Page:Tales of my landlord (Volume 3).djvu/184

 ways, given desperate and unpardonable offence to the government.

With them were mingled their preachers, men who had spurned at the indulgence offered by government, and preferred assembling their flocks in the wilderness, to worshipping in temples built by human hands, if their doing the latter could be construed to admit any right on the part of their rulers to interfere with the supremacy of the Kirk. The other class counsellors were such gentlemen of small fortune, and substantial farmers, as a sense of intolerable oppression had induced to take arms and join the insurgents. These also had their clergymen with them, who, having many of them. taken advantage of the indulgence, were prepared to resist the measures of the more, violent, who proposed a declaration in which they should give testimony against the warrants and instructions for indulgence as sinful and unlawful acts. This delicate question had been passed over in silence in the first