'About three, one of our men, quhom we sent to attend at the Counsel door, comes to us with teires, and schowes us that he was carried direct from the Counsel by water to the Tower. We followit with diligencey it could not meit with him by the way, neither could we get access to him by any means.' Surely a more treacherous and unkingly act was never done than this which James did not scruple to commit. It is but the beginning of that arbitrary course which he had decided to adopt with regard to the eight ministers, his invited guests. On the sixth of May the seven ministers received letters, banishing each and all of them to various places in Scotland, all except Mr. James, who is ordered to repair with all convenient speed to Newcastle-on-Tyne, there to remain during the King's pleasure. It was in vain that Mr. James begged to be allowed to stay in London to be near his uncle; his best friends counselled him to desist, lest both he and Mr. Andrew should be worse usit.'

'So convoyit with a guid number of most loveing and godly Bretherin to the Tower stairs, we tuk loiting the 2nd of July and devallit towards the ship with very sorrowful hairts because of him we left behind us in this danger, and of the scattering and dissipation of the mony guid Bretherin so firmly joyned togeddir in Christ his cause.'

FLORENCE MACCUNN.

ART. VII. THE FORMER PROPRIETOR OF ABBOTS

FORD.

OWARDS the close of last century and the commencement

of the present there were three eminent ministers settled in parishes in the Border counties-Dr. Somerville of Jedburgh, Dr. Charters of Wilton, and Dr. Douglas of Galashiels-men who were in their day distinguished ornaments of the Church of Scotland. Dr. Somerville of Jedburgh adorned the ministerial office for the long period of sixty years; he was the friend and associate of many of the learned men of a learned age. If his histories of King William III. and Queen Anne are

now superseded by the more brilliant productions of Lord Macaulay and Earl Stanhope, they are still referred to as authorities, and his delightful autobiography, so well edited by the late Professor William Lee of Glasgow, introduces us to the great men of a past age, and gives a vivid description of the manners of a former generation. Dr. Charters of Wilton was a man of no ordinary abilities, and was justly regarded as one of the best preachers of that day. His sermons, now little known, rivalled those of Dr. Blair, and were regarded as models of pulpit eloquence; and in the opinion of Dr. Chalmers, no mean judge, if they had had more of the sal evangelicum, would have been almost perfect. The third, Dr. Douglas, was scarcely inferior to the other two in literary acquirements, and greatly their superior in energy of purpose. After the lapse of seventy years he is still spoken of in respectful terms, and it is freely acknowledged that it was greatly to his judgment and encouragement that the town of Galashiels owes its present prosperity as the centre of the woollen trade.

Dr. Douglas was the son of the manse; his father was the Rev. John Douglas, minister of Jedburgh, and his mother's name was Beatrice Ainslie. The Rev. John Douglas was not an unknown person, and had rather a curious history. He was ordained minister of Kenmore, in the Highlands of Perthshire, in 1743. During the troubles of the rebellion (1744-1746) he did his utmost to keep his parishioners loyal to the crown, and in consequence met with much hostility, since the Highlanders as a body were the partisans of Prince Charles. After the defeat at Culloden he interposed between the Government and those who were out in the rebellion, and by his influence, in consequence of his well-known loyalty, he saved the lives of many. The Government did not leave his services unrewarded, and in the year 1757 he was presented by the Crown to the parish of Jedburgh. Here, however, his troubles did not cease; Jedburgh was to him no bed of roses. There was much opposition to his settlement; the people had set their affections on the Rev. Thomas Boston of Oxnam, the son of the celebrated Boston of Ettrick, the author of The Fourfold State. A minister who had been presented withdrew on account of the

opposition of the people; but Mr. Douglas, in spite of that opposition, accepted the presentation. The reasons of his acceptance are on record; they were the smallness of the living of Kenmore, which was only £48, with a poor glebe, too little for the maintenance of himself and family, and the resolution of the Government not to present Mr. Boston. Mr. Douglas was settled in Jedburgh in 1758, but he had long to preach to empty benches, and to encounter hostile parishioners. The people of Jedburgh,' writes Principal Cunningham, ‘resolved to abandon the walls of their old Abbey, and erect a meetinghouse where they could hear the Gospel preached to them by the lips of a man whom they loved. By the month of December, 1757, their church was erected, and Boston, abandoning Oxnam, where he had only £90 a year, received £120 from the pious liberality of the people who rallied around him.'

