It was thought at this time, however, that ‘popery’ was becoming impudent, and an unusual number of priests was supposed to be going about the country. Considering the hazard with which ‘the true Protestant religion’ was threatened, the parliament, in May 1700, enacted a severe statute, which continued to be acted upon for many years afterwards, assigning a reward of five hundred merks for the detection of each priest and Jesuit, and ordaining that any one who was so by habit and repute, and refused to disclaim the character on oath, should be liable to banishment without further ceremony, under certification that, on returning, still a papist, he should be liable to death. Lay Catholics were in the same act declared incapable of succeeding to heritable property; and their incompetency to educate their children, formerly established, was confirmed.[232] The identity of this act _in principle_ with the dragooning system practised against the western hill-folk in 1685, is obvious. Notwithstanding the crushing severity of this treatment, the professors of the Catholic religion in Scotland contrived to establish about this time, and to maintain, one seminary for at least the preparation of its priesthood; but it was of a character to impress more forcibly the sternness of Protestant prohibition than had there been none. It was literally a little cottage, situated on the bank of the Crombie Water, in a very sequestered situation among the mountains dividing Inveravon parish, in Banffshire, from the Cabrach, Glenbucket, and Strathdon, in Aberdeenshire. It was named _Scalan_, which means an obscure or shadowy place, and the name was most appropriate. Here, far from the haunts of civilised man, hardly known but to a few shepherds, or the wandering sportsman, living on the proceeds of a small tract of mountain-ground, a priest superintended the education of eight or ten youths, designed for the most part to complete their course and take ordination on the continent; though, occasionally, the rite of ordination was performed at Scalan. This truly humble seminary, as singular a memorial of the tenacity of the human [Sidenote: 1698.] heart towards the religious tenets impressed on it as the Covenanters’ moorland communion-tables or their mossy graves in the west, continued in existence at the close of the eighteenth century.[233] [Sidenote: JULY 26.]