Biggar and the House of Fleming

250 BIGGAE AND THE HOUSE OF FLEMING.
is not a clean pulpit in all Scotland this day, curate nor indulged.
Wherefore, come out from among them, and be separate, saith
the Lord, and touch not these unclean things ; and I will be a
Father unto you, and ye shall be My sons and daughters, saith
the Almighty."
Jacob Curate, who wrote the curious work entitled " Scotch
Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," published in 1740, says,
that one of the Covenanting Divines in preaching one day by
the side of Tinto, cried out with a loud voice, " What think
you, sirs, would the curates do with Christ if they had him ?
They would e'en take him up to Tintoch tap, cut off his head,
and hurl his head down the hill and laugh at it."
Tinto, situated in the midst of a j)opulous district, and
affording concealment and security in its deep declivities, was
a favourite preaching place with several of the other heroes
of the Covenant. Donald Cargill, who was in the habit of
saying that he felt more liberty and delight in preaching and
praying in the glens and wilds of the Upper Ward of Clydes-
dale than in any other place of Scotland, came to this distrct
in the beginning of June 1681, after a tour through Ayrshire
and Galloway, and intended on the Sabbath following to preach
on Tinto. Mrs Baillie, the Lady of St John's Kirk, who pro-
fessed a warm attachment to the Covenant and its champions,
but who was looked on with suspicion by some of its more
zealous and rigid partisans, as a person whose fidelity was
likely to give way in the hour of trial, had begun to feel un-
easiness at the frequent conventicles held in her neighbourhood.
When she learned Cargill's design to preach on Tinto, she held
a correspondence with some of the leading Covenanters in the
country round ; and it appears that they entered so far into
her views as to permit her to issue an announcement, that the
meeting on Sabbath would take place on a Common in the
parish of Glenholm, at the back of Coulter Heights. Mr
Cargill had taken up his abode in the house of John Liddell,
at Heidmire, in the neighbourhood of St John's Kirk ; but
though communication could thus have been very readily held
with him, he received no notice that the place of meeting had
been changed. He rose early on the Sabbath morning, and
going out to meditate in the fields, observed numbers of
people travelling to the south. On learning from some of