On reviewing a writer, un-named,
who was less than just to the memory
of those Covenanters who died for
their faith
This writer shows mercy neither to the living nor to the
dead, provided only they have the original sin of being Scotch. The very
martyrs, to whom we owe much of that freedom in which we now rejoice as a
cherished birthright, whose memories are dear to every man who is capable of
appreciating high principle, patient endurance, unconquerable faith, and by
whose humble graves the soil of our country is consecrated and hallowed,- these
very martyrs he has tried to rob of their peculiar honours, and to lower in the
estimation of the people for whose liberties they fought and died.
He might
have spared us this outrage at least on our feelings. Even if he had been at
once a native and a resident of England, it was in miserable taste to leave his
subject for the purpose of heaping insult on ancestors whom we venerate. But it
is intolerable that this should be done by one who has voluntarily migrated
into our land, has sworn allegiance to that polity for which our martyrs
struggled, and is eating, at this very moment, the pleasant fruits of that
plant of renown which they rooted with their hand and watered with their blood.
He represents them as men mistaken in the work that God required of them;
aud as falling like Homer’s heroes rather than Christ’s confessors,
prophesying retribution, and denouncing judgment, against their oppressors, it
is easy for those whom their forefathers have left nothing to fear, and nothing
to suffer from the oppressor’s arm, - for whom the battle has been won,
and the yoke broken, and the blessing secured, - and to whom has descended the
privilege of living secure and dying in peace ; - it is easy for such to talk
of the failings and aberrations that occasionally mingled with the virtuous
achievements by which this great deliverance was wrought out, and to illustrate
them with a careless mixture of Christian and classical allusion; but it is
base - base beyond endurance - thus to requite the doings and the sufferings of
those ancient worthies, who, at the expense of their lives, asserted for their
posterity that precious freedom, without which all other possessions are poor
and unsatisfying!
Rev. Andrew Thomson, D.D.
(1779.1831).
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