Shortly after my grandfather had returned with his wife to their quiet
dwelling at Quharist on the Garnock side, he began, in the course of the
winter following, to suffer an occasional pang in that part of his body
which was damaged by the fall he got in rugging down the Virgin Mary out
of her niche in the idolatrous abbeykirk of Kilwinning, and the anguish
of his suffering grew to such an head by Candlemas that he was obligated
to send for his old acquaintance, Dominick Callender, who had, after his
marriage with the regenerate nun, settled as a doctor of physic in the
godly town of Irvine. But for many a day all the skill and medicamenting
of Doctor Callender did him little good, till Nature had, of her own
accord, worked out the root of the evil in the shape of a sklinter of
bone. Still, though the wound then closed, it never was a sound part,
and he continued in consequence a lamiter for life. Yet were his days
greatly prolonged beyond the common lot of man; for he lived till he was
ninety-one years, seven months, and four days old, and his end at last
was but a pleasant translation from the bodily to the spiritual life.
For some days before the close he was calm and cheerful, rehearsing to
the neighbours that came to speer for him, many things like those of
which I have spoken herein. Towards the evening a serene drowsiness fell
upon him, like the snow that falleth in silence, and froze all his
temporal faculties in so gentle a manner, that it could not be said he
knew what it was to die; being, as it were, carried in the downy arms of
sleep to the portal door of Death, where all the pains and terrors that
guard the same were hushed, and stood mute around, as he was softly
received in.
No doubt there was something of a providential design in the singular
prolongation of such a pious and a blameless life; for through it the
possessor became a blessed mean of sowing, in the hearts of his children
and neighbours, the seeds of those sacred principles, which afterwards
made them stand firm in their religious integrity when they were so
grievously tried. For myself I was too young, being scant of eight years
when he departed, to know the worth of those precious things which he
had treasured in the garnel of his spirit for seed-corn unto the Lord;
and therefore, though I often heard him speak of the riddling wherewith
that mighty husbandman of the Reformation, John Knox, riddled the truths
of the gospel from the errors of papistry, I am bound to say that his
own exceeding venerable appearance, and the visions of past events,
which the eloquence of his traditions called up to my young fancy,
worked deeper and more thoroughly into my nature than the reasons and
motives which guided and governed many of his other disciples. But,
before proceeding with my own story, it is meet that I should still tell
the courteous reader some few things wherein my father bore a part--a
man of very austere character, and of a most godly, though, as some
said, rather of a stubbornly affection for the forms of worship which
had been established by John Knox and the pious worthies of his times;
he was withal a single-minded Christian, albeit more ready for a raid
than subtle in argument. He had, like all who knew the old people his
parents, a by-common reverence for them; and spoke of the patriarchs
with whom of old the Lord was wont to hold communion, as more favoured
of Him than David or Solomon, or any other princes or kings.
When he was very young, not passing, as I have heard him often tell,
more than six or seven years of age, he was taken, along with his
brethren, by my grandfather, to see the signing at Irvine of the
Covenant, with which, in the lowering time of the Spanish armada, King
James, the son of Mary, together with all the Reformed, bound themselves
in solemn compact to uphold the protestant religion. Afterwards, when he
saw the country rise in arms, and heard of the ward and watch, and the
beacons ready on the hills, his imagination was kindled with some
dreadful conceit of the armada, and he thought it could be nothing less
than some awful and horrible creature sent from the shores of perdition
to devour the whole land. The image he had thus framed in his fears
haunted him continually; and night after night he could not sleep for
thinking of its talons of brass, and wings of thunder, and nostrils
flaming fire, and the iron teeth with which it was to grind and gnash
the bodies and bones of all protestants, in so much that his parents
were concerned for the health of his mind, and wist not what to do to
appease the terrors of his visions.
