Series 3 > Early letters of Robert Wodrow, 1698-1709

xlii WODROW CORRESPONDENCE
enough for them that understand or are taken with long
citations out the Talmud, &c. Witsius in private gives
us a neat & distinct colledg upon his oun (Economia
Fcederum, and in publick on the Lyfe of Paul, in which he
has some curious dissertationes on passages of the Acts.
Mynheer Mark once a day in private hearkens his lads
their lessons in his oun Medulla & in another private
colledg upon the hist, of the Old Testament for which he
take Spanh[eim’s] Introd[uction]. He gives us long disser¬
tations out of the Rabbins Talmud & Cabballa on the ser¬
pent’s speakeing &c., & at that rate with much adoe
wrestles through a paragraph or 2 at a time, so that for
ought I know heT afford himself mater for all his life.
However I find them all very civill in converse, especially
Trigland, who promised to send your brother some orations
he had lately. Perizonius has an excellent private col¬
ledg on the Roman history; he’s now upon Constantine
& takes in the best hints of Ecc. History by the by, wherein
he is sure not to miss his holiness now & then, & on a
morning after I had had a long conference with him the
night before, mostly upon our affairs in Scotland chiefly
with relation to Church Government, I had the satis¬
faction to hear him, after a long deduction of the mater of
fact, plainly decide in favor for Presbytery. His publick
lessons also are much frequented they being at present on
the Rom. & Batavic antiquity which he does very well.
He seems truely to be a fine man. By this short account
yow may judge of the present state of the University
which is yet far before Utrecht.’
Final impressions are that in Theology the Scots did
not find the Dutch universities so much superior to their
own as they had expected. In Glasgow, Theology had
probably more attention given to it than any other subject,
and the Scots professors, though they did not print much,
were not far behind the more famous teachers abroad. In