and having come in contact, in Edinburgh, with some Quakers, he was well-nigh induced to join with them. But on more serious consideration, he deemed some of their tenets not quite in unison with those of the Bible. He attended, for some time after the Restoration, the preaching of the curates; but, profiting little by their doctrines, he deliberated whether he did right in hearing them, and concluded in the negative, in the very year in which all such conclusions were declared treason by act of Parliament. In short, by dint of reasoning and reading, he landed full in Presbyterianism, at a time when there was nothing to be gained by it, and a great deal to be lost. And not merely did he embrace it for himself, but deeming it the cause of God, he came forward in this season of wrong and suffering, when the bad opposed it, and the timid shrunk from it, to preach it to the people. He believed himself called to the ministerial office in a peculiar manner, by the Great Being who had fitted him for it; and the simple fact that he did not, in Scotland at least, gain a single sixpence by all his preaching until after the Revolution, ought surely to convince the most sceptical that he did not mistake on this occasion the suggestions of interest for those of duty. He began to preach the forbidden doctrines in the year 1672; and he was married shortly after to a lady to whom he had been long attached. The sufferings to which he had been subjected prior to his marriage affected only himself. He had been fined and exposed to ridicule; and he had had to submit to loss and imposition, out of a despair of finding redress from corrupt judges, whose decisions would have been prompted rather by the feelings with which they regarded his principles than by any consideration of the merits of his cause. No sooner, however, had he married, and become a preacher, than he was visited by evils greater in themselves, and which he felt all the more deeply from the circumstance that their effects were no longer confined to himself. He was summoned before councils for preaching without authority, and in the fields, and denounced and outlawed for not daring to appear. But he persevered, notwithstanding, wandering under hiding from place to place, and preaching twice or thrice every week to all such as had courage enough to hear him. He was among the number intercommuned by public writ; all the people of Scotland, even his own friends and relatives, being charged, under the severest penalties, not to speak to him, or receive him into their houses, or minister even the slightest comfort to his person. And yet still did he persevere on the strength of the argument urged by St. Peter before the Jewish Sanhedrim. The lady he married was a person every way worthy of such a husband. “In her,” I use his own simple and expressive language, “did I behold as in a glass the Lord’s love to me; and so effectually did she sweeten