John Taylor Brown

“ The only explanations which can be given perhaps are that Leighton, living very much out of the world, and being somewhat deficient in what may be called the political sense, had no idea of the deadly hatred entertained toward Episcopacy by the great mass of the religious people of Scotland, and so of its utter unfitness to become the established church polity of the country, and that his soft and gentle nature rendered him too open to the persuasions which were used to induce him to enter a sphere for which he instinctively felt he was ill qualified. ”

“ At Dunblane tradition still preserves the memory of "the good bishop," silent and companionless, pacing up and down the sloping walk by the river's bank under the beautiful west window of his cathedral. And from a letter of the earl of Lothian to his countess it appears that, whatever other reasons Leighton might have had for resigning his charge at Newbattle, the main object which he had in view was to be left to his own thoughts. It is therefore on the whole not very wonderful that he was completely misjudged and even disliked both by the Presbyterian and the Episcopal party. ”

“ No one can study Leighton's works without feeling that Burnet's judgment of the man must have been the true one. We know not if anywhere, except in Holy Scripture, there is to be found so much of what seems to breathe the very breath of heaven, or to be the expression of a life quite apart from the life of this world. ”

“ No writer conveys a clearer or more elevated idea both of what Christian religion is and what it is capable of in the heart of man. It was a common reproach against Leighton, as we have seen, that he had leanings towards Roman Catholicism, and perhaps this is so far true that he had formed himself in some degree upon the model of some of those saintly persons of that faith, such as Pascal and Thomas a Kempis, who had carried the spiritual life to more ethereal heights than appear to be as yet attained within the lines of Protestantism. ”

“ If Leighton did not know before, he soon began to discover the sort of men with whom he was to be associated in the episcopate. He travelled with them in the same coach from London towards Scotland, but having become, as he told Burnet, very weary of their company (as he doubted not they were of his) , and having found that they intended to make a kind of triumphal entrance into Edinburgh, he left them at Morpeth and retired to the earl of Lothian's at Newbattle. ”

“ When disgusted with the proceedings of the other bishops in "outing so many honest ministers and filling their places with insufficient and for the most part scandalous men," and intimating his wish to demit his office in consequence, he was only "pretending to be displeased." ”