request the women, after some days, were removed to another vault.  The prisoners suffered the horrors of these dark foul pits three months.  But the Lord Jesus Christ did not forsake them; they were sustained by His abundant grace.  He heard their mournful cries and upheld their faith.  Some breathed out their lives on the hard stone floor, with no pillow on which to rest their aching heads.  Blessed termination of the horrid cruelty!  Even there the “pearl gate” opened wide, and the ransomed soul arose in power, and walked forth into the marvelous light of the world above.  They who survived death were offered liberty on condition of taking the king’s oath, and acknowledging his supremacy over Church and conscience.  They persistently refused to do this.  How great the loyalty of these men and women to the Lord Jesus Christ!  Imprisonment with all its bitterness was sweeter to them than liberty with a defiled conscience.

[Illustration:  Dunnottar castle.

The castle rock projects into the sea, on the east coast of Scotland, and rises with rugged sides out of the water to the height of 160 feet.  It is connected with the mainland by a narrow neck.  Here is the “Whigs’ Vault,” a dismal underground room, hewn out of the rock, where many Covenanters suffered imprisonment.]

The Bass Rock, too, was a penitentiary for the Covenanters.  This is a lofty green rock arising boldly out of the sea near Edinburgh, having steep rugged sides, being accessible only at one point.  Thither they brought, in the latter years of the persecution, the overflow of prisoners after the inland jails had been crowded.  The rock is very desolate.  This was the Covenanters’ Patmos.  Here Alexander Peden, John Blackader, and many others spent months and years, walking round and round over the storm-battered cliffs, or sitting on the ledges looking landward thinking of the desolated home, the broken family, the wasted Church, and the guilty land.  When the waves dashed against the rock, and the breakers leaped high; when storms darkened the land, and billows whitened the sea; when nothing was heard but the noise of the waters, the roar of the tempest, and the scream of the sea-fowl, even then was the Holy Spirit there to illuminate these prisoners of hope.  They held communion with God; visions of glory lighted up their dreary home; they moved amidst the scenery of heaven; the Bass rock was peopled with angels.  Blackader has left on record some rich experiences he there enjoyed.

We are free to worship God according to conscience and the Word.  But let us not forget that our liberty is the blossom, and our privileges the fruit, of the rough black root of persecution suffered by our forefathers.  Had they not been faithful, we would have had to fight the battles they fought, and suffer as they suffered, or have perished in darkness.  Will not we, for the sake of coming generations, be likewise faithful?  The Lord Jesus grant us strength and success.