever opinion may be entertained with regard to the prophetical spirit of the denunciation, yet it deserves to be remarked, that Rothes when dying, under great terror of mind, sent for two Presbyterian clergymen, Mr John Carstairs and Mr George Johnstone, to administer consolation to him in his last hours. Charles II. died under very suspicious circumstances in the arms of an harlot. Lauderdale, after being despoiled of his property, and abused in his dotage by his Duchess, departed almost in a state of idiocy, in consequence, it was alleged, of her ill treatment during his imbecility. York died a discrowned exile in a strange country. Dalziel dropped down with a glass of wine at his lips, and entered the eternal state without a moment’s warning. “Sir George Mackenzie died at London—all the passages of his body running blood.”—Walker’s Remarks, p. 10.
However much the persecutors affected to despise this procedure, they showed by their conduct that they did not deem it so ridiculous an affair. That it had touched their souls, scared as they were by unrestrained indulgence in the lowest hardening and profligate licentiousness, was evident from the rage they exhibited and the increased fierceness of their persecution.
Ancient episcopacy, as established by Constantine, has always been considered the genuine parent of the papacy. Modern episcopacy, as established by law, was always considered by the reformers of Scotland, and their descendants in the Presbyterian church, as the legitimate daughter of the man of sin. Nor did the deeds of this period disgrace the relationship. The Duke of York, who had professed himself a papist, and for this reason was obliged to leave England, was hailed by the Episcopalians of Scotland, where he arrived to resume the government this year. On the 29th, he came to the Abbey of Holyrood-house, and was welcomed by the Bishop of Edinburgh, with the orthodox clergy, as their great protector.
On the 2d of November, a council was held, at which the Earl of Moray produced his commission as sole secretary of state, Lauderdale, on account of his increased corpulence and mental decay, being forced unwillingly to resign a trust he had so awfully abused. The same day they returned a letter of thanks to his majesty—an admirable specimen of courtly congratulation, which might teach despots what reliance is to be placed on the profession of interested sycophants, especially when we recollect that many of those who signed it, in less than eight years conspired to hurl the object of their adulation from the throne. “The only thing,” say they, “which is forced upon the worst of your subjects—viz. the covenanters—is, that they must unavoidably confess that nothing can lessen their happiness, except their being insensible of it and unthankful for it.” Next comes their gratitude for a standing army and their own salaries:—“Your majesty by dispensing for our protection all the revenue which is raised in this your majesty’s ancient kingdom, lets us see that all you crave of us is, that we would be true to our own interest; and all that you get by us is, the care of governing us to our own satisfaction.” Then the loyal professions so easily lavished and so easily forgotten—“That profound respect and sincere kindness, sir, which we observe in your majesty’s subjects here to your royal brother, the Duke of Albany and York, assure us that we want nothing but occasion to hazard for the royal family those lives and fortunes which you have made so sweet and secure to us!”