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We see at one time a servant girl coming home from Guthrie's church saying that she cannot contain all that she has heard to-day, and that she feels as if she would need to hear no more on this side heaven. Another day Wodrow's old mother has been at Fenwick, and comes home saying that the first prayer was more than enough for all her trouble without any sermon at all.
Gibb, a raving fanatic, went to America, where he was greatly admired by the Red Indians, 'because of his much converse with the devil'. The pious of Wodrow's date distrusted these luminous appearances, as they might be angelical, but might also be diabolical temptations to spiritual pride. Thus the blasphemous followers of Gibb were surrounded by a bright light, no less than pious Mr.
Rule, Principal at Edinburgh'. Such is Wodrow's way, his ideas of evidence are quite rudimentary. Give him a ghost, and he does not care for 'contemporary record, or 'corroborative testimony'. To come to the story. Dr. Rule, finding no room at an inn near Carnie Mount, had a fire lit in a chamber of a large deserted house hard by.
He had an officer under him, one Carmichael, no less zealous than himself against conventicles, and who, by his violent prosecutions, had rendered himself extremely obnoxious to the fanatics. A company of these had waylaid him on the road near St. * Wodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland vol. ii. p. 28.
Wodrow's work is very far from being the contemptible thing some apologists for Claverhouse would have us believe; but he is not a witness whose unsupported testimony it is always safe to take for gospel-truth.
Blair, the compact fell from the roof of the church. The tale is told by Increase Mather about a French Protestant minister, and, as Increase wrote twenty years before Wodrow, we may regard Wodrow's anecdote as a myth; for the incident is of an unusual character, and not likely to repeat itself.
Thus his pages are valuable to the student of superstition, because they contain 'the clash of the country' for about forty years, and illustrate the rural or ecclesiastical aberglaube of our ancestors, at the moment when witchcraft was ceasing to be a recognised criminal offence. A diary of Wodrow's exists, dating from April 3, 1697, when he was but nineteen years of age.
Such were his last words: and these animated speeches he uttered with an accent and manner which struck all the bystanders with astonishment. * Burnet, p 237. * Wodrow's History, vol. i. p. 255. The settlement of Ireland, after the restoration, was a work of greater difficulty than that of England, or even of Scotland.
Unless, therefore, we are ready to suppose that officers were in the habit of sitting on a jury with their own troopers, or to believe that within three days a change had taken place in Claverhouse's position of which there is no record either in his own letters or in any other existing document, we must accept Wodrow's narrative as the true one, and exonerate Claverhouse from all responsibility for the deaths of Gillies and his unfortunate fellow-sufferers.
They are now printed, in the fine type of the Maitland Club, in four portly quartos, under the title, Wodrow's Analecta. Few books would hold out so much temptation to a commentator, but their editor is dumb, faithfully reprinting the whole, page by page, and abstaining both from introduction and explanatory foot-note. Perhaps in the circumstances this was a prudent measure.
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