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is, however big they may look for a season, and however they may strut in the fulness of their pride and vaunt of their descent, all their pomp and fancied greatness, like the morning cloud and the early dew, shall speedily pass away. For the Lord loveth judgement, and forsaketh not his saints: they are preserved for ever; but the seed of the wicked shall be cut off [Ps. xxxvii. 28].

The preceding remarks are fully verified by the ordinary economy of divine providence.

The great, great grandfather of the venerable subject of this Memoir, and the common ancestor of the Livingston family in this country, was the eminently pious and celebrated minister of the gospel, Mr. John Livingston, of Scotland.*

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* The family, from which this devoted servant of Christ was descended, is honourably noticed in Scottish history. From a genealogical tree, which the writer has seen, it would appear, that his father and grandfather were successively ministers of the parish where he was born, and that his great, great grandfather was Lord Livingston, afterwards Earl of Linlithgow. This nobleman, as history states, had, with Lord Erskine in 1547, the care of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the Castle of Dumbarton, where, at the invasion of Scotland by the Duke of Somerset, she was placed for safe keeping, and whence, not long after, she was conveyed to France, and delivered to her uncles, the princes of Lorrain.

Mary Livingston, a daughter of the lord, was one of the four Maries that accompanied the Queen to France, as her companions. Linlithgow is the chief town of West Lothian, and distant from Edinburgh sixteen miles. "The family of Livingston, who take the title of earl from this place, are hereditary keepers of this palace" (the palace, in which the unfortunate Mary Stuart first saw light,) "as also bailiffs of the king's bailifry and constables of Blackness castle — Sir James Livingston, son of the first earl by marriage with a daughter of Callendar, was created earl of Callendar, by Charles I. 1641, which title sunk into the other."
Encyclopedia Brit.

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As the name of this worthy clergyman occupies a prominent place in the ecclesiastical histories of his time, and as the exile to which he was compelled to submit, for his zeal in the cause of truth and religion, will account probably for the subsequent connexion of many of his descendants with the Dutch Church, a brief sketch of his life seems to be proper in this place, and though given, for the most part, in his own plain language, will not, it is hoped, prove altogether uninteresting to the reader.

He was born in Monyabroch, in Stirlingshire, June 21, 1603. "I observed," he says, in a narrative of his life, written by himself, "the Lord's great goodness, that I was born of such parents, who taught me somewhat of God, so soon as I was capable to understand any thing: — I had great