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"And you are to be married almost immediately, are you not?" Miss Murchison continued, pleasantly. Mrs Kilbannon had an inspiration. "Could he by any means have had the banns cried?" she demanded of Christie, who looked piercingly at their visitor for the answer. "Oh, no," Advena laughed softly. "Presbyterians haven't that custom over here does it still exist anywhere? Mr Finlay told me himself."
The Presbyterians, who had chiefly supported the war, were enraged to find the prize, just when it seemed within their reach, snatched by violence from them. The royalists, disappointed in their expectations by the cruel treatment which the king now received from the army, were strongly animated to restore him to liberty, and to recover the advantages which they had unfortunately lost.
But in Scotland it was utter darkness; and, excepting a sorrowful, scattered, and persecuted remnant, the pulpits were abandoned to Presbyterians, and, he feared, to sectaries of every description. It should be his duty to fortify his dear pupil to resist such unhallowed and pernicious doctrines in church and state as must necessarily be forced at times upon his unwilling ears.
The per cent of gain in membership, from 1890 to 1905, in the six American religious bodies that number a million each was as follows: Christians or disciples of Christ, 94 per cent.; Roman Catholics, 73 per cent.; Lutherans, 51 per cent.; Methodists, 40 per cent.; Baptists, 38 per cent., and Presbyterians, 35 per cent.
There had been successes, it was true, against the insurgents in Wales, and Cromwell was hopefully besieging Pembroke; Lambert was doing well with his small forces against Langdale in the north; Colchester was beginning to be distressed in the grip of Fairfax; but still, with the whole of England in Royalist or semi-Royalist palpitation, and the City of London actually heaving with suppressed revolt, what could be expected when Hamilton and his army of Scottish Presbyterians did cross the border?
If her evidence may be accepted, it amounted in her day to a bigotry as implacable as that of the straitest sect of the Scotch Presbyterians a generation ago. She tells an anecdote to the following effect: A New York tailor sold, on a Sunday, some clothes to a sailor whose ship was on the point of sailing.
But the country was now in a state of anarchy; the intentions of the armies in Scotland and Ireland remained uncertain; and the royalists, both Presbyterians and Cavaliers, were exerting themselves to improve the general confusion to the advantage of the exiled king. which they had been unrighteously deprived.
Upon the whole, however, considering the wrongs he had personally endured, and those which he had seen daily inflicted on his fellow-subjects; meditating also upon the precarious and dangerous situation in which he already stood with relation to the government, he conceived himself, in every point of view, called upon to join the body of presbyterians already in arms.
John, and Prideaux had come to Uxbridge not so much to treat, as to act the part of spies on the conduct of their colleagues; and that there existed an irreconcilable difference of opinion between the two parties, the Presbyterians seeking the restoration of royalty, provided it could be accomplished with perfect safety to themselves, and with the legal establishment of their religious worship, while the Independents sought nothing less than the total downfall of the throne, and the extinction of the privileges of the nobility.
Gladstone was once the spokesman have long ceased to regard the men who are still sometimes called Whigs as the most fanatical members of the body politic. It would be no mere fanciful application of modern terms to distinguish the two parties of the Scottish Church as Liberals and Radicals; but it will for many reasons be best henceforth to write of them as Presbyterians and Covenanters.
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