courses, and others afterwards, ripened matters for his fatal end."

If Parliament had not been prorogued, every Diocesan Synod intended to have presented protests against the Indulgence and the proceedings of the Presbyterians. Wodrow confesses, that "matter was not wanting for what the prelates and their party reckon grievances." He was only able to procure a copy of the Glasgow protest, which is of considerable length and may be seen in our larger work. In it they enumerate a multitude of sins which were the consequences of the meetings of field conventicles; such as incest, beastiality, child murder, and frequent adulteries.

The letters of those prelates that have survived the storms of the Revolution, speak of both the Duke of Lauderdale and of his brother, the Lord Hatton, as having been sincere and unflinching supporters of the church. Both the prelates and the King's Government had the horrors of the grand rebellion ever before their eyes; and they were justly apprehensive, that men who still pertinaciously held the same religious and political sentiments would re-enact the same scenes of rebellion and bloodshed, whenever an opportunity should occur. These reasonable apprehensions made Government determined to prevent the meetings of field conventicles, and to resist the calling of a General Assembly for which there was considerable agitation. Bishop Leighton was now permitted to retire from his episcopal duties, and Dr. Burnet was restored to the see of Glasgow, by the powerful influence of Dr. Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of St. Andrews, "and other bishops in England, who, considering how such precedents might extend, interposed with their whole might; nor did they leave it, till they had the Archbishop of Glasgow restored."

At this time, Lauderdale used some very harsh and arbi

trary measures with some of the bishops and clergy that had been favourable to the proposal for summoning a General Assembly; and Wodrow justly observes, "Here indeed is summary justice, and the full exercise of the royal supremacy." It is indeed another confirmation of the dangerous tendency of the Assertory Act, which made the King a pope and laid the Church prostrate at his feet.

In the year 1675 the meetings of field conventicles became more frequent; and Wodrow admits "that there might be a kind of affectation to be in the fields;" and to defend themselves against the agents of Government, "many came to hear the gospel with arms for their own defence; and some scuffles ensued in several places; so that the country resembled war as much as peace." This is a fair acknowledgment of the Presbyterian system, and Lauderdale must be exonerated for much of the severities, which were practised in order to reduce them to a peaceable condition. The indulged ministers were under no necessity of preaching in the fields; because they had parish churches to preach in, under the sole government of their Erastian head, the Privy Council. But Wodrow alleges that disobedience and resistance to Government were taught the people by those ministers that "preached without judicatories."

Driven to their last shifts, the Council now wrote to Lauderdale to advise the King to place garrisons in several noblemen's and gentlemen's houses in the disaffected districts, in order to suppress the conventicles. For this unconstitutional severity Wodrow, of course, most unjustly blames the bishops; but all the severities of those days are the consequences of Presbyterian principles; and besides, the Council was obliged to revive the old Popish law against excommunicated persons, called an "Act of Intercommuning." An intercommuned person was proclaimed rebel and traitor at the Market Cross;

when all and sundry were "charged and commanded, that they nor none of them presume to take upon hand to reset, supply or intercommune with any of the aforesaid persons, our rebels, for the causes aforesaid; nor to furnish them with meat, drink, house, harbour, victual, nor other useful thing or comfortable to them, nor have intelligence with them by word or writ or message or any other manner of way, under the pain to be repute and esteemed act and part with them in the crimes aforesaid." These are the fruits of Presbyterian principles of disobedience to the powers that be. Every means had been tried and had failed; and this unchristian and tyrannical relic of Popery, the "Interdict," was doomed to fail also, to reclaim the sons and daughters of the Covenant, that most diabolical contrivance of the most wicked of men-the Jesuits.

In the year 1675, several individuals were examined by the Council for an assault upon the Episcopal clergyman of New Monckland, in the diocese of Glasgow; and this is another proof of the truth of Burnet's allegation " that the persecution is mainly on the Conformists' side;" for, he says, "If I should recount the railings, scoffings and floutings which the conformable ministers met with to their faces, even on streets and public highways, not to mention the contempt that is poured out upon them more privately, I would be looked upon as a forger of extravagant stories." But this persecution was a systematic aud designed thing; persevered in with the view of rendering all the parish churches vacant, so as to have more indulged Presbyterians planted, and thus gradually to get their sect altogether established, and the kingdom Presby terianised by degrees.

The effects of the Assertory Act and of the Presbyterian Indulgence, proved to be "a heavy blow and great discouragement" to the Established Church, notwithstanding the great

care and circumspection of the bishops to guard against the pernicious tendency of both. The bishops therefore drew up a modest representation of the divisive consequences that the Indulgence had already produced, without its having answered the end that was expected; and they referred it to His Majesty's wisdom to provide a better remedy. In answer to this memorial, a Declaration by the Privy Council was published, in which the extraordinary supremacy claimed by the Crown over the Church was modified; and the intrinsic power, authority and jurisdiction which the Church enjoyed during the three first centuries, was acknowledged and allowed.

ENGLAND AND ROME.

(Continued from page 143.)

CHAPTER XVII.

THE ROMISH ADDITIONS TO THE CREED.

Art. 22 of the Creed of Pope Pius IV.

ART. 22.-1 also maintain that the power of indulgences has been left by Christ in His Church, and that the use of them is most wholesome to Christian people.

The same Article (xxii.) of which we have made use, in order to show the sense of our Church upon the subjects we have considered in the last two chapters, we must also cite again in condemnation of the doctrine of indulgences or "pardons." The reader will find it printed in full at the beginning of cap. xv.

The Council of Trent, Session xxv., December 4, 1563, enacted the following decree :

DECREE CONCERNING INDULGENCES.

"Whereas the power of conferring indulgences was granted by Christ to the Church, and she has, even in the most ancient times, used the said power, divinely handed down to her; the holy synod teaches and enjoins that the use of Indulgences, being extremely salutary for Christian people, and approved by the authority of sacred councils, be retained the Church; and condemns with anathema those who either assert that they are useless, or deny that there is in the Church the power of granting them."

We are treading now, to a certain extent, on dangerous ground; for the statements and the practice of the Roman Church with reference to this subject hardly seem to agree. In the Rheims Testament, upon Matt. xvi., 19—“ I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven "—there is the following note:- "The loosing the bands of temporal punishment due to sins is called an indulgence; the power of which is here granted." And Dr. Challoner, in his "Catholic Christian Instructed," defines an indulgence as being no more than a releasing to true penitents the debt of temporal punishment, which remained due to their sins, after the sins themselves, as to the guilt and eternal punishment, had been already remitted by the sacrament of penance, or by perfect contrition."

66

According to both of these definitions an indulgence is a release from temporal punishment of sin. And whether we understand the words "temporal punishment" to refer to earthly penalties, whether ecclesiastical or otherwise, or to the penalties of purgatory, they can at any rate hardly be interpreted as applying to such a case as the following; and the result must be either that Rome exceeds the power which alone she acknowledges to have been conferred upon her, or that the definitions given above, authoritative though they be, are not complete.-"The prayer of St. Bernardine of Sienna.-Thys most devoutly prayer sayd the holy father S. Bernardine daylie kneeling in the worship of the most holy Jesus. And yt is well to believe that through the invocation of that most excellent name of Jesu, S. Bernard. obtayned a singular reward of perpetual consolation of our Lord Jesu Christ. And thys prayer is written in a table that hangeth