as representative English divines; but his Highness had not yet made up his mind.  The rumour in Scotland was that Sharp was likely to succeed, and that he had driven Warriston and Gillespie very hard in the Conference, and contrived, in particular, to make Warriston, in self-defence, betray some awkward secrets.  One finds, however, that Principal Gillespie was invited to preach twice before the Parliament, and thanked for his sermons, and that he had influence enough to move in the Council a suit in the interests of the University of Glasgow.  Though Sharp, as Baillie advised him, was “supping with a long spoon,” Cromwell had probably taken estimate of him.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Council Order Books of dates given, and of others (e.g.  Nov. 4 and Dec. 2, 1656, and Jan. 12 and Feb. 12, 1656-7); Merc.  Pol. No. 340 (Dec. 11-18, 1656); Life of Robert Blair, 329-331; Baillie, III. 328-341.]

One matter In which there had been an approach to disagreement between the Parliament and the Protector was the famous Case of James Nayler;—­Quakerism and its extravagancies were irritating the sober part of the nation unspeakably, and this maddest of all the Quakers, on account of the outrageous “blasphemies” of his recent Song-of-Simon procession through the west of England—­repeated at Bristol after his release from Exeter jail—­had been selected by Parliament for an example.  On the 31st of October, 1856, a large committee was appointed on his case; and on the 5th of December, Nayler and others having been brought prisoners to London meanwhile, the report of the Committee was made, and there began a debate on the case, which was protracted through ten sittings, Nayler himself brought once or twice to the bar.  It was easily resolved that he had been “guilty of horrid blasphemy” and was a “grand impostor and great seducer of the people”:  the difficult question was as to his punishment.  On the 16th of December it was carried but by ninety-six votes to eighty-two that it should not be death, and, after some faint farther argument on the side of mercy, this was the sentence:  “That James Nayler be set on the pillory, with his head in the pillory, in the New Palace, Westminster, during the space of two hours, on Thursday next, and shall be whipped by the hangman through the streets from Westminster to the Old Exchange, London, there likewise to be set on the pillory, with his head in the pillory, for the space of two hours, between the hours of eleven and one on Saturday next—­in each of the said places wearing a paper containing an inscription of his crimes:  and that at the Old Exchange his tongue shall be bored through with a hot iron; and that he be there also stigmatized in the forehead with the letter B:  And that he be afterwards sent to Bristol, and conveyed into and through the said city on a horse bare-ridged, with his face backwards, and there also publicly whipped the next market-day after he comes thither:  And that from thence