“Dr Alexander Scroggy, minister in the Cathedral Church, first known to the world as thought worthy to contribute to the ‘Funerals’ of his patron and friend, Bishop Forbes,[16] is described in 1640 by Gordon as ‘a man sober, grave, and painefull in his calling;’[17] and by Baillie as ‘ane old man, not verie corrupt, yet perverse in the Covenant and Service-book.’ His obstinacy yielded under the weight of old age and the need of rest, but he is not the more respected for the questionable recantation of all his early opinions.[18] “Foremost, by common consent, among that body of divines and scholars, was John Forbes, the good bishop’s son. He had studied at King’s College, and, after completing his education in the approved manner by a round of foreign universities, returned to Scotland to take his doctor’s degree, and to be the first professor in the chair of theology, founded and endowed in our University by his father and the clergy of the diocese. Dr John Forbes’s theological works have been appreciated by all critics and students, and have gone some way to remove the reproach of want of learning from the divines of Scotland. His greatest undertaking, the _Instructiones historico-theologicæ_, which he left unfinished, Bishop Burnett pronounces to be ‘a work which, if he had finished it, and had been suffered to enjoy the privacies of his retirement and study to give us the second volume, had been the greatest treasure of theological learning that perhaps the world has yet received.[19] “These were the men whom the bishop drew into the centre and heart of the sphere which he had set himself to illuminate; and in a short space of time, by their united endeavours, there grew up around their Cathedral and University a society more learned and accomplished than Scotland had hitherto known, which spread a taste for literature and art beyond the academic circle, and gave a tone of refinement to the great commercial city and its neighbourhood. “It must be confessed cultivation was not without bias. It would seem that, in proportion as the Presbyterian and Puritan party receded from the learning of some of their first teachers, literature became here, as afterwards in England, the peculiar badge of Episcopacy. With Episcopacy went, hand in hand, the high assertion of royal authority; and influenced as it had been by Bishop Patrick Forbes and his followers, Aberdeen became, and continued for a century to be, not only a centre of northern academic learning, but a little stronghold of loyalty and Episcopacy—the marked seat of high Cavalier politics and anti-Puritan sentiments of religion and church government.