260 M. Biof s Abstract of Mr Napier'^s 



dane affairs, will not be unavailing to perfect that philosophical 

 point of view under which we must regard him. 



It was the period when the crisis of the Reformation agitated 

 Scotland with peculiar violence. James VI., afterwards James I. 

 of England, then reigned over that distracted country ; a Prince 

 habitually feeble, yet not incapable of displaying a certain de- 

 gree of firmness, by no means devoid of knowledge, we should 

 say of erudition, especially upon the subject of religion, yet 

 rarely failing to render himself ridiculous by the clumsy self- 

 esteem with which he paraded his learning, tormented by the 

 incessant revolts of his unruly vassals, by the demands, be- 

 coming daily more audacious, of the reforming party, whose pu- 

 ritanism watched with suspicion his indulgence, nay his par- 

 tiality, for the Catholics ; disquieted in the extreme by the am- 

 bitious Elizabeth, who was perpetually setting snares for him, 

 ill brookirig to see in him her immediate and inevitable successor, 

 sprung from the very blood which her jealousy as a woman, and 

 her policy as a queen, had caused to flow. In this state of fre- 

 quent perils and annoyances, the poor King of Scots kept beat- 

 ing about like a ship in a storm, most anxiously on the look- 

 out for fair weather ; and it is amidst these struggles betwixt 

 puritanism and royalty that the Baron of Merchiston appears 

 upon the scene. He took part with the Presbyterian Synods 

 then pursuing the King with indefatigable audacity, and pressing 

 upon him their fanatical demands against the Catholics, whom, 

 according to their opinions, his Majesty was not persecuting 

 with sufficient zeal. Napier was a member of the Synod of Fife, 

 the most violent of all the synods. He was one of the deputies 

 whom that synod, and afterwards the General Assembly at 

 Edinburgh, selected to carry to James their solemn delibera- 

 tion, in which they declared, " that the principal and chief ene- 

 mies, the Earls of Huntly, Angus, &c. (here follows a list 

 which includes the father-in-law of Napier himself) have, by their 

 idolatry, heresy, blasphemy, apostasy, perjury, and professed 

 enmity against the Kirk, and true religion of Jesus Christ 

 within this realm, ipso facto cut off themselves from Christ and 

 his kirk, and so become most worth}' to be declared excommu- 

 nicated and cut off from the fellowship of Christ and his kirk, 

 and to be given over to the hands of Satan, whose slaves they 



