ut; and upon a new call, struggled to
be back; but lost it only by four voices. However, he lost all his legal
stipend the four years, which, with the expences of suit, amounted to
10,000 merks. Mr. Vetch's hard usage from the assembly, with their
illegal removing him, merely to please the duke, and to send him to
Dumfries, made him resolve to leave the nation, and refuse to submit to
their sentence. In the mean time his old friends in England, hearing
this, sent a gentleman to Peebles to bring him back to them. Mr. Vetch
went with him; but he refused to settle with them, till he had
handsomely ended with the commission of the church, to whom the matter
was referred. Upon his return, they persuaded him to submit: which at
last he did, and continued minister in that place until the day of his
death, which fell out (if I mistake not) about the year 1720, being then
about 80 years of age.

From the foregoing account two things are conspicuous: first, that the
whole of Mr. Vetch's life, at least during the persecuting period, was
attended with a train of remarkable occurrences of divine providence.
Secondly, that in that time, he behoved to be a most powerful and
awakening preacher from the influence he had upon the manners or morals
of those who attended his sermons. Nor is it any disparagement to him
that that black-mouthed calumniator in his Presbyterian Eloquence
displayed, has published to the world, "That he murdered the bodies as
well as souls of two or three persons with one sermon, because (says he)
preaching in the town of Jedhurgh, he said, _There are two thousand of
you here, but I am sure eighty of you will not be favored_; upon which
three of his ignorant hearers dispatched themselves soon after." Indeed
it must be granted, that, after the revolution in the latter end of his
life, he became somewhat inimical and unfriendly to dissenters[264], at
least some of those who professed to own and adhere unto the same cause
and testimony that he himself had contended and suffered somewhat for;
whether this proceeded from the dotage of old age (as some would have
it) or from mistaken principles, or any thing else, we cannot, and shall
not at present determine.

_The Life of JOHN BALFOUR of Kinloch_.

John Balfour of Kinloch (sometime called Burly) was a gentleman in the
north of Fife. He joined with the more faithful part of our late
sufferers, and altho' he was by some reckoned none of the most
religious, y