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THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION

THE
SCOTTISH REFORMATION

Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics

(Being the Baird Lecture for 1899)

BY THE LATE
ALEXANDER F. MITCHELL, D.D., LL.D.

EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY
IN ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY

EDITED BY
D. HAY FLEMING, LL.D.

WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR
BY JAMES CHRISTIE, D.D.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCC

PREFACE.

Few men have shown more indomitable application to an arduous duty, amid physical weakness and bodily pain, than did the author of these Lectures in their preparation and revision. In the MS. there are a goodly number of additions and minute alterations in his own hand—some of them very tremulous, some of them in ink, some of them in pencil. He intended to revise them still more carefully ere they were published; but expressed the desire that, if he were not spared to do so, I would see them through the press. The Master, whom he served so long and so faithfully, having released him from the work he loved so well, and from the suffering he so patiently endured, the final revision has devolved upon me.

On the suggestion of Professor Robertson the book has been arranged in chapters. The sixth lecture having temporarily gone amissing before its delivery, Dr Mitchell prepared a rescension of it. The original and the rescension are now combined in chapter [x]. He intended to devote an extra lecture to Alesius, and another to Andrew Melville, but unfortunately was unable. The chapter on Alesius is therefore taken from two of his class-lectures, some of the longer extracts being thrown into appendices, and a few passages being slightly compressed. This is at once the fullest and the best account of Alesius that has yet been published. The facts concerning Melville in chapter [x.] are supplemented to a small extent in the paper quoted in Appendix [A].

Comparatively few of the authorities were entered in the MS. when it was placed in my hands. I have filled in many, and have taken care, in almost every instance where volume and page are given, to check the quotations with the originals. My notes, and my additions to Dr Mitchell's notes, are enclosed within square brackets; but when I have merely supplied authorities, they are not so distinguished. The list which he had drawn up of the works of Alesius was partly in an obsolete form of shorthand, which to me was quite undecipherable. Having been privileged to examine a good many of these rare treatises in various public libraries, I have been able, though only to an inconsiderable degree, to supplement the list; these additions being marked like those in the notes and other appendices. In revising the Lectures themselves, I have corrected a number of trifling slips, but have made no alteration of which Dr Mitchell would not have cordially approved had his attention been drawn to it.

In preparing the Lectures, Dr Mitchell availed himself of elaborate articles he had written at various times for periodicals and other publications. The present volume is valuable in several ways, not the least of these being that it embodies, on many obscure and important points, the matured views of one of the most competent and cautious of historical students—of one who grudged no time and spared no labour in eliciting and elucidating the truth.

D. H. F.

December 1899.

THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION.

CONTENTS.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
OF
THE VERY REV. ALEXANDER FERRIER MITCHELL, D.D., LL.D.,
Professor of Ecclesiastical History in St Mary's College, St Andrews.

A pathetic and almost melancholy interest attaches to this volume of the Baird Lectures. Their scholarly and accomplished author may be said to have entered on the last stage of the malady to which he succumbed when they were read for him in Blythswood Parish Church, Glasgow, by his friend and former student, Professor Robertson, the closing one, indeed, having been delivered but a few days before his death. In proof of the deep interest which he took in the subject of these Lectures, and of his desire to present them in as perfect a form as possible, it may also be mentioned that he employed his time in revising them while confined to bed during the protracted and painful illness through which he passed. The editing of them he intrusted to another friend, Dr Hay Fleming of St Andrews, with whom he had much in common—similarity of tastes and interest in the same literary pursuits having led to an intercourse between them which ripened into mutual confidence and esteem. Had Professor Mitchell lived to see the work through the press himself, there is hardly room to doubt that, as in the case of most of his other publications, additional explanatory and supplementary notes on obscure points would have been appended by him. As it is, the editor in executing his task has done what he could in this respect.

When the decease of the venerable Professor took place at St Andrews towards the end of March of this year, it was felt that the Church of Scotland had been bereft not only of one of her ablest and most trusted leaders, but of one of the wisest and warmest friends of her missions; and the many tributes paid to his memory, both from the pulpit and in the press, were all expressive of the high regard in which he was held, and of the sense of public loss caused by his removal. But the loss was not that of his own Church alone, nor of the University with which his name had been so long and so honourably associated. There are those in other communions who had learned to look upon him as "a master of Israel," and in all Presbyterian Churches especially he was recognised as one of the ablest and most learned exponents of the principles which they hold in common, and as one of the most earnest defenders of "the faith once delivered to the saints."

As many of those who are familiar with Professor Mitchell's writings may know little or nothing of his personal history, it has been suggested that a short biographical sketch of him would form an appropriate introduction to this posthumous volume. The particulars woven together in the following narrative have been collected from various sources, some of them having been furnished by members of his own family.

Alexander Ferrier Mitchell was born on 10th September 1822 in the old ecclesiastical city of Brechin, with which his ancestors had had an honourable connection for several generations. His grandfather, Alexander Mitchell, and his father, David Mitchell, were both known as Convener Mitchell, probably as having succeeded each other in the convenership of the local guilds. On the maternal side he was descended from another Brechin family, some of the members of which had in their day served in various capacities abroad, one of his granduncles, Alexander Ferrier, after whom he was named, having been a doctor in India, and another, Captain David Ferrier, "a brave and bold sailor,"—in memory of whom there is a tablet on the east door of the old Cathedral,—having made a voyage round the world in the Dolphin, in which also he ran the blockade in time of war into some of the French ports. Elizabeth, daughter of James Ferrier at Broadmyre, the Professor's mother, was a woman of good judgment and deep piety, and from her he seems to have inherited some of the most prominent features of his character. He was one of a family of three, his brother and sister having died, the former at Bloemfontein in South Africa, many years ago. In childhood he had a narrow escape, a cart having run over his body. He was picked up and carried home by the minister of the Episcopal church. As a boy he passed through more than one severe illness, and when taken for a change to Glenesk one summer he was described by a sympathetic friend as "a deein' laddie." To a mother's unwearied care and attention he owed, under the divine blessing, the recovery of his health, and to a mother's religious training he owed in no small degree that knowledge of the Holy Scriptures and that pious disposition by which he was distinguished from his earliest years. His elementary education he received at the grammar-school of his native town, and when fifteen years of age he proceeded to St Andrews to prosecute his studies with a view to the Christian ministry.

In those days the journey thither was not made with the comfort and facility with which it is now accomplished; and the Professor himself has told how, on landing from the North off the ferry-boat at Newport, he walked all the way to St Andrews—a distance of eleven miles—along with the carrier's son by the side of the cart which conveyed his luggage to its destination. Widely different as were the future careers of those two youths, there were various interesting points of contact in their lives, the one becoming an eminent doctor in the University, and the other filling the honourable position of a magistrate in the ancient city, while both were associated as members of the kirk-session of the Town Church.

At the very outset of his career at St Andrews the young student from Brechin gained the highest distinction, having won the first bursary open to students entering the University, as the result of a competitive examination in classical scholarship. Throughout his course, both in Arts and Divinity, he maintained a highly honourable place in all the classes, distinguishing himself particularly by proficiency in Hebrew and other Oriental languages; while he won the commendation of his professors and the esteem of his fellow-students not more by his attainments in learning than by the sterling integrity of his character and the example of his consistent Christian life. Among his contemporaries at College were not a few who in after-life rose to prominent positions in the Church, one of these being his future colleague, the late Principal Tulloch, with whom he continued to have most cordial relations during a lifelong friendship.

On completing the usual curriculum of study at the University, Mr Mitchell was in 1844 licensed to preach the Gospel, and after acting for some time as an assistant, first to the minister of the parish of Meigle and then to the minister of the parish of Dundee, he was in 1847 ordained by the Presbytery of Meigle to the pastoral charge of the parish of Dunnichen in his native county.

The Professor had been no passive spectator of the exciting and momentous events which were taking place in the Church of Scotland in the years which immediately preceded and followed his entrance on the work of the ministry; and in his address as Moderator of the General Assembly, four decades afterwards, he gives a graphic account of the impressions made upon him by his visits to the Supreme Court of the Church during that period of acrimonious controversy and painful separation. He says: "My first view of the General Assembly was gained in 1840, where from the public gallery of the Tron Church, in near proximity to Dr John Ritchie, of the Potterrow (whose thoughts were already running in the same direction as those of his successors are now), I listened to the thrilling eloquence of Chalmers, and the calm, thoughtful utterances of Cook, and witnessed the first of those titanic encounters between Cunningham and Robertson, which the pen of Hugh Miller and the histories of the period have made classical. My next glimpse of the Assembly was in 1843, when, from the students' gallery of St Andrew's Church, beside my friend William Smith, afterwards of North Leith, I witnessed that sad sight which was never to fade from our memories, nor cease to influence the course of our thought and action—the scene when Welsh, Chalmers, Gordon, and many more good and devoted ministers, abandoning in despair the contest of ten years, withdrew from the Church of their fathers, to rear another in which they hoped to enjoy greater freedom and peace. My next view of the Assembly was in 1848, when, along with Dr Tulloch, and two or three other college friends, I took my place for the first time as a member of the House, and when my old preceptor, then Professor of Church History in St Mary's College, filled the chair. The Church at that time was but slowly recovering from the staggering blow she had received in '43, and the great Dr Robertson was shaping out the splendid scheme which was to constitute her mission for the immediate future, and give to her the consciousness and confidence of reviving life. There were plenty of aged men there, whose lives had been honourably worn out in her service; a goodly band of young men, with not a little of the ardour and enthusiasm of youth; not a few of riper years, who, after weary waiting, had at last been promoted to pastoral charges. But that class which is the mainstay of a Church—the men who have attained to experience by years of labour in her service, and are still able to bear the burden and heat of the day—was more scantily represented."

The young minister, with so many conspicuous gifts and graces, was not allowed to remain long in the quiet pastoral charge at Dunnichen, where his ministry had been very acceptable; and in 1848—only one year after his ordination, and when not more than twenty-six years of age—he was appointed to the chair of Hebrew in St Mary's College, St Andrews, through which he had so recently passed as a student. He has himself told of the cordial welcome which he received from the venerable Principal Haldane and the other members of the professorial staff, and of the harmony with which they co-operated in the work of the College.

It was not then a common thing that so young a minister should be called to occupy such a position of dignity and responsibility, nor was Hebrew then so popular a branch of study as it has, for various reasons, since become in our Divinity Halls; but the ability and success with which the Professor discharged the duties of his chair, and the salutary influence which he exerted in many ways upon the students, more than justified the appointment. He was one of the first in Scotland to introduce a scientific method in the teaching of Hebrew, and his class-room became a place of very real work, necessitating careful preparation on the part of the students. Some of these, perhaps, thought him rather exacting, and the strict discipline which he enforced was not altogether to their liking; but there were very few who did not value his good opinion, or who would not have considered it a kind of degradation to incur his displeasure; while many, imbued with something of his own spirit, attained under his guidance to such a degree of proficiency in the knowledge of the sacred tongue as made the reading of the Old Testament in the original a source of interest and pleasure to them in subsequent years. Dr William Wright, one of the greatest of Orientalists, was one of his students, and two others of them are occupants of Hebrew Chairs in Scottish Universities.

