Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/65

 height to its mournful termination:—"This man had many great gifts, but especially excelled in the tongue and pen; and yet, for abusing of the same against Christ, all use of both the one and the other was taken from him, when he was in greatest misery, and had most need of them. In the latter end of his life, his nearest friends were no comfort to him, and his supposed greatest enemies, to whom indeed he offered greatest occasion of enmity, were his only friends, and recompenced good for evil, especially my uncle Andrew, but found small tokens of any spiritual comfort in him, which chiefly he would have wished to have seen at his end. Thus God delivered his kirk of a most dangerous enemy, who, if he had been endowed with a common civil piece of honesty in his dealing and conversation, he had more means to have wrought mischief in a kirk or country, than any I have known or heard of in our island."

As will be surmised from the foregoing account, Patrick Adamson was both an able and a voluminous writer; but most of his productions were merely written for the day, and have passed away with the occasions in which they originated. Some of them he never purposed to acknowledge, while others remained unpublished in manuscript. Most of these he confessed and regretted in his "Recantation," declaring, that if it should please God to restore his health, he would change his style, "as Cajetanus did at the Council of Trent." His principal writings were collected and published, in one quarto volume, by Thomas Volusenus (Wilson) in 1619; but notwithstanding their undoubted excellence, it may be questioned if they are now at all known beyond the library of the antiquary. It appears, that on becoming minister of Paisley, Adamson married the daughter of a lawyer, who survived him, and by whom he had a family; but all record of them has passed away, so that he may be said to have been the last, as he was the first of his race. The precise date of his death has not been mentioned; but it was in the latter part of the year 1591. Such was the career and end of the great antagonist and rival of Andrew Melville.  AIDAN,, Bishop of Lindisfarne in the seventh century, was originally a monk in the island of Iona, and afterwards became a missionary in England. To understand aright the history and labours of this self-devoted Christian missionary, it is necessary to glance at the condition of England, and especially of Northumbria, at the commencement of his ministry. England had been but lately converted to Christianity, through the labours of Augustin and forty monks, who had been sent to Britain, for that purpose, by Pope Gregory the Great. The conversion of the seven kingdoms of the heptarchy, into which England was divided by the Saxon conquerors, had been effected with unexampled rapidity, but through the simplest agency. The monks, in the first instance, addressed themselves to the sovereign of the state; and when he renounced his heathen errors, and submitted to baptism 3 his people implicitly followed the example. But such sudden and wholesale conversions were extremely precarious; and it sometimes happened that, when the king apostatized or died, the people returned to their former worship of Thor and Odin as promptly as they had forsaken it. Such was especially the case in North* umbria, the largest kingdom of the heptarchy, and the scene of Aidan's labours. Edwin, the best and most illustrious sovereign of his day, after a life of strange peril and adventure, had won his hereditary Northumbrian crown, and been converted to -Christianity by the Italian missionary Paulinus; and, on becoming a Christian, the happiest change was soon perceptible among his hitherto untamable subjects. They received their sovereign's creed without murmur or