The critics fastened on this line with great exultation, concluding, that doomed and fated mean precisely the same thing. "Faith, Mr Bayes," says one of these gentlemen, "if you were _doomed_ to be hanged, whatever you were _fated_ to 'twould give you but small comfort."[134] This criticism is quite erroneous; doom, in its general acceptation, meaning merely a sentence of any kind, the pronouncing which by no means necessarily implies its execution. In the criminal courts of Scotland, the sentence is always concluded with this formula, "and this I pronounce for doom." Till of late years, a special officer recited the sentence after the judge, and was thence called the _doomster_,[135] an office now performed by the clerk of court. The criticism is founded on the word _doom_ having been often, and even generally, used as synonimous to the sentence of heaven, and therefore inevitable. But in the text, it is obvious that the doom, or sentence, of an earthly tribunal is placed in opposition to the decree of Providence. Note II. _The bloody Bear, an independent beast, Unlicked to forms, &c._--P. 120. The sect of Independents arose to great eminence in the civil wars, when the enthusiastic spirits were deemed entitled to preferment upon earth, in proportion to the extravagance of their religious zeal. Hume has admirably described their leading tenets, or rather the scorn with which they discarded the principles of other religious sects; for their peculiarities consisted much more in their neglect and contempt of all forms, than in any rules or dogmata of their own.