CHAPTER XXI 



DAVID BARCLAY 



A faithful friend is a medicine of life ; 



And they that fear the Lord shall find him. 



He that feareth the Lord directeth his friendship aright ; 



For as he is, so is his neighbour also. 



Ecclus. vi. 1 6. R.V. 



DAVID BARCLAY, the most intimate of Fothergill's friends, 

 belonged to a great Quaker house. His grandfather was 

 Robert Barclay of Urie, a Scottish laird of noble ancestry, 

 a man familiar with princes, and a scholar versed in 

 theology. Bred as a Presbyterian, and trained in a 

 Roman Catholic College, R. Barclay gave the adherence 

 of his mature and logical mind to the doctrine of the 

 Friends whilst scarcely more than a boy, and laboured 

 and suffered in their cause. In 1676 at the age of twenty- 

 eight years he published " The Apology for the true 

 Christian Divinity, as the same is held forth and preached 

 by the people called in scorn Quakers " ; a famous work, 

 which cast Quaker doctrine into a dogmatic form, and 

 became the acknowledged theological text-book of the 

 society, unchallenged for many generations. His power- 

 ful mind and peaceable spirit gave him, until his early 

 death in 1690, a high place among the leaders of the 

 early Friends. 1 



Robert Barclay's second son David cafhe to London, 

 and became an opulent linen-draper and merchant. He 

 dwelt in one of the finest houses in the city. After 

 Cheapside had been swept by the Great Fire in 1666, one 

 Edward Waldo, a mercer, bought three sites opposite the 



1 See Robert Barclay, by M. Christabel Cadbury, 1912. 

 269 