Dr. Douglas was born in the manse of Kenmore on 17th July, 1747. We know nothing concerning his early life or at what University he received his literary and theological education, probably Aberdeen, as it was from that University that he received his degree of Doctor of Divinity. In the twentythird year of his age he was presented by Hugh Scot of Gala to the church and parish of Galashiels, and was ordained by the Presbytery of Selkirk, by a singular coincidence, on his birthday, 17th July, 1770. In the Session records of that parish we have the following entry: Galashiels, July 17, 1770: Mr. Robert Douglas, son to the deceased Mr. John Douglas, late minister in Jedburgh, having past his previous trials before the Presbytery of Selkirk, was this day solemnly ordained in order to be minister of this parish.'

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Among Dr. Douglas' numerous correspondents was Mrs. Cockburn, the gifted authoress of the Flowers of the Forest.' She was a daughter of Rutherford of Fairnalee, and one of the Doctor's parishioners. It was to him she wrote in 1777 that interesting letter contained in Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, in which the genius of Scott, then a boy of six, is first mentioned. She chanced,' observes Lockhart, 'to be writing next day to Dr. Douglas, the well known and much respected

'

minister of her native parish Galashiels.' The letter is curiously dated: Edinburgh, Saturday night, 15th of the gloomy month when the people of England hang and drown themelves."*

In another of her letters to him, she writes from Edinburgh, under date 30th December 1786: The town is a [in] gog with the Ploughman Poet who receives adulation with native diguity and is the very figure of his profile, strong and coarse, but has a most enthusiastic heart of love. He has seen Duchess Gordon and all the gay world; his favourite for looks and manners is Bess Burnet (daughter of Lord Monboddie)—no bad judge indeed.' The 'Ploughman Poet,' it need hardly be added, was Burns, who at the time was being féted in Edinburgh.

Dr. Douglas carried on correspondence with eminent leaders of the Church; and interesting letters are preserved written by Dr. Blair, Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk, and Professor Adam Ferguson. Dr. Hugh Blair was minister of the High Church, Edinburgh, Professor of Rhetoric in the University, and the author of those famous sermons, which, being highly recommended by Dr. Johnson, were in a former age generally read, and which still maintain their place on the shelves of every well furnished theological library. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, minister of Inveresk, known on account of his noble head and countenance as Jupiter Carlyle, was in his day one of the leaders of the Church of Scotland, and is still known as the author of a most interesting autobiography published fifty years after his death. Dr. Adam Ferguson was the Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh and the author of the History of the Roman Republic, which, notwithstanding all subsequent researches, is still regarded as an authority.

In 1783 Dr. Douglas first appeared as an author. The work which he published was in the form of a pamphlet of 108 pages entitled Observations on the Nature of Oaths. Its contention is that the number of oaths should be diminished; that all useless oaths are wrong and deteriorating to the moral character.

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Oaths,' he observes, 'about trifles fail to co.nmand attention and respect. Besides, though they retained their influence, the feelings of human nature are affronted when the sacred majesty of an oath is thus debased.' And he concludes the pamphlet with the following words: 'Let Britons reflect that nothing can more effectually destroy our impression of the living and true God and our fears of future vengeance than to multiply oaths, to demand and administer them without necessity, to evade by forced constructions their obvious meaning, or to persuade ourselves that some of them are mere forms and of no obligation.' Certainly Dr. Douglas is right, for all unnecessary oaths are sinful and wrong; they are at variance with that liberty which Christ confers on his people. Legislation has removed much of what Dr. Douglas complained. The writer of this paper, when presented to a parish had to take an oath that he renounced the Pretender, a most useless procedure as that unfortunate Prince had drunk himself to death more than eighty years before. Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk, in a letter to Dr. Douglas, thus adverts to this pamphlet on oaths: 'I advert to what you say about your pamphlet. But it has already gone to rest and if Addison or Dean Swift were to return from the dead to write a criticism upon it, or even if Jem Rivington was to return from New York to puff it away by advertising at the rate of £5 per diem, it would be impossible to give it a resurrection. So the only thing you

can do is totally to forget it.' Not a very flattering notice and advice to a disappointed author.

In 1783 Dr. Douglas made a journey on horseback through England by way of Newcastle and York to London and thence to Bath, returning by Carlisle, a very different mode of conveyance from our modern railways, on which, as Ruskin observes, we are conveyed like parcels booked from one station to another. An interesting record of this journey has been preserved in a series of letters to his mother.

On his return Dr. Douglas found himself engaged in a great controversy, now wholly forgotten but which then violently. agitated the Church, on the election of a successor to Dr. Drysdale, the Principal Clerk of the Assembly. The Moderate