SIR ROBERT SIBBALD. 
49 
Leighton, whose “ high toned spirituality made 
him overlook the importance attached by vulgar 
opinion to the outside forms and fashions of re- 
ligion,”* should diligently inculcate such advice 
at a period when bitter hatred and rancorous 
hostility against each other had completely ex- 
cluded pure Christian charity from the bosom 
of all sects, is scarcely to be wondered at, but 
such opinions may be overstrained ; and in his 
own person, they led even him into compliances 
that were scarcely consistent, and which have to 
this day left a blot upon a name otherwise res- 
plendent for piety and virtue. It is worthy of 
observation also, that there are many points of 
Leighton’s character, and tone of thinking and 
writing, that may be considered favourable to the 
Romish ritual, though not to its faith.f His own 
to truth and error, which depraved both their sentiments 
and dispositions, which relaxed the springs of Christian 
integrity and conduct, and gradually brought them to call 
good evil and evil good, to put light for darkness, and 
darkness for light .” — Boyne and Bennet's History of the 
Dissenters, vol. ii. pages 305-6, second edition. 
* Pearson’s Life of Leighton. 
t The following quotation from Pearson’s Life will justify 
the remark in the text, — “ Leighton was not by nature 
morose and ascetic ; yet something of a cloisteral com- 
plexion appears to have been wrought in him by the 
character of the times, and by the society of men like- 
minded with himself. He plunged into the solitudes of devo- 
tion, with a view to escape the polluting commerce of the 
world, to gain the highest place of sacred contemplation, 
and to maintain perpetual intercourse with Heaven. That 
he was no friend to monastic seclusion is certain. He 
reckoned the greater number of the regular clergy in 
I) 