The appointment of the Professor to the Convenership of the Committee on the Mission to the Jews in 1856 marked a new era in its history, in respect both of the method of its operations and the field in which these have ever since been carried on. One of the results of the Crimean war, which had then but recently closed, was the opening of the Turkish empire for evangelistic enterprise; and it may be said that the Professor laid the foundations of the Mission in the Levant at the several stations occupied by the Church of Scotland, which are now known not only as places of great historic interest but as important centres of missionary activity in which the Church bears an honourable part. In the autumn of 1857 he undertook a journey to the East at the request of the Committee, and in the course of his travels there visited not only the principal Turkish cities on the coast, but Jerusalem and other places in Palestine and Syria, collecting information with a view to find openings for the planting of the Mission at suitable stations in addition to the two which had been already occupied. The report which he presented on his return led by degrees to a great expansion of the Mission, and several of his own students and others were through his influence induced to enter the service of the Committee. With many other claims on his attention, he ungrudgingly gave up a great part of his time to the administration of the affairs of the Mission, over which for nineteen years he continued to preside with great zeal and wisdom, pressing its claims on the members of the Church, and guiding and encouraging the missionaries by an intelligent and sympathetic interest in their arduous work. When in 1875 he retired from the Convenership, the General Assembly expressed its sense of the value of the distinguished services which he had rendered to the Church in this department of her work in the following terms: "The Assembly are satisfied that the present prosperity of the Jewish Mission, and the remarkable progress which it has made, has been mainly owing to the great labour, the learning, enthusiasm, and warm and intelligent Christian interest which Dr Mitchell has devoted during these years to the cause of Jewish conversion in connection with the Church of Scotland." After his retirement from the Convenership he but seldom attended the meetings of the Committee, for the reason, as he was once heard to say, that he did not wish to appear to hamper his successors; but he never ceased to take a deep interest in the Mission, and none rejoiced more than he in its growing prosperity.

While the Professor still occupied the Hebrew Chair, he had shown a special aptitude for another branch of learning, in which he was yet to make a reputation for himself in the Churches not only of Britain but of America. In 1866 he published a lecture, primarily addressed to his students, on 'The Westminster Confession of Faith: A Contribution to the Study of its Historical Relations and to the Defence of its Teaching,' which, as a reply to views then current in certain quarters, attracted no little notice at the time of its publication, and which is not only of special interest as illustrating his theological standpoint, and the calm and temperate, yet earnest and vigorous, manner in which he could defend it, but is of permanent value as a contribution to the literature of the subject with which it deals. In the following year he published 'The Wedderburns and their Work, or the Sacred Poetry of the Scottish Reformation in its Relation to that of Germany'—a subject which was treated by him much more fully in one of his most recent works.

The Professor was known to possess a most extensive and accurate knowledge of Church History in general, and of Scottish Church History in particular; and when in 1868 he was called to occupy the Chair of Ecclesiastical History in St Mary's College, the appointment was hailed with satisfaction alike by the University and the Church. With an absorbing interest in his subject, and with the true instinct of the historian, he was most painstaking in ascertaining historical facts, never reaching his conclusions but as the result of patient and careful investigation; and those who knew him intimately can tell how little he grudged the trouble of a journey to Edinburgh or London, or even of an occasional excursion to the Continent, in order to prosecute his researches in libraries there with the view of verifying a statement, or of obtaining indubitable evidence on some controverted point. Besides those who had the privilege of listening to his prelections from the professorial chair, there are many in the Churches on both sides of the Atlantic who have profited by his great erudition; and his published writings, which all bear the impress of a master-hand, will always be reckoned standard works in Ecclesiastical History.

It is no part of the purpose of this notice to describe his various works in detail, but the mere enumeration of them will show what a life of unremitting study he lived. Besides those already referred to, he edited, along with the late Dr Struthers, in 1874, 'The Minutes of the Westminster Assembly from November 1644 to March 1649,' to which is prefixed an elaborate Historical Introduction written by himself; in 1882 he wrote a 'Historical Notice of Archbishop Hamilton's Catechism' (first printed at St Andrews in 1551), prefixed to Paterson's black-letter reprint of the same; in 1883 he published his Baird Lecture, 'The Westminster Assembly: Its History and Standards'; in 1886 he published 'The Catechisms of the Second Reformation'; in 1888 he edited, for the Scottish Text Society, 'The Richt Vay to the Kingdome of Heuine,' by John Gau, the earliest known prose-treatise in the Scottish dialect setting forth the doctrines of the Reformers; and in 1897, for the same Society, 'The Gude and Godlie Ballads,' reprinted from the edition of 1567, with a full and most interesting Introduction. For the Scottish History Society he also edited in 1892 and 1896, along with the writer of this sketch, two volumes of 'The Records of the Commissions of the General Assembly,' covering the period 1646-1650, from the original manuscript in the Assembly library, with an introduction, notes, and appendices by himself. To these must be added the present volume of the Baird Lecture, 'The Scottish Reformation.'

The Baird Lecture on the Westminster Assembly was received with great favour in America as well as in this country, and a new edition of it was published at Philadelphia in 1897, in a notice of which in the 'Presbyterian and Reformed Review' the following statement occurs: "The book at once took its rank as the most trustworthy and sympathetic account of the Westminster Standards in existence, and rapidly ran out of print. The public is to be congratulated that Dr Mitchell has permitted himself to be persuaded by the [Presbyterian] Board to revise the text and allow a new edition to be issued to meet the present demand. The revision does not much alter the text. A phrase is more felicitously turned here or rendered a shade more exact or emphatic there; a few additional references are added in the notes; and a few additional citations and remarks incorporated in them: that is about all. But so good a book needed only these little touches of betterment."

The Professor also contributed to various journals and encyclopædias many important articles, chiefly on historical topics relating to Scotland, which, if collected, would form a volume of miscellaneous papers of great interest and value. The most important of these are included in the subjoined list: In the 'British and Foreign Evangelical Review,' January 1872, "Our Scottish Reformation: Its Distinctive Characteristics and Present-Day Lessons," pp. 87-128; October 1875, "Dr Merle D'Aubigné on the Reformation in Scotland," pp. 736-760; October 1876, "Killen's Ecclesiastical History of Ireland," pp. 713-741: in the 'Catholic Presbyterian,' March 1879, "Calvin and the Psalmody of the Reformed Churches": in the 'Scottish Church,' November 1886, "St Andrews in Covenanting Times": in the 'Year-Book of the Church of Scotland,' 1886, "Brief Sketch of the History of the Reformed Church of Scotland": in 'St Giles' Lectures,' First Series, 1880-81, "Pre-Reformation Scotland"; and in Fourth Series, 1883-84, "The Primitive or Apostolic and Sub-Apostolic Church," being the first of the lectures entitled, "The Churches of Christendom." To Dr Schaff's Encyclopædia he contributed separate articles on "St Columba," "The Culdees," "Patrick Hamilton," "Iona," and "The Keltic Church"; and to the 'Presbyterian and Reformed Review,' published at Philadelphia, he contributed a review of Dr Hume Brown's 'John Knox.' Besides many Reports on various matters presented to the General Assembly, he issued for special purposes a "Statement regarding the Eldership," and a "List of Acts of the Scottish Parliament, and of Acts, Overtures, and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, adopted at various times for the Acknowledgment of the True Reformed Protestant Religion, the Maintenance of Sound Doctrine, and the Subscription of the Confessions of Faith of 1560 and 1647." When at Geneva, on one of his visits to the Continent, he prepared for private circulation, from the original, which is still preserved among the historical treasures in the Hotel de Ville, "Livre Des Anglois, or Register of the English Church at Geneva under the pastoral care of Knox and Goodman, 1555-1559," with a Prefatory Notice and a Facsimile of pp. 49, 50. To this list of his minor works may be added a sermon on "The Unsearchable Riches of Christ," published in 1879.

The Professor accorded a generous and helpful sympathy to those who were workers in the field in which he laboured himself with so great assiduity and success; and he was not only a member both of the Scottish History Society and of the Scottish Text Society, but took an active interest in their affairs. He was also one of the representatives of the Church of Scotland in the General Presbyterian Alliance from the date of its formation, and took part in the business of all its General Councils, at the first of which, held at Edinburgh in 1877, he laid on the table a paper which he had drawn up on "The Harmony between the Bibliology of the Westminster Confession and that of the earlier Reformed Confessions, exhibited in parallel columns." He was appointed Convener of the Committee on the Desiderata of the History of the Presbyterian Churches; and at the following General Council, held at Philadelphia in 1880, it fell to him, in consequence of the death of Principal Lorimer, who was Convener of the British section of the Committee on Creeds and Formulas of Subscription, to give in the report containing "Answers to Queries regarding Creeds and Confessions." The Answers as regards the Church of Scotland, which had been prepared by himself, are to be found in the Report of the Proceedings of the Council, pp. 969-984. When in America he also delivered a course of lectures at Alleghany. His connection with the Alliance brought him into close contact with some of the leading Presbyterian divines of Britain and America, with whom his opinions on the history of the doctrine, worship, and government of the Church carried great weight; and Dr Schaff has acknowledged his obligations to him, among others, in his well-known work entitled 'The Creeds of Christendom.'

In 1885 the Church showed her appreciation of the Professor's character and work by electing him to the Moderatorship of the General Assembly, an office which he filled with a union of dignity and authority which reflected honour upon the Church. If there are parties in the Church of Scotland, he never identified himself with any of them, and had learned to call no man master but Christ. He knew his own mind, and could give forcible expression to his convictions when occasion required. Naturally of an unassuming disposition and unobtrusive manners, he never courted popularity nor sought to thrust his opinions upon others; and it was for this reason, perhaps, that he was deferred to even by those whose views were in some respects widely divergent from his. It was doubtless for this reason also, as well as for others, that he wielded so great an influence in the counsels of the Church, and probably few men had more to do than he with the shaping of her policy in recent years. In paying a tribute to his memory at a meeting of the Presbytery of Edinburgh a few days after his decease, the Very Rev. Dr Scott of St George's said that "by Professor Mitchell's death the Church had lost a laborious, faithful, successful, and honoured minister and professor, and perhaps one of the soundest and wisest counsellors that the Church ever had. He was a man who had friends in all the Churches. He knew how powerfully his influence had told in the Church—always for conciliation, not only so far as those without their own Church were concerned, but those within the Church also. Had it not been for Dr Mitchell's influence the relaxation of the formula regarding the subscription of elders would never have been carried through."

