Series 1 > Miscellany of the Scottish History Society (Second volume)

BURNET-LEIGHTON PAPERS
studies, making the lad 4 rise constantly about four.’ The
good sense of Gilbert Burnet revolted in the long run from
an intellectual discipline so prematurely severe, and from the
rigid domestic discipline by which it was accompanied. His
own sons, he admits, he subsequently treated with too much
indulgence; but he had never been able to forget how the
stern corrections which followed on youthful escapades had
sometimes brought him to the verge of ‘ desperate measures,’
and had gone near to inspire him with hatred for his stoical
parent.1
But this boyish resentment never really impaired the
young Gilbert’s sense of the anxious affection which underlay
these Spartan methods, or interfered with the intense ad¬
miration which he through life entertained for the character
and principles of his father. His mother he regarded as a
‘ good religious woman ’; but despite the respect and attach¬
ment felt for her by her husband, her son seems to have been
from the first repelled by the violence of her Presbyterian
sympathies, which were not recommended by a temper
excitable to the verge of hysteria, and a somewhat shrewish
tongue.2
It was the great wish of Robert Burnet, whose elder sons
had adopted respectively the profession of medicine and the
law, that his youngest son should enter the ministry.3 Such
a wish under the circumstances seems strange. When Gilbert
Burnet, at the age of thirteen, took his Master of Arts
degree (1657), the Westminster Confession, the Presbyterian
economy, and, we presume, the Covenant, were the three
distinctive features of the Scottish Church. It is true that,
faithful to his Erastian principles, the elder Burnet ‘though
he preferred Episcopacy to all other forms of government,
and thought it was begun in the Apostles’ times, . . . did
not think it so necessary but that he could live under another
1 Supplement to Burnet, p. 454.
3 Ibid., p. 454.
2 Ibid., p. 459 and note.