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Excerpt from Sir George Mackenzie: King's Advocate, of Rosehaugh, His Life and Times; 1636 1691 In the education of Scotland the Restoration was a bitter but necessary moment. The century of war between State and Kirk, arising from the intolerable claims which the Crown on one side, and the preachers on the other, asserted, must come to an end in one way or another, if Scotland was ever to be reasonably tranquil. Between 1660 and 1689, the two contending powers wore each other down: the Government of William of Orange then entered perforce on constitutional paths; the pretensions of the preachers were henceforth maintained, but mainly in a platonic, not a practical fashion. It is impossible to imagine what would have occurred had the ministers of Charles II. and James II. been less unscrupulous. "The good old cause" of the Covenant - that unhappy anachronism - might not have ceased to trouble, had Lauderdale, Rothes, and the other rulers been men of temperate character, well-meaning, large-minded Liberals. How the pretensions of the preachers could have been reduced, save by the ferocities of repression, I am unable to imagine. "Scotsmen are only governable by such usage," wrote Lauder of Fountainhall in notes intended only for his own eye, and Fountainhall was no persecutor, but a man of Liberal ideas. In the long strife, almost all the virtues were in the camp of the Covenanters; almost all the vices haunted the council chamber, in which men were cruelly tortured. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
