nterpret it. The toleration they demanded
they would not give. No man should be free to worship God as he pleased:
every man must worship Him in the way which seemed good to them, and in
that way only. The moderate Presbyterians were as hateful to them as
Charles himself and all his bishops; and they in their turn were as
obnoxious to the majority of the Scottish nation as to the English
Government. Cleric and layman alike was weary of the unending squabbles
that had distracted the Church of Scotland since the days of Knox. They
wished for peace; and no peace was possible so long as an ignorant and
noisy minority would suffer it only at their own price.

One other point should also be remembered. It has been the custom to
excuse the cruelties of the Covenanters, when they could not be denied,
as the acts of men goaded into madness by years of persecution. This
excuse will hardly serve. It might, indeed, serve to explain the murder
of Sharp and the savage deeds of such men as Hamilton and Burley; but
long before that time the Scottish fanatic had proved himself a match
in ferocity for the bloodiest Malignant of them all. After Philiphaugh
one hundred Irish prisoners were shot in cold blood, while a minister of
the Covenanting Church stood by, reiterating in savage glee, "The wark
goes bonnily on." About the same time eighty women and children were in
one day flung over the bridge at Linlithgow for the crime of having been
followers of the camp of Montrose. In 1647 three hundred of the
Macdonalds who held a fortified post on a hill in Kintire surrendered at
discretion to David Leslie. It is said that Leslie would have let them
go but for his chaplain, John Nave. Borrowing the words of Samuel, "What
meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of
the oxen which I hear?" in a long and fiery harangue this man of God
exhorted the conquerors to finish their work, and threatened their
captain with the curse of Saul who spared the Amalekites. The prisoners
were butchered to a man.[9]

If, then, it be but a delusion of later times that Scotland could at the
Restoration have been conciliated into accepting a moderate form of
Episcopacy, it is at least clear that there was at that time a strong
party in the country anxious for a compromise between the two Churches,
and willing to make all reasonable advances towards one. Unfortunately
the first move on both sides was of a nature to make all chances of a
com