* * * * *

Points for the class.

1.  What was done with, the prisoners taken at Bothwell Bridge?

2.  How did they suffer in Edinburgh?

3.  Describe their prison, and their hardships.

4.  What two of their ministers were executed?

5.  Describe Dunnottar Castle.

7.  Describe the Bass Rock.

8.  For what was it used in those times?

9.  How may we meet the obligations descending from the fathers?

XXXV.

Declaration of independence.—­A.D. 1680.

The persecution of the Covenanters under King Charles II. had now continued twenty years.  These were years of slaughter, and the horrors were still deepening.

The battle of Bothwell Bridge was followed by a climax of suffering and sacrifice.  The wrath of the king, vented through the dragoons, fell upon every district where the Covenanters were located and followed them into their hiding-places.  They were required to take the oath of loyalty, or suffer the direful consequence.  Some were haled to the judges to be sentenced, others were shot like game where they were found.  Like a fire that breaks out in a city and mercilessly devours while the flames find fuel, so this fire seemed destined to spread and devour till the last drop of Covenanted blood would sizzle on the coals.

The persecutors were in degree successful.  Four hundred ministers, in 1662, had refused to receive orders from the king for the exercise of their ministry; they gave up home and all its comforts, rather than admit the king’s claim of supremacy over the Church of Christ.  These were now reduced to less than one hundred.  Some were martyred, some were banished, some had died of old age and some of exposure; but many, if not most, had been constrained to accept the Indulgence and were gone back home.  Their first love had been chilled by the wintry blasts.  Their zeal for the Lord Jesus and His testimony abated as the hardships increased.  Worn with suffering, emaciated with hunger, exposed to danger, grey with sorrows, and the darkness deepening with no relief in prospect, they weakened and accepted the terms of a false peace.  But let them not be judged with harshness.  Our Lord has said of such, “The spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak.”  The struggle lasted eight more years, during which time there were sixty ministers standing by their Covenant instead of four hundred, and even these sixty, almost to a man, counted it expedient to suspend their testimony and keep silence.