A man of a very catholic spirit, and a lover of peace and concord, the Professor, like many others who longed for a comprehensive union of the Scottish Churches, would willingly have made all reasonable concessions for the attainment of so desirable an object. But he was too loyal a son of the Church of Scotland to consent to any unworthy compromise, and in the hour of danger no one was more ready than he to exert all the influence at his command in her defence. Readers of Dr Boyd's 'Twenty-five Years of St Andrews' may remember the account there given of the impression made by the Professor's sermon in the Town Church in the height of the contest in 1885, when the question of Disestablishment was brought so prominently before the electors of the St Andrews Burghs. Dr Boyd says: "It had been intimated at the services during the day that Dr Mitchell, our Professor of Church History, would lecture in the parish church in the evening on 'Some aspects of the Church Question deserving of consideration in the present crisis.' Dr Mitchell was that year Moderator of the Kirk: and he very seldom preaches. The church was filled by a great congregation. I should not in the least degree have been surprised to hear Dr Mitchell preach wisely and devoutly: that is his usual way. But it did surprise me to find that man of calm and well-balanced mind fire up into a pathos and vehemence which I have rarely seen equalled and never surpassed. The question of disestablishment had been raised: and one was made to realise how it stirs the blood of good men here. And not merely were there this evening a fire, a keenness, a power of stirring a multitude to the depth of their nature, which are rare indeed, but an incisive severity of denunciation which few had expected from that calm, cautious man. And if the preacher was at white-heat, so was the congregation long before he was done. Several times there would have been loud applause, had it not been hushed."

The attitude which the Professor maintained in regard to the doctrine and worship of the Church was a strictly conservative one, and may be best described in his own words, taken from an article included in the list of his minor works. In that article, after quoting the advice tendered by an eminent minister of the Church of England to a minister of the Church of Scotland—"Stick by your own Kirk: it is an honest Kirk, one of the few that has fairly rid itself of sacerdotalism and ritualism, and you have no cause to be ashamed of it"—he goes on to say: "The advice is not unneeded in the present day by others than he to whom it was originally tendered, and I give it this publicity for the benefit of all whom it may concern. The Reformed Church of Scotland from the first rid herself of these medieval corruptions, and the attempt to bring her again under the yoke issued in dire disaster to those who made it. This surely is no time for the Presbyterian Churches to swerve from the testimony they have so long and resolutely borne against all such errors. When we think of the mischief they are now causing in the Church of England, and the grief they are occasioning to many of her most loyal sons, rather does it become us to bear more decided testimony to the truths, that under the New Testament there is but one Priest, who ever liveth to make intercession for us, and one sacrifice once offered, which perfects for ever them that are sanctified; that He has not communicated His priestly office to His ministers either by succession or delegation, nor authorised them to repeat or continue that sacrifice which is the propitiation for sin; and that He has neither Himself imposed, nor warranted others to impose, a load of 'fondly' invented ceremonies in His worship."

If the Professor thus strenuously opposed sacerdotalism on the one hand, he had as little sympathy with Broad Churchism on the other. The non-natural sense in which the narratives of the New Testament miracles are understood and interpreted by some of the modern critics he rejected as subversive of Christian truth, a common saying of his being, "If the Gospel is not true historically, it is not true at all: 'If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain'"; and while he mellowed with advancing years, he never wavered in his deep religious convictions, nor for a moment relaxed the tenacious grasp which he had of the doctrines of Christianity as set forth in the standards of the Reformed Churches. One of his latest sayings was, "I die in the faith which I have always professed."

From his Alma Mater the Professor had received the degree of D.D. in 1862, and in 1892 the University of Glasgow conferred upon him the degree of LL.D. in recognition of his eminence as a teacher and an author. A young minister of the Church, himself one of his most distinguished students, has drawn a picture of him as he appeared about the latter of these dates, which is so true to the life that no excuse is needed for introducing it here. He says: "St Andrews and Professor Mitchell are inseparable. For forty-four years he has taught in the University: first the Hebrew Tongue; next the History of the Church of Christ. As a Professor, Dr Mitchell comes into contact with a comparatively small number of students. The classes in St Mary's are diminutive—in some ways a source of much gratification to the writer and others—consequently he is little known by most men here. Of course, all are familiar with the Figure pacing the town in the bright of the forenoon; or, arm-in-arm with a youthful Professor, walking as far as the Swilcan; or, at a Graduation Ceremony, scanning the audience, if perhaps he may get a glimpse of some old pupil among the crowd of interested spectators. For many of his students have risen high: and some of them have a weight of years to bear. But all are not aware that in the Church History Class-Room English is spoken as she is nowhere else in St Andrews. The beautifully rounded and perfectly balanced sentences, and the elegance of the language, will hardly be excelled. To make the study of Church History what is called popular is one of the few impossibilities of life, but there is no man living who can invest the subject with more interest; for Professor Mitchell is thoroughly up to date with all his facts, and loses no opportunity of visiting the great German authorities.... To be reproved in class by the Professor is not to be desired: to be 'spoken to' in his ante-room still less so. Many men stand in awe of him—I have always thought unnecessarily so."

The Professor continued to take a warm interest in his students after they had left the Divinity Hall, and had entered on the work of the ministry; and when attending the General Assembly he could generally tell how many of its members had passed through one or other of his classes in St Mary's College. When he retired from the duties of his Chair in 1894, the occasion was regarded as affording a suitable opportunity of giving public expression to the esteem in which he was held by his friends, and to their grateful appreciation of his services both to the Church and the University; and in 1895, while the General Assembly was in session, he was presented, in name of a large number of his former students and other friends, with an illuminated address, a cheque for 200 guineas, and his portrait by Sir George Reid—acknowledged to be one of the best that have yet come from the studio of the President of the Royal Scottish Academy. The Right Hon. James A. Campbell of Stracathro, M.P., with whom he had long had intimate relations, presided at the ceremony and made the presentation. The reply of the Professor, as containing many interesting reminiscences, and as showing the view which he took himself of his life and work, is here inserted in extenso. He said:—

"Mr Campbell, I thank you, sir, with all my heart, for the many kind things—far more kind than I deserve—which you have just said of me, and for the many kind services which you have rendered to me in the course of our lifelong friendship; and I thank, with all my heart, you, my many esteemed friends and pupils, who have united in presenting me with this address expressive of your warm affection, this speaking likeness and munificent gift. Kindness far more than I have merited has followed me all my life through—never more conspicuously than at the close of my public career; and now in retiring from the professorial work I loved, and from the College for which almost for half a century I lived and laboured, it is a consolation to me to know that I carry with me into my retirement the esteem of so many honoured friends and the affectionate regard of so many former pupils. Some have been speaking lately of the loneliness of a Scottish student's college life. I can only say for myself that the years I spent as a student in St Mary's College were among the happiest of my life, and that the friendships then formed within the little band of my fellow-students were among the most valued and lasting of those I have enjoyed. I have but to name John Robertson, afterwards minister of Glasgow Cathedral; John Tulloch, afterwards Principal of St Mary's College; William Milligan, afterwards Professor of Biblical Criticism in Aberdeen; William Dickson, afterwards Professor of Divinity in Glasgow; Drs W. H. Gray, Gloag, and Herdman, and with these some who afterwards joined the Free Church: Dr Thomson, long at the head of the Free Church Jewish Mission at Constantinople; Dr Thomas Brown, younger brother of my late colleague, Dr William Brown, agent for the Turkish Missions Aid Society; and Edward Cross, afterwards Free Church minister at Monifieth, with whom I laboured in happiest intercourse in Dundee, he being assistant to the Free Church minister in the same district of the town when I was assistant to the Parish minister. When in my twenty-sixth year I returned as a Professor in the College where so shortly before I had been a student, I can never forget the kindness with which I was received by my aged instructors there, especially by Principal Haldane, whose kind counsels were then invaluable to me, nor the kindness of Professors Duncan and Alexander, the only two of my instructors remaining in the Old College. St Andrews about that time had the reputation of being rather a hot place. The conviction that I was a man of rather placid temper, who would not add fuel to the flame, I believe weighed considerably with Lord Advocate Rutherfurd in finally recommending me for the Chair. Within St Mary's College we were a happy family, and the youth of twenty-six and the two aged Professors beyond threescore and ten continued to work in unbroken harmony—the youth deeming it a special privilege to aid the venerable Principal in his class-work during the last year of his life, as well as to aid him and his aged colleague in their pulpit work. It was soon after this that I began to take an active part in Church work, attending the General Assembly as an elder and as Convener of the Jewish Mission—doing what I could to reorganise it in Turkey, first in conjunction with such venerable fathers as Drs Muir, Hunter, Grant, and James Robertson, and with several brethren nearer my own age, who were bearing the burden and heat of the day—Drs Crawford, Nicholson, Nisbet, William Robertson, and Elder Cumming, and such laymen as Sheriff Arkley, David Smith, Henry Cheyne, John Elder, John Tawse, and the good Edmund Baxter, all now gone to their rest and their reward. Principal Haldane was succeeded by my old class-fellow, Principal Tulloch, in harmony with whom I wrought for thirty years in the College, occasionally taking part of his work, as I had of his predecessor's, when he was laid aside by ill-health, and also taking part with him in Church work, especially in the work of the Anti-Patronage Committee, on whose success so many in the Church had set their hearts. After his untimely removal, though I had served for seven or eight years beyond the statutory thirty, I continued at my post, and in the most kind and cordial relations both in Church and University work with his successor, Principal Cunningham, heartily co-operating with him in the repeal of what has been termed the Black Act of 1711, and in the restitution of the old formula for ministers and elders, which are now so generally welcomed, and have been acknowledged by one at least of the three who protested against the change to be a great boon. I have often spoken of the pleasure I have had in superintending the work of my students, and my gratification at the zest with which they took to the study both of Hebrew and Church History. The circumstances which led to my resignation are already well known to you all, and I need only say that it was to me a very regretful necessity. I leave in each of the three other Divinity Faculties at least one distinguished pupil, and in St Mary's College two who, with their younger colleagues, I trust will strive to make it more than ever a School of the Prophets, a nursery for earnest, faithful, scholarly, and devoted ministers, who shall set high above all passing isms Christ the personal Saviour, and those great truths as to His divine nature, incarnation, atoning death, and glorious resurrection, to which the historic Church of Christ through so many centuries has clung as her life and strength and joy. Christ before, Christ behind,—according to St Patrick's prayer,—Christ above, Christ beneath, Christ in the heart, Christ in the home. I heartily thank you all for your great kindness, and especially Principal Stewart and Mr Wenley, and one who once said I had been as a father to him, and of whom I may truly say that he has been as a son to me."