At last, however, the great Judith of the protestant cause, Queen
Elizabeth of England, being enabled to drive a nail into the head of
that Holofernes of the idolaters, and many of the host of ships having
been plunged, by the right arm of the tempest, into the depths of the
seas, and scattered by the breath of the storm, like froth over the
ocean, it happened that, one morning about the end of July, a cry arose
that a huge galley of the armada was driven on the rocks at Pencorse;
and all the shire of Ayr hastened to the spot to behold and witness her
shipwreck and overthrow. Among others my grandfather, with his three
eldest sons, went, leaving my father at home; but his horrors grew to
such a passion of fear that his mother, the calm and pious Elspa Ruet,
resolved to take him thither likewise, and to give him the evidence of
his eyes, that the dreadful armada was but a navy of vessels like the
ship which was cast upon the shore. By this prudent thought of her, when
he arrived at the spot his apprehensions were soothed; but his mind had
ever after a strange habitude of forming wild and wonderful images of
every danger, whereof the scope and nature was not very clearly
discerned, and which continued with him till the end of his days.
Soon after the death of my grandfather, he had occasion to go into
Edinburgh anent some matter of legacy that had fallen to us through the
decease of an uncle of my mother, a bonnet-maker in the Canongate; and,
on his arrival there, he found men's minds in a sore fever concerning
the rash councils wherewith King Charles the First, then reigning, was
mindit to interfere with the pure worship of God, and to enact a part in
the kirk of Scotland little short of the papistical domination of the
Roman Antichrist. To all men this was startling tidings; but to my
father it was an enormity that fired his blood and spirit with the
fierceness of a furnace. And it happened that he lodged with a friend of
ours, one Janet Geddes, a most pious woman, who had suffered great
molestation in her worldly substance, from certain endeavours for the
restorations of the horns of the mitre, and the prelatic buskings with
which that meddling and fantastical bodie, King James the Sixth, would
fain have buskit and disguised the sober simplicity of gospel
ordinances.
No two persons could be more heartily in unison upon any point of
controversy than was my worthy father and Janet Geddes, concerning the
enormities that would of a necessity ensue from the papistical
pretensions and unrighteous usurpation of King Charles; and they sat
crooning and lamenting together all the Saturday afternoon and night
about the woes of idolatry that were darkening again over Scotland.
No doubt there was both reason and piety in their fears; but in the
method of their sorrow, from what I have known of my father's earnest
and simple character, I redde there might be some lack of the decorum of
wisdom. But be this as it may, they heated the zeal of one another to a
pitch of great fervour, and next morning, the Sabbath, they went
together to the high Kirk of St Giles to see what the power of an
infatuated government would dare to do.
The kirk was filled to its uttermost bunkers; my father, however, got
for Janet Geddes, she being an aged woman, a stool near the skirts of
the pulpit; but nothing happened to cause any disturbance till the godly
Mr Patrick Henderson had made an end of the morning prayer, when he
said, with tears in his eyes, with reference to the liturgy, which was
then to be promulgated, "Adieu, good people, for I think this is the
last time of my saying prayers in this kirk;" and the congregation being
much moved thereat, many wept.
No sooner had Mr Henderson retired, than Master Ramsay, that horn of the
Beast, which was called the Dean of Edinburgh, appeared in the pulpit in
the pomp of his abominations, and began to read the liturgy. At the
first words of which Janet Geddes was so transported with indignation
that, starting from her stool, she made it fly whirring at his head, as
she cried, "Villain, dost thou say the mass at my lug?" Then such an
uproar began as had not been witnessed since the destruction of the
idols; the women screaming, and clapping their hands in terrification as
if the legions of the Evil One had been let loose upon them; and the men
crying aloud, "Antichrist! Antichrist! down wi' the Pope!" and all
exhortation to quiet them was drowned in the din.
Such was the beginning of those troubles in the church and state so
wantonly provoked by the weak and wicked policy of the first King
Charles, and which in the end brought himself to an ignominious death;
and such the cause of that Solemn League and Covenant, to which, in my
green years, my father, soon after his return home, took me to be a
party, and to which I have been enabled to adhere, with unerring
constancy, till the glorious purpose of it has all been fulfilled and
accomplished.