Most Of These Kind Advisers Were
Protestant, Though I Observed That Protestant And Catholic Intermingled
In A Very Easy Manner; And It Surprised Me To See What A Lively Memory
Still Subsisted Of The Religious War.
Among the hills of the south-west,
by Mauchline, Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse,
Serious Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great
persecution, and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded.
But in towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these
old doings have become an idle tale. If you met a mixed company in the
King's Arms at Wigton, it is not likely that the talk would run on
Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's wife had
not so much as heard of Prophet Peden. But these Cevenols were proud of
their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was their chosen topic;
its exploits were their own patent of nobility; and where a man or a race
has had but one adventure, and that heroic, we must expect and pardon
some prolixity of reference. They told me the country was still full of
legends hitherto uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's
descendants - not direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins
or nephews - who were still prosperous people in the scene of the
boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old
combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth century,
in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the great-grandchildren
were peaceably ditching.
Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to visit
me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed an hour or
two in talk. Florac, he told me, is part Protestant, part Catholic; and
the difference in religion is usually doubled by a difference in
politics. You may judge of my surprise, coming as I did from such a
babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as Monastier, when I learned that
the population lived together on very quiet terms; and there was even an
exchange of hospitalities between households thus doubly separated. Black
Camisard and White Camisard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon,
Protestant prophet and Catholic cadet of the White Cross, they had all
been sabring and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their
hearts hot with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy
years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in mutual
toleration and mild amity of life. But the race of man, like that
indomitable nature whence it sprang, has medicating virtues of its own;
the years and seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the
rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single man awakens
from the passions of a day. We judge our ancestors from a more divine
position; and the dust being a little laid with several centuries, we can
see both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show of
right.
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