victorious-all these yet resound benedictions in thy favour. God grant that the fatal bandage which hides the truth from thine eyes may fall off! May God forget the rivers of blood with which thou hast deluged the earth, and which thy reign hath caused to be shed. May God blot out of his book the injuries which thou hast done us; and while he rewards the sufferers, may he pardon those who exposed us to suffer. Oh! may God, who hath made thee to us and to the whole Church a minister of his judgments, make thee a dispenser of his favours and administrator of his mercy." 99*

* Some of the sad points referred to above, in the experience and character of Louis, have appeared in the case of other persecutors. Thus, Charles IX., a predecessor, and the instigator of the St. Bartholomew massacre the man who said, in reference to the mortal remains of the Hugonots, that the “body of a dead enemy always smelled sweet," and who sent a messenger all the way to Rome, to tell the Pope, that "the Seine flowed on more majestically after receiving the bodies of the murdered heretics"-the man who left the couch where his first-born had been brought forth, and hurried straightway to the sight of Protestant executions;-this man, hardened and insensible as he may seem, was, under the moral government of God, visited with awful compunctions. Paré, his body surgeon, was a Protestant, and was wonderfully preserved. He relates, that after the fatal deed, the king used often to come to him, and confessed, that from the beginning of the massacre, he felt as if he had been in a high fever, and that the figures of the murdered, with their faces besmeared with blood, seemed to start up every moment before his eyes, both while he slept and while awake. What a fearful punishment! The reader will remember that he died in three years after, of a strange and bloody disease.

It was noted that Louis XIV., was a patron of literature, and yet that the persecution took place in his Augustan era-an obvious proof that mere knowledge cannot restrain, and far less extinguish, the intolerant spirit of Popery. This is not a singular instance. Gregory XIII., the Pope who rejoiced in the St. Bartholomew massacre, struck medals of different metals, and granted a jubilee, to which one hundred thousand pilgrims flocked to Rome in honour of it, was not only a kind and humane man, but was one of the most learned of the Popes. He was a man of so much science, that he converted the Julian into the Gregorian year; and yet he was the patron of that horrible deed, which, Sully tells us, was punished by the vengeance of Heaven, in national disasters and distractions of twenty-six years' duration. How vain, then, is it to think that the intellectual progress of the nineteenth century can change Popery, and make it harmless and good!

CONTEMPORANEOUS HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND, FROM 1688 TO 1715.

GOD, for his all-wise purposes, seems to have treated different Churches of the Reformation from Popery in different ways. In some countries, as Italy, Poland, and Spain, he suffered Protestantism to be utterly extinguished by the violence of protracted persecution. In other quarters, as in Britain, and Holland, and Germany, he blessed it with a speedy triumph over its enemies, which, in spite of occasional assaults and declensions, it maintains to the present day. In the case of France, his treatment of the Christian Church was mingled. Protestantism was neither allowed to be extinguished, nor to triumph. It was called upon to occupy a middle space-to maintain a perpetual contest down to 1685, when it might be said to be nationally overthrown. There is, then, at this period of history, a grand contrast between the Church of Scotland and the Church of France. While the Church of France was broken up in a way from which she has never recovered, the Church of Scotland started forth from the Revolution of 1688 into new vigour, and was soon introduced to what may be called her third era of Reformation.

But before entering on the consideration of this noble period, it will be necessary to advert to the state of things in Europe generally, and in Scotland in particular, at the Revolution. We have already remarked, that the hand of Divine Providence was most conspicuously manifested in bringing about that great event. The darkness was deepest just before the light burst forth. Bishop Burnet remarks, that among the different crises of the Protestant religion, of which he enumerates five, the year 1685 may be considered one. In February, the King of Britain (James II.) declared himself a papist. In June, the crown of the Elector Palatine of Germany went to a bigoted Popish family. In October, the Edict of Nantes-the protective shield of the Protestants of France was withdrawn. In December, the Duke of Savoy withdrew a similar protection from his Protestant subjects-the long persecuted Vaudois. No prospects could be more dismal. But in three short years the cloud begins to break up. As the most important step of the whole, the British Papist is set aside, and a Protestant prince from Holland, specially upon Protestant grounds, is called to the

