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

THE TIMES OF CLAVERHOUSE.
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viduals themselves it produced fearful effects,—their
consciences were seared as with a hot iron, and they
were judicially hardened in their sin. The re¬
morse and dreadful apprehensions that seized them
on their death-bed, testified the Divine disapproba¬
tion of their wicked life. They were tormented
with a terrific certainty of a judgment to come, of
which they could not divest themselves; for they
felt the terrors of the Lord within them, and no
relief could be had from their associates in wicked¬
ness, and they could obtain no dispensation from
those who had employed them in the criminal work
of persecuting the saints of God. The case of Rothes
was a fearful lesson to his compeers in crime. When
on his death-bed, under the intolerable anguish of a
guilty conscience, he sent for the very men whom
he persecuted to pray for him, his heart being bowed
down under the distracting fears of a coming dam¬
nation. And no less instructive was the death-
scene of that noted persecutor and wicked man, Ali¬
son the chamberlain of Drumlanrig, mentioned by
Wodrow. “At this time,” says the historian (1684),
“the death of John Alison, chamberlain in Nithsdale
| to Queensberry, made a great noise; he had been an
b apostate from the profession he had taken up before
the Restoration, and lived a bitter persecutor. His
I torment in body made him roar, but he had heavier
torture in his spirit for his by-gone ways. He died
in the greatest agony and terror; yet the living laid
it not to heart, but the persecution went on in its
\ full vigour.” Such were the effects of the persecu-
; tion on the persecutors themselves, and such the
effects of their conduct on the minds of the people.
But another effect of the persecution was the with-