In 1852 the Professor married the eldest daughter of the late Mr Michael Johnstone of Archbank, near Moffat, who belonged to an influential yeoman family that has been connected with Annandale for the last two hundred years. The late Mr Peter Johnstone, brother of Mrs Mitchell's father, who was a proprietor as well as a large farmer, is still remembered as having done a great deal to promote the cause of education in the district where he resided; and her brother, the late Mr James Johnstone, was tenant of Bodsbeck farm, which is the scene of the Ettrick Shepherd's well-known Covenanting story—"The Brownie of Bodsbeck." How much Mrs Mitchell did to brighten the life and to minister to the happiness of the Professor can be known only to those who have had the privilege of being admitted into the inner circle of their friends, and there are not a few who have very pleasant reminiscences of delightful intercourse with them in their house at 56 South Street, where the duty of entertaining strangers seemed never to be forgotten. Their family of four sons and two daughters all survive, with the exception of the eldest son, Robert Haldane, who died several years ago in Australia, to which he had emigrated along with his brother Johnstone.

Probably few are aware that the Professor spent many of his happiest days, and did much of his literary work, at Gowanpark, his country residence near Brechin, which, with its charm of seclusion and restfulness, no one who has visited it can ever forget, and which his family came to regard as their home almost as much as St Andrews. There he found relaxation in the interest which he took in the work of his little farm, which was his own property, and as long as he had health he enjoyed a ramble among the neighbouring hills, or a walk, varied by an occasional drive, along the quiet country roads. His home in the country, however, was with him no mere place of recreation, still less of idleness, and there, as elsewhere, he never failed to find his chief source of pleasure in the prosecution of his favourite studies.

When the Professor retired from the duties of his Chair he did not cease to take an interest in the affairs of the College, of which he was an ornament while he lived, and with which, as was said in a notice of him at the time of his death, his name will always be associated—like those of Andrew Melville, Samuel Rutherford, and others in remote and troublous times, and that of Principal Tulloch in our own more peaceful days. Nor did he cease to interest himself in the work of the Church which he loved so well and had served so faithfully. Perhaps it was to show his love for the Church as much as to gratify his own feelings that, amid great bodily infirmity, he undertook the journey to Edinburgh, in May 1898, to attend the General Assembly. He was unable, indeed, to be present there more than once or twice, and when on one occasion he occupied the Moderator's chair for a few minutes, a thrill of respectful sympathy passed through the House. In a letter written a few days after his return home he says, "I am very pleased to have been able to give even such limited attendance," adding, with a touch of pathos, as if anticipating that the visit would be his last, "in the fiftieth year since Mr John Tulloch and Alex. F. Mitchell were first returned as members."

Soon afterwards he removed to his loved retreat at Gowanpark, but his health did not improve, and he was but seldom able to leave the house. Most of the letters he wrote at this time, some of them in pencil, with his head resting on the pillow, were evidently intended to be his parting words to those to whom they were addressed. In one of these, written in the middle of September, he says, "For the first fortnight after I came here I was able to go out of doors, and in my invalid chair bask in the sun for an hour a-day. I am still keeping my bed in the hope of being able to return without risk to St Andrews in the end of the month;" and then, alluding to a subject his interest in which seems to have helped to keep him alive, he says, "I have got five of my six Baird Lectures transcribed. Of course I must get some one to read them for me."

When he returned to St Andrews, the burden of his infirmities grew heavier, and as the spring approached it was manifest that he was nearing the end. He was greatly affected by the tidings of the tragic death of Dr Boyd, who had paid him a visit shortly before his departure for the south. On the Monday before he died he repeated the words of the second paraphrase in a clear, strong voice, and quoted almost the last recorded words of St Paul, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith." On Tuesday evening he desired some one to sing to him, and as Miss Mitchell was unable to control her feelings to do so, Mr Smith, his amanuensis, who had come in, was asked by him to sing "Jesus, Lover of my Soul." When this was done he turned to Miss Mitchell, and said, "What would you like?" and they sang together "Rock of Ages." With uncomplaining patience he had suffered much, but welcome rest came to him on the morning of Wednesday, 22nd March. Having served his own generation by the will of God, he fell asleep amid the tender regrets of his family, leaving behind him a memory that will always be held in honour, and an example of laborious service, of deep piety, and of fervent trust in Christ.

In compliance with his own wish, his remains were conveyed to Brechin, where they were laid to rest beside those of his fathers under the shadow of the old Cathedral, the members of the local Presbytery, in token of their respect, being present on the occasion. "The world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever."

Gilmerton Manse, December 1899.

THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION.

CHAPTER I.
THE NATURE AND NEED OF THE REFORMATION.

With the single exception of the period which covers the introduction and first marvellous triumphs of Christianity, the Reformation of the sixteenth century must be owned as perhaps the greatest and most glorious revolution in the history of the human race. And the years of earnest contendings and heroic sufferings which prepared the way for its triumph in many lands and issued in its cruel suppression in others, and the story of the men who by God's grace were enabled to bear the brunt of the battle and to lead their countrymen on to victory or to martyrdom, will ever have a fascination for all in whose hearts faith in the great truths, then more clearly brought to light, has not yet altogether evaporated. The movement then initiated was no mere effort to get quit of acknowledged scandals, which had long been grieved over but never firmly dealt with; no mere desire to lop off a few later accretions, which had gathered round and obscured the faith once delivered to the saints;[1] no mere "return to the Augustinian, or the Nicene, or the Ante-Nicene age," but a vast progress beyond any previous age since the death of St John—a Its Animating Principle. deeper plunge into the meaning of revelation than had been made by Augustine, or Anselm, or St Bernard, or À Kempis, or Wycliffe, or Tauler. Its object was to get back to the divine sources of Christianity,—to know, and understand, and appropriate it as it came fresh and pure from the lips of the Son of God and His inspired apostles, not excluding that chosen vessel to whom the grace had been given "to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ." It was, in fact, a return to the old Gospel so attractively set forth by him in his Epistles, and verified to the reformers by their own inmost spiritual experience under deep convictions of sin and shortcoming. The cry of their awakened consciences had been, How shall we sinners have relief from our load and be justified before God? And this, as has been said, was just the old question put to the apostle himself by the jailer at Philippi, What must I do to be saved? And the answer their own experience warranted them with one accord to proclaim was still, Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, believe in the riches of His pardoning mercy, in the merit of His atoning death, in the freeness and power of His efficacious grace. By believing, however, they meant, and were careful to explain that they meant, not a mere intellectual assent to the truth of the facts, but such an assent as drew with it the trust of the heart and the personal surrender of the soul to Christ; or—to use language of somewhat later origin—the individual appropriation of the freely offered Saviour, with all His fulness of blessing, pardon, and righteousness by His one offering once offered, and renewal into His own image by the continuous indwelling of His Holy Spirit.

Such was the animating principle which gave power to the teaching of the reformers in all lands, and which constitutes still the central article of a standing or a falling church to all their true-hearted successors—Christ crucified for our sins, raised again for our justification, and now exalted to the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens as Prince and Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sin and all needed grace to those who thus believe in Him, and are brought into union with Him. And the Reformed Church will never perish or decay while it continues to set forth this Gospel, and is honoured by its divine Head to bring it home to the hearts and consciences of men, with the same power as its first teachers were honoured with in the brave days of old. For it must never be forgotten, I repeat, that the Reformation movement was not only the introduction of a more scriptural and scientific method of exhibiting Christian doctrine, and simple unfolding of its teaching Infusion of a New Life. as to man's fallen state and the remedy their heavenly Father had in His love provided for them; not only the reassertion of the supremacy of the written Word of God over human traditions, as well as of the right of all Christian men and women to have direct access to that blessed Word; not only the translation into the vernacular—German, English, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish—and the circulation throughout Western Europe of that which for ages had been to the Christian laity as a book that is sealed; but it was also, above all this, the infusion of a new and higher life into the churches. We fall short of a full comprehension of the movement if we fail to recognise that the God of all grace and blessing was then pleased to "send a plentiful rain to confirm His inheritance when it was weary," to grant a second Pentecost to the church, to make the people willing in the day of His power, and to pour out His Spirit in rich abundance upon men.

With all the conscious and unconscious preparation which had paved the way for them, the men who were God's chosen instruments at that crisis were made deeply to feel and humbly to own that it was God Himself who had led them on—at times by ways they had not thought of; that it was He who had upheld them in their extremity when all human power seemed to be arrayed against them; that it was He who, when their resources were exhausted, was pleased, in the day when they cried unto Him, to hear their prayer and revive their hopes by the plentiful outpouring of His Spirit. How feelingly this was acknowledged by Luther at various crises in his life is known to all who are in any measure acquainted with his thrilling story. No one could have more constantly in his heart or more frequently on his lips the Hebrew psalmist's song of holy confidence, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.... There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God." There was also that other which, under reverses and discouragements, was the solace of our own reformer, "If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us: then they had swallowed us up quick.... Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth." As they mused the fire burned and found expression in such songs of holy confidence as—

"A sure stronghold our God is He,
A trusty shield and weapon;
Our help He'll be, and set us free
Whatever ill may happen.

. . . . . . . . . .

Through our own force we nothing can,
Straight were we lost for ever,
But for us fights the proper Man,
By God sent to deliver.
Ask ye who this may be?
Christ Jesus named is He,
Of Sabaoth the Lord
Sole God to be adored,
'Tis He must win the battle."[2]

"If God were not upon our side
When foes around us rage,
Were not Himself our help and guide
When bitter war they wage,
Were He not Israel's mighty shield,
To whom their utmost crafts must yield,
We surely must have perished."[3]

Decay of the Medieval Church.

