The Bible, New Testament, and a catechism, having recently been prepared in the Irish language, mainly for the use of the Irish population, it was thought by some religiously disposed persons in England, including some of Scottish extraction, that the same might serve for the people of the Highlands of Scotland, whose language was very nearly identical. It was accordingly part of the duty of the General Assembly to-day to make arrangements for receiving and distributing throughout the Highlands a gift of three thousand Bibles, one thousand New Testaments, and three thousand catechisms, which was announced to be at their disposal in London. A thousand pounds Scots was petitioned for from the Privy Council, to pay the expense of transporting the books from London and sending them to the various northern parishes.[46] It is to be regretted that so important an event as the first introduction of an intelligible version of the Scriptures to a large section of our population should be so meagrely chronicled. We shall hereafter have much to tell regarding further operations of the same kind in the northern portion of Scotland. [Sidenote: DEC.] The domestic condition of the people is so much affected by certain sacred principles of law, that the history and progress of these becomes a matter of the first consequence. We have seen how the new rulers acted in regard to the sacredness of the subject from imprisonment not meant to issue in trial; we shall now see how they comported themselves respecting the unlawfulness of torture, which they had proclaimed as loudly in their Declaration or Claim of Rights.[47] We find the Duke of Hamilton, within three months of his presiding at the passing of this ‘Declaration,’ [Sidenote: 1690.] writing to Lord Melville about a little Jacobite conspiracy—‘Wilson can discover all: if he does not confess freely, it’s like he may get either the boots or the thumbikens.’[48] When, at the crisis of the battle of the Boyne, the plot of Sir James Montgomery of Skelmorley, the Earl of Annandale, Lord Ross, and Robert Fergusson, for the restoration of King James, broke upon the notice of the new government, a Catholic English gentleman named Henry Neville Payne, who had been sent down to Scotland on a mission in connection with it, was seized by the common people in Dumfriesshire, and brought to Edinburgh. Sir William Lockhart, the solicitor-general for Scotland, residing in London, then coolly wrote to the Earl of Melville, secretary of state at Edinburgh, regarding Payne, that there was no doubt he knew as much as would hang a thousand; ‘but,’ says he, ‘except you put him to the torture, he will shame you all. Pray you _put him in such hands as will have no pity on him_; for, in the opinion of all, he is a desperate cowardly fellow.’