“Of these learned divines, Dr Robert Barron had succeeded Bishop Forbes in his parish of Keith, and from thence was brought on the first opportunity to be made Minister of Aberdeen, and afterwards Professor of Divinity in Marischal College. He is best judged by the estimation of his own time, which placed him foremost in philosophy and theology. Bishop Sydserf characterises him as ‘vir in omni scholastica theologia et omni literatura versatissimus:’ ‘A person of incomparable worth and learning,’ says Middleton, ‘he had a clear apprehension of things, and a rare facultie of making the hardest things to be easily understood.’[10] Gordon of Rothiemay says, ‘He was one of those who maintained the unanswerable dispute (in 1638) against the Covenante, which drew upon him both ther envye, hate, and calumneyes; yet so innocently lived and dyed hee, that such as then hated him doo now reverence his memorye, and admire his works.’ Principal Baillie, of the opposite party, speaks of him as ‘a meek and learned person,’ and always with great respect: and Bishop Jeremy Taylor, when writing in 1659 to a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, recommending the choice of books for ‘the beginning of a theological library,’ named two treatises of Barron’s especially, and recommended generally ‘everything of his.’[11] That a man so honoured for his learning and his life should receive the indignities inflicted on Barron after his death, is rather to be held as a mark of the general coarseness of the time, than attributed to the persecuting spirit of any one sect.[12] “Another of the Aberdeen doctors, William Leslie, was successively Sub-principal and Principal of King’s College. The visitors of 1638 found him worthie of censure, as defective and negligent in his office, but recorded their knowledge that he was ‘ane man of gude literature, lyff, and conversatioun.’[13] ‘He was a man,’ says James Gordon, ‘grave, and austere, and exemplar. The University was happy in having such a light as he, who was eminent in all the sciences above the most of his age.’[14] “Dr James Sibbald, Minister of St Nicholas, and a Regent in the University, is recorded by the same contemporary: ‘It will not be affirmed by his very enemyes, but that Dr James Sibbald was ane eloquent and painefull preacher, a man godly, and grave, and modest, not tainted with any vice unbeseeming a minister, to whom nothing could in reason be objected, if you call not his ante-covenanting a cryme.’[15] Principal Baillie, while condemning his Arminian doctrines, says—‘The man was, there, of great fame.’