EXTRAORDINARY COIN DUCT OF A FREE CHURCH MINISTER.

Clutha Leader, Volume III, Issue 139, 9 March 1877, Page 3

EXTRAORDINARY COIN DUCT OF A FREE CHURCH MINISTER.

In the First Division of ihe Court of Sessions, there is now pending a petition by the Revr. James Philip Lilley, minister of the Free Knox's Church, Arbroath, for custody of his child. He states that he was married to his wife, who was a Miss Margaret Beattie Sal- | mond, on the 18th of July, 1.870, and they resided together till .March, 1876, when she left him and went back to stay with her relations. She was delivered of a female child on the 19th of May, and it is this child which forms the ground of the action. The petitioner attributes his wife's conduct and desertion to the interference of her brothers and sisters, the former of whom were elders m his congregation. Another point in his case is that the infant Las not been baptised, which, he avers, is a cause of* much pain and blame to him as a father and a minister. The respondent admits having left her husband's house, and says that circumstances not only rendered that course justifiable, but necessary. She avers that her husband is a man of irritable temper, violent passions, and sullen, discontented nature, and that she has been, since their marriage, the subject of sudden and violent outbursts of temper on his part. He placed no confidence in her, treated her in an unfeeling and unmanly manner, sneered at her, frequently sought to mortify and humiliate ber, and even went the length of personal violence to her. At the same time he never ceased preaching to her and at her, in season and out of season, the Christian virtues of love and forbearance and self-humiliation, which in his own home he so little practised. He had sneered and ridiculed her when alone and in the presence of the servant ; declared that &he was not a fit companion for him ; that the servant girl would have made a better wife ; doubted her Christianity ; prayed that he might be enabled to keep his hands off her ; and threatened; he would yet cow and tame her. She endeavoured by gentleness to win his love and confidence, but with no success ; and, notwithstanding

her approaching confinement, his cruelty aud unkindness increased, and therefore became the more intolerable. After enduring the utmost agony for eight months, she found that it was hoping against hope, and that, both for the sake of her own health and for that of her child, then unborn, it was absolutely necessary that she should leave him, at least for a time. Nor, since she left him, had there been any evidence of returning affection on his part, for on the 24th March last he wrote to her a long history of the result of his renewed self-scrutiny, passed sentence on himself, and called on God to be his witness ; and again on the 23rd April, while writing in endearing" terms to her, beseeching her to return to be confined in his house, he was, during the intervening period, writing to her brothers in the following terms : — " I hesitate not to remind you that I have a potent weapon in store (referring to his wife's approaching confinement). If Maggie retains long her present criminal attitude, and if it please the Creator to put that instrument (her then unborn child) into my hands, I shall feel not only impelled, but solemnly bouna as a husband to use it relentlessly. On this I will not enlarge, beyond saying that in Lochland House there is room both for my sister and a nurse." The respondent further states that she has all along been anxious that it should be baptised ; and but for the persecution of the petitioner taking advantage of the forms of that Church to which he and she belong, it would have been baptised at the proper time. The child, she adds, has been named and registered as Mary Salmond Lilley, and she denies that he has been refused access to his child ; but she decidedly objects to handing it over to his custody, because he is a most unfit person to have the charge of a tender infant, more particularly of a daughter. The petition and answers were sent to the Sumnaar Roll

for discussion.