The Modern Athens: A dissection and demonstration of men and things in the Scotch Capital.Mudie, Robert
General
The Modern Athens: A dissection and demonstration of men and things in the Scotch Capital.
Mudie, Robert
Edinburgh (Scotland) -- Description and travel
On Monday the hearts of the address men were lifted higher than ever;
and, as the rapid and dumb show in which they passed before the King
on Saturday, had taken off the first and deepest blush of their
bashfulness, they went to the court in very masterly style: foremost,
were a hundred ministers of the Scotch kirk, supported by about fifty
ruling elders of the same; who, having met in solemn conclave in the
Canon-gate church, said to be the most composing and soporific in all
Edinburgh, they moved “dark as locusts o’er the land of Nile” across
the sanctuary, not of churchmen but of insolvent debtors, approached
the presence, bowed themselves with more than priestly reverence, and,
by the mouth of David Lamont, D.D., their moderator, poured the honey
and the oil of their adulation into the royal ear. Spirit of John Knox,
wert thou then on the watch! and didst thou mark the silken cords in
which thy degenerate sons were drawn to bend the knee before an earthly
Monarch! Yes, how wouldst thou have exclaimed that the gold of the zeal
of thy church had become dim, and the fine gold of its independence had
changed, if thou hadst heard thy backsliding children tempering their
temporizing address with the miry clay of earthly politics, calling
the King “the bulwark of the church,” and promising to labour, not for
the conversion of sinners, or for the glory of Him whom thou didst
account the only Head of the church, but “to impress upon the people
committed to their care, a high sense of the invaluable blessings
of the glorious and happy constitution?” But, boldest spirit of the
reformation, be not offended,--Think on the difference of the times.
The times in which your earthly lot was cast, were times of wrestling
and of reformation,--they required the heart of steel, the eye that
turns not aside, and the hand which is never slackened; but the lines
of thy followers have fallen in pleasant places, they have become full
of the fatness of the earth, and therefore they recline at their ease
under the refreshing shadow of temporal power.
After the Scottish kirk, came, laden with wisdom, the members of the
four Scottish universities; and this having been done, the remaining
individuals and classes of men who were charged with courtly sayings,
disburthened themselves in the closet behind the throne; and the paper
thus accumulated, having been deposited for use, this act of the drama
closed, leaving less upon the memory than had been anticipated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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