Robert Baillie for
several years to come. Baillie did not like Guthrie, and there was no
love lost between the two men. The one man was all fire together in
every true and noble cause, and the other we spew out of our mouth at
every page of his indispensable book. As Carlyle says, Baillie contrived
to 'carry his dish level' through all that terrible jostle of a time. And
accordingly while we owe Baillie our very grateful thanks that he kept
such a diary, and carried on such an extensive and regular correspondence
during all that distracted time, we owe him no other thanks. He carried
his dish level, and he had his reward.

As we trace James Guthrie's passionate footsteps for the years to come
through Principal Baillie's sufficiently gossiping, but not unshrewd,
pages, we soon see that he is travelling fast and sure toward the Nether
Bow. We hear continually from our time-serving correspondent of
Guthrie's 'public invective,' of his 'passionate debates,' of his
'venting of his mind,' of his 'peremptory letters,' of his 'sharp
writing,' and of his being 'rigid as ever,' and so on. All that about
his too zealous co-presbyter, and then his fulsome eulogy of the
returning king--his royal wisdom, his moderation, his piety, and his
grave carriage--as also what he says of 'the conspicuous justice of God
in hanging up the bones of Oliver Cromwell, the disgracing of the two
Goodwins, blind Milton, John Owen, and others of that maleficent crew,'
all crowned with the naive remark that 'the wisest and best are quiet
till they see whither these things will go'--it is plain that while our
wise and good author is carrying his dish as level as the uneven roads
will allow, Guthrie is as plainly carrying his head straight to the Cross
of Edinburgh, and to the iron spikes of the Canongate.

All the untold woes of that so woful time came of the sword of the civil
power being still grafted on the crook of the Church; as also of the
insane attempt of so many of our forefathers to solder the crown of
Charles Stuart to the crown of Jesus Christ. How those two so fatal, and
not even yet wholly remedied, mistakes, brought Argyll to the block and
Guthrie to the ladder in one day in Edinburgh, we read in the instructive
and inspiriting histories of that terrible time; and we have no better
book on that time for the mass of readers than just honest John Howie's
_Scots Worthies_. There is a passage in our Scottish martyr's last
defence of h