Some Incidents in Troqueer Parish. 153 



and particularly yt betwixt the death of our late Revd. Pastor, 

 Mr Wm. Somervel, and the admission of the Rev. Mr Alexr. 

 Hutcheson there were eleven Protestants yt apostacized." " 3o 

 . . . besides the abounding immoralities among the Pro- 

 testants there is such a dreadfull prophanation of the Lord's Day 

 that there is more looseness, mirth, and Jollity among the 

 Papists, especially in the afternoons of the sd day, than there 

 is through the whole week. 4o . . . we allege we could 

 not give a Call to a probationer, there being none we know of in 

 the Presbytery, and if there were we would not incline to have a 

 raw, unexperienced young man which would be no ways proper 

 for us in our circumstances, and we further forbear to mention 

 the differences yt have been betwixt Ministers in ys paroch after 

 their admission and their Parochiners which were composed after 

 better experience." 



The Synod supported the appeal, but the Troqueer Heritors 

 not insisting the matter dropped. The Presbytery, however, 

 wrote to Mr John Simson, probationer, son of Mr Patrick Sim- 

 son, of Renfrew, and on September, 1705, he is ordained. Mr 

 Simson did not long remain minister. In May, 1708, he was 

 appointed to a professorship of Divinity in Glasgow University. 

 The Presbytery is unanimously against this change, but is over- 

 bourn, and again over a year elapses before Mr John Bowie, pro- 

 bationer, is called and ordained. 



Roman Catholics. 



Let us turn now to the methods of discipline exercised by 

 the Church over the people in this parish. From the standpoint 

 of two hundred years distance we are able to see in perspective all 

 the grotesqueness and crudities incident to a body, but slightly in 

 advance of the people and subject to all their frailties governing 

 from the attitude of God commissioned shepherds. One must 

 respect the faithful observance they gave to what they conceived 

 to be their duty, although it led them into strange travesties of 

 their Founder's teaching. They endeavoured to avoid undue 

 observance of persons, but wealth and position then, as now, gave 

 protection to their possessors. Thus the Presbytery never seem 

 to have commissioned some of their number to go to the bedside 

 of any of the wealthier delinquents, " and in her extremity to 