By the time at which reforming influences began manifestly to show themselves in Scotland, that grand medieval organisation, which had supplanted the simpler arrangements of the old Celtic church, had in its turn exhausted its life powers, and shown unmistakable signs of deep-seated corruption and hopeless decay. Whatever good it may have been honoured to do in times past,—in keeping alive the knowledge of God and of things divine in the midst of "a darkness which might be felt," in promoting a higher civilisation than the Celtic, in alleviating the evils of the feudalism which Anglo-Norman settlers had brought in, in founding parishes and universities and some other institutions which, with a purified church and revived Christian life, were to be a source of blessing after it was swept away,—yet now at last it had grossly failed to keep alive among the common people true devotion, or to give access to the sources at which the flame might have been rekindled; it had failed to provide educated men for its ordinary cures, to raise the masses from the rudeness and ignorance in which they were still involved, and even to maintain that hearty sympathy with them and that kindly interest in their temporal welfare which its best men in its earlier days had shown. It continued to have its services in a language which had for ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely circulated among them.[4] It did not, when the invention of printing put it in its power, make any effort to circulate among them the Holy Book, that they might read therein, in their own tongue, the message of God's love. No doubt it had its pictures and images, its mystery plays and ceremonies, which it deemed fit books for children and the unlearned. But it forgot that these children were growing in capacity, even if allowed to grow up untrained; that "to credulous simplicity was succeeding a spirit of eager curiosity, an impatience of mere authority, and a determination to search into the foundation of things"; and that, if it was to maintain its place, it must not only keep abreast but ahead of advancing intelligence and morality. But the old church began greatly to decline just as the laity began to rise. Bishop Kennedy, I suppose, was almost its last preaching bishop; and the character of the preaching, so far as preaching was still continued by the friars and some of the inferior clergy, was not generally fitted to supply the lack of Bibles and catechisms, and other vernacular books of instruction. It never grappled, as it ought, with the problem of lightening the burdens it had long exacted of the peasantry; but refused almost to the last moment to ease even the most galling of them. It never grappled, as it ought, with the problem of the education of the masses; and what was done for those of the community in more fortunate circumstances was done more by the efforts of a few noble-minded individuals than by any corporate action of Church or State. There is not among all its codes of canons anything approaching to the clear ringing utterances of our First Book of Discipline concerning the necessity and advantages of education.[5]

Lethargy of the Medieval Church.

Not only had the life powers of the medieval church been exhausted and decay set in, but corruption, positive and gross corruption, had reached an alarming height. There were the indolence and neglect of duty which wealth too often brings in its train; the covert secularising of that wealth, just as in the old Celtic church, by various devices, to get it into the hands of unqualified men and minors; luxury, avarice, oppression, simony, shameless pluralities, and crass ignorance; and above all that celibate system, which nothing would persuade them honestly to abandon, though it had proved to be a yoke they could not bear, and was producing only too generally results humiliating and disastrous to themselves and to all who came under their influence. The proof of this does not rest merely or even mainly on the statements of Knox, Alesius, and Spottiswood, nor on the representations of Lindsay and the Wedderburns. The fact, as both the late Dr David Laing and Dr Joseph Robertson have shown, and the late Bishop Forbes has sorrowfully acknowledged, is confessed and deplored in the canons of their councils, in the Acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in the writings of their own best men.[6] The harsh measures to which men themselves so vulnerable had recourse to maintain their position, the relentless cruelties they perpetrated on men of unblemished character, amiable disposition, deep-seated conviction and thorough Christian earnestness, could not fail in the end to turn the tide against them, and arouse feelings of indignation which on any favourable opportunity would induce the nation to sweep them away.

Corruption of the Medieval Church.

The corruptions in the doctrine of the church were hardly less notable than those in the lives of its clergy. The sufficiency and supremacy of the written Word of God were denied, and co-ordinate authority was claimed for tradition. The Virgin Mary and the saints departed were asserted to share the office which Scripture reserves for the one Mediator between God and man. Penances and other external acts of work-righteousness were alleged to co-operate in the pardon of sin with the "one obedience" by which "many are made righteous." The sacraments were asserted to produce their effect ex opere operato,—not by the working of the Spirit in them that by faith receive them. Belief in the literal transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper was rigidly enforced and substituted for that spiritual presence and spiritual manducation which the earlier church had maintained. The doctrine of a purgatory after this life was invented, and the virtue of masses for the dead therein detained was persistently taught and required to be believed. The Roman church was affirmed to be the mother and mistress of the churches, and its head to be the successor of St Peter and the Vicar of Christ.

The Reforming Priests.

Yet it must never be forgotten that, even in these degenerate days, there were those among the ministers of the church who wept in secret over the abominations that were done, who longed for the dawn of a better day, and, in their parishes or cloisters or colleges, sought to prepare the way for it, and who succeeded in doing so with many of their younger comrades, and only made up their minds in the end to abandon the old church when all their efforts for its revival proved vain. Nay, the men who initiated and carried to a successful issue the struggle for a more thorough reformation than the others desired, the martyrs, confessors, and exiles, were almost all from the ranks of the priesthood of the old church—from the regular as well as from the secular priesthood; from the Dominican and Franciscan monasteries as well as from the Augustinian abbeys; and from none more largely than the Augustinian Priory of St Andrews, and the College of St Leonard founded in connection with it, notwithstanding that its prior for the time being was so far from what he ought to have been. At least twenty priests joined the reformed congregation of St Andrews in 1559-60, and among them more than one who had sat in judgment on the martyrs and assisted in their condemnation.[7] A much larger number were ultimately admitted as readers in the Reformed Church.

Precursors of the Reformation.

How was the great revolution which was to bring the church back from these corruptions of life and doctrine prepared for? Ebrard supposes that witnesses for holy living and simple faith, but partially connected with the dominant church, were never from Celtic times entirely wanting in Britain; and it may have been that, through Richard Rolle and a few other hermits, the feeble spark in the smoking wick continued to smoulder on till it was blown into a flame by Wycliffe. At any rate it was blown into a flame by him and his poor priests; and from their time witness after witness arose to contend for the right of the laity to read the Word of God, and to maintain that men were saved by the merits of Christ and should pray to Him alone, that there was no purgatory in the popish sense, and that the pope was not the Vicar of Christ. Wycliffe's poor priests, when persecuted in the south, naturally sought shelter among the moors and mosses of the north. The district of Kyle and Cunningham was "a receptakle of Goddis servandis of old," where their doctrines were cherished till the dawn of the Reformation. In 1406 or 1407 James Resby, one of these priests, is found teaching as far north as Perth, and for his teaching he was accused and condemned to a martyr's death. A similar fate is said to have befallen another in Glasgow about 1422, in all probability the Scottish Wycliffite whose letter to his bishop has recently been unearthed in a Hussite MS. at Vienna; and in 1433 Paul Craw or Crawar, a Bohemian, for disseminating similar opinions, was burned at the market cross in St Andrews. These were not in all probability the only grim triumphs of Laurence, Abbot of Lindores, one of the first rectors in the University of St Andrews, who during so many years "gave no rest to heretics," but they are all of whom records have been preserved to our time. The fact that every Master of Arts in the University of St Andrews had to take an oath to defend the church against the Lollards,[8] and the other fact that the Scottish Parliament in 1425 enjoined that every bishop should make inquiry anent heretics and Lollards, and that where any such were found, they should be punished as the law of holy church requires,[9] speak more significantly of the alarm they had occasioned than these sporadic martyrdoms. Still more, perhaps, does the abuse Fordun, or rather his continuator, heaps on them, bear witness to the alarm they had caused. Yet at the very close of the century, and in the old haunt, we find no fewer than thirty processed, and through the kindness of the king more gently dealt with than the ecclesiastical authorities wished; three of the most resolute—namely, Campbell of Cessnock, his noble wife, and a priest who officiated as their chaplain and read the New Testament to them—being released when at the stake.

Reforming tendencies in the sixteenth century, it has been said, first showed themselves in Scotland in the reassertion of "those principles, catholic but anti-papal," which had been maintained in the preceding century in the Councils of Constance and Basle. The decisions of the former were received in Scotland in 1418, and allegiance to Benedict XIII. was finally renounced.[10] A Scottish doctor[11] had taken a rather prominent part in the proceedings of the latter, though the Scottish Church, like the others, ultimately fell away from that council and the pope elected by it, and under Bishop Kennedy was reconciled to the Roman See and to Pope Eugenius.[12] Scotland had had no Grosteste, no Anselm or Bradwardine among its prelates in the middle ages, no Wycliffe among its priests. Duns Scotus, the one theologian before the sixteenth century who claimed Scottish birth and European fame, never seems to have taught in his native land. John Major.Chief among its doctors in the beginning of the sixteenth century stood John Major, a native of East Lothian, who taught with distinguished success, first in Paris, then in Glasgow, after that in St Andrews, then once more in Paris, and finally in St Andrews again. Melanchthon, while ridiculing his scholastic ways, places him at the head of the doctors of the Sorbonne. The remembrance of his early labours in Montaigu College had not died out when Calvin entered it, and probably he had returned to it before Calvin left. Patrick Hamilton and Buchanan may possibly have been brought into contact with him while there, as they, Alesius, and John Wedderburn afterwards were in St Andrews, and John Hamilton and Knox in Glasgow. He was a true disciple of D'Ailly and Gerson, but like them was warmly attached to the dominant church and opposed to the heretics of his time. He taught, as they had done, that the church, assembled in general council, may judge and even depose a pope and reform abuses in the church; that papal excommunications have no force unless conformed to justice, and do not necessarily prevent a man who dies under them from going to heaven. He sharply censured the vices of the Roman court, and of the bishops and clergy of his time, particularly those of his native land. He is especially severe in censuring their immorality and ignorance; and, like Wycliffe, condemns the monks and friars for inveigling into their order young novices who had no vocation for a celibate life, and ought rather to have been encouraged to enter into honest wedlock. But he was a stern opponent of heresy—Lutheran as well as Wycliffite—a subtle defender of Roman doctrine; and in dedicating to Archbishop Betoun his Commentary on St Matthew's Gospel, he congratulated him on the success of his cruel measures against Hamilton and the heretics.[13]

CHAPTER II.
PATRICK HAMILTON.

It has not been very clearly ascertained how or when the opinions and writings of Luther were first introduced into Scotland. M. de la Tour, who in 1527 suffered in Paris for heresy, was accused of having vented various Lutheran opinions while in Edinburgh in attendance on the Duke of Albany. This, of course, must have been before 1523. On the 9th June 1523, the same day that John Major was received as Principal of the Pædagogium, or St Mary's College,[14] Patrick Hamilton was incorporated into the University of St Andrews;[15] and on 3rd October 1524 he was admitted as a member of the Faculty of Arts. If he did not from the latter date act as a regent in the University, he probably took charge of some of the young noblemen or gentlemen attending the classes. At that date he was probably more Erasmian than Lutheran, though of that more earnest school who were ultimately to outgrow their teacher, and find their congenial home in a new church.

