.]

RINGAN GILHAIZE

CHAPTER I

It is a thing past all contesting, that, in the Reformation, there was a
spirit of far greater carnality among the champions of the cause than
among those who in later times so courageously, under the Lord, upheld
the unspotted banners of the Covenant. This I speak of from the
remembrance of many aged persons, who either themselves bore a part in
that war with the worshippers of the Beast and his Image, or who had
heard their fathers tell of the heart and mind wherewith it was carried
on, and could thence, with the helps of their own knowledge, discern the
spiritual and hallowed difference. But, as I intend mainly to bear
witness to those passages of the late bloody persecution in which I was
myself both a soldier and a sufferer, it will not become me to brag of
our motives and intents, as higher and holier than those of the great
elder Worthies of "the Congregation." At the same time it is needful
that I should rehearse as much of what happened in the troubles of the
Reformation as, in its effects and influences, worked upon the issues of
my own life. For my father's father was out in the raids of that
tempestuous season, and it was by him, and from the stories he was wont
to tell of what the Government did when drunken with the sorceries of
the gorgeous Roman harlot, and rampaging with the wrath of Moloch and of
Belial, it trampled on the hearts and thought to devour the souls of the
subjects that I first was taught to feel, know and understand the divine
right of resistance.

He was come of a stock of bein burghers in Lithgow; but his father
having a profitable traffic in saddle-irons and bridle-rings among the
gallants of the court, and being moreover a man who took little heed of
the truths of religion, he continued with his wife in the delusions of
the papistical idolatry till the last, by which my grandfather's young
soul was put in great jeopardy. For the monks of that time were eager to
get into their clutches such men-children as appeared to be gifted with
any peculiar gift, in order to rear them for stoops and posts to sustain
their Babylon, in the tower and structure whereof many rents and cracks
were daily kithing.

The Dominican friars, who had a rich howf in the town, seeing that my
grandfather was a shrewd and sharp child, of a comely complexion, and
possessing a studious observance, were fain to wile him into their
power; but he was happily preserved f