The next political event of importance which agitated the kingdom was the Union. And there was at least one of the people of Cromarty who regarded it with no very complacent feeling. He was a Mr. William Morrison, the parish schoolmaster. I have seen a manuscript of 230 pages, written by this person between the years 1710 and 1713, containing a full detail of his religious experience; and as a good deal of his religion consisted in finding fault, and a good deal more in the vagaries of a wild imagination, though the residue seems to have been sincere, he has introduced into his pages much foreign matter, of a kind interesting to the local antiquary. He was one of that class who read the Bible in a way it can be made to prove anything; and he deemed it directly opposed not only to the Union and the Abjuration Oath of the succeeding reign, but to the very Act of Toleration, which secured to the poor curates the privilege of being, like himself, the open opponents of both. “May we not truly account,” says he, “for the deadness and carnality of the Church at this present time (1712), by the great hand many of its members had in carrying on the late Union, of sorrowful memory, whereby our country’s power to act for herself, both as to religion and libertie, is hung under the belt of idolatrous England? Woe unto thee, Scotland, for thou hast sold thy birth-right! Woe unto thee for the too too much Erastian-like obedience of the most part of thy Church to the laws of the men of this generation--men who, having established a tolleration for all sorts of wickedness, have set up Baal’s altars beside the altars of the Lord! Woe unto thee for that Shibboleth, the oath of abjuration, which the Lord hath permitted to try thy pulse to see how it did beat towards him! Alreadie hath thy Church, through its unvaliant, faint, cowardly, and, I am bold to say, ungodly spirit, suffered woful encroachments to be made on Christ’s truths in this kingdom, and yet all under a biassing pretence of witt and policy--leaving not only hoofs in Egypt, but also many of the best of the flock of God’s revealed injunctions. Art thou not discouraged and beaten back, O Church! from thy duty, by the sounding of the shaking leaf of a parliament of the worms of the earth, that creep, peep, and cry, appearing out of their holes and dens in this time in Scotland’s dark night, when only such creatures come abroad in their native shapes and colours. For if the sun did now as clearly shine on the land as at former times, they would not so appear. It is in the night-time that evil spirits and wild beasts seize on folk, and cry in the streets to fleg and flichter them; and such as they find most feared and apprehensive they haunt most. And so, O Scotland! is thy Church affeared and flichtered with the scriekings and worryings of an evil Parliament.” CHAPTER XI. “Give us, for our abstractions, solid facts-- For our disputes, plain pictures.”--WORDSWORTH.