Farewell meat and drink! Farewell sun, moon, and stars!--Welcome God and
Father! Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant!
Welcome blessed Spirit of grace and God of all consolation! Welcome
glory! Welcome eternal life! Welcome Death!"[30]

At Glasgow too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers to
beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears. Hideous
refinement of revenge! Even the last words which drop from the lips of a
dying man--words surely the most sincere and the most unbiassed which
mortal mouth can utter--even these were looked upon as poisoned and as
poisonous. "Drown their last accents," was the cry, "lest they should
lead the crowd to take their part, or at the least to mourn their
doom!"[31] But, after all, perhaps it was more merciful than one would
think--unintentionally so, of course; perhaps the storm of harsh and
fiercely jubilant noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of
drums, and the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the
last they heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when
the river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of
the angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.

Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the
peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian,
pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who
fell in their way. One strange story have we of these times of blood and
persecution: Kirkton the historian and popular tradition tell us alike
of a flame which often would arise from the grave, in a moss near
Carnwath, of some of those poor rebels: of how it crept along the
ground; of how it covered the house of their murderer; and of how it
scared him with its lurid glare.

Hear Daniel Defoe:[32]

"If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made
desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who can
justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God 'That
oppression makes a wise man mad'? And therefore were there no other
original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising of
Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of those
times might have justified to all the world, nature having dictated to
all people a right of defence when illegally and arbitrarily attacked in
a manner not justifiable either by laws of nature, the laws of G