Patrick Hamilton was born in 1503 or 1504 at Stonehouse in Lanarkshire, or at Kincavel near Linlithgow. His father, a natural son of the first Lord Hamilton, had been knighted for his bravery, and rewarded by his sovereign with the above lands and barony. His mother was a daughter of Alexander, Duke of Albany, the second son of James II., so that he had in his veins the noblest blood in the land. His cousins, John and James Hamilton, were in due time raised to episcopal rank in the unreformed church of Scotland, and several others of his relations received high ecclesiastical promotion. Marked out for a similar destiny, Patrick was carefully educated, and, according to the corrupt custom of the time, was in his fourteenth year appointed to the Abbacy of Ferne in Ross-shire, His Studies. to enable him to maintain himself in comfort while continuing his studies abroad. Like many of his aristocratic countrymen he went first to the University of Paris, and probably to the College of Montaigu, where Major, the great Scottish scholastic doctor, was then teaching with much eclat, and gathering round him there, as afterwards at St Andrews, an ardent band of youthful admirers, several of whom in the end were to advance beyond their preceptor, and to lend the influence of their learning and piety to the side of Luther and the reformers. Before the close of 1520 he took the degree of M.A. at the University of Paris, and soon after left Paris for Louvain, to avail himself of the facilities for linguistic studies provided there, or to enjoy personal intercourse with Erasmus, the patron of the new learning. He is said while there to have made great progress in the languages and in philosophy, and to have been specially attracted towards the philosophy of Plato. With the Sophists of Louvain, as Luther terms them, he could have had no sympathy. But there were some there, as well as at Paris, whose hearts God had touched, to whom he could not fail to be drawn. He may even have met with those Augustinian monks of Antwerp whom these Sophists so soon after his departure sent to heaven in a chariot of fire, and whose martyrdom unsealed in Luther's breast the fount of sacred song. In the autumn of 1522, or the spring of 1523, he returned to Scotland, and, after a brief visit to his relatives in Linlithgowshire, appears to have come on to St Andrews. Probably, along with Alesius, Buchanan, and John Wedderburn, he there heard those lectures on the Gospels which Major afterwards published in Paris and dedicated to the Archbishop of St Andrews and other prominent churchmen in Scotland. But his sympathies were more with the young canons of the Augustinian priory than with the Old Scholastic; and probably it was that he might take a place among the teachers of their daughter college of St Leonard's that he was received as a member of the Faculty of Arts. Skilled in the art of sacred music, which the alumni of that college were bound specially to cultivate, he composed what the musicians call a mass, arranged in parts for nine voices, and acted himself as leader of the choir when it was sung in the cathedral. He is said to have taken on him the priesthood about this time, that he might be formally admitted "to preach the word of God." But he was not then of age for priests' orders, and Dr David Laing is doubtful if he was in orders at all, and certainly no mention is made of his degradation from orders before his martyrdom, and the final summons of Betoun seems to imply that he had never been authorised to preach at all.

Parliament and Heresy.

The years 1525 and 1526 were very unquiet years in Scotland, various factions contending with varying success for the possession of the person of the young king. It was on the 17th July of the former year that his Parliament passed its first Act against the new opinions, in which, after asserting that the realm had ever been clean "of all sic filth and vice," it enacted, "that na maner of persoun strangear that hapnis to arrife with their schippis within ony part of this realm bring with thaim ony bukis or werkis of the said Lutheris his discipillis or servandis, desputt or rehers his heresyis or opunyeouns bot geif [i.e., unless] it be to the confusioun therof, and that be clerkis in the sculis alanerlie, under the pane of escheting of ther schippis and gudis and putting of ther persouns in presoun."[16] In consequence of a letter from the pope, urging the young king to keep his realm free from stain of heresy, the scope of the Act was extended in 1527 by the chancellor and Lords of Council so that it might apply to natives of the kingdom as well as to strangers resorting to it for purposes of commerce.[17]

In 1526 the primate, Archbishop James Betoun, uncle of the cardinal, having taken a keen part in the political contentions of the day with the faction which lost, had to escape for a time from St Andrews, and, disguised as a shepherd, to tend a flock of sheep for three months on the hills of Fife, on the high grounds of Kennoway, immediately to the east of where the railway now reaches its summit level.[18] It was at this juncture that copies of the New Testament of Tyndale's translation were brought over from the Low Countries by the Scottish traders to the seaports of Aberdeen, Montrose, St Andrews, and Leith. Most of them are said to have been taken to St Andrews and put in circulation there in the absence of the archbishop. One was present there at that time who had long treasured the precious saying of Erasmus, "Let us eagerly read the Gospel, but let us not only read, but live the Gospel"; and who seized the golden opportunity to impress the saying on others, and invite longing souls to quench their thirst at those wells of living water which had so marvellously been opened to them for a season. During the months when the primate was in concealment, and in those which followed his return, Patrick Hamilton came out more earnestly than he had done before as an evangelist and an advocate of the great James Betoun's Motives. truths, for which ultimately he was to be called to lay down his life. His conduct could not long escape the notice of the returned archbishop. I do not suppose that he was naturally cruel, nor after his recent misfortunes likely, without consideration, to embroil himself with the Hamiltons, with whom in the tortuous politics of the times he had often acted. But he had those about him who were less timid and more cruel, especially his nephew, the future cardinal. He was himself ambitious and crafty, and about this very time was exerting all his influence to obtain special favours from the pope without the sanction of the king.[19] He knew that the holy father had written the sovereign requiring him to keep his realm free from heresy, and no doubt he and his scheming nephew thought that by their zeal in this matter they would discredit the opposition of the king and his advisers to their ambitious schemes at the papal court. Still, he was anxious to perform the ungrateful task in the way least offensive to the Hamiltons. So while issuing his summons against the reformer to appear and answer the charges which had been brought against him, he did not attempt at once to restrain his personal liberty; he would rather, if he could, rid the kingdom of his presence without imbruing his hands in his blood. And that was the result actually attained.

Some of Hamilton's opponents even, touched by his youth, his illustrious descent, his engaging manners and noble character, joined with his friends in urging him to avoid by flight the danger which impended. He yielded to their counsels, and, along with two friends and a servant, made his escape to the Continent. The story of his residence there has been graphically told by Principal Lorimer and Dr Merle D'Aubigné; and the latter has the merit of explaining why Hamilton did not carry out his original intention of visiting Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg, as well as Frith, Tyndale, and Lambert at Marbourg. At the very time he arrived on the Continent, the plague was raging in Wittenberg. "Two persons died of it in Melanchthon's house." Luther himself was suddenly taken ill. "All who could do so, and especially the students, quitted the town."[20] Thus the absence of documents bearing on his alleged sojourn at the Saxon university is naturally explained. He went to the younger University of Marbourg in Hesse, and prepared there, and Final Return to Scotland. publicly disputed, those theses that most fully and systematically set forth the doctrines which he mainly taught, and for which at last he suffered. He was warmly beloved by Lambert of Avignon, who was then the most distinguished theological professor in the infant university, as well as by others with whom he was brought into contact; and he would have been gladly retained by them, could he have been persuaded to remain in Germany: but his heart yearned to return to his native land, and once more proclaim there the truths which had now become to him more precious and engrossing than before. His faith had been confirmed, and his spirit quickened, by living for a time among earnest and decided Christians; and in the autumn of 1527 he set out once more for Scotland, prepared for any fate that might await him, not counting even life dear unto him if he might finish his course with joy, and bear faithful witness to his Master's truth, where before he had shrunk back from an ordeal so terrible. He appears first to have resorted to his native district, and made known to relatives, friends, and neighbours about Linlithgow that Gospel of the grace of God which gave strength and peace to his own spirit. In his discourses and conversations he dwelt chiefly on the great and fundamental truths which had been brought into prominence by the reformers, and avoided subjects of doubtful disputation. His own gentle bearing gained favour for his opinions and success in his labours, and it won for him the heart of a young lady of noble birth, to whom he united himself in marriage, following in this the example of Luther and others of the German reformers.

In St Andrews.

Archbishop Betoun being then on the other side of the Forth, in the neighbouring abbey of Dunfermline, could not fail to hear of his doings or to desire to silence him. But neither could he fail, in the state of the political parties in Scotland at the time, to recognise "that a heretic with the power of the Hamiltons at his back was more to be dreaded than Luther himself," and must be dealt with very cautiously. It was long supposed that, if not at the king's express desire, as Bishop Lesley seems to suggest,[21] then certainly from his own wariness, the archbishop did not at first venture formally to renew his old summons, but invited the reformer to St Andrews to a friendly conference with himself and other chiefs of the church on such points as might seem to stand in need of reform, and that Hamilton accepted the invitation. At first, it has been said, he was well received: "All of them displayed a conciliatory spirit; all appeared to recognise the evils in the church; some of them seemed even to share on some points the sentiments of Hamilton."[22] He left the conference not without hope of some other than the sad issue he had at first anticipated. He was permitted for nearly a month to move about with freedom in the city, to dispute in the schools of the university, and privately to confer with all who chose to resort to him at the lodging which had been provided for him. It was evidently the intention of those who were deepest in the plot against him, that he should have ample time allowed him to express his sentiments fully and unmistakably, and even should be tempted by dissemblers, like Friar Campbell, to unbosom himself in private on matters as to which he refrained from saying much in public—the many alterations required in doctrine and in the administration of the sacraments and accustomed rites.

It is said that the archbishop still desired that he should again save himself by flight, and there is nothing in the summons flatly inconsistent with this;[23] but he and his friends took the credit of the terrible deed as promptly as if they had planned and intended it from the first. They also assembled their armed retainers, that when the days of truce had expired they might be able to hold their prisoner against all attempts to rescue him. The reformer refused to flee, affirming that he had come to the city for the very purpose of confirming, if need be, by the sacrifice of his life, the doctrines he had taught. He even anticipated the time fixed for his appearance, and had one more conference with the archbishop and his doctors, who even then had come to a formal decision that the articles charged against him were heretical. The same evening he was seized and imprisoned in the castle, and next day was brought out for public trial and condemnation in the Abbey Church or cathedral of St Andrews.

His Martyrdom.

Among the articles with which he was charged, and the truth of which he admitted and maintained, the most important were: "That a man is not justified by works, but by faith alone;" "That faith, hope, and charity are so linked together, that he who hath one of them hath all, and he that lacketh one lacketh all;" and "That good works make not a good man, but that a good man doth good works."[24] On being challenged by his accuser with having avowed other heretical opinions, he affirmed it was not lawful to worship images or to pray to the saints; and maintained that "it is reason and leisome to all men that have a soul to read the Word of God, and that they may understand the same, and in special the latter-will and testament of Christ Jesus."[25] These truths, which have been the source of life and strength to many, were to him the cause of condemnation and death; and on the last day of February 1527-28, the same day the sentence was passed, it was remorselessly executed before the gates of St Salvator's College. "Nobly," as I have said elsewhere, "did the martyr confirm the minds of the many godly youths he had gathered round him, by his resolute bearing, his gentleness and patience, his steadfast adherence to the truths he had taught, and his heroic endurance of the fiery ordeal through which he had to pass to his rest and reward." The harrowing details of his six long hours of torture have been preserved for us by his friend Alesius, himself a sorrowing witness of the fearful tragedy. "He was rather roasted than burned," he tells us. It may be that his persecutors had not deliberately planned thus horribly to protract his sufferings—though such cruelty was not unknown in France, either then or in much later times. They were as yet but novices at such revolting work, and all things seemed to conspire against them. The execution had been hurried on before a sufficiency of dry wood had been provided for the fire. The fury of the storm, which had prevented the martyr's brother from crossing the Forth with troops to rescue him, was not yet spent. With a fierce wind from the east sweeping up North Street, it would be a difficult matter in such a spot to kindle the pile and keep it burning, or to prevent the flames, when fierce, from being so blown aside as to be almost as dangerous to the surrounding crowd as to the tortured victim. They did so endanger his accuser, the traitor Campbell, and "set fire to his cowl, and put him in such a fray, that he never came to his right mind." But, through all his excruciating sufferings, the martyr held fast his confidence in God and in his Saviour, and the faith of many in theEffects of his Constancy. truths he taught was only the more confirmed by witnessing their mighty power on him.[26]

CHAPTER III.
THE OPPRESSED AND THE OPPRESSORS.

