astering[11] and
probationership he was, in 1664, duly admitted on the new Black
Prelatic conditions to the parish of Glendevon. Under the mild rule of
Bishops Leighton and Ramsay he lived quietly there for fourteen years.
His name occasionally appears on the Synod and Presbytery Committees
during this period, and he seems to have done his best to get the
brethren stirred up to "better the provision of Glendovan." The Bishop
and Synod did actually order a "perambulation" to be made to see if
anything could be annexed from the adjacent parishes, especially
"Denying and Fossoquhy," so that, as Mr Spence put it, "ane
augmentation proportionablie might {196} be made to him out of the
vacant teindes of the said paroches in respect of the poornes and
meannes of his stipend for the present."[12] The perambulation, beyond
affording a pleasant outing to the visitors in the long May days, does
not seem to have had any practical result. Mr Spence had, however,
been thinking of higher things than teinds and augmentation, and had
been looking far beyond the bounds of his own parish, and, spite of the
extreme gentleness of the somewhat mongrel Prelatic-Presbyterian rule
under which he was, and the general atmosphere of conformity which he
breathed, he began to have serious searchings of heart about the state
of the "poor afflicted" Church. Accordingly, towards the end of 1678
he took the bold step of presenting a paper[13] to the Presbytery of
Auchterarder drawing the attention of the Court to the sundry gross
corruptions under which the Church was suffering and to the horrid
defection from its first purity, obvious to {197} every man who did not
wilfully shut his eyes. The evils against which he asked the Court to
testify were doctrinal, liturgical, disciplinary, moral, and what may
be called ecclesiastical. He includes in the sweep of his very
impartial denunciation not only the pernicious tenets of Pelagianism,
Arminianism, Latitudinarianism, and Popish errors, but "the dotage of
Quakers and other enthusiasts," human inventions in worship, and the
private essays made to introduce or impose an unwarrantable liturgie of
unsound and useless form, the loose spirit of atheism, profaneness, and
ungodliness reigning in all corners of the kingdom, and the dreadful
differences that prevailed, and calls for a return to sound doctrine,
the practice of "the gude Kirk primitif," the exercise of a strict
discipline, and the ways of peace.