Volume 1
Domestic annals of Scotland : from the reformation to the revolution / by Robert Chambers.
- Robert Chambers
- Date:
- 1858-1861
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Domestic annals of Scotland : from the reformation to the revolution / by Robert Chambers. Source: Wellcome Collection.
561/574 page 545
![contemporary and friend, Mr John Livingstone, to have been 1624. earnest Christians of the evangelical type. Big was 'much exercised in spirit, and of great experience in the ways of God. I have been several times with him in private meetings, and observed that when he prayed, he began with bitter and heavy complaints and confession beyond any. He spent his income chiefly on pious uses.’ Mean ‘ used both summer and winter to rise about three o’clock in the morning, and always, as he put on his clothes, he used to sing some part of a psalm, and then went to his closet, where he was employed in religious exercises till six. By that time, the rest of his family being got up, he worshipped with them, and then went to his shop. He was so much master of the Scripture, [that] though he had been half sleeping, he could have corrected readers if they miscalled or wrong cited ony scripture.’ ’ During the time when the king was pressing on the innovations in the church, dissentients of this kind were rising everywhere throughout the southern districts of Scotland, many of them lairds, a few of them nobles, but most of them belonging to the middle classes of society. Of the lairds, Livingstone enumerates Ilalhill (Fife), Crosshill (Lanarkshire), Cunningham-head, Cess- nock, and Bowallan (Ayrshire). There was also a number of ladies, some of them of noble birth, who embraced and strongly held fast the evangelical riews. Such were Margaret Countess of Wigton, Anne Marchioness of Hamilton, the Countess of Eglintoun, and Lady Loudon. For the time, these people, as well as the more earnest of the clergj^ were kept silent under the frown of an imperious government, or made themselves but little heard; but the fire burned not the less intensely for being covered up; and when the time for resistance came, it was ready to break forth with the greater violence that it had been so long suppressed. Almost as a matter of eourse, while these Presbyterian recusants were in hands, the state authorities took some order with papistry. John Gordon of Craig in Aberdeenshire had attracted their notice as 'an excommunicat trafiicking papist,’ who, not content with blaspheming the truth and its preachers himself, did all that he could to 'withhold his people from coming to the kirk, boasting [threatening] some, and persuading others;’ thus, it is alleged, 'he steirs up mony not weel satled in their religion to imitate him in his contemptuous and VOL. I. 1 Life of John Livingstone, Glasgow, 1764, p. 89. 2i](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24886658_0001_0561.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