Archbishop Betoun thought that by Patrick Hamilton's death he had extinguished Lutheranism in Scotland. The University of Louvain applauded his deed; and so also, I regret to say, did John Major, the old Scottish Gallican, then resident at Paris, and preparing for the press his Commentary on the Gospels, the first part of which was to be dedicated to his old patron in Scotland, and was emphatically to express his approval of what that patron had done to root out the tares of Lutheranism.[27] But, according to the well-known saying, "the reek of Patrick Hamilton infected all on whom it did blow."[28] His martyr death riveted for ever in the hearts of his friends the truths he had taught in his life. This was Henry Forrest. especially the case with the younger alumni in the colleges, and the less ignorant and dissolute inmates of the priory and other monastic establishments in the city. As at a later period it was felt certain that a stern Covenanter had been detected when a suspected one refused to own that the killing of Archbishop Sharp was to be regarded as murder, so in these earlier days it was thought a sufficient mark of an incipient Lutheran if he could not be got to acknowledge that Hamilton had deserved his fate. On the charge that he had a copy of the English New Testament, and had been heard to say that Hamilton was no heretic, Henry Forrest was subjected to a rigorous imprisonment and a violent death. Forrest was a native of the county of Linlithgow, and had associated with Hamilton in St Andrews, and was the first to share his bloody baptism there. He was burned at the north kirk-style of the Abbey Church, that the heretics of Angus might see the fire and take warning from his fate.[29] One for simply touching in his sermons with a firm hand on the corruptions of the clergy had to escape for his life.[30] Another, whose history after being long forgotten has been again brought to light in our own day, for a similar offence was subjected to cruel imprisonment, and at last forced to flee from his native land.

The name of this confessor was Alexander Alane, and it is so entered in the Registers of St Andrews University; but it is by the name of Alexander Alesius, imposed on him by Melanchthon, that he has been chiefly known to posterity. It may admit of some doubt whether he was absolutely the first after the death of Hamilton to abandon his country[31] and all he held dear, rather than renounce the faith the martyr had taught him, or crouch before the lecherous tyrant who had destined him to a filthy dungeon and a lingering death. But it admits of no doubt that he was the most notable of all the band of young Scottish exiles who had to leave their native country between the martyrdom of Hamilton and that of Wishart, and who were honoured to do faithful service in the cause of the Reformation in England and on the Continent. The story of Alesius, of the shameless cruelties which drove him from his native land, of the hardships he had to bear in the earlier years of his exile, of the high place he gained in the affections of Melanchthon and Beza, and the great work he was to do by his writings and prelections for the Protestant churches of Germany, is one of the most interesting in the Alesius and the Scriptures. great movement of the age. But to be appreciated it must be told in detail, and as most of his work was done out of Scotland, I have decided to reserve it for a supplementary lecture. I must not, however, omit to mention here one special service which he was honoured to do for the cause in his native land soon after he left it, as it casts fresh light on the origin of the Reformation in Scotland. His first publication, printed in 1533, was entitled 'Alexandri Alesii Epistola contra decretum quoddam episcoporum in Scotia, quod prohibet legere Novi Testamenti libros lingua vernacula.' It brought into bold relief, and set high above all minor issues, what had been taught by Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, and maintained by the Lollards of Kyle in the fifteenth, and what had actually been urged as an additional charge against Patrick Hamilton. Save for this epistle of Alesius, and the controversy it occasioned, we might not have known that even in ignorant Scotland the bishops had been so far left to themselves as to issue such a decree.[32] It is still more melancholy to think that even among the better informed controversialists of Germany one was found to champion their cause, and to maintain that there was nothing at variance with sound doctrine in the decree; that nothing but harm could come from the practice of allowing laymen to read the Scriptures in their own tongue; and that it could not fail to make them bad Christians and bad subjects, as Luther's translation had done in Germany.

From the time that Alesius fled from Scotland down to the death of James V. in the end of 1542, there was almost continual inquisition made for those who were suspected of having in their possession heretical books, including the New Testament in the vernacular, or who otherwise betrayed a leaning towards the new opinions. In 1532, we are told, "there was ane greit objuratioun of the favouraris of Mertene Lutar in the Abbay of Halyrudhous;"[33] and of course their goods were forfeited to the crown. In 1534 a second great assize against heretics was held in Norman Gourlay and David Stratoun. the same place. The king, as the great Justiciar of the realm, was present in his scarlet robe, and took a prominent part in the proceedings. Betoun was also present and taking part. About sixteen are said to have been convicted and to have had their goods forfeited. James Hamilton, brother of the martyr, had been ordered by the king to flee the country, as he could not otherwise save him. His sister was persuaded to submit to the church. Two were reserved for a fiery death—Norman Gourlay and David Stratoun. Gourlay was a priest in secular orders, and "a man of reassonable eruditioun,"[34] who had been abroad, and there imbibed the new opinions. These he abjured,[35] and was, it seems, really burned for the greater crime of having married a wife.[36] Stratoun was the brother of the Laird of Laureston in the Mearns, and had been reclaimed from his former godless life by his neighbour, Erskine of Dun, but by some free speeches had incurred the resentment of the notorious Prior Hepburn. They were burned at the Rood of Greenside, on the northern side of the Calton Hill.Fugitives and Martyrs. In the same year, Willock, M'Alpine, and M'Dowal had to escape into England. In 1536, when the king and Betoun were abroad, there was comparative peace. In 1537 several were convicted at Ayr, and had their goods forfeited, among whom was Walter Steward,[37] son of Lord Ochiltree. In 1538-39 many were accused and convicted in various burghs in which by that time reformed opinions were spreading, and many had to seek safety in flight. Among these last were Gavin Logie, principal regent in St Leonard's College,[38] who for a number of years had been exercising a marked influence on the students under him; John Fyfe, who under the designation of Joannes Faithus matriculated at Wittenberg in 1539, and under that of Joannes Fidelis was incorporated into the University of Frankfort on the Oder, and appointed Professor of Divinity there in 1547; George Buchanan, who at the king's command had exposed the hypocrisy of the friars; and George Wishart, who had taught the Greek New Testament in Montrose; also Andrew Charters, John Lyne, and Thomas Cocklaw, John and Robert Richardson and Robert Logic, canons of the Augustinian Abbey of Cambuskenneth. Nearly all of these fugitives took refuge in England. Cocklaw, Calderwood tells us, for marrying a wife had been mewed up within stone walls, but his brother came with crowbars and released him. His goods, as well as those of his wife, were forfeited to the Crown. Large numbers of the wealthy burgesses, even after they had consented to abjure their opinions, were stripped of their possessions, among whom the burgesses of Dundee were conspicuous. "Nor was the good town of Stirling far behind Dundee in the same race of Christian glory. She had less wealth to resign, ... but she brought to the altar a larger offering of saintly blood."[39] On 1st March 1538-39, no fewer than four of her citizens were burned at one pile on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh. On the same day with them, and in the same place, perished one of the most sainted and interesting of Scotland's martyrs—Thomas Forret, canon of the Augustinian Abbey of Inchcolm, and thereafter vicar of Dollar, who was universally admired for his attractive character. He taught his parishioners the ten commandments, penned a little catechism for their instruction, and caused a child to commit it to memory and to repeat it publicly, that it might be impressed on the hearts of his parishioners who could not read. He succeeded in leading several of the younger monks in the abbey to more evangelical views; but the old bottles, he said, would not take in the new wine. He preached every Sunday to his people on the epistle or gospel for the day, and showed them, in opposition to the teaching of the friars, that pardon for sin could only be obtained through the blood of Christ.

Cardinal Betoun.

During all these anxious years the severe measures against the reformers had really been directed by the man who comes more prominently into public view toward their close. This was David Betoun, the nephew of the primate, and, like him, a younger scion of the house of Balfour in Fife, who by this time was not only Abbot of Arbroath and Bishop of Mirepoix in France, but also coadjutor to his aged uncle in the Archbishopric of St Andrews, and cardinal, with the title of St Stephen on the Cœlian Mount. "Paul III.," says D'Aubigné, "alarmed at seeing the separation of England from Rome, and fearing lest Scotland—as she had a nephew of Henry VIII. for her king—should follow her example, was anxious to have in that country one man who should be absolutely devoted to him. David Betoun offered himself. The pope created him cardinal in December 1538, and thenceforth the red—a colour thoroughly congenial with him—became his own, and, as it were, his symbol. Not that he was by any means a religious fanatic: he was versed neither in theology nor in moral philosophy. He was a hierarchical fanatic. Two points, above all, were offensive to him in evangelical Christians: one, that they were not submissive to the pope; the other, that they censured immorality in the clergy, for his own licentiousness drew on himself similar rebukes. He aimed at being in Scotland a kind of Wolsey, only with more violence and bloodshed. The one thing of moment in his eyes was that everything in church and state should bend under a twofold despotism. Endowed with large intelligence, consummate ability, and indomitable energy, he had all the qualities needed to ensure success in the aim on which his mind was perpetually bent without ever being diverted from it. Passionately eager for his projects, he was insensible to the ills which must result from them. One matter alone preoccupied him, the destruction of all liberty. The papacy divined his character and created him cardinal!"[40]

This is one of the few attempts made fairly to estimate the character of the man whom one party seemed to have thought they must make out to be a very monster of iniquity, and of whom the other party seemed to have felt that the less they said the better; and to a certain extent D'Aubigné's estimate is correct, but it requires to be supplemented. The cardinalate was rather eagerly sought by him and his friends on the ground of what he had already done, and was expected yet to do, for pope and king, than voluntarily offered by the pope. Two, if not three, letters, extremely urgent, were written regarding it by the king to the pope, to the King of France, and to Cardinal Farnese, in the favour of all of whom he stood high.[41] The pope consented to bestow on him the cardinalate he so much coveted; but the office of legate a latere, without which the other was rather an office of dignity than of power, was not granted till 1544,[42] by which time neither the papacy nor any others needed to divine his character. Betoun was a man not only of large intelligence, high ability, unremitting energy, and unbounded ambition, but also of considerable scholarly attainments. He did not belong, it is true, to the school of Pole and Contarini, who would have made concessions to the reformers in regard to doctrine, nor to that of the disciples of D'Ailly and Gerson, who were pressing for a reformation within the old church in regard to morals. His associations and sympathies were rather with the laxer Italian and French humanist school, both in their virtues and vices, and he seems to be lightly referred to in their gossip as ille latinus Juvenalis.[43] He was a great stickler for the liberties of holy church, and for years refused to pay the tax imposed on him for the support of the College of Justice.[44] It was no doubt by his counsel that heretical processes from the first were carried on under the canon law, and that that code and French consuetudinary ecclesiastical law were more completely naturalised in Scotland than they had been before. Most of his time from 1514 to 1524 was passed abroad—the later years in the diplomatic service of his country; and he had acquitted himself with much credit and success. He had been subsequently employed in the negotiations for the marriage of the king, first with the daughter of the King of France, and after her death with Mary of Guise, and in both missions had given high satisfaction to his sovereign. He had no sooner returned home in 1524-25, than the same measures of cruel restraint against the reformers began to be adopted here which had already been put in practice in France; and he was a member of the various Parliaments in which the rigour of these measures had been increased. Even some of the hardest sayings of the Scottish king against heretics were but the echo of those of his father-in-law, the King of France.

