The morals of the flock were superintended with something beyond pastoral care. Promiscuous dancing was strictly prohibited. For ‘the downbearing of sin,’ women were not allowed to act as waiters in taverns, ‘but allenarly men-servands and boys.’[136] An elder had a certain little district assigned to him, which he carefully inspected once a month. Any scandalous sin which he discovered, or even the existence of any stranger without a certificate of character, he had to report to the kirk-session. The being drunk, or the utterance of a profane word, inferred kirk-discipline. The inspecting elder was also to take cognizance of how everybody spent his time on Sunday. For acts of a licentious character, both sexes were alike punished in the manner most likely to mortify persons of a sensitive nature. Whatever their quality, they had to stand three Sundays in sackcloth before the congregation. A second fault brought the same punishment for six Sundays; a third kept the delinquent on the seat of shame for half a year. That all this was done in honour and sincerity, and not primarily from the love of power, is shewn by the impartial severity which the clergy exercised upon each other; regarding not only moral aberrations, but such faults as that of conversing with ‘malignants’ (persons inclined to be loyal to the king without regard to the terms of the Solemn League and Covenant), and any shortcoming in efficiency either as preachers or as disciplinarians. ‘None of the clergy in those days,’ says one of their successors in the next age, ‘durst be scandalous in their conversation, or negligent in their office.... In many places the spirit seemed to be poured out with the word.... There were no fewer than sixty aged people, men and women, who went to school, that even then they might be able to read the Scripture with their own eyes. I have lived many years in a parish where I never heard an oath, and you might have rid many miles before you heard any.... You could not have lodged in a family where the Lord was not worshipped by reading, singing, and public prayer. Nobody complained more of our church-government than our taverners, whose ordinary lamentation was, their trade was broke, people were become so sober.’[137] It is to be feared that Mr Kirkton wrote under the influence of that palliative spirit with which we are apt to look back upon a past age or upon the days of our youth, for, undoubtedly, strong evidences exist that the period now under review was not free from great vices and criminalities of a very deep shade. The diarist John Nicoll mentions, under February 1650, that ‘Much falset and cheating was detected at this time by the Lords of Session; for the whilk there was daily hanging, scourging, nailing of lugs [ears] and binding of people to the Tron [the public weighing-machine in Edinburgh], and boring of tongues; so that it was ane fatal year for false notars and witnesses, as daily experience did witness.’ [Sidenote: 1650.]