Alexander Peden

I have written often about the Great Ejectment in Great Britain in 1662 in which well over 400 ministers were removed from their pulpits because they would not conform to the Middleton Act. These pastors were not only thrown out of their pulpits, but they were removed from their manses and their pay was cancelled. One of these men was Alexander Peden, who after the ejectment spent his years preaching to the covenanters on the hills and in the moors of southern Scotland. He did this at great risk to his life.

His church, before the ejectment, was in New Luce. On his final Sabbath with his people, he preached in the morning and the evening from Acts 20. In the evening service, his final sermon was on Acts 20:32, "And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified." The people did not want to leave at the close of church; great emotion gripped them as they knew the time of parting with their pastor had come. As Peden left the pulpit, he turned and knocked on the pulpit three times with his Bible and he said the following words: "In my Master's name I arrest thee; that none enter thee but such as enter as I have done, by the door." It was a striking moment, and a statement that came to pass. For the next 27 years the pulpit of that church remained unoccupied, and no minister who had conformed ever entered the pulpit. The man who succeeded Peden, 27 years later, was a man after Peden's own heart, a man of great covenant conviction named William Kyle.