One direction in which the earnestness of the time more especially projected itself, was towards an absolute exclusion of all shortcoming in religion, or even in what might be called church politics. Not only did an act of parliament thrust out of offices and places of trust all who had been in the slightest degree concerned in the Engagement--who must have been a large portion of the middle and upper classes of lay society--but the church-courts were equally unsparing of any clergy who had touched the unclean thing, or proved at all slack in faith and zeal. As a specimen--In September, a ‘visitation’ sat at the appointment of the General Assembly in the synodal province of Angus and Mearns, under the moderatorship of Mr Andrew Cant. It called several ministers of twenty years’ standing before it to preach, that there might be trial of doctrine and efficiency. In all, eighteen ministers were deposed, on the ground of insufficiency, ‘silence during the time of the late Engagement,’ ‘famishing of congregations,’ and corruption of life or doctrine.--_Lam._ This was only one of ‘diverse commissions’ which had gone east, west, north, and south, as Robert Baillie expresses it, and ‘deposed many ministers, to the pity and grief of my heart; for sundry of them might have been, for more advantage every way, with a rebuke, keeped in their places; _but there was few durst profess so much_.’ In short, as invariably happens in revolutions and times of danger, an institution professedly of a popular cast was ruled by this Mr Cant and two or three of his fellows, with as uncontrolled a power as usually belongs to institutions of an avowedly despotic character; and, doubtless, unavoidably so. It is at the same time evident that large numbers of individuals could not thus be made to suffer for merely sentimental offences, without some perilous consequences. It only afforded too good a precedent, as well as excuse, for retributory acts of the same kind after a reaction had set in. It is clear that the throwing of so many people out of their ordinary means of livelihood must have added not a little to the distresses of a time which, from natural as well as political causes, was one of general suffering. * * * * * [Sidenote: FEB.] [Sidenote: 1649.]