ject the aid of associations which exist in every nation sufficiently civilised to have a calendar, and which are found by experience to have a powerful and often a salutary effect. The Puritan, who was, in general, but too ready to follow precedents and analogies drawn from the history and jurisprudence of the Jews, might have found in the Old Testament quite as clear warrant for keeping festivals in honour of great events as for assassinating bishops and refusing quarter to captives. He certainly did not learn from his master, Calvin, to hold such festivals in abhorrence; for it was in consequence of the strenuous exertions of Calvin that Christmas was, after an interval of some years, again observed by the citizens of Geneva.[1] But there had arisen in Scotland Calvinists who were to Calvin what Calvin was to Laud. To these austere fanatics a holiday was an object of positive disgust and hatred. They long continued in their solemn manifestoes to reckon it among the sins which would one day bring down some fearful judgment on the land that the Court of Session took a vacation in the last week of December.[2]
On Christmas day, therefore, the Covenanters held armed musters by concert in many parts of the western shires. Each band marched to the nearest manse, and sacked the cellar and larder of the minister, which at that season were probably better stocked than usual. The priest of Baal was reviled and insulted, sometimes beaten, sometimes ducked. His furniture was thrown out of the windows; his wife and children turned
- ↑ See Calvin's letter to Haller, iv. Non. Jan. 155I: "Priusquam urbem unquam ingrederer, nullæ prorsus erant feriæ præter diem Dominicum. Ex quo sum revocatus hoc temperamentum quæsivi, ut Christi natalis celebraretur."
- ↑ In the Act Declaration, and Testimony of the Seceders, dated in December, 1736 it is said that "countenance is given by authority of Parliament to the observation of holidays in Scotland, by the vacation of our most considerable Courts of justice in the latter end of December." This is declared to be a national sin, and a ground of the Lord's indignation. In March, 1758, the Associate Synod addressed a Solemn Warning to the Nation, in which the same complaint was repeated. A poor crazy creature, whose nonsense has been thought worthy of being reprinted even in our own time, says: "I leave my testimony against the abominable Act of the pretended Queen Anne and her pretended British, really Brutish Parliament, for enacting the observance of that which is called the Yule Vacancy." — The Dying Testimony of William Wilson sometime Schoolmaster in Park, in the Parish of Douglas, aged 68, who died in 1757.
