Such is his own account; and there is no reason to doubt of its correctness.—Having carefully formed an idea of his line of duty, he set himself in good earnest upon acting up to it; but here he met with insuperable difficulties, which troubled and plagued him exceedingly, and forced him at last, to resign his living {1052} and quit the church of which he had been many years a minister, and which he would probably have continued still to be, had he been permitted by his ecclesiastical superiors to act with honesty and a good conscience, which they however were no way disposed to allow him to do. Thus was he forced to resign his vicarage of Kirkton; after he had held it 14 years, while numbers of sporting, fox hunting, and loose living incumbents were suffered to retain their situations with impunity and without the least check or remonstrance. But though he quitted the ministry, he did not immediately withdraw from the communion of the established church, for we find him communicating sometime after at Frampton, where his friend _Ishmael Burroughs_ was curate, who himself afterwards left the church and became pastor of a Presbyterian congregation at Wisbeach, where he continued the remainder his days. We are not sure that either he or Rastrick engaged in the ministry among the Dissenters, or even actually joined them, till after the Revolution, when the Toleration Act made it perfectly safe for them so to do. It does not appear at what time Burroughs undertook his charge, or entered upon his ministry at Wisbeach; but it appears that Rastrick entered upon his ministry and took the charge of the Presbyterian congregation at Lynn in 1701, {1055} for we find that he was minister here 26 years; and he died in 1727. The commencement of his ministry here was therefore 14 years after he had resigned or quitted Kirkton, and perhaps 30 years or more after the commencement of his public ministry: so that at the time of his death he had been in the ministry between 50 and 60 years. How and where he spent his time during the interval between his quitting Kirkton and his settling at Lynn, we have not been able to discover. Wherever it was, he spent it no doubt, in a manner worthy of himself, or of that integrity and goodness of character which he so uniformly and so well sustained through life. Old members of that congregation used to say, 30 years ago, that he settled here as successor to a Mr. _Williams_, who, as far as we can find, was the only minister of that society during the 25 years, that intervened between the death of Mr. Horne and the arrival of Mr. Rastrick. Of this Mr. Williams we have not been able to obtain any further information. Where he came from, what was his character, how long he was settled here, what became of him, whether he died here or removed elsewhere, must of course be all left among the uncertainties. When Mr. Rastrick came to settle at Lynn, he had been 14 years in a state of separation from the