divided into a moderate and an extreme party.  The chiefs of the former, or Erastians as their opponents scornfully termed them, were John Welsh and David Hume.  Of Hume there is no particular account, but Welsh we have met before.  Though he had been under denunciation as a rebel ever since the Pentland rising (in which he had, indeed, borne no part), he had never given his voice for war; and, though assuredly neither a coward nor a trimmer, had always kept from any active share in the proceedings of his more tumultuous brethren.  His plan, and the plan of the few who at that time and place were on his side, was temperate and reasonable.  They asked for no more than they were willing to give.  Against the King, his government, and his bishops they had no quarrel, if only they were suffered to worship God after their own fashion.  Though they themselves had not accepted the Indulgence, they were not disposed to be unduly severe with those who had.  In a word, they were willing to extend to all men the liberty they demanded for themselves.  Had there been more of this wise mind among the Covenanters—­among the Presbyterians, one may indeed say—­though it is hardly possible to believe that Lauderdale and his crew would not still have found occasion for oppression, it would be much easier to find sympathy for the oppressed.

On the other side, Hamilton himself, Donald Cargill, and Thomas Douglas were the most conspicuous in words, while Hackston, Burley, and the rest of Sharp’s murderers were, of course, with them.  Hamilton and Douglas we know.  Cargill, like Douglas, was a minister:  he had received a good education at Aberdeen and Saint Andrews, but had soon fallen into disgrace for the disloyalty and virulence of his language.  In a sermon on the anniversary of the Restoration he had declared from his pulpit that the King’s name should “stink while the world stands for treachery, tyranny, and lechery."[30] In this party all was confused, extravagant, fierce, unreasoning.  What they wanted, what they were fighting to get, from whom they expected to get it, even their own historians are unable to explain, and probably they themselves had no very clear notions.  They talked of liberty, by which they seem to have meant no more than liberty to kill all who on any point thought otherwise than they did:  of freedom, which meant freedom from all laws save their own passions:  of the God of their fathers, and every day they violated alike His precepts and their practice.  To slay and spare not was their watchword; but whom they were to slay, or what was to be gained or done when the slaying was accomplished, no two men among them were agreed.  For the moment the current of their fury seems to have set most strongly against the Indulgence and those who had accepted its terms.  A single instance will show pretty clearly the state of insubordination into which those unhappy men had fallen.  It was announced that one Rae, a favourite expounder on the