exacted. The subject of this memoir, at least, was never brought to any real trouble respecting it.
Amid all Mr Boston's attention to public affairs he was still a most diligent minister; and instead -of relaxing any thing of his labours since leaving Simprin, had greatly increased them by a habit he had fallen into of writing out his sermons in full, which in the earlier part of his ministry he scarcely ever did. This prepared the way for the publication of his sermons from the press, by which they have been made extensively useful. The first suggestion of this kind seems to have come from his friend Dr Trotter, to whom he paid a. visit at Dunse, after assisting at the sacrament at Kelso, in the month of October, 1711; on which occasion the notes of the sermons he had preached on the state of man were left with the Doctor for his perusal, and they formed the foundation of that admirable work, the Fourfold State, which was prepared for publication before the summer of 1714, but was laid aside for fear of the Pretender coming in and rendering the sale impossible. In the month of August, the same year, he preached his action sermon from Hosea ii, 19; which met with so much acceptance, that he was requested for a copy with a view to publication. This he complied with, and in the course of the following winter, it was printed under the title of the Everlasting Espousals, and met with a very good reception, twelve hundred copies being sold in a short time, which paved the way for the publication of the Fourfold State, and was a means of urging him forward in the most important of all his public appearances, that in defence of the Marrow of Modern Divinity.
During the insurrection of 1715, he was troubled not a little with the want of military ardour among his parishioners of Ettrick, and, in the year 1717, with an attempt to have him altogether against his inclination transported to the parish of Closeburn, in Dumfries-shire. In the meantime, the Fourfold State had been again and again transcribed, and had been revised by Mr John Flint at Edinburgh; and, in 1718, his friends, Messrs Simson, Gabriel Wilson, and Henry Davidson, offered to advance money to defray the expense of its publication. The MS., however, was sent at last to Mr Robert Wightman, treasurer to the city of Edinburgh, who ultimately became the prefacer and the publisher of the book, with many of his own emendations, in consequence of which there was a necessity for cancelling a number of sheets and reprinting them, before the author could allow it to come to the public; nor was it thoroughly purged till it came to a second edition. The first came out in 1720.
The oath of abjuration, altered, in a small degree, at the petition of the greater part of the presbyterian nonjurors, was again imposed upon ministers in the year 1719, when the most of the ministers took it, to the great grief of many of their people, and to the additional persecution of the few who still wanted freedom to take it, of which number Mr Boston still continued to be one. Mr Boston was at this time employed by the synod to examine some overtures from the assembly regarding discipline; and having been, from his entrance on the ministry, dissatisfied with the manner of admitting to the Lord's table, and planting vacant churches, he set himself to have these matters rectified, by remarks upon, and enlargements of these customs. The synod did not, however, even so much as call for them, and, though they were by the presbytery laid before the commission, they were never taken into consideration. "And I apprehend," says Boston, "that the malady will be incurable till the present constitution be violently thrown down." Though the judicatures were thus careless of any improvement in discipline, they were not less so with regard to doctrine. The Assembly, in 1717, had dismissed professor Simson without censure, though he had gone far into the regions of error; and they condemned the whole presby-
