Crime & punishment > Times of Claverhouse, or, Sketches of the persecution

THK TIMES OP CLAVERHOUSE.
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!1 their delicacy; it borders on the extremely painful,
and even on the horrible, and they cannot bear to
’ witness, even in contemplation, these shocking
things. But if even the rehearsal be so intolerably
painful, how do they think the reality was sus¬
tained by the sufferers ?—if it be too much for us
only to read their sufferings, what must it have been
for them to have endured them ? Truly it is the
least thing that posterity can do to review the his-
| tory of their tribulations, in their endurance of such
outrages, and tortures, and cruel deaths, for the
! truth’s sake, and for our sakes, who now enjoy the
precious fruits of all their struggles. And be it
remembered, that we should make ourselves fami¬
liar with the sufferings of those days, lest we our¬
selves be called to undergo something of the same
j kind; it is therefore necessary to have our minds
fortified beforehand, and to he animated with the
spirit of those who have passed through the furnace
before us. It is indeed to be hoped that those days
will never return, as the spirit of religious freedom
has diffused itself so widely through the community,
—still of this we have no absolute assurance; for as
our prophetic expositions have, in many instances,
i. proved fallacious, so may this, which affirms that
the age of persecution is for ever gone by. We
i need not lay the flattering unction to our souls,
that days only of uninterrupted ease and prosperity
are before us, for it may perchance be far otherwise.
The Churches may yet have to pass through a fiery
ordeal, which will test their soundness, and the
soundness of every individual belonging to them,
and by this means the whole may yet be fused into
one solid mass of pure and precious metal. We
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