It was a terrible and most exciting crisis for Scotland, when the people found themselves constrained by all they held sacred to resist their sovereign. Revering the institution of monarchy, and long accustomed to yield to the powerful king of Great Britain a deference which had neither been asked by nor paid to the sovereign of their own rude and inferior state, nothing could have brought them into such an attitude but their anxiety for the avoidance of soul-endangering errors. Even after the riots of July--such was the unwillingness to adopt strong measures--they might have been induced to remain at peace under bishops and Perth articles, if the king had been so far well counselled as at once and gracefully to withdraw the Service-book. So might a moderate Episcopacy have been preserved in Scotland, and the Civil War itself avoided or postponed. The king unfortunately determined to persevere in his unlucky course. The consequence was that the great mass of the people, including many of the nobility and gentry, was led into measures, at first of protestation, and latterly of resistance. There was indeed a district in the north-east where Episcopacy was the favourite system. In some other places, papist nobles exercised a limited local influence. The Highlanders were an uninstructed people, with no religious predilections. But in the Lowland provinces generally, a people far from void of intelligence were intensely earnest in favour of their old simple forms of worship and model of church-government. In the agitation of the subject during a few months, their prepossessions acquired a strength and fervour which never had been known before. It were quite impossible for any individual of our cool and temperate age, to form an adequate idea of the earnest feelings of the men who now arrayed themselves against Charles’s Episcopal innovations, without a careful perusal of the numberless documents in which these feelings found expression.