The Marytdom of the Scottish Covenanter Hugh M’Kail
By Jacob Tanner - Posted at Place for Truth:
On December 22nd, 1666, the Market-Cross of Edinburgh was filled with a crowd of teary-eyed spectators. The cause of their lament was the young man of twenty-six-years-of-age who was being hung from the gallows before them. His name was Hugh M’Kail, a minister of the gospel, and Scottish Covenanter.Hugh M’Kail bore all the markings of a promising ministry. In 1661, he was ordained at age twenty to gospel ministry, and licensed by the Presbytery of Edinburgh. He was, evidently, well-respected, well-learned, and well-loved by the people of Scotland. He was known to be a man of great prayer, who would spend one day each week fasting as he prayed for the Church at large, and God’s Kirk in Scotland especially.
As a Presbyterian and Covenanter, his public ministry coincided with a time of great persecution for those who practiced such things. With their adoption of Presbyterian church government, alongside a simplified worship holding to what is known as the Regulative Principle (the belief that we must worship God only as He has explicitly commanded within His Word), and their practice of extemporaneous prayers (a practice at odds with the Church of England’s own practice of having ministers pray from the Book of Common Prayer), men like M’Kail not only watched their own brothers in ministry persecuted and martyred for practicing their faith, but felt the very real cross-hairs of their enemies aimed at their heads.
M’Kail felt the very real burden of ministering faithfully in an age where faithfulness could get one quickly ejected from their pulpits, or worse. In fact, in 1640, Hugh’s father, Matthew, was forced out of his own pulpit in Bothwell. Persecution was not so much a matter of if, but when.
The Boldness of M’Kail
Despite the danger, M’Kail demonstrated that gospel boldness peculiar to genuine ministers of Christ during times of great persecution. On September 1st, 1662, he would preach his final public sermon in the High Kirk of Edinburgh on the text of Song of Songs 1:7: “Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?”
Though the text may seem to have had little consequence to the governing authorities of M’Kail’s day, he made several comments in the sermon that would see him accused of rebellion. Concerning the severe persecution that the Covenanters and Scottish Kirk had been experiencing, M’Kail preached “that the Church and people of God had been persecuted, both by a Pharaoh upon the throne, a Haman in the state, and a Judas in the Church.”[1] Though M’Kail did not name any governing authority within this sermon as a Pharaoh, Haman, or Judas, this was nonetheless enough to earn a charge of treason and rebellion.
M’Kail managed to escape immediate arrest and would take shelter first at his father’s home, before eventually traveling away from his homeland to continue the work of his studies. But eventually, he would return home, and he would find his enemies awaiting him with chains.
