132 Kirx-Session Recorps oF Ironcray, 1691-1700. 
session any more, and gives this reason, that he is most insufficient 
for such an office, and withal desires liberty for a time to advise, 
which the minister, in the session’s name, granted him.’’ 
As far as I can see, Welsh never returned to the session, but 
he cannot have withdrawn himself altogether from the church, 
for four years later his daughter Nicolas was baptised by Mr 
Guthrie. 
The interesting person in these extracts was not William 
Welsh of Scar, but the gentleman of the Scriptural name, Mr 
Hebron, with whose errors he was tainted. Mr Hebron was the 
celebrated minister of Urr, John Hepburn, who troubled not only 
his own and the neighbouring parishes, but the Presbytery of 
Dumfries, the General Assembly, and the Privy Council of Scot- 
land; and on one occasion made even the valiant burgh of Dum- 
fries tremble within its walls. He was a native of Moray, and had 
been ordained by an English Presbytery at London. In Episcopal 
times he had given trouble in Ross-shire—-“ intruding into the 
ministry, and thereby debauching weak men and silly women and 
driving them into rebellion.’’ In 1680 he appeared in Urr, where 
the curate, John Lyon, was so unpopular that the parishioners 
broke into the manse and carried off his wife to the hills. In 
1689, after the Revolution, he was regularly inducted at Urr, but 
the wild Hepburn blood did not suit the peaceful times. You 
remember in Sir Walter Scott’s “ Heart of Mid-Lothian’’ the 
faction to which Davie Deans belonged, “ that lovely and scattered 
remnant, brave and worthy champions of the Covenant, who 
wadna sae muckle as hear a minister speak, be his gifts or graces 
as they would, that hadna witnessed against the enormities of the 
day.’’ Hepburn was such a minister, and there were many Davie 
Deans in Irongray. Hepburn thundered against toleration in 
Church and State. He intruded himself into other parishes. 
He married and baptised in spite of the ministers. At last, in 
1696, the Assembly suspended him, but restored him in 1699 on 
his promising to confine his ministry to his own parish. His 
promise was disregarded. He was in 1705 imprisoned in Stirling 
Castle by the order of the Privy Council, and deposed by the 
General Assembly on the ground of “ having neither dispensed the 
Lord’s Supper to others nor partaken thereof himself for sixteen 
years, and being found guilty of a continuous tract of erroneous, 
seditious, and diversive doctrines and schismatical courses.’’? In 
