it, when it became the symbol for suffering he was drawn
to it, till at last, to the horror of his family, he threw in his lot
with the Covenanters of the west of Scotland. Being a lad of parts
with competent scholarship, and having given every pledge of
sincerity, he was studying theology in Holland, while Claverhouse was
fighting in the army of the Prince, and he was there ordained to the
ministry of the kirk. When one has passed through so thorough a
change, and sacrificed everything which is most dear for his
convictions, he is certain to be a root and branch man, and to fling
himself without reserve, perhaps also, alas, without moderation, into
the service of his new cause. Pollock was not of that party in the
kirk which was willing to take an indulgence at the hands of the
government and minister quietly in their parishes, on condition that
they gave no trouble to the bishops. He would take no oaths and sign
no agreements, nor make any compromise, nor bow down to any
persecutor. He threw in his lot with the wild hillmen, who were being
hunted like wild birds upon the mountains by Claverhouse's cavalry,
and as he wandered from one hiding place to another, he preached to
them in picturesque conventicles, which gathered in the cathedral of
the Ayrshire hills, and built them up in the faith of God and of the
Covenant. Like Rutherford, who had been to him what St. Stephen was to
St. Paul, he was that strange mixture of fierceness and of tenderness
which Scots piety has often bred and chiefly in its dark days. He was
not afraid to pursue the doctrine of Calvin to its furthest extreme,
and would glorify God in the death of sinners till even the stern
souls of his congregation trembled. Nor was he afraid to defend
resistance to an unjust and ungodly government, and he was willing to
fight himself almost as much, though not quite, as to pray.

But even the gloomiest and bitterest bigots that heard him, huddled in
some deep morass and encircled by the cold mist, testified that Henry
Pollock was greatest when he declared the evangel of Jesus, and
besought his hearers, who might before nightfall be sent by a bloody
death into eternity, to accept Christ as their Saviour. When he
celebrated the sacrament amid the hills, and lifted up the emblems of
the Lord's body and blood, his voice broken with passion, and the
tears rolling down his cheeks, they said that his face was like that
of an angel. Times without number he had been