James Aikman

“ They had seen their civil and religious liberties swept away, the ministers they loved scattered, and hirelings they detested settled in their stead. They had groaned beneath the yoke of tyrannous enactments, the insolence of lordly prelacy, and the licentiousness of military exaction, and yet had abstained from any acts of rebellion. But their patient endurance only encouraged the perpetration of new mischief, and their unexampled loyalty was abused as the occasion of fresh aggression. ”

“ Yet terrible as these military executions were, they were mild and merciful compared with the legal atrocities which followed. As after Pentland no faith was kept with the prisoners, who were treated—as men who fail in struggling for their rights always are—more like wild, noxious animals than fellow-creatures of the human form; a lesson to patriots and to the oppressed when they rise against their tyrants:—better perish on the high places of the field than submit to languish out a few mournful years beneath the tender mercies of the victors. ”

“ Now, my lord, I must in all humility beg leave to entreat your lordship that you would seriously consider what you do with poor ministers, who have been so long kept, not only from their liberty of preaching the gospel, but of hearing it—that so many congregations are laid desolate for so long a time, and many poor souls have put up their regrets on their deathbed for their being deprived of a word of comfort from their ministers in the hour of their greatest need! ”

“ The Lord give you wisdom in all things, and pour out upon you the spirit of your high and weighty employment, of understanding and the fear of the Lord, that your government may be blessed for this land and kirk—that you may live long and happily—that your memory may be sweet and fragrant when you are gone—that you may leave your name for a blessing to the Lord’s people—and that your houses and families may stand long and flourish to the years of many generations! ”

“ I know it is neither in your power to save us or to kill us; and I again declare, it is not for any particular feud of quarrel I have at you which moves me to this attempt, but for the blood shed, not only after Pentland, but several times since, and for your perjury and shedding the blood of Mr James Mitchell, and having a hand in the death of James Learmont, which crimes cry with a loud voice to Heaven for vengeance ”

“ I have no righteousness of my own; all is vile, like filthy rags. But blessed be God there is a Saviour of sinners, Jesus Christ the righteous, and that through faith in his righteousness I have obtained mercy; through him only I desire to hope for, and to have a happy and glorious victory over sin and satan, hell and death; that I shall attain to the righteousness of the just, and be made partaker of eternal life. I know in whom I have believed, and that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him against that day. I have in my poor capacity preached salvation in his name ”

“ Were not every circumstance in this atrocious business as much opposed to common sense as to law, we might wonder how any set of men above the scale of idiocy could consent to a process of treason being raised upon such palpable expressions of loyalty and patriotism; but that men, and these in the highest rank of society in Scotland, could have been found to bring in a verdict of guilty, shows what a dreadful want of moral principle then existed in the country, especially among the elevated classes. ”

“ Shall the end of government be lost through the weakness, wickedness, and tyranny of governors? Have not the people, in such an extremity, good ground to make use of that natural and radical power which they possess, to shake off that yoke? which, accordingly, the Lord honoured us (in a general and unprelimited meeting of the estates and shires in Scotland) to do; at which convention he was most legally and by general consent cut off by the declaration at Sanquhar. ”

“ In religion, as in every thing else, what may be right in the abstract, may be essentially wrong in its practical application. The power of the magistrate to enforce attendance upon divine worship may he very plausibly defended as a principle, but, supposing that the whole Episcopalians in Scotland had been as godly men, and as excellent preachers as Archbishop Leighton, to have obliged these conscientious sufferers to have attended their ministrations, would have been no less persecution than forcing them to attend the worthless curates who neither understood nor preached the gospel. ”

“ In answering some of the queries Sharpe had put to him, he omitted the primate’s titles, and only styled him, Sir, which Rothes observing, meanly truckling to the priest, asked him, “if he knew to whom he was speaking?” “Yes, my lords, I do,” answered the prisoner firmly; “I speak to Mr James Sharpe, once a fellow-minister with myself.” For this high misdemeanour, the worthy man was immediately laid in irons and cast into the filthiest corner of the prison—the thieves’ hole. ”

“ Command thy holy angels to watch over her continually, and defend her from all dangers and evil accidents, that what she has conceived may be happily brought forth to the joy of our sovereign lord the king, the further establishment of his crown, the happiness and welfare of the whole kingdom, and the glory of thy great name! ”

“ Likeways, as the bands of the Scottish church were strong, so her beauty was bright; no error so much as named; the people were not only sound in the faith, but innocently ignorant of unsound doctrine; no scandalous person could live; no scandal could be concealed in all Scotland, so strict a correspondence there was between ministers and congregations. ”

