vincement of my understanding thereby, that I came to receive and bear witness of the truth, but by being secretly reached by this Life. For when I came into the silent assemblies of God's people, I felt a secret power amongst them which touched my heart; and as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me, and the good raised up; and so I became thus knit and united unto them, hungering more and more after the increase of this power and life, whereby I might find myself perfectly redeemed." According to his friend William Penn, it was in the year 1667, when only nineteen years of age, that he fully became "convinced, and publicly owned the testimony of the true light, enlightening every man." "This writer," says he, "came early forth a zealous and fervent witness for it [the true light], enduring the cross and despising the shame that attended his discipleship, and received the gift of the ministry as his greatest honour, in which he laboured to bring others to God, and his labour was not in vain in the Lord." The testimony of another of his brethren, Andrew Jaffray, is to the same effect: "Having occasion, through his worthy father, to be in the meetings of God's chosen people, who worship him in his own name, spirit, and power, and not in the words of man's wisdom and preparation, he was, by the virtue and efficacious life of this blessed power, shortly after reached, and that in a time of silence, a mystery to the world, and came so fast to grow therein, through his great love and watchfulness to the inward appearance thereof, that, not long after, he was called out to the public ministry, and declaring abroad that his eyes had seen and his hands had handled of the pure word of life. Yea the Lord, who loved him, counted him worthy so early to call him to some weighty and hard services for his truth in our nation, that, a little after his coming out of the age of minority, as it is called, he was made willing, in the day of God's power, to give up his body as a sign and wonder to this generation, and to deny himself and all in him as a man so far as to become a fool, for his sake whom he loved, in going in sackcloth and ashes through the chief streets of the city of Aberdeen, besides some services at several steeple-houses and some sufferings in prison for the truth's sake."
The true grounds of Barclay's predilection for the meek principles of the Friends, is perhaps to be found in his physical temperament. On arriving in Scotland, in 1664, with a heart open to every generous impulse, his mild nature appears, from one of the above extracts of his own writings, to have been shocked by the mutual hostility which existed between the adherents of the established and the dis-established churches. While these bodies judged of each other in the severest spirit, they joined in one point alone—a sense of the propriety of persecuting the new and strange sect called Quakers, from whom both might rather have learned a lesson of forbearance and toleration. Barclay, who, from his French education, was totally free of all prejudices on either side, seems to have deliberately preferred that sect which alone, of all others in his native country, professed to regard every denomination of fellow-Christians with an equal feeling of kindness.
In February, 1669-70, Robert Barclay married Christian Mollison, daughter of Gilbert Mollison, merchant in Aberdeen; and on his marriage settled at Ury with his father. The issue of this marriage was three sons and four daughters, all of whom survived him, and were living fifty years after his death. In the life of John Gratton, there is an agreeable and instructive account of this excellent mother's solicitude to imbue the tender minds of her children with pious and good principles. The passage is as follows: "I observed (1694, her husband being then dead,) that when her children were up in the morning and dressed, she sat down with them, before breakfast, and in a religious manner waited upon the Lord: which pious care, and motherly instruction of her chil-
