possible at the time, were full of wise counsel, of apparently honest
confessions of the many difficulties he foresaw in the way, and of
protestations of fidelity and firmness which were no less implicitly
believed. "I told him," said his colleague Robert Douglas, a man of very
different stamp, when Sharp went up to London later for his ordination,
"I told him the curse of God would be on him for his treacherous
dealing; and that I may speak my heart of this man, I profess I did no
more suspect him in reference to Prelacy than I did myself."[10]

Meanwhile the extreme party had not been idle. It will be perhaps most
convenient henceforth to distinguish them as Covenanters: to call them
Whigs, as Burnet and other historians of the time call them, would not
convey to modern ears the significance it had for their contemporaries.
Even those stern and unbending Tories of whom Mr. Gladstone was once the
spokesman have long ceased to regard the men who are still sometimes
called Whigs as the most fanatical members of the body politic. It would
be no mere fanciful application of modern terms to distinguish the two
parties of the Scottish Church as Liberals and Radicals; but it will for
many reasons be best henceforth to write of them as Presbyterians and
Covenanters.

The Covenanters, then, had not been idle. Shortly after the Restoration
they had, through a deputation of their elders and ministers, called
upon their brethren of the Church to unite with them in an address to
the King, praying him, as a member of the Covenant with themselves, to
remember his obligations to that sacred institution and zealously to
prosecute its blessed work in all his three kingdoms. Toleration in
things religious was especially denounced as a vast mischief disguised
under the specious pretence of liberty for tender consciences.
Schismatics were to be stamped out as sternly as Papists and Prelatists;