 not drown, points of controversy as empty and unsubstantial as its foam.
    It was the fixed judgment of most of the meeting, that all payment of cess
or tribute to the existing government was utterly unlawful, and a sacrificing to
idols. About other impositions and degrees of submission there were various
opinions; and perhaps it is the best illustration of the spirit of those
military fathers of the church to say, that while all allowed it was impious to
pay the cess employed for maintaining the standing army and militia, there was a
fierce controversy on the lawfulness of paying the duties levied at ports and
bridges, for maintaining roads and other necessary purposes; that there were
some who, repugnant to these imposts for turnpikes and pontages, were
nevertheless free in conscience to make payment of the usual freight at public
ferries, and that a person of exceeding and punctilious zeal, James Russel, one
of the slayers of the Archbishop of St. Andrews, had given his testimony with
great warmth even against this last faint shade of subjection to constituted
authority. This ardent and enlightened person and his followers had also great
scruples about the lawfulness of bestowing the ordinary names upon the days of
the week and the months of the year, which savoured in their nostrils so
strongly of paganism, that at length they arrived at the conclusion that they
who owned such names as Monday, Tuesday, January, February, and so forth,
»served themselves heirs to the same, if not greater punishment, than had been
denounced against the idolaters of old.«
    David Deans had been present on this memorable occasion, although too young
to be a speaker among the polemical combatants. His brain, however, had been
thoroughly heated by the noise, clamour, and metaphysical ingenuity of the
discussion, and it was a controversy to which his mind had often returned; and
though he carefully disguised his vacillation from others, and perhaps from
himself, he had never been able to come to any precise line of decision on the
subject. In fact, his natural sense had acted as a counterpoise to his
controversial zeal. He was by no means pleased with the quiet and indifferent
manner in which King William's government slurred over the errors of the times,
when, far from restoring the Presbyterian kirk to its former supremacy, they
passed an act of oblivion even to those who had been its persecutors, and
bestowed on many of them titles, favours, and employments. When, in the first
General Assembly which succeeded the Revolution, an overture was made for the
revival of the League and Covenant, it was with horror that Douce David heard
the
