ALEXANDER JAFFRAY. "Prepare yourselves to meet the Lamb, your Bridegroom, who comes to you now who are mourning, hungering and thirsting after Him, to lead you out of your bewildered state to His saving light and blessed appearance. For now He sees you, and now He calls you, and knocks at your doors to come in unto you. Let Him reign over you as a King, for He has bought you with His own precious blood. He has laid down His life for you, and can you not lay down your sins for His sake-yea, for your own sake? Lean, then, upon His breast, for so does the Bride in spirit. Trust in Him, and not in man nor in yourselves."-WILLIAM PENN. "WHATEVER may be of mistake in the way of opinion of the people called Quakers, I do verily believe there is light appearing from and holden forth by these despised people which, if prejudice and passion did not hinder, might be received with much advantage." Thus Alexander Jaffray wrote at the age of forty-seven. His father was a member of the Scotch Parliament, and Provost of Aberdeen, where Alexander Jaffray was born in 1614. It was, he says, "whilst in the heat of youth, very ignorant and grossly guilty before God," that his conversion occurred. The reflection that he knew neither the time nor the place of this change troubled him at times; but he writes, "I concluded, and I think warrantably so, that the pressing of this too much was but a temptation, God's way in it being very various. Only the thing which I looked upon as my duty was to have the point itself made clear." Although he wished never to forget the sins of his youth he yet wisely remarks, in a sketch of his personal history, "I shall say nothing of these here. My good God having pardoned them, I purpose not to give Satan advantage any more to accuse me of them." This brief review of his religious experience seems to have been written in his forty-third year, and is followed by a diary kept during the succeeding four or five years. When-fifty years ago the late John Barclay, of Croydon, was visiting the home of his ancestors at Ury, near Stonehaven, he found the first part of this document, but without the name of the writer, amongst other neglected MSS., in a corner of the study of Robert Barclay, the author of "The Apology." In the loft of a neighbouring farm-house he afterwards recognised the same handwriting on a tattered manuscript, the fragments of which he rescued leaf by leaf from a heap of waste paper. Having discovered that this was a sequel to the diary, and found the name of Alexander Jaffray, John Barclay spared neither pains nor patience until he had deciphered it and prepared it for publication. When in his nineteenth year Alexander Jaffray married a young lady whose gentleness and meekness seem to have sprung from a heart that was learning to yield itself to the sweet and holy influence of a Saviour's love. In later life he felt the greater gratitude for the gift of such a wife from the remembrance that he had not sought God's guidance in his choice, and that his parents' motives for desiring the union were of a worldly character. Thankfulness also filled his heart for the protecting care vouchsafed him in those days of his forgetfulness of God, and which had preserved him from much of outward evil, though his nature was, he says, as perverse and vile as any." In Paris his life was endangered by wounds inflicted in the back and head by a drunken soldier, from whose hands he was rescued by two gentlemen who were strangers to him. 66 At the age of thirty Alexander Jaffray lost his wife, a sorrow rendered keener by the painful events that hastened her end. The Laird of Haddo had a grudge against Jaffray who, in his capacity of bailiff, had committed one of his servants to prison for a riot. Soon afterwards, when Alexander Jaffray was returning from a funeral, the Laird pursued him for his life, which was in extreme peril; for when his adversary overtook him, near Kintore, he fired two pistols at him, both of which missed their aim, although the two horses would soon have been abreast. After some strokes had passed between them, the Laird succeeded in wounding him in the head, and likewise inflicted an injury on his brother, John Jaffray, who had also been present at "the good man of Brakay's burial. "This was no just quarrel to pursue a judge for doing justice," is the comment of the historian Spalding. For this assault the Laird was prosecuted by Alexander Jaffray, and, as he did not appear before the Commissioners of Estates at Edinburgh, he was "declared fugitive," and fined 20,000 (Scotch) marks; 15,000 to the State, and 5,000 to the brothers Jaffray. Indignant at this sentence, he took up arms, and proclaimed himself an enemy of the State, as did his chief, the Marquis of Huntly. At seven o'clock on a winter morning, the Laird of Haddo, in company with the young Laird of Drum, and others, to about the number of sixty horse, came galloping through the Old Town to New Aberdeen, where they took captive Alexander Jaffray, his brother John, and two other gentlemen. Once more Alexander Jaffray's life was imperilled by a pistol of the Laird of Haddo, which he fired at him from a study window. "I shall never get him felled," he exclaimed, with a curse, when it missed fire. The four prisoners were taken to Strathbogie, and thence to Auchindown. Castle, where they were kept close prisoners, and very |