Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/67

 burned, and fields laid waste, and the Gospel had been preached in wildernesses, and its ministers had been shot in their prayers, and husbands had been murdered before their wives, and virgins had been defiled, and many had died by the executioner, and by massacre, and in imprisonment, and in exile, and slavery, and women had been tied to stakes on the sea- shore till the tide rose to overflow them, and some had been tortured and mutilated; it was a religion of the boots and the thumb-screw, which a good man must be very cool-blooded indeed if he did not hate and reject from the hands which offered it. For, after all, it is much more certain that the Supreme Being abhors cruelty and persecution, than that He has set up bishops to have a superiority over presbyters.

I give this passage, firstly, to impress upon you and my readers the memorable and gratifying fact that, in spite of all these oppressions and cruelties, Scotland is now a contented and flourishing part of the United Kingdom; partly to inculcate the lesson that this marvellous change was effected by the sacrifice of the Episcopal Church of Scotland. Macaulay tells us how the Episcopal clergy were rabbled, that is to say, their houses were sacked, "and they with their families driven away; and Hallam records that, owing to the love of religious freedom of William, some of these clergymen returned, and were allowed to reside in their old benefices. But no one can deny that Episcopacy was dis-established, and that Presbytery was set up in its place. Nor will any one contend that the English sovereign or the English people preferred the Westminster Confession of Faith and Presbytery to the Episcopal Church of England, any more