Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... EPILOGUE. THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY MEETS AGAIN. THE Parliament of 1690 had invited the General Assembly of the Church to meet once more; and, on the 16th of October, the invitation was obeyed. Thirty-seven years had come and gone since Cromwell dispersed the last gathering of Presbyterian ministers and elders--years crowded with labours and sacrifices and griefs. As the members took their places in the old Assembly Aisle of St. Giles's Church, what visions they saw! what battles they fought anew! what scaffolds rose, stark and yet glorious, before the eyes of the mind! They could not forget that they had travelled to their inheritance out of the house of bondage and through a land of pits and snares. It was natural and right that they should give their earliest sessions to the exercises of solemn fasting and prayer, to meditation on the words and ways of God, and to adoring praise of Him who had led them so wondrously to the city of habitation. Lord John Carmichael was the Commissioner of the King --a man prudent, intelligent, of quiet and equable temper. There were present, Principal Rule says, one hundred and sixteen ministers and forty-seven ruling elders. "For the age, piety, learning, and gravity of the members," writes one who had his seat in the Assembly Aisle, "it is much to be doubted if they were not equal, if not superior, to any convocation of churchmen that ever were in Britain in our day." Men were there who had carried gun and sword at Rullion Green and Bothwell Bridge; men who bore branded on their bodies the marks of the rack and the thumbscrew, and who could tell of the horrors of Dunnottar and the Bass; men on whose heads the Government of Charles and James had set a price, and who had been laid under the ban of...
