The book Arran; - Cook Clan

THE CHURCH AFTER THE REFORMATION 139
case of Kilbride, despite the omen that its first minister
on record, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century,
bore the name of John Knox and was a graduate of Glasgow
University. He was deposed in 1649 for ' keeping change
in his house, selling drink, etc' ^ This was an old-time sore
in the kirk, for in 1576 it is the judgment of the General
Assembly that ' a minister or reader tapping aile, beare,
or wine, or keeping open tavern, sould be exhorted by the
Commissioners to keip decorum.' ^ Apparently this re-
source was one way of supplementing small and uncertain
incomes, but the kirk's face was set against it, and by
Knox's time even that excuse could no longer be made,
since the financial position of the church had been substantially
readjusted. Knox subsided into poverty.
His successor was 'Alexander M'Laine ' of the Lochbuy
Macleans,^ who was transferred to Kilbride from Kilmorie
parish, which thereafter, for a time, lay desolate, and had
to be served from the sister parish as explained above.
John Cunison, who followed, had to meet the restoration
of Episcopacy under Charles ii., and, refusing that rule, was
deprived in 1662. But he lived to be one of the sixty ' outed '
clergymen restored to their livings after the Revolution of
1688, and from 1690 to 1692 again ministered in his old
charge, till transferred to Killean, whence he had originally
come to Arran.
Two others occupied the parish during the suspension
of Cunison, and apparently Kilmorie also till 1688, of whom
the first, Archibald Beith, clearly an alien, distinguished
himself in a most unpastorlike manner. In 1671 a proclamation
was issued authorising the lieges to prevent the
1 Scott's Fasti, vol. iii. p. 41 S.
' Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland, vol. iii. p. 377. The phrase ' keipe
decorum ' is ambiguous. It may mean that it was indecorous for a clergyman to keep
a public-house at all.
.' ' Maclean ' here represents the general spelling of the name. The Lochbuy
branch use the form 'Maclaine.'