thought; but of how many hundreds in the very church of which these men were the ornaments, may not the same thing be affirmed? or who that knows any thing of the history of the times would so much as think of applying such a standard to the Scottish clergy of that day? Opportunities of acquiring large stores of literature, or of cultivating to a great extent powers of graceful or elaborate disquisition, were but sparingly furnished at that time to candidates for the sacred office in Scotland. Nor was the temper of the times favourable to the indulgence of that quiet plodding and academic repose by which the great divines of the English church amassed their treasures and nurtured their faculties. The public mind was unsettled; questions of mighty moment, both in theology and in politics, were under general discussion; interests of the deepest value were at stake. It was a time for decision, not for contemplation; for the energetic use of what a man had, not for the quiet and composed amassing of resources, which however valuable in themselves, their possessor might never have any occasion to call forth. Such learning and eloquence as times like these require-the learning that fits for rapidly taking a firm and discriminating grasp of a complicated question, and the eloquence that is adapted to guide the opinions and sway the feelings of a people deeply in earnest, the Scottish clergy at that time sufficiently possessed. In all matters of scholastic and controversial theology, they were accurately, if not profoundly, versed; of the original languages of the Scriptures they all knew something, and of some it might be justly said, that they were learned in those tongues; with points connected with the civil law, or with ecclesiastical and general politics, they were more than conversant; and their eloquence, though neither of the most refined nor of the most elevated order, was of that vehement, compact, and business-like character which is best suited to affect a people, shrewd, determined, and impassioned, like those to whom it was addressed.* That such men could, as a body, have been cajoled by a set of revolutionary nobles is not to be supposed for a moment; still less can we suppose them to have sided with those men from sinister and factious motives. Had they adopted this latter course, they would have been, in a temporal point of view,

It is doing Mr. Napier no injustice to prefer, in a question respecting pulpit oratory, the opinion of such a man as Dr. Mc Crie to his. We have read,' says that eminent man, not one, but a number of sermons preached by Henderson, Gillespie, and Baillie, and we are sure we do not go too far when we say, that they may bear a comparison with any sermon at that time delivered in London; and that they might have been heard, and indeed were heard, by the most refined members of Parliament of England, without the slightest feeling of disgust or ridicule.'-Review of Tales of My Landlord, in the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, for 1817, p. 175.

deeply and insanely injuring themselves. What had they to gain by such a course, supposing it successful? If they sought worldly honour and wealth, the surer, the safer, and the shorter path was to have sided with Charles, and have lent the weight of their influence to his schemes. There were some of the clerical leaders in this movement-Henderson, for instance-whom the king and Laud would have purchased at any price. Had they given in to the royal scheme-had they consented to acknowledge their temporal sovereign as their ecclesiastical head-had they, in opposition to their conscientious convictions, assumed the sacerdotal robes, and engaged to observe what they justly deemed the unscriptural and deceptive ritual of the Episcopal Church-and had they used their vast influence with the community to induce them to remain quiet under those changes, and to receive as inoffensive and scriptural the principles which they involved; there can be no doubt that their unprincipled conformity would have been rewarded by a shower of benefits from the gratified monarch. It is inconceivable how, had they been such selfseeking, evil-minded men as Mr. Napier says they were, they should have foregone all the advantages which were thus spread before them, for the uncertain chance of bettering their condition by a civil war. The supposition is monstrous, and carries its own refutation on its front. Nor will any theory serve to account for their conduct, on the ordinary principles of human nature, which denies the validity of that plea which they themselves urged, when they rested their defence upon the obligation under which God had laid them to prefer truth to emolument, and to obey him rather than man.

As to the charge of being agitators, it is not to be denied, that the ministers made the utmost use of their influence with the people for the purpose of exciting them against the measures of the king, and that some of them forgot, in the excess of their zeal, what was altogether due to the sacredness of their office. At the same time, it is to be borne in mind, that their position was somewhat peculiar, and greatly different from that of a clergyman in the present day. Of them may be said, what Lord Brougham has said of the orators of ancient Greece: each was for his own district the parliamentary debater, the speaker at 'public meetings, the preacher, the newspaper, the published 'sermon, the pamphlet, the volume all in one. To them the people looked for information and advice in regard to all their affairs, both public and private, temporal and spiritual. They were thus constrained at times to transgress the strict limit of

*

Dissertation on the Eloquence of the Ancients, appended to the fourth volume of his Speeches, p. 380.

VOL. VI.

C

official duty, and meddle with matters that did not altogether belong to them. On the occasion in question, however, it is to be kept in view, that they felt themselves called upon to act as they did, in consequence of the danger with which the spiritual wellbeing of the people seemed to them to be threatened. They felt that principles of deep and awful moment were at stake, and were convinced that the proposed innovations were fraught with evil to the best interests, temporal and eternal, of the people. As faithful shepherds it behoved them to warn their flock of the impending danger; as vigilant watchmen it was required of them to sound the alarm when they saw the enemy preparing to approach. Ready themselves to endure every thing rather than relinquish their principles, they felt it incumbent to rouse their followers to the same pitch of conscientious and holy determination. And in following out this course, Mr. Napier may rest assured, they went to work after a very different fashion from what he supposes. They were not the men to aim at accomplishing their designs by working upon the fears or the feelings of the weaker sex. It is in a very different quarter that he must look for the sleek and soft-tongued parsons, who familiar with a round 'of ladyships,' act the part of drawing-room agitators, and seek, by working upon the nerves or the bigotry of their female disciples, to raise an excitement, which may be turned to good account in favour of the continually and much endangered Church.' The clergy of the Covenant were men, every inch of them. They scorned to ply the distaff, when the circumstances of their country called upon them to wield the mace. Confident in the rectitude of their principles and the honesty of their intentions, they came boldly before their countrymen, and spoke their minds in open day. Hence the real secret of the depth and permanence of their influence over the movements of their party. Nothing appears to us more preposterous than to attribute this to their hold upon the women. It is true that the Scottish females of that period took a deep interest in public affairs, and it is no less true, that it was among them that open resistance to the use of the liturgy in the churches first broke out; but had there been no more powerful element at work upon the minds of the male part of the population than what arose from their influence, we may rest assured the matter had never come to the issue of a civil war. Does Mr. Napier himself believe, or does he expect any man of sense to believe, that the riotous proceedings of Jenny Geddes and her assistant serving wenches,' were the real commencement of the mighty conflict in which the nation was soon after involved with its rulers? What! because an old woman lost her temper in church, and imperilled the life of the officiating clergymen by flinging her stool at his head, and because a few scores of persons of her own sex and class seconded her fury by 'voices and missiles,'