throne. Though as we have seen, the oppression of the Protestants in France continued, yet a place of refuge was afforded in this and other Protestant countries, to as many as chose, or were permitted, to emigrate. The next effect of the British Revolution was to put a period to the persecutions of Piedmont. As the influence of Cromwell at an earlier day had been exerted in the same cause, so now the reflex influence of the British Revolution reached the valleys of the Duke of Savoy. The cruelties had been very shocking. As a specimen, we may mention that twelve thousand poor prisoners-men, women, and children—were shut up in fourteen prisons, castles, and strongholds, choked together during the heat of summer and the cold of winter. In a short time, eight thousand out of the twelve thousand perished from the effects of the cruel treatment to which they were subjected. Burnet, who was on the Continent at the time, states in his "Letters," that the Court affected to be ashamed of the persecution, and alleged that the Duke had been reluctantly constrained into it to please France, a country which seems to have wished to be kept in countenance in her course of blood, by similar proceedings among her neighbours. It is stated also, that, according to the acknowledgment of the Duke himself, the Vaudois Protestants were his most faithful, industrious, and profitable subjects, and had proved eminently loyal in a recent war; but that the French king insisted they should be treated in the same way as his Protestant subjects, otherwise he would send troops himself for the purpose. It is on this that Jurieu, the French Protestant minister, in his book on the " Prophecies," exclaims, "All other persecutors have been content to persecute their own subjects or countrymen; but behold persons who, after they have reduced the subjects of their own king to the utmost extremities, go and make themselves the hangmen and murderers of the subjects of foreign princes!"* But the Protestantism of Europe was reassured and reinvigorated by the Protestant Revolution of so powerful a country as Britain; and in 1689, between eight and nine hundred Vaudois returned to their native valleys, headed by M. Arnaud, a minister, and took successful possession of the land of their fathers, severely retaliating the harsh treatment under which they and their countrymen had been groaning for the last three years.

Turning from Europe to this country-I refer particularly

* P. 256.

to Scotland-the consequences of the Revolution were most important. The Church of Scotland was established anew, and a thousand blessings, temporal and spiritual, followed in her train. We shall better appreciate these if we think, for a moment, of the moral and religious state of the country as the persecution left, and the Revolution found it. Though, during the reign of Charles II., there was much more of the operation of the Presbyterian Church than many imaginethough there was only one parish (Salton) into which the English Liturgy was introduced, and the courts, with the exception of the General Assembly, discharged their usual functions, and the forms of Presbyterian worship were substantially observed-yet there was a vast change for the worse in the character of the great body of the people. However the party of the martyrs and their immediate friends may have been quickened and sanctified by the fires of the furnace, a relentless persecution of twenty-eight years' duration could not fail to be most injurious in a multitude of ways. There were many broken vows. Not a few in all ranks, particularly in the higher, had failed in the day of trial. In spite of solemn purposes and professions, they had abandoned their plighted faith. This must have been very prejudicial to their own moral feeling, and that of the country. Much, too, of the instruction which was communicated by the Presbyterian ministers was irregular and interrupted, under perpetual fear and restraint; while no small share of what was supplied by the ignorant and scandalous intruded. curates was grossly erroneous-at best rank Arminianism, if not Pelagianism, tending to Popery. The result was, that multitudes received no proper instruction at all, and that others were tempted to make a hasty profession, on an imperfectly prepared foundation. It is owing to these causes that, while Bishop Burnet bears witness to the amazing religious knowledge even of the "poor commonalty," their familiarity with the Scriptures, their ability to argue on disputed questions of principle, and their extemporaneous prayers, other writers relate how much ignorance prevailed not merely in the Highlands and Islands-which would not be very wonderful-but in parishes of the western Lowlands, where the persecution had been general and fierce. Thus, Hogg of Carnock, who was minister of Dalserf, in Lanarkshire, immediately after the Revolution, in the "Memoirs of his Life and Times," states, in regard to that parish, that though the people made a large profession, many of

them were grossly ignorant, and otherwise seriously defective. It is said, "Some few he found intelligent; yet many, of whom he had better thoughts, were very ignorant, having patched and kept up a sort of profession, without ever making it their business to learn. This obliged him to lay aside his former designs, and wholly to apply himself publicly and privately to teach them the plain ground of revealed truth, as it might please the Lord to direct and furnish him." He states, that while abroad in Holland he had been acquainted with not a few of the common people, who not only knew the principles of religion, but who were tolerably well versed in the controversial parts of theology, and that he had expected as much of his charge at Dalserf; but that, though many of them made a great profession, he found them exceedingly ignorant; and that he records this without meaning to disparage those who feared the Lord, and who were docile and tractable. There can be little doubt that many other parishes were in the same predicament as Dalserf. The result shows, that persecution, instead, as many imagine, of being uniformly a good to the Church of Christ, is often most injurious, and that in ways which at first would not be thought of. The absence of regular instruction, and the temptations to a party profession, would just bring about the state of things over which the excellent Mr. Hogg mourns; though after all, perhaps, his standard of attainment may have been a high one. The profligate example, too, of the Court party must have been very adverse. Their manners were formed upon the French Popish model, in which open debauchery, obscene stage plays, and gross Sabbath desecration, bore a prominent part. Indeed, it seems to have been their labour to run directly counter, in every possible way, to the stern morality of the Commonwealth. They were anxious not only to shun every trace of connection with the spirit and manners of Cromwell, but to proclaim their deadly hostility to them, though religion and morality, yea decency, should be sacrificed in making the proclamation. There is little doubt, too, that long-sighted priests encouraged such courses as the best mode of breaking the power of evangelical religion and the Presbyterian Church, and of preparing the way for the re-establishment of Popery, which they seem always to have kept in view. No religion is more suited to the taste of a profligate than the Popish; and the progress of the efforts of James afford melancholy proof, how speedily a nation, by a course of sin,