and chaff-winnowed out and flung away by Satan.  They charged the Cameronian preachers with leading the deluded multitude to slaughter at Bothwell, by prophesying a certainty of victory, and dissuading them from accepting the amnesty offered by Monmouth.  “All could not avail,” says Mr. Law, himself a presbyterian minister, “with McCargill, Kidd, Douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace.  Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on these terms with them:  ’they would give us a half Christ, but we will have a whole Christ,’ and such like impertinent speeches as these, good enough to feed those that are served with wind and not with the sincere milk of the word of God.”  Law also censures these irritated and extravagant enthusiasts, not only for intending to overthrow the government, but as binding themselves to kill all that would not accede to their opinion, and he gives several instances of such cruelty being exercised by them, not only upon straggling soldiers whom they shot by the way or surprized in their quarters, but upon those who, having once joined them, had fallen away from their principles.  Being asked why they committed these cruelties in cold blood, they answered, ’they were obliged to do it by their sacred bond.’  Upon these occasions they practised great cruelties, mangling the bodies of their victims that each man might have his share of the guilt.  In these cases the Cameronians imagined themselves the direct and inspired executioners of the vengeance of heaven.  Nor did they lack the usual incentives of enthusiasm.  Peden and others among them set up a claim to the gift of prophecy, though they seldom foretold any thing to the purpose.  They detected witches, had bodily encounters with the enemy of mankind in his own shape, or could discover him as, lurking in the disguise of a raven, he inspired the rhetoric of a Quaker’s meeting.  In some cases, celestial guardians kept guard over their field-meetings.  At a conventicle held on the Lomond-hills, the Rev. Mr. Blacader was credibly assured, under the hands of four honest men, that at the time the meeting was disturbed by the soldiers, some women who had remained at home, “clearly perceived as the form of a tall man, majestic-like, stand in the air in stately posture with the one leg, as it were, advanced before the other, standing above the people all the time of the soldiers shooting.”  Unluckily this great vision of the Guarded Mount did not conclude as might have been expected.  The divine sentinel left his post too soon, and the troopers fell upon the rear of the audience, plundered and stripped many, and made eighteen prisoners.