It is a thing past all contesting, that, in the Reformation, there was a spirit of far greater carnality among the champions of the cause than among those who in later times so courageously, under the Lord, upheld the unspotted banners of the Covenant. This I speak of from the remembrance of many aged persons, who either themselves bore a part in that war with the worshippers of the Beast and his Image, or who had heard their fathers tell of the heart and mind wherewith it was carried on, and could thence, with the helps of their own knowledge, discern the spiritual and hallowed difference. But, as I intend mainly to bear witness to those passages of the late bloody persecution in which I was myself both a soldier and a sufferer, it will not become me to brag of our motives and intents, as higher and holier than those of the great elder Worthies of "the Congregation." At the same time it is needful that I should rehearse as much of what happened in the troubles of the Reformation as, in its effects and influences, worked upon the issues of my own life. For my father's father was out in the raids of that tempestuous season, and it was by him, and from the stories he was wont to tell of what the Government did when drunken with the sorceries of the gorgeous Roman harlot, and rampaging with the wrath of Moloch and of Belial, it trampled on the hearts and thought to devour the souls of the subjects, that I first was taught to feel, know and understand the divine right of resistance. He was come of a stock of bein burghers in Lithgow; but his father having a profitable traffic in saddle-irons and bridle-rings among the gallants of the court, and being moreover a man who took little heed of the truths of religion, he continued with his wife in the delusions of the papistical idolatry till the last, by which my grandfather's young soul was put in great jeopardy. For the monks of that time were eager to get into their clutches such men-children as appeared to be gifted with any peculiar gift, in order to rear them for stoops and posts to sustain their Babylon, in the tower and structure whereof many rents and cracks were daily kithing. The Dominican friars, who had a rich howf in the town, seeing that my grandfather was a shrewd and sharp child, of a comely complexion, and possessing a studious observance, were fain to wile him into their power; but he was happily preserved from all their snares and devices in a manner that shows how wonderfully the Lord worketh out the purposes of His will, by ways and means of which no man can fathom the depth of the mysteries.