lie, _ut supra_; Life of Robert Blair, 313
_et seq._; Wodrow's Introduction to his _History_ (1721);
Beattie's _Church of Scotland during the Commonwealth_ (1842),
Chap. III.]

Though the Protesters were originally what we have called
super-ultra-Presbyterians, it was not surprising that some of them
had moved into Independency. There certainly were some Independents
among the Scottish parish clergy at this time, especially about
Aberdeen; and the Independents apart from the National Church had
become numerous. But mere Independency now, or even Anabaptism, was
nothing very shocking in Scotland; it was the increase of newer
sectaries that alarmed the clergy. Quakerism had found its way into
Scotland; so that there were now, we are told by a contemporary,
"great numbers of that damnable sect of the Quakers, who, being
deluded by Satan, drew away many to their profession, both men and
women." As in England, Quaker preachers went about disturbing the
regular service in churches, or denouncing every form of ministry but
their own to open-air congregations, and often with physical
convulsions and fits of insane phrenzy. The Church-courts and the
civil authorities were much exercised by the innovation, and had
begun action against the sect, the rather because many of the common
people, in their weariness of the strife among their own clergy,
"resetted" the Quaker preachers and said they "got as much good of
them as of anybody else."[1]

[Footnote 1: The quotations are from Chambers's _Dom. Annals of
Scotland_, II. 232-234.]

Not an importation like Quakerism, but of ineradicable native growth,
was the crime of witchcraft; and, though that crime was known in
England too, and occupied English law-courts, Scotland maintained her
fearful superiority in witch-trials and witch-burnings. "There is
much witchery up and down our land," wrote Baillie: "the English be
but too sparing to try it, but some they execute." Against crimes of
other orders the English judges were willing enough to act; and
nothing is more startling to one who is new to such facts than to
find how much of their business, in pious and Presbyterian Scotland,
consisted in trials of cases of hideous and abnormal sexualism. But,
indeed, very strange _isms_ of quite another sort, and of which mere
modern theory would have pronounced the Scotland of that time
incapable, lurked underneath all the piety, all the preaching, all
the exercise of Presbyterian discipline