It is, indeed, hardly possible to overestimate the importance of the Church question during the Union controversy. It is certain that if the Church of the majority had not been established in Scotland at the Revolution, another civil war would have been the result. The Presbyterian clergy were Whigs, almost to a man, and their influence in the country was enormous. The views held by the extreme branch of the Church did not affect, to any great extent, the course of events in Scotland. These were the men who, under their various designations of Cameronians, or Hill men, or Society men, still clung tenaciously to the old Covenanting ideas in their most uncompromising form. They could hardly bring themselves to submit to the existing Government. The old formula of a “Covenanted King” of the Stuart dynasty was still full of meaning to them; and long afterwards, during the reign of Anne, the Jacobites tried to make use of them for the purpose of defeating the Union. They were, however, Whigs, and would never, under any circumstances, have acquiesced in the overthrow of the Presbyterian system. The great danger to the cause of the Union and the Hanoverian succession lay in the sentiments of the Episcopalians. Every Episcopal clergyman in Scotland, with scarcely an exception, was a Tory and a Jacobite. On the eve of the Revolution, when the bishops of England were opposing, with dignified firmness, the arbitrary pretensions of the king, the Scottish bishops had addressed him in terms of the most servile eulogy. They assured him that they regarded a steadfast allegiance to the throne as an essential part of their religion. They declared that the line of Stuart was the greatest glory of Scotland. They spoke of James himself as the darling of heaven, and described the amazement and horror with which they had heard the rumours of an invasion from Holland.[106] It is not wonderful that the Presbyterians, when they obtained the ascendency, should have excluded from power the authors of this address. Nor is it wonderful that, in those parts of the country where the persecutors had been at work, the peasantry should have subjected the obnoxious clergymen to every species of indignity. For more than a quarter of a century their oppressors had appealed to the law to justify their misdeeds, and it was natural that, when the hour of deliverance came, the oppressed should take the law into their own hands. Locked out of their churches and expelled from their houses, with their gowns torn from their backs, the Episcopal clergy in Scotland learned how precarious is the situation of a priesthood which is protected by the law, but has no place in the affections of the people.