text:  Every body has heard of persecutions that were courted; but in such a case at least the spirit of persecution must have had a local existence and to some extent must have uttered menaces--or how should those menaces have been defied? Now the "persecutions " before which a large section of the Scottish church has fallen by an act of spontaneous martyrdom were not merely needlessly defied but were originally self-created; they were evoked like phantoms and shadows by the martyrs themselves out of blank negations