Tweed, Robert B.

2018-05-22T12:49:20Z

2018-05-22T12:49:20Z

1964

The substance of this study relating to the early years of the life of Donald Cargill, seventeenth century Covenanter, represents an attempt to trace the multifarious influences--family, school, university and general—that determined the course of his singular career as parish minister, field conventicler and martyr.

Several of these principal formative factors, hitherto obscure, have been brought to light by this investigation. First, it reveals that Cargill was fundamentally a product of the turbulent era into which he was born when "the battledore and shuttlecock vicissitudes of Presby¬ terian and Episcopal supremacy" were at their height. It reveals that those closest to him—his near relations and teachers alike—typified these hostile factions that were striving for the mastery in the con¬ flict being waged in the nation at large where ranks were divided by politico-religious antipathies and opposing allegiances. It indicates an intimate and extended acquaintance on his part with Aberdeen during a period unique in its history—the time of "the trubles"—when it not only reflected more sharply than any other city the conflict of the hour but lent support to the very cause to which its long tradition and civic temperament had been warmly opposed. It discloses, furthermore, that he studied at St. Andrews in one of the most colourful and eventful decades of its post-Reformation history when the University was enjoying "a con¬ dition of prosperity...never before or afterwards exceeded" and when the burgh itself had risen to a new eminence on the national scene as touch¬ ing the affairs of church and state. It also reveals the predominant Royalist and Erastian influence that was brought to bear upon him at St. Salvator's College and, conversely, the predominant Presbyterian and Covenanting influence that confronted him at St. Mary's. It shows the University to have been, in fact-,- a veritable academic crucible where a student's traditional or newly formed religious and ecclesiastical attachments, his moral courage and fidelity to principle, were tried to the very core—a setting which, by its very nature, brought Cargill to the point of facing the two supreme, spiritual crises of his life. Finally, it points to Samuel Rutherfurd as the person who, apart from Cargill's own parents, exerted the most puissant theological and ecclesiastical influence in the moulding of his thought and churchmanship; and it characterises Cargill (to use the metaphor of McWard) as one of Rutherfurd's choice "Cedars" which were hewn from the "Lebanon" he created at St. Mary's for the building of the house of the Lord in the land.

In these factors, then, are to be found the principal background forces that gave both form and content to the ministry that began at the Glasgow Barony and ended so abruptly in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/30865

The University of Edinburgh

Annexe Thesis Digitisation Project 2018 Block 19

Donald Cargill, Covenanter (1627?-1681): a background study with special reference to his family connections and other formative influences

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy