supremacy, that is-such as would accept a benefice without acknowledging the bishops' authority. And none could accept it at its lowest terms, and return, in any way, and "keep kirk-sessions, presbyteries, and synods," except, said the edict, "in our name and by our authority." But high privileges were granted to such of the ejected ministers as would return and accept, not only the king's indulgence, but the bishops' collation, and so not only acknowledge the religious power of the king, but the ecclesiastical authority of the bishops also.

This was, indeed, a master-piece of the serpentine cunning which the writers of the period ascribe to Sharp. It was sure to divide the Presbyterians. Some in other countries might have been expected to accept it completely, and go wholly over to Episcopacy. But as good as none did this in Scotland. Some would acknowledge the king, but not the bishops. And some would take the plain, but fearfully-trying ground of downright truth and principle, and acknowledge neither. So there would be a variety of parties among them. Eighty clergymen were mentioned, by names, as indulged. They were to confine themselves to their own parishes-to celebrate the communion on the same day all over a diocese to prevent concert among them-and not to depart from their diocese without leave from the bishop.

Would that it could be written that not a man of them accepted it at all! And yet the reader of the Tales of My Landlord, will remember to what derision their Macbriars, and their Mucklewraths, and their Pound Texts are held up in that work of wonderful genius, because they would not all permit themselves to be lured into what all men now admit, was an insidious Episcopacy, involving the denial of every principle which they held peculiarly dear. It was with a pang of sadness, gradually changing itself into the most thorough contempt, that the writer first saw the fact, since perfectly obvious to him, that the author of Old Mortality takes it as his first principle that the Scottish and the English people ought to have accepted whatever changes in their religious faith and conscientious obligations king Charles chose to make; and that he actually deals blame and praise to the parties respectively, as they accept the king as lord of their conscience, or do not accept him. It will be a first principle of the most hideous bad odour in coming years. Let every man who perceives it, free his garments from it in good time.

But there is another feature about this indulgence, not to be forgotten in estimating the animus of those who granted it. The courtiers of Scotland, who were called lords of the clergy, actually became alarmed for fear too many of the Presbyterians would accept the indulgence, and that thus their bishops would not have vacant benefices enough to reward those who hungered for the spoils of the ejection! We do not know that this histori

cal fact has been disputed, or is disputable. We use it on the authority of WODROW, and quote it in his words. Vol. 2., p. 131:

"In this interval, the lords of the clergy, and some of their orthodox ministers, had a meeting to fall upon means to hinder the indulgence, which they apprehended would be ruining to their interests. No practical measures could be proposed to prevent it altogether, since the king bad made known his pleasure; but bishop Sharp, to comfort his brethren, promised to do his utmost to make it a bone of contention to the Presbyterians. Indeed, he wanted not abundance of serpentine subtility; and when his attempts to break it altogether failed, he set himself with all vigour to have it so clogged, from time to time, as to break ministers and people of the Presbyterian judgment among themselves."

And yet Sharp is the virtuous and illustrious martyr of Old Mortality, and these men whom he set himself, with all vigor, to break up and divide among themselves, that his brethren might get the spoils of their Church, are perverse rebels, whom fanaticism would not permit to be quiet under the mildest and most virtuous of monarchs. We rather think it would take all the gentility of "the more gentleman-like persuasion," and all the genius of the Waverly romances, to reconcile us to such martyrs as Sharp, and such men of honour as Sir Walter Scott. And, yet, we await with great cheerfulness, the coming, in the realms of history, of Talus, the iron man of truth, with his fearful flail "to beat down falsehood, and the truth unfold."

The reader will find the Presbyterian church reviled for its republican tendencies during the whole time of the dynasty of the Stuarts in Great Britain.

When the Presbyterian and Episcopal divines met together for conference, at the Restoration, to see if there was a chance of accommodation or compromise, the Presbyterians objected to the government of the church by a single person. The Episcopalians replied that "they wondered they should except against the government by one single person, which, if applied to the civil magistrate, is a most dangerous insinuation." It is well known that the attachment of king James I. and king Charles II. to Episcopacy, was on a political account, as it agreed with their ideas of monarchy, and that in the far-famed and classic phrase of the British Solomon, "presbytery agreed with monarchy as God with the devil."+ Hume, MacIntosh, Macaulay, Sir Walter Scott, and a vast multitude of authorities and quotations might be heaped up upon this point. They would be useless, because well known to any one acquainted at all with the tenor of British

*Neal's Puritans, 2., 572.

Pictorial History, Book 7., pp, 444, 446.

historians. We can hardly undertake those who know no history but the romances. The climate of their Boeotia is too thick for us at the present. The reader will find as neat a little specimen as he has often seen, of the art of carrying water on both shoulders, in the late Episcopal tract entitled, "Why I am a Churchman," wherein certain beautiful analogies are pointed out, beween the constitution of the Episcopal Church and that of the American Republic!! We wondered as we read, whether the writer had forgotten the bold and eloquent champion of his cause in the reign of Charles II.-he that spoke of blind and glorious old Milton as "the Latin Secretary, the blind adder-and of Charles II. as "the ne plus ultra of all regal excellency "-Dr. ROBERT SOUTH-and his vehement assaults on the covenant as republican, in his anniversary sermon on the day of the death of Charles I., in the memorable year 1662;-and his splendid and triumphant declaration, in his fifth sermon, that "the Church of England glories in nothing more than that she is the truest friend to kings and to kingly government of any other church in the world." It is a little awkward sometimes, to attempt to steer both sides of the same breakers; to ride both sides of the same tree; to be both hound and hare according to the fortune of the chase.

But the Presbyterians defended themselves from the charge of republicanism in the seventeenth century, in Scotland, and pointed to their deep and earnest loyalty towards their ancient line of kings. They did not confess the charge of republicanism under a monarchy; for that would be synonymous with rebellion. But they claimed then, and they claim now, they claimed in Scotland, and they claim in America, to be constitutionalists under all governments. The title of the famous book of old Samuel Rutherford-LEX REX, which, by the way, it is said, has never been answered, and never can be fairly answered-that famous work which king Charles II. graced with the honour of being burnt by the hangman at the market-cross, the title of that noble book was, indeed, the motto of all their struggles for liberty. The condition of Britain at the present time demonstrates, with all honour to her noble races of men, that liberty may exist under a government of law, even though administered by a king. Indeed, it is hardly probable that the Covenanters of Scotland, or the parliamentarians of England, would have rebelled against the Stuarts on a merely civil account. But they could not make a Stuart the lawgiver of their consciences and their religion. And the mighty God who works his deep designs in wondrous ways, bound civil liberty close around religion, as the golden circle around the jewel, so that in securing the one, which he saw they never would quietly let go, they secured the other too. They could not permit a Stuart to be the ape of the Lord Jesus, as a

Romanist permits the pope to be, and lay the rude hands of carnal and sensual laws upon the mysteries of man's religious soul.

But, in truth, the course of events very soon refuted the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance which the bishops had so sedulously preached to the Scottish people during the Episcopal dragonade in that country. James II., unfortunately for their logic, was a Roman Catholic. Never were principles more thoroughly refuted by adverse necessity than theirs were by the regular legal succession to the throne. If the Scotch had no right to resist the compulsory Episcopacy of Charles II., then the English had no right to resist the compulsory Romanism of James II. If it was wrong to resist Charles in Scotland, it was wrong, by precise parity of reasoning, to dethrone James in England. The parallel is far worse than equal for the bishops. James' offence was a suspension of the laws enforcing Episcopacy. His sin against them was his ceasing to persecute in their behalf. He suspended the laws, by usurped power, so as to grant toleration to papists and covenanters. Then they deserted, dethroned, defeated, and drove him away. Charles' offence was a rigourous administration of executive decrees, establishing Episcopacy where the people did not desire it. He persecuted the Covenanters to drive them to a faith strange and hateful to them. They never preached passive obedience. They seldom practiced civil rebellion. They made a sort of passive resistance, if that is an allowable idea. The Cameronians, or hill-people, alone, disowned the civil authority of the king. But if it was right and proper to drive off the king of England for being a Roman Catholic, would it not have been precisely as right to drive off the king of Scotland for being an Episcopalian? Is there any imaginable difference, except that the bishops were on the winning side in one case and not in the other? All honour to the English people for that manly bravery with which they cast off the meshes of that slavish logic, when their religious rights were in danger. All those rights, save the right to persecute the Scotch, were worth preserving, even at the expense of the expulsion of a graceless bigot from the great Protestant throne. It is strange and sad that their zealot tories, to this day, have not caught the noble and generous idea of giving equal honour to the Scottish people, for simply disobeying the sorrier of the two brothers, in his attempts to overthrow their faith. The act of the English church and people, in 1668, went much farther than a full sanction to the patient refusal to apostatise, of the Scottish church and people during the previous twenty-eight years. So certain are erroneous and one-sided principles, of a practical refutation, when men are required themselves to live by principles which they manufacture for

others.

Here it may be observed how different were the circumstances under which the Presbyterian system was attempted to be set up in England, in the time of the commonwealth, from the circumstances under which the Episcopal system was attempted to be set up in Scotland in the reign of Charles II. The Presbyterian system proposed to the English was the Westminster Confessiona system formed by a body of English divines, convoked by English civil authorities. There were not a dozen Scots in that large assembly. The solemn league and covenant was a voluntary bond entered into by the English, Scottish, and Irish peoples, to adopt that system, as a more complete reformation of the church. The Scottish people swore to adopt it, and did adopt it. To this day, the fact stands out broadly in British church history, that the Scottish Confession of Faith is a book furnished them by an assembly of English divines. Truly, it is not easy to see how this solemn league and covenant was a persecutor of the English. If the English Episcopalians were persecuted, it was by English Presbyterians, not Scottish.

The Episcopal system attempted to be set up by military force in Scotland was foreign to the whole Scottish mind. It was the Romish system restored. It was reactionary. It was a lapse from reformation. It was never assented to at all by an ecclesiastical assembly in Scotland, but was professedly based on the claim of royal supremacy in religious matters, and was ratified only in a Scottish Parliament, composed of the profligate tools of a more profligate king.

The reason for which presbytery was attempted to be set up in England was that it was a more perfect reformation of the church than the old system; and, in the language of David Hume, that "that form of ecclesiastical government is more favourable to liberty than to royal power." The reason for which Episcopacy was attempted to be set up in Scotland, was that it was regarded as a form of ecclesiastical government more favorable to royal power, and especially to the peculiar ideas of royal power entertained by the house of Stuart. Both these propositions could be established by a very large number of authorities and references, which will occur without difficulty to the memory of the reader well informed in the history of the seventeenth century.

When Episcopal ministers were ejected from their parishes in England, in the times of the commonwealth, it was, as a general thing, for a dissolute moral character, for shameful incompetency to teach, or for a denial of fundamental doctrines. Old Fuller, the witty historian, almost as zealous a royalist as South himself, was admitted to a living by Cromwell's Court of Triers. The reader who has met with the morceau, will hardly have forgotten how the jolly old clerical wit, amused himself afterwards with the questions the Triers asked him on the subject of the new