Not at all intimidated by this insolent and indecent threat, Henderson with
several of his brethren courageously opposed the intended innovations.
For this resistance, to which was added a charge of composing and publishing a
book against the validity of the Perth assembly, he was with other two ministers
summoned in the month of August, 1619, to appear before the court of High
Commission in St Andrews. Obeying the summons, Henderson and his brethren
presented themselves before the bishops, when the former conducted himself with
such intrepidity, and discussed the various matters charged against him and his
colleagues with such talent and force of reasoning, that his judges, though they
eagerly sought it, could gain no advantage over him, and were obliged to content themselves with threatening, that if he again offended he should be more
hardly dealt with. With this intimation Henderson and his friends were dismissed. From this period to the year 1637, he does not appear to have
meddled much with any transactions of a public character. During this long
period he lived retired, confining his exertions within the bounds of his own
parish, in which he found sufficient employment from a careful and anxious discharge of his pastoral duties. Obscure and sequestered, however, as the place of his ministry was, his fame as a man of singular capacity, and as an eloquent and powerful debater, was already abroad and widely known ; and when the hour of trial came, those talents were recollected, and their possessor called upon to employ them in the behalf of his religion.
Before, however, resuming the narrative of Mr Henderson's public career, it may be necessary to give a brief sketch of the circumstances which induced him to leave his retirement and to mingle once more in the religious distractions of the times. The unfortunate Charles I. inheriting all the religious as well as political prejudices of his father James VI. had, upon the moment of his accession to the throne, entertained the design of regulating church worship in Scotland by the forms observed in that of England. In this attempt he was only following out an idea of his father's; but what the one with more wisdom had little more than contemplated, the other determined to execute. Unfortunately for Charles he found but too zealous an abettor of his dangerous and injudicious designs in his favourite counsellor in church affairs, Laud, archbishop of Canterbury. Encouraged in the schemes of violence which he meditated against the religious principles of Scotland, and urged on to their execution by Laud, Charles, after a series of lesser inroads on the presbyterian mode of worship in Scotland, finally, and with a rash hand fired the train which he had prepared, and by which he set all Scotland in a blaze. This was the imposition of the Liturgy or Service Book on the church of Scotland. This celebrated book, which was principally composed by Wedderburn, bishop of Dunblane, and Maxwell, bishop of Ross, and afterwards revised by Laud, and Wren, bishop of Norwich, was grounded upon the book of common prayer used in England, but contained, besides, some parts of the catholic ritual, such as the benediction or thanksgiving for departed saints, the use of the cross in baptism and of the ring in the celebration of marriage, the consecration of water at particular times by prayer, with many other ordinances of a similar character. Most of these observances were introduced by Laud when revising the original work. When the book was completed, the king gave instructions to the archbishops and bishops regarding its introduction; and immediately after issued a proclamation requiring his subjects, both ecclesiastical and civil, to conform to the mode of worship which it enjoined, concluding with an order that every parish should be furnished with two copies, between the publication of the injunction and Easter. The book itself, a large folio, was prefaced by a charge from the king, denouncing as rebels all who refused it. To complete the measure of Charles's rashness on the
