for the Scottish Church on this ground, since the permission was granted by the State, against her wishes. This writer, therefore, unwittingly adds his testimony to the fact, that Presbytery was not set up because the majority wished it, but as an act of political expediency.[1]
So inveterate was the hatred of the Presbyterians to the English Liturgy, that they would not allow its use, in the case of English regiments stationed in Scotland. Mr. Chamberlayne, writing to Carstairs, himself an advocate for the use of the Liturgy, where-ever it was wished, remarks: "The inclosed account of the great severity of your Church against chaplains of English regiments, for reading the Liturgy to their own people only, is so like the Inquisition, that it must needs raise an indignation in the minds of all good Christians." An English officer, writing from Edinburgh, says: "Though our chaplain was here, yet he was not suffered to preach: which is what we were never denied in the most rigid Roman Catholic countries."[2] Carstairs was a man of too much sense and moderation to fall in with the rigid Presbyterians. These cases disprove the assertion, in the pamphlet against Greenshields, that he was
- ↑ In some parts of Scotland the majority of the people avowed themselves Episcopalians, when the penal laws were removed, a circumstance quite in the teeth of the assertions so commonly made, that the population was altogether Presbyterian.
- ↑ The hostility to the Liturgy was quite as strong as in the days of Charles the First, when Janet Geddes threw the stool at the Dean of Edinburgh. There was still the same desire to dictate to, or to interfere with, England. "They pray publickly for the conversion of England from their superstition and idolatry, meaning our Episcopacy and Liturgy: and hope once more to send their covenant for a text to us. Would we had their zeal, or they our truth." Sage's Vindication. Preface.