are we to be told that a whole nation, hastily espousing her quarrel, would take up arms against their sovereign, and carry on a long, a bloody, and an expensive war in defence of a cause to which they were seduced only by the skill with which a few crafty nobles and intriguing clergymen improved' the feminine tumult? Had Mr. Napier perused the page of human nature with half the diligence which he has bestowed upon the wormeaten records of former times, he would have learned that it is not by such sudden and intemperate outbursts of individual wrath that the peace of nations is broken, and the stability of thrones endangered. Emotions that are so easily excited into unseasonable fervour, lie too near the surface, and have too little hold upon the moral and intellectual energies of the people, to be sufficient for the parentage of mighty revolutions. Where a single spark kindles a devastating flame, the materials for the conflagration must have been previously collected; where the 'lenis susur'rus' of a local tumult stirs a kingdom into rebellion we may rest assured that the minds of the people have been previously unsettled by the criminality or folly of their rulers. Had the unseemly conduct of the women on the occasion referred to, been called forth by nothing but their own excited feelings, their wrath would have cooled with the ducking of the first scold whom the magistrates might have doomed to that once approved and appropriate punishment. But vehement as their indignation was, it was not from it that danger to the commonwealth was to be apprehended. It was in the pallid sternness, the compressed lips, the knit brows, the gloomy silence of the dark-visaged mass that partly in indifference, partly in displeasure, looked on whilst the fury of the women was expending itself in noisy outrage, that the signs of the impending storm were to be descried. The outrage which had been committed upon the most cherished rights of the nation, had kindled a deep and moody resentment which the excesses of a mob could neither express nor satisfy.

It was whilst this excitement was rising to its height, that Montrose arrived in Edinburgh. His name appears for the first time in connexion with the famous convention of November, 1637, out of which the Institution of the Tables, already referred to, arose. His appearing on this occasion among the ranks of the disaffected party, has been usually attributed to a feeling of mortified pride in consequence of the treatment he had received from the king in London; but when we consider that it was not until some considerable time after his arrival in Scotland, that he joined the Covenanting party, and that at no period of his connexion with them, did his conduct betray any of that rancorous partisanship which commonly characterizes the man who adopts a side in a great national conflict from motives of mere personal offence, the soundness of this opinion may well be questioned. Mr. Napier

attributes Montrose's adduction to his mind having been worked upon by the craft of Lord Rothes and the clergy, quoting as his authority the words of Baillie-the canniness of Rothes brought in Montrose to our party'-and a MS. deposition by Robert Murray, minister of Methven, taken in 1641, in which Montrose is introduced as affirming that Murray was an instrument in 'bringing him to this cause.' It is quite possible, however, that both Rothes and Murray may have dealt with' Montrose, as the phrase went, without either of them practising any deceit upon his mind. There is nothing to forbid the supposition that he agreed with his former guardian, Lord Napier, in the opinions which led that nobleman, along with many others of the same moderate and rational views, to espouse the side of the people against the bishops; and though some management might be necessary to induce him to commit himself to active measures, it is quite possible, and from all we know of his character and subsequent career, extremely probable, that he did not take that step without a full conviction of its necessity, and a clear understanding in his own mind how far he was prepared to go in the course on which he had thus entered.

Once committed, the ardour of his temperament and the daring character of his genius, led him to pursue with unhesitating vigour those measures which appeared conducive to the interests of the cause he had espoused. At the convention above mentioned, he was named, along with Lords Rothes, Loudon, and Lindsay, to represent the nobility of Scotland in the Committee of Tables; and in this capacity he was accessary to the composition of, as he was among the first to affix his bold and masculine signature to, that memorable paper the Solemn League and Covenant.' This document was drawn up by Henderson, minister of Leuchars, and Johnstone, of Warriston, by order of the Tables, after a very decided instance of Charles's perfidy and obstinate determination to enforce his ecclesiastical innovations. It was framed upon the model of the Bands,' as they were called, into which from very ancient times the Scotch had been in the habit of entering for mutual support and defence in seasons of peril. One of these, which had been framed at the time of the Reformation, and had been adopted as the National Confession of Faith, was selected by the Covenanters as the basis on which their document was to be formed; or rather was reissued by them, with the addition of a single clause to the effect that all persons signing it were obliged to defend each other against all sorts of persons whatsoever.' The addition of this clause has drawn down upon them the charge of duplicity as well as rebellion; inasmuch as, it is said, they issued the document as a simple copy of the former Confession, whereas it contained a clause pledging all who signed it to stand by each other against any and every opponent, not even excepting the