t, moved by so many different considerations, he had
shifted his ground at different times concerning the degree of freedom
which he felt in adopting any act of immediate acknowledgment or
submission to the present government, which, however mild and paternal,
was still uncovenanted, and now he felt himself called upon, by the most
powerful motive conceivable, to authorise his daughter's giving testimony
in a court of justice, which all who have been since called Cameronians
accounted a step of lamentable and direct defection. The voice of nature,
however, exclaimed loud in his bosom against the dictates of fanaticism;
and his imagination, fertile in the solution of polemical difficulties,
devised an expedient for extricating himself from the fearful dilemma, in
which he saw, on the one side, a falling off from principle, and, on the
other, a scene from which a father's thoughts could not but turn in
shuddering horror.

"I have been constant and unchanged in my testimony," said David Deans;
"but then who has said it of me, that I have judged my neighbour over
closely, because he hath had more freedom in his walk than I have found
in mine? I never was a separatist, nor for quarrelling with tender souls
about mint, cummin, or other the lesser tithes. My daughter Jean may have
a light in this subject that is hid frae my auld een--it is laid on her
conscience, and not on mine--If she hath freedom to gang before this
judicatory, and hold up her hand for this poor castaway, surely I will
not say she steppeth over her bounds; and if not"--He paused in his
mental argument, while a pang of unutterable anguish convulsed his
features, yet, shaking it off, he firmly resumed the strain of his
reasoning--"And if not--God forbid that she should go into defection at
bidding of mine! I wunna fret the tender conscience of one bairn--no, not
to save the life of the other."

A Roman would have devoted his daughter to death from different feelings
and motives, but not upon a more heroic principle of duty.

CHAPTER EIGHTEENTH.

To man, in this his trial state,
The privilege is given,
When tost by tides of human fate,
To anchor fast on heaven.
Watts's _Hymns._

It was with a firm step that Deans sought his daughter's apartment,
determined to leave her to the light of her own conscience in the dubious
poin