nal interests. And
what tended not a little to increase the public divisions, the
Anabaptists, Quakers, and other sectarians, connected with the English
army, employed themselves wherever they went, in propagating with great
industry, their peculiar opinions. By keeping these things in view, the
reader will be better able to understand, in the writings of Binning,
numerous allusions, more or less recondite, to the particular
circumstances of the times.

It was on Saturday the nineteenth of April, 1651, that Cromwell came to
Glasgow, with the principal part of his army. The next day he went to hear
sermon in the High church. In the forenoon, he entered the Choir, or Inner
church, as it was called, and, as Principal Baillie says, "quietly heard
Mr. Robert Ramsay preach a very good honest sermon, pertinent for his
case."(1) He appeared equally unexpectedly in the afternoon, in the Nave,
or Outer church, when Mr. John Carstairs delivered in his presence a
lecture, and Mr. James Durham, a sermon. Both of these discourses had,
like the former one, a special reference to the existing posture of public
affairs. But as might have been expected, Cromwell was offended at the
plain dealing of all the three clergymen, who considered it to be their
duty to condemn him and his army, for their invasion of Scotland, for the
contempt they manifested for the religious institutions of the country,
and likewise, for their persecution of the ministers of Ireland. On the
following day, therefore, he summoned them, and the other clergymen of the
city, to a meeting in his own lodgings, that he might vindicate himself
and his confederates from the charges which had been brought against them,
and at the same time hear what his accusers had to advance in their own
behalf.

At this conference, which appears to have been conducted with good temper
on both sides, they who spoke most on the part of the Scottish clergy,
were Mr. Patrick Gillespie, Principal of the University of Glasgow, and
Mr. James Guthrie, minister of Stirling, who forfeited his life at
Edinburgh soon after the Restoration. On the other side, the principal
speakers were Cromwell himself, and General Lambert,(2) who, like many
other of the parliamentary officers, was a preacher, as well as a
soldier.(3) Some of Cromwell's chaplains(4) are also represented to have
taken a share in the discussion, along with the Rev. Hugh Binning.
Cromwell, it is said, was struck with the fearlessness