and Wardrope of Whitburn all of whom mention their having been intimately acquainted with him.
After the usual trials, he was licensed to preach the gospel, 30th October, 1740, by a respectable class of English dissenters, among whom Dr Doddridge presided as Moderator, and ordained to the work of the ministry, 22d Jan. 1741. It is said that his first charge was over a dissenting congregation in the north of England. If so, it must have been for a very short time, for in March following he returned to Scotland, bringing with him warm and ample recommendations from Dr Doddridge, Mr Job Orton, and thirteen other ministers in that neighbourhood, "as a deeply experienced Christian, well qualified for the important work of the ministry, and one who bade fair to prove an ornament to his holy profession, and an instrument of considerable usefulness to the souls of men."
Soon after his return to Scotland he got a regular call to the parish of Carnock near Dunfermline, to which he was presented by Mr Erskine of Carnock. At that time, the forms of procedure in the church of Scotland seem to have been not so strict, and unaccommodating tocircumstarces, as they are now; for in inducting him into Carnock, the presbytery of Dunfermline proceeded on his deed of license and ordination by the English dissenters as valid, and dealt by him as one who had already held a charge. At his admission into Carnock, he showed the influence which his theological education at Northampton, and his intercourse with the English dissenters had exerted upon his opinions as to Christian liberty, by objecting to the doctrine of the Confession of Faith respecting the power of the civil magistrate in religion ; he was permitted to subscribe with an explanation of his meaning upon this point. The passages of the Confession to which he objected, were the 4th section of the 20th chapter, and the 3d section of the 23d chapter; which declare that those may be proceeded against by the power of the civil magistrate, who publish such opinions, or maintain such practices, as are contrary to the light of nature, the known principles of Christianity. or the power of godliness, or Avhich are destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath established in the church ; and that the civil magistrate, hath authority, and it is his duty, to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline, be prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed, for the better effecting of which, he hath power to call Synods, to be present at them, and to provide that whatever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God.
Mr Gillespie laboured as parish minister of Carnock till the year 1752. He was a careful student, a diligent and faithful minister, and generally acceptable and useful in his pulpit labours, both in his own parish, and as an occasional assistant elsewhere. The acceptance which his pulpit discourses met, was not owing to any advantage of manner, for his delivery was uncouth, and his whole manner that of one nervously afraid of his audience. But he was solemn and affectionate, much impressed himself, as conscious of his awful charge. He had struggled hard himself against the oppression of a constitutional tendency to despondency; and in his discourses he sought especially to comfort and counsel the desponding and tempted Christian. Dr John Erskine, who was several months his stated hearer, and who besides this often heard him occasionally, bears witness in his preface to Mr Gillespie's Essay on the continuance of immediate revelations in the church, that "he studied in his ministry what was most needful for the bulk of his hearers, giving law and gospel, comfort and terror, privileges and duties, their proper place. I never (says he) sat under a minis-
