'With this, Burley falles down on his knees to the King, and craves justice. "Justice!" sayes Mr. Andro, "wald to God yow haid it! Yow wald nocht be heir to bring a judgment from Chryst upon the King, and thus falslie and unjustlie to vex and accuse the fathfull servants of God!" The King began, with sum countenances and speitches, to command silence and dashe him; bot he, insurging with graitter bauldnes and force of langage, buir out the mater sa, that the King was fean to tak it upe betwix tham with gentill termes and mirrie talk; saying, "They war bathe litle men, and thair hart was at thair mouthe!"' Melville's boldness stopped the proceedings, and there and then the trial took end. We have now reached a period, 1596, just midway between the Reformation and the Covenant, when the Crown resumed its openly hostile policy towards the Church, laying upon her once more the heavy hand of oppression. From this date it pursued its object--the introduction of Episcopacy--more energetically than before. For the first decade of the renewed struggle it was strenuously opposed by the leaders of the Assembly; but thereafter, when the leaders had been silenced or banished, there was a free course for tyranny, and during the next fifty years the fortunes of the Church suffered an eclipse. To see the emergence we have to look ahead to 1632-1638, the period of the Covenant and the Glasgow Assembly, when there came that revival of the spirit of the Church which prepared her for her ultimate conflict and hard-won victory in 1688. The cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, had already appeared on the horizon in the changed attitude of the King, which we have just noted; but there was no one able to foresee the storm it portended, which was to rage so long and so cruelly before the sky cleared again.