Like too many of the high dignitaries of the Scottish church of his time, Cardinal Betoun was of notoriously incontinent habits;[45] but he was never, so far as I know, guilty of such shameless excesses as were the boast of his comrade, Prior Hepburn, nor did he ever allow himself to sink into the same indolence and unredeemed sensuality. He was above all a "hierarchical fanatic," devoted to the cause of absolutism, who would shrink from no measures, however cruel, to preserve intact the privileges of his order, and to stamp out more earnest and generous thought, whether that thought was aiming at the reformation of the old church or the building up of another on her ruins. If we may not say that he had sold himself to France—which had pensioned him with a rich bishopric and helped him to his honours—we must say he had lived so long in it, and had got so enamoured of it, that he was at any rate three parts French, and all popish. He had mingled not only with her scholars but with her nobles, loved and determined to imitate their ways even down to their scandalous laxity of morals and merciless treatment of so-called heretics. He made no earnest effort to reform the old church, and so help her to weather the gathering storm; and it was not till towards the close of his life that he laid out on the building of St Mary's College part of the money which his uncle had carefully hoarded for that purpose.

The Cardinal and James V.

For the forcible suppression of the new opinions the cardinal needed the unflinching support of his sovereign, and he spared no efforts to gain him over completely to his side, and to detach him from his nobility,—turbulent and self-willed, but fondly clinging to what remnants of liberty were still left to them,—and to alienate him from his uncle, not unfrequently well-meaning but always over-impetuous, and often in his later years selfish and untrustworthy. There was much in the king's character to encourage such efforts. With good natural abilities and a frank and amiable disposition, he had for their own selfish ends been encouraged by his early guardians in sensual pleasures, and never to the last freed himself from his evil habits. "Dissolute as a man, prodigal as a king, and superstitious as a Catholic, he could not but easily fall under the sway of superior minds,"[46] who undertook to free him from the worries of business, to provide him with money, and to regard his failings with indulgence, and on easy terms to absolve him from those grosser excesses which could not fail at times to trouble his conscience. These things Betoun and his clerical party endeavoured to do; and, lest he should be tempted to follow the example of his uncle, and appropriate the property of the monasteries and other religious institutions, or set the church lands to feu, as he had threatened, they once and again presented lists to him of those who were suspected of heresy, urging that they should be prosecuted without delay, and their goods, on conviction, be escheated to the Crown. They made large contributions from their own revenues to aid him in the wars with England, which obedience to their counsels had brought on him. They procured dispensations from the papal court to enable his sons, though illegitimate and infants, to hold any ecclesiastical benefices inferior to bishoprics, and on reaching a certain age to hold even the highest offices in the church. In this way they largely added to his revenues during the minority of his sons, and buoyed him up with the hope that when these sons came to years, and were formally invested with their dignities, he would have wealthy allies on whom he could thoroughly depend in his contests with his nobles.

James the Fifth.

But though James showed little indulgence to the reformers, and little favour for their doctrines, he seems to the last to have had less real liking for the priests of the old faith. No bribery, no flattery, no solicitations could reconcile him permanently to those who for their own selfish ends dragged him into courses from which his own better impulses at times made him revolt. "He incited Buchanan to lash the mendicant friars in the vigorous verse of the 'Franciscanus.' He encouraged by his presence the public performance of a play" which, by its exposure of the vices of the clergy, contributed greatly to weaken their influence. "He enforced the object of that remarkable drama by exhorting the bishops to reform their lives, under a threat if they neglected his warning that he would deal with them after the fashion of his uncle of England" or his cousin of Denmark. "He repeated the exhortation in his last Parliament, declaring that the negligence, the ignorance, the scandalous and disorderly lives of the clergy, were the causes why church and churchmen were scorned and despised."[47]

So, notwithstanding all measures of repression, the desire for a reformation quietly grew and spread throughout the nation, especially among the smaller landed proprietors in Angus and Mearns, in Perthshire and Fife, in Kyle and Cunningham, as also among the more intelligent burgesses in the various burghs, and, above all, among the élite of the younger inmates of the monasteries and of the alumni of the University. When the poor monarch, as much sinned against as sinning, at last died of a broken heart,[48] and the Earl of Arran, who claimed the regency, looked about for trusty supporters to defend his claims against the machinations of the cardinal and the queen dowager, he deemed it politic to show not a little countenance to the friends of the Reformation and of the English alliance. We are not warranted to assert that he meant to declare himself a Protestant; but he chose as his chaplains preachers who showed themselves favourably inclined to the new faith. He encouraged the chief men among the Protestants to frequent his court, and he ventured to lay hands on the unscrupulous cardinal, who had striven to exclude him from the regency. He consented to pass through Parliament an Act expressly permitting the people to have and to read the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments in the vulgar tongue, and despatched messengers to all the chief towns to make public proclamation of the Act. The little treatises of Alesius had thus done their work, and he himself thought of returning and completing what he had so well begun.

Arran's Deceit.

The friends of the Reformation imagined that the hour of their triumph was at hand. They did not know on what a treacherous prop they were leaning, or what sore trials were yet in store for them ere that triumph should be gained. They knew the regent to be weak and timid; they did not know him to be deceitful—so deceitful that, within six weeks after the last of the messengers were despatched with the above-named proclamation, immediately on the return from France of his brother, the Abbot of Paisley, others were secretly sent off to inform the holy father of his accession to the regency, to put himself and the kingdom under his protection, and to ask permission to have under his control the income of the benefices of the king's sons till they should come of age.[49] The love of money was with him the root of this evil; as the fear of man was of others which soon followed, and were fraught with dire calamities to the nation. And so he went from bad to worse, till in the dim light of the Franciscan chapel at Stirling,[50] "that weak man, to whom people had been looking for the triumph of the Reformation in Scotland, fondly fancying that he was performing a secret action, knelt down before the altar, humbly confessed his errors, trampled under foot the oaths which he had taken to his own country and to England, renounced the evangelical profession of Jesus Christ, submitted to the pope, and received absolution of the cardinal."[51]

Even in June he had entered in the books of the Privy Council an Act against Sacramentaries holding opinions on the effect and essence of the Sacraments tending to the enervation of the faith catholic, in which they were threatened with "tinsale of lif, landis, and gudis."[52] He had not dared to proclaim this openly, though perhaps his ally, Henry VIII., would not have blamed him greatly for doing so. But no sooner was he in league with, and under the power of, the cardinal, than he showed in open Parliament "how thair is gret murmure that heretikis mair and mair risis and spredis within this realme, sawand dampnable opinionis incontrar the fayth and lawis of Haly Kirk, actis and constitutionis of this realm"; and exhorted all prelates and ordinaries "to inquir upon all sic maner of personis and proceid aganis thame according to the lawis of Haly Kirk"; promising to be ready himself to do therein at all times what belonged to his office.[53] This promise he was soon obliged cruelly to fulfil.

The Perth Martyrs.

On the 20th January 1543-44 he set out in company of the cardinal, the Lord Justice and his deputy, with a band of armed men and artillery, to Perth, where a great assize was held. Several were convicted of heresy, and their goods forfeited. Several were condemned to die. The governor himself was inclined to spare their lives, but the cardinal and the nobles who were with him threatened to leave him if he did this. So on St Paul's day (25th January) 1543-44, Robert Lamb, James Hunter, William Anderson, and James Ranaldson were hanged; and the wife of this last, who had refused when in labour to pray to the Virgin Mary, was denied the consolation of being suspended from the same beam with her husband, and put to death by drowning, after she had consigned to the care of a neighbour the infant she carried in her arms. Dundee was next visited, but it was found that the suspected citizens—who in the previous autumn had sacked and destroyed the Grey Friars and the Dominican monasteries—had taken the alarm and fled from their homes.

The weak and inconstant man continued to be regent in name, but from that hour he was dominated by the imperious cardinal almost as completely as King James had been. He wrote to the pope that the cardinal's devotion to the holy see and to the interests of his native country was so great that he deserved the praise, or at least no small part of the praise, of preserving its liberty and extinguishing heresy.[54] That last work, however, was by no means so nearly accomplished as the regent in his letter to the pope had boasted. In fact, within two months after we find the cardinal himself confessing in a letter to the pope that he was still in the thick of the fight, and all but worn out—"vigiliis, laboribus, atque sumptibus"—not only in contending with foes without, but also with traitors within, the camp.[55] The regent himself was obliged to confess, in a subsequent letter, that they were then in a miserable plight; and that, unless material assistance The Balance of Parties. came to them from abroad,—and in particular from his holiness, when almost all their other friends were growing cold,—it would be hard for them to maintain the struggle against the English king. The balance of parties at this critical juncture was more nearly equal than is generally supposed. "An active minority of the nobles and gentry saw in the government of Beaton not only their own personal ruin, but the giving away of the country to a power more dangerous to its liberties than England itself.... With those who favoured England were naturally associated those who desired a reformation of religion,—a body now so numerous in the opinion of a papal legate [Grimani] who visited the country in 1543, that, but for the interposition of God, Scotland would soon be in as bad a case as England itself."[56] These appeals for foreign help, and the hopes raised by them, intensified the struggle, and retarded for years the triumph of a really national party resolved to set the interests of Scotland above those of France and Rome as well as of England.

CHAPTER IV.
GEORGE WISHART.

It was about this time that a new evangelist arrived in the country, singularly fitted to impress on the hearts of men the lessons of the Holy Book to which they had now access in their native tongue. This was George Wishart, a younger son or nephew of Sir James Wishart, laird of Pittarrow in the Mearns. He appