THE LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON. THE name of Leighton occurs in some of the oldest annals of Scottish history. It belonged to a reputable family, proprietary of the barony of Ulishaven, otherwise called Usan, which is a demesne in Craig, a considerable fishing-village in the county of Forfar. Of this name the spelling is very various, as will commonly be the case with the patronymic of a family of which the scattered vestiges appear, at wide intervals, in the wilderness of the unlettered ages. It is spelt Leichtoune, Lichtoun, Lyghton, Lighton, and in several other fashions, which are not respectively fixed to certain dates, but seem to ave obtained indiscriminately in the same ras. One may remark, however, that the n odern orthography of the name is the same which presents itself in registers of the greatest antiquity. In the Rotuli Scotia, which have lately been published from the original records in the Tower, we read that A. D. 1374, John de Leighton, clericus de Scotiâ, obtained a safe-conduct to Oxford, there to prosecute his studies. Whether or not this zealot of literature were of the Usan race can not now be certainly determined. To the ancestors of that family, however, may be assigned the meed of sturdy warriors, on the authority of a quaint chronicle which relates, that "Schir Walter of Ogilvy, that gud knycht, Stout and manful, bauld and wycht," being sheriff of Angus, was killed in 1392 at Gasklune or Glenbrerith near Blairgowrie in Perthshire, by a party of three hundred Highlanders. Ogilvy, with Sir Patrick Gray, Sir David Lindsay of Glenesk, and about sixty men encountered the enemy. Gray and Lindsay were wounded: and Sir Walter Ogilvy, his uterine brother, Walter Leighton of Ulishaven. and some of their friends, were killed. Besides this testimony to the prowess of a Leighton in the days of feudal lawlessness, there is proof of the same family, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, having been inscribed in the lists of ecclesiastical dignity and political importance. Mention is made by Keith, in nis Catalogue of Scottish Bishops, of one Henry Leighton, parson of Duffus and chantor of Moray, "legum doctor et baccalaureus in decretis," a son of the ancient family of the Leightons of Ulishaven, who was consecrated Bishop of Moray, in 1414 or 1415, and was translated about ten years afterward to the see of Aberdeen. He was one of the commissioners sent to London to negotiate the ransom of James I., with whom he returned to Scotland; where he is supposed to have died A. D. 1441. Although it may be received for a fact, that the subject of our memoir was descended of this ancient and respectable family, yet it has been found impossible to trace all the steps of his pedigree. The family itself had undoubtedly declined in wealth and credit, before the birth of the individual, who was destined to reflect upon it a new and transcendent lustre: for it is on record that, A. D. 1619, a part at least of its origi nal estates had been alienated; and in 1670, there is a grant under the great seal to Charles Maitland of Halton of the barony of Ulishaven, escheated to the king by the death of John, Earl of Dundee, without male issue. The father of Archbishop Leighton was Dr. Alexander Leighton, a presbyterian clergyman of unhappy celebrity. His sufferings and the causes of them are notorious. In the reign of Charles I., he was sentenced by the Star-Chamber, for a virulent attack upon episcopacy, to be whipped and pilloried, to have his ears cropped, his nose slit, and his cheeks branded. This barbarous punishment was rigorously inflicted; and to it were superadded, during a long imprisonment, such atrocious severities, as savored more of vindictive malignity than of judicial retribution. No apology would be valid, or even decent, for cruelties, which were alike revolting to justice, to humanity, and to religion. That the wretched sufferer, however, was of a cross, untowardly disposition, may be conjectured from his having brought | presumed, not a shadow of evidence appear himself under the lash of the law, in the ing to the contrary, that the son was born in preceding reign, by stubbornly refusing to the place wherein the father was then reabandon the irregular practice of medicine. siding. He had one brother, of whom menThere is a fact, moreover, not generally tion will be made hereafter, who was younger known, which may account for the extreme than he; and two sisters, one of whom was rigor with which his subsequent offences married to a Mr. Lightmaker, a gentleman were visited. Not only was the book, for of landed property in Sussex; and the other which he was so maltreated, and which is to Mr. Rathband, as appears from a single entitled "Zion's Plea against Prelacy," out- allusion in one of her brother's letters. rageously scurrilous and inflammatory in its contents, but there were collateral circumstances attending its publication, that betokened a mischievous purpose in the writer. In the first edition, neither the name of the author nor of the printer is given, and instead of the date in the usual way, we find "Printed the year and moneth wherein Rochell was lost." The frontispiece exhibits on one page a lamp burning, supported by a book, and guarded by two men with drawn swords; which hieroglyphic is explained by the legend: "Prevailing prelats strive to quench our light, Of his early years there is left but a scanty though valuable notice. It comes to us on the unquestionable authority of his sister, that his singular teachableness and piety, from his tenderest age, endeared him greatly to his parents; who used to speak with admiration of his extraordinary exemption from childish faults and follies. At college his behavior was so uniformly excellent, as to attract the notice of his superiors; and one of them, in a letter to Dr. Leighton, congratulates him on having a son, in whom Providence has made him abundant compensation for his sufferings. There is still in existence a humorous poem on Dr. Aikenhead, warden of the college, which Leighton wrote when an undergraduate. It evinces a good-natured playfulness of fancy, but it not of a merit that calls for publication. to unshackle the mind of indigenous prejudices, to abate the self-sufficiency of partial knowledge, and to produce a sober and charitable estimate of opinions that differ from our own. Many years afterward, he recommended a similar course to his nephew, alleging, that "there is a very peculiar advantage in travel, not to be understood but by the trial of it; and that for himself he nowise repented the time he had spent in that way." Except your sacred power quash their might." On the other page is the representation of an antique, dilapidated tower. Out of its ruins grows an elder-bush, from the branches of which several bishops are tumbling, one of them holding in his hand a large box. This device is interpreted by the motto:After taking his degree, Leighton passed several years in travel, and in the studies "The tottering prelats, with their trumpery, all, proper to qualify him for future usefulness. It Shall moulder down, like elder from a wall." was his mature opinion, that great advantages The place of Archbishop Leighton's birth are to be reaped from a residence in foreign has been much debated It is commonly be- parts; inasmuch as a large acquaintance lieved that he was a native of London; on with the sentiments of strangers, and with the strength, I imagine, of Burnet's asser- the civil and religious institutions, the mantion, that he was sent thence to be ed-ners and usages of other countries, conduces ucated in Scotland. This, however, is inferring too much: for he may have been carried up, in his infancy, from Scotland to London, when his father settled in that city. Craig also claims him for her son: but this claim seems to have no stronger foundation, than the fact of his direct or collateral ancestors having been considerable proprietors in that village: a fact too weak to sustain the hypothesis raised on it by the inhabitants, through a virtuous solicitude to make out their affinity with so eminent a person. To my mind there are unanswerable reasons for assigning that distinction to Edinburgh. In the inscription on his tombstone, Leighton is said to have died in his 74th year; and deducting 73 from 1684, the undisputed year of his decease, we shall have 1611 for the year of his nativity. The same amount is obtained by deducting 30, the number of his years when he took orders, from 1641, which is the date of that transacion. Now his father was at that time professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh college, and did not go up to London until two years afterward;* and it is certainly to be See Chalmer's Biograph. Dict. During his stay abroad, Leighton was often at Douay, where some of his relations were settled. In this seminary he appears to have met with some religionists, whose lives were framed on the strictest model of primitive piety. Though keenly alive to the faults of popery, he did not consider the Romish church to be utterly antichristian; but thought he discerned in it beautiful fragments of the original temple, however disfigured with barbarous additions, and almost hid beneath the rampant growth of a baleful superstition. Having learnt from these better portions of that corrupt establishment, that its constitutions were not altogether dross, he went on to discover that the frame of his own church was not entirely gold nor did it escape him, that in the indiscriminate extermination, so clamorously demanded in Scotland, of all those offices of devotion, which symbolized with the Roman catholic services, there would be swept away some of the noblest formularies and most useful institutes of the primitive church. It was probably from this period that his yeneration for the presbyterian platform began to abate. He was thirty years old before he took holy orders; and in postponing it to so ripe an age his entrance on the ministry, as well as in retiring so early as he did from its more laborious province, he acted agreeably to his avowed opinion, that "some men preach too soon, and some too long." His judgment of what is most reverent toward God corresponded with those canons of the Levitical economy, which prescribe a mature age for engaging in the more arduous department of the sacerdotal office, and grant an honorable superannuation at that period of life, when the strength of mind and body commonly begins to decay. It was on the sixteenth day of December, A. D. 1641, that Leighton was ordained and admitted minister of Newbottle, in Midlothian, a parish in the presbytery of Dalkeith. All diligence has been used to retrieve traditional reminiscences of the manner in which this holy man discharged the duties of the office, in undertaking which he had evinced so much religious caution. But research has been fruitless. No distinct traces remain of those parochial ministrations, which doubtless fill an ample page in that book of the Divine remembrance, from which no work of faith, no labor of love, is ever obliterated. Although Leighton was averse, both hy temper and principle, from meddling with politics, yet there were certain conjunctures of perplexity and peril, in which he though himself bound to set an example to his flock of intrepid loyalty. In the year 1648, he acceded to the Engagement for the King; a step which would have involved him in se rious trouble with the republican govern ment, but for the interposition of the Earl of Lothian, and the charms of his personal character. When the Engagement expired, in the discomfiture of those enterprises to which it had given birth, he was placed in a very delicate predicament; in which, however, his behavior was not less creditable to his political discretion, than to his Christian boldness and integrity. Called upon in his official capacity to admonish some of his parishioners, after they had made a public profession of repentance, for being actively concerned in that Engagement to which he himself had subscribed, he directed their consciences to the many offences against morality and religion which they had committed in the course of their military service; and of these, without touching on the grounds of the expedition and the merits of their cause, he solemnly charged them to repent. About this time, we find him in correspondence with several of the episcopal clergy, and especially with Bishop Burnet's father. His mind seems to have been led by observation of the faults under which the presbyterian disciple labors, to an attentive examination of the episcopal form, against which he had imbibed the strongest aversion with his mother's milk; an aversion, which would Of the general tenor, however, of his life gather strength from sympathy with his faand ministerial occupations, we have a few ther, of whose martyrdom, as he would be short but invaluable notices in Burnet's His- taught to esteem it, his soul must have tory of his own Time. Engrossed with the drunk in a deep resentment. Although care of his parish, he seldom mixed in the Leighton never considered any particular convocations of the presbyters, whose prac-mode of ecclesiastical polity a point of suflitice of descanting on the Covenant from the pulpit he greatly disapproved; and still more their stern determination. to force that bitter morsel on conscientious objectors. It was his aim not to win proselytes to a party, but converts to Jesus Christ. And exemplary indeed must he have been, since the picture of a finished evangelist, which his intimate friend has drawn in the beautiful Discourse of the Pastoral Care, was correctly copied from the lively pattern exhibited by Leighton. Yet the blameless sanctity of his manners, his professional excellence, and his studious inoffensiveness, were not enough to content the zealots of his church. In a synod he was publicly reprimanded for not preaching up the times." "Who," he asked, "does preach up the times?" It was answered that all the brethren did it. "Then," he rejoined, "if all of you preach up the times, you may surely allow one poor brother to preach up Christ Jesus and eternity." cient moment to justify schism, yet it is clear that from this time he regarded the episcopal model as adapted, beyond any other, to the edification of the church universal. Assuredly it was no prospect of secular preferment that helped him to shake off the prepossessions of his early years; for his worldly interest pointed another way. Besides,conversions to which unrighteous motives have conduced, are usually characterized by extraordinary bitterness against the deserted party; whereas Leighton, after he was become a moderate episcopalian, breathed nothing but good-will and kindness toward his former associates. He wholly sequestered himself, indeed, from their legislative conclaves, and at length relinquished his cure. But he took this last step, not from any scruple about continuing to officiate in a church framed on the Genevese platform, but from a hearty repugnance to that system of spiritual despotism, which had been linked |