my anxieties and cares, of the
children of our love, and of the dangers of their defencelessness, and I
marvelled with a weeping spirit at the manner in which I had been
snatched up, and brought, as it were in a whirlwind, to be an actor in a
scene of such inevitable woe. Sometimes, in the passion of that grief, I
was tempted to rise, and moved to seek my way back to the nest of my
affections. But as often as the thought came over my heart, with its
soft and fond enticements, some rustle in the camp of the weary men who
had borne in the march all that I had borne, and many of them in the
cause far more, yea, even to the martyrdom of dear friends, I bowed my
head and prayed for constancy of purpose and fortitude of mind, if the
arm of flesh was ordained to be the means of rescuing the Gospel, and
delivering poor Scotland from prelatic tyranny, and the thraldom of an
anti-Christian usurpation in the kingly power.

While I was thus sitting in this sad and solitary state, none doubting
that before another night our covenanted army would be, as the hail that
smote so sorely on our march, seen no more, and only known to have been
by the track of its course on the fields over which we had passed, a
light broke in upon the darkness of my soul, and amidst high and holy
experiences of consolation, mingled with awe and solemn wonder, I beheld
as it were a bright and shining hand draw aside the curtain of time, and
disclose the blessings of truth and liberty that were ordained to rise
from the fate of the oppressors, who, in the pride and panoply of
arbitrary power, had so thrown down the temple of God, and laid waste
His vineyard.

I saw that from our hasty enterprise they would be drawn to commit still
more grievous aggressions, and thereby incur some fearful forfeiture of
the honours and predominancy of which they had for so many years shown
themselves so unworthy; and I had a foretaste in that hour of the
fulfilment of my grandfather's prophecy concerning the tasks that were
in store for myself in the deliverance of my native land. So that,
although I rose from the rock whereon I was sitting, in the clear
conviction that our array would be scattered like chaff before the wind,
I yet had a blessed persuasion that the event would prove in the end a
link in the chain, or a cog in the wheel, of the hidden enginery with
which Providence works good out of evil.

CHAPTER LIV

In the course of the night, shortly after the