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 government by paying taxes, by taking out excise licenses, by joining the volunteers, or by labouring on public works. The number of these zealots went on diminishing till at length they were so thinly scattered over Scotland that they were nowhere numerous enough to have a meeting house, and were known by the name of the Nonhearers. They, however, still assembled and prayed in private dwellings, and still persisted in considering themselves as the chosen generation, the royal priesthood, the holy nation, the peculiar people, which, amidst the common degeneracy, alone preserved the faith of a better age. It is by no means improbable that this superstition, the most irrational and the most unsocial into which Protestant Christianity has ever been corrupted by human prejudices and passions, may still linger in a few obscure farmhouses.

The King was but half satisfied with the manner in which the ecclesiastical polity of Scotland had been settled. He thought that the Episcopalians had been hardly used; and he apprehended that they might be still more hardly used when the new system was fully organized. He had been very desirous that the Act which established the Presbyterian Church should be accompanied by an Act allowing persons who were not members of that Church to hold their own religious assemblies freely; and he had particularly directed Melville to look to