er took me with him by the hand, and
we sat together on the same form with Ebenezer Muir, whom we found in
the church before us.

When Mr Sundrum mounted into the pulpit, and read the psalm and said the
prayer, there was nothing particular; but when he prepared to preach,
there was a rustle of expectation among all present, for the text he
chose was from Romans, chapter xiii. and verses 1 and 2; from which he
made an endeavour to demonstrate, as I heard afterwards, for I was then
too young to discern the matter of it myself, the duty and advantages of
passive obedience--and, growing warm with his ungospel rhetoric, he
began to rail and to daud the pulpit in condemnation of the spirit which
had kithed in Edinburgh.

Ebenezer Muir and my father tholed with him for some time; but at last
he so far forgot his place and office, that they both rose and moved
towards the door. Many others did the same, and presently the whole
congregation, with the exception of a very few, also began to move, so
that the kirk skayled; and from that day, so long as Mr Sundrum
continued in the parish, he was as a leper and an excommunicant.

Meanwhile the alarm was spreading far and wide, and a blessed thing it
was for the shire of Ayr, though it caused its soil to be soakened with
the blood of martyrs, that few of the ministers were like the
time-serving Mr Sundrum, but trusty and valiant defenders of the green
pastures whereon they had delighted, like kind shepherds, to lead their
confiding flocks, and to cherish the young lambs thereof with the tender
embraces of a holy ministry. Among the rest, that godly and great saint,
Mr Swinton of Garnock, our neighbour parish, stood courageously forward
in the gap of the broken fence of the vineyard, announcing, after a most
weighty discourse, on the same day on which Mr Sundrum preached the
erroneous doctrine of passive obedience, that next Sabbath he would
administer the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, not knowing how long it
might be in the power of his people to partake of it. Every body around
accordingly prepared to be present on that occasion, and there was a
wonderful congregation. All the adjacent parishes in succession did the
same thing Sabbath after Sabbath, and never was there seen, in the
memory of living man, such a zealous devotion and strictness of life as
then reigned throughout the whole West Country.

At last the news came, that it was resolved among the great and faithful
at Ed