The blood testifies to the need of a witnessing Church.  While Satan remains above the pit, and iniquity abounds in present proportions, a faithful and fearless testimony for Jesus Christ, and His glorious Gospel and royal rights, will be a moral necessity.  God has His own way of calling out His witnesses, and assigning service to them.  The Church, as a whole, has invalidated and incapacitated herself for this responsibility, by weakness, declension, and compromise.  God does not commit His testimony to the Church, while in such condition; nor to the faithful in the Church, whose voice and actions are weakened or neutralized by majorities.  This important and hazardous task throughout the ages has not been committed to a Church, that is recreant at any point; nor to individuals, that are true at every point; but to a distinctive body of earnest, faithful, and fearless believers.  For this purpose the Lord has divided, and sub-divided, His people time and again.  He will have a testimony by a Church that is distinct from every retrograde organization.  While the Covenanted Church was faithful under Henderson, Johnston, Guthrie, Gillespie, and other worthy leaders, she was united, happy, and prosperous; “she was beautiful as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.”  But when she suppressed, by resolution, one principle of the Covenant, God drew the dividing line.  He sent the persecution that brought out His witnesses, four hundred ministers, and people in proportion.  And when these ministers weakened under the royal Indulgences, He intensified the persecution and called out the “Cameronians.”  These witnesses He qualified to see the truth in its vast proportions and feel it in its divine dreadfulness.  They became the embodiment of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; they were the incarnation of the doctrines of His kingdom on earth.  They dwelt in the presence of God, lived on the hidden manna, and pulsated with the power of the endless life.  Such were the martyrs who defied death and all the instruments of torture.  Have the Covenanters of to-day spirit, power, and character like this?

[Illustration:  The burial.

The burial service was peculiarly sad and solemn, in the times of persecution.  The deceased Covenanters were, in many cases, buried at night, for fear of the enemy.  The friends, with breaking hearts, gathered around the new grave, and waited under the dim star-light, while the minister, with the use of a flickering candle, offered consolation from the Word of God.  Great was the grief when one of the leaders had fallen in death.]

A CRY FOR VENGEANCE.