[Sidenote: TYNDALE’S NEW TESTAMENTS IMPORTED.] Early in the summer, merchants of Leith, Dundee, St. Andrews, Montrose, and Aberdeen, sent out their ships laden with the productions of Scotland to the ports of the Netherlands, Middelburg, Antwerp, and other towns, there to procure commodities for which there was a demand among the Scotch. At that time there was no prohibition against the introduction of the New Testament into Scotland: only the books of Luther and other reformers were proscribed. These good Scottish seamen took advantage of this; and one day Hacket, who had received orders from Henry VIII. to burn all the Testaments translated by Tyndale (and this ‘for the preservation of the Christian faith’), learnt at Berg-op-Zoom, where he then was, that the Scottish traders had put on board many copies of the Gospels as they were on the point of setting sail for Edinburgh and St. Andrews. He started with all speed for the ports which had been named to him: ‘I will seize those books,’ said he, ‘even though they be already on board the ships, and I will make a good fire of them.’[31] He got there: but alas! no more Scottish vessels; they had sailed one day before his arrival. ‘Fortune,’ said he, ‘did not allow me to get there in time; ah, well, have patience.’ And he gave good instructions on the matter to M. de Bever, admiral of Flanders, and to Mr. Moffit, conservator of the Scottish nation in that country.[32] It was during the time that archbishop Beatoun, arch-foe of the Reformation, was feeding his sheep on the Fifeshire hills in September, October, and November 1526, that the New Testaments arrived and were distributed in the towns and neighboring districts. Scotland and England received the Holy Scriptures from the same country and almost at the same time. The citizens of Edinburgh and the canons of St. Andrews were reading that astonishing book as well as the citizens of London and the canons of Oxford. There were monks who declared that it was a bad book ‘recently invented by Martin Luther,’ but the reading of it was not forbidden. At St. Andrews especially these sacred writings soon shed the evangelical light over the souls of men.[33] [Sidenote: PATRICK HAMILTON’S PREACHING.]