of weimen, and receating within his hous of the
King's rebels and forfault enemies!"

'With this, Burley falles down on his knees to the King, and craves
justice. "Justice!" sayes Mr. Andro, "wald to God yow haid it! Yow wald
nocht be heir to bring a judgment from Chryst upon the King, and thus
falslie and unjustlie to vex and accuse the fathfull servants of God!"
The King began, with sum countenances and speitches, to command silence
and dashe him; bot he, insurging with graitter bauldnes and force of
langage, buir out the mater sa, that the King was fean to tak it upe
betwix tham with gentill termes and mirrie talk; saying, "They war bathe
litle men, and thair hart was at thair mouthe!"' Melville's boldness
stopped the proceedings, and there and then the trial took end.

We have now reached a period, 1596, just midway between the Reformation
and the Covenant, when the Crown resumed its openly hostile policy
towards the Church, laying upon her once more the heavy hand of
oppression. From this date it pursued its object--the introduction of
Episcopacy--more energetically than before. For the first decade of the
renewed struggle it was strenuously opposed by the leaders of the
Assembly; but thereafter, when the leaders had been silenced or
banished, there was a free course for tyranny, and during the next fifty
years the fortunes of the Church suffered an eclipse. To see the
emergence we have to look ahead to 1632-1638, the period of the Covenant
and the Glasgow Assembly, when there came that revival of the spirit of
the Church which prepared her for her ultimate conflict and hard-won
victory in 1688.

The cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, had already appeared on the
horizon in the changed attitude of the King, which we have just noted;
but there was no one able to foresee the storm it portended, which was
to rage so long and so cruelly before the sky cleared again.

James Melville speaks of 1596 as to be 'markitt for a special perriodic
and fatall yeir to the Kirk of Scotland,' and he enters on his narrative
of it 'with a sorrowful heart and drouping eyes,' so 'doolful' was the
decay it ushered in. The declension is not to be wondered at; for where
has a Church been found in which such prolonged oppression as the
Scottish Church had been subjected to, did not weary the patience and
damp the zeal of all but the most resolved members of its Communion? Had
we been present at one of the diets of the Assembly, held in M