But the sayings and the character of the ministers of the Church of Scotland were assailed in the most effective way by those writers who relied upon ridicule rather than serious invective. Londoners who remembered laughing over Hudibras in the heyday of the Restoration must have found the Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence very poor reading. But it was admirably suited for the purpose of persuading Englishmen that the sermons and prayers of the Scottish ministers were nonsensical rhapsodies, and that, in many cases, both the preachers and their hearers were hypocrites who led the most immoral lives. That part of the work which attacked the private characters of the Presbyterian ministers was met by a series of accusations of the same kind against the Episcopalians; and it is difficult to say whether the attack or the defence is more discreditable. Both are probably, on the whole, equally mendacious.[116] But the most telling part of the work consisted of selections from grotesque sermons and prayers. “Sirs,” one minister is reported to have said in his first sermon, “I am coming home to be your shepherd, and you must be my sheep, and the Bible will be my tar-bottle, for I will mark you with it; (and laying his hand on the clerk or precentor’s head) he saith, ‘Andrew, you shall be my dog.’ ‘The sorrow a bit of your dog will I be,’ said Andrew. ‘O Andrew, I speak mystically,’ said the preacher. ‘Yea, but you speak mischievously,’ said Andrew.” Another minister, preaching on the first chapter of the Book of Job, is represented as saying, “Sirs, I will tell you this story very plainly. The Devil comes to God one day. God said, ‘What now, Deel, thou foul thief, whither are you going?’ ‘I am going up and down now, Lord, you have put me away from you now, I must even do for myself now.’ ‘Well, well, Deel (says God) all the world kens that it is your fault; but do not you know that I have an honest servant they call Job? Is not he an honest man, Deel?’ ‘Sorrow to his thank,’ says the Deel; ‘you make his cup stand full even, you make his pot play well, but give him a cuff, I’ll hazard he’ll be as ill as I am called.’ ‘Go, Deel,’ says God, ‘I’ll yoke his honesty with you. Fell his cows, worry his sheep, do all the mischief ye can, but for the very soul of you, touch not a hair of his tail.’” The specimens of prayers are equally absurd. “O Lord,” one divine says, “thou’rt like a mousie peeping out at the hole of a wall, for thou sees us, but we see not thee.” Another prayed as follows: “Good Lord, what have ye been doing all this time? What good have ye done to your poor Kirk in Scotland?... O, how often have we put our shoulders to Christ’s cause, when his own back was at the wall; to be free with you, Lord, we have done many things for thee that never entered in thy noddle, and yet we are content that thou take all the glory; is not that fair and kind?”