Page:Sketches of the History of the Church of Scotland.djvu/32

 shut up their places of worship; and, except in the cases where the Clergy were in hiding, imprisoned their persons. But again I have to tell that all this is carefully excluded from the popular histories which treat of those times.

The Bishops, in continuing the succession, were obliged to act with the greatest secresy and caution. To use the language of a historian who describes it, "the prelates celebrated with a mournful privacy the august solemnities of the Church. The rites were shorn of the old cathedral splendour. The  'Veni Creator'  must be murmured like a voice out of the dust. But yet they had with them the eternal Pontiff, and the unfailing powers of His kingdom. They were speaking His words, and doing His work; and it was in full assurance of Him for their unseen Consecrator, that the Priests about to fill the places of those worn out old men, knelt before them to receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of Bishops in the Church of God."

"As the Liturgy," says the little work from which I have been quoting, "was the chief object of dislike, so the first attack was upon the Pastors of the Episcopal persuasion, where the Liturgy was used." It is to be observed that many of the dispossessed Clergy, when left at liberty to do it, had introduced the Book of Common Prayer into their churches, many of them being the parish churches, of which public opinion was strong enough to help them to keep possession. During the whole of Anne's reign, the substitution of the Prayer Book Offices for the extemporaneous worship of the late Establishment period, went on rapidly; and to encourage it, the Queen sent a farther gift of a large impression of the Folio Prayer Book for the use of the Clergy in the public services of the Church. "These congregations were instantly desolated. On the marching north of a party of Argyle's army, the Presbyterians took advantage to threaten those Clergy with imprisonment, which put those who could do so under the necessity to abscond." As showing that the military were acting at the instigation of the Presbyterian authorities, and that the persecution was quite as much a religious as a political one, it is noticeable that in the churches of the Aberdeen Diocese, where the extempore mode of worship still continued, the Clergy were not at first interfered with. Doubtless it was expected that they would in time comply, as they had not adopted the hated Service Book, which the preachers were in the habit of denouncing as a thinly disguised Mass Book." The desolations, continues the writer of the pamphlet, "began at Aberdeen, where the Liturgy had been used with great decency and order for more than four years,"—in those congregations, it is understood, which had been forced out of the parish church of St. Nicholas, and the Cathedral. The violence used was very great. " Mr. Dunbreck fled; Dr. George Garden, who made not so much haste to escape, was seized and thrown into prison, where he lay for