“ During the protectorate, as no persecution had been allowed on account of religious opinions, a few in Scotland seem to have adopted the tolerant maxims of the decried usurper; and although sectaries never flourished in that soil, they seem to have been sufficiently numerous to have excited the fears of the resolutioners, who, insensible to the benefits they enjoyed under the toleration of Cromwell, and eager to secure the liberties of their own kirk from the oppression of the prelatists, were equally anxious to guard against any freedom being allowed to those whom they termed fanatics. ”

“ The wretched man, the major, being enraged, forgetting the terror he was in, and all the vows he had sworn to grow better, did first stir up the council to seize the house, break open the door, and plunder all. On the morrow or third day, a narrow and formidable search was made throughout the town for strangers, and to find out the persons who had offered such an affront to their major, so useful a servant, not only to the town of Edinburgh, but to the prelates and their interest. Linlithgow’s men, with the town constables, were appointed to search. ”

“ The Earl of Crawford, whose treasurer’s rod was a desirable object for Middleton, had declined mingling in the debate, which the Chancellor of England observing, requested his majesty that he might be desired to give his opinion, in order that he might either disclaim Presbytery or displease the king, and thus put his principles or his place in jeopardy; for it appeared to be a settled rule among the courtiers of Charles, that whatever Scottishmen were allowed to interfere in the public affairs of their native country, should sacrifice either their conscience or their interest. ”

“ There are some, and those not openly profane, who, if their private interest go well, they care not whether religion or the church of God sink or swim. But, whatever they think, God hath laid engagements on Scotland. We are tyed by covenants to religion and reformation, and it passeth the power of all magistrates under heaven to absolve a man from the oath of God. It is the duty of every Christian to be loyal; but God must have his as well as Cæsar. Religion must not be secondary. ”

“ Oppressions under form of law kept pace with those without it;—if the mere acts of men in place can be called in any sense legal while they are trampling under foot the constitutional rights of their countrymen, simply because these men happen to hold offices, the names of which are in the statute-book, or pervert possession of power, a proper exercise of which would be legal. ”

“ Whenever any unprincipled set of men, who have obtained and abused power, become conscious that they are hated, and deserve to be hurled from their eminence, they commonly pretend to discover some plot for overturning their government. Accordingly, a plot against the Duke’s life was fabricated; and John Spreul, apothecary in Glasgow, and Robert Hamilton, were accused of being accessary to it. The council ordered them to be examined by torture, and appointed a committee to conduct the examination, among whom it is painful to observe the name of the Earl of Argyle. ”

“ Tyranny is never stationary when introduced into a country, until it either level all resistance, and degrade a nation into one quiescent mass of torpid subjection, or rouse the people to a pitch of determined enthusiastic irresistless exertion, which drives their oppressors from the land. At this period, the evident design of the Scottish rulers was to accomplish the former limb of the alternative, though it eventually led to the last. ”

“ The Chancellor made some feeble show of opposition, but the universal spirit of submission to the will of the crown which pervaded the higher classes, and their selfish eagerness to obtain a share in the spoils of their unhappy country, not only blighted every appearance of patriotism, but precluded every plan of association among the aristocracy themselves for maintaining their own rank and station independent of the minions of the court. ”

“ But the blind confidence that the Presbyterians had so unaccountably reposed in the king, produced a species of fatuity; nor would they believe till they experienced the truth of the prognostications of the more discerning, who saw from the first the ill-dissembled hatred Charles bore to Presbyterianism as well as to piety. They were like men amazed at the greatness of the calamity; and although some few of them attempted to draw up petitions to the council, no united effort was made to vindicate the oppressed church. ”

“ Under the New Testament, the Lord Jesus, the King, Head, and Lawgiver of his church, hath a visible kingdom which he exerciseth in and over the church visible by its spiritual office-bearers, given to it as a church, and therefore distinct from, and independent upon, the civil power—the keys of the kingdom of heaven being by him committed, not to the magistrates, but to the apostles’ successors in the work of the ministry.” He therefore quitted the Established Church, betook himself to the fields, and shared in the labours and obloquy of the persecuted. ”

“ Yet I know not that men suffering for the cause of truth can be called unfortunate.
Sir Hugh Campbell of Cessnock’s memory stands upon an elevation, that his most distant relations might well be proud of being connected with. His persecutors are despised by the humblest of our virtuous peasantry, who still on a solitary Sabbath, between sermons, moralize amid the tombs of the Greyfriar’s churchyard. ”