Life of John Welsh Minister of Ayr Author:James Young Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PERIOD FOURTH. FROM AUGUST 1600, WHEN WELSH BECAME MINISTER OF AYR, TO 7TH NOVEMBER, 1606, WHEN HE EMBARKED AT LEITH FOR FRANCE. CHAPTER I. FROM HIS SET... more »TLEMENT AT AYR TO MEASURES TAKEN BY THE TOWN COUNCIL OF AYR TO PROMOTE THE CAUSE OF RELIGION. We now come to that period in the life of Welsh which is both more pleasing and more painful than any other—the period of his successful labours at Ayr, and of his sufferings in the cause of religious and civil freedom. It is with Ayr that his name is commonly associated; for there his ministry was chiefly signalised, and there was his light quenched by the rude hand of oppression—quenched, indeed, but only to procure for him the additional honour of being a steadfast confessor, and almost martyr. In no part of Scotland, perhaps, did the doctrines of the Reformation obtain a more extensive footing at an early period than in Ayrshire. It was one of those portions of the kingdom where the sentiments of Wickliffe had found a considerable number of adherents, as appears from the fact that, in the year 1494, no fewer than thirty of them, all persons of consideration, were summoned at the same time % Blackadder, Archbishop of Glasgow, to answer for their heretical opinions. " The Lollards of Kyle," as they were called, were among the morning stars of the Scottish Reformation, and in some measure predisposed the minds of men for the adoption of the opinions of the Reformers who followed in their wake. George Wishart, the martyr, itinerated in the west, in the year 1545, when he visited Ayr, where, at the market cross, " he made so notable a sermon, that the very enemies themselves were confounded."1 John Willock, too, " a man godly, learned, and grave," as Knox describes him, who was a native of Ayrshire, and an inmate, at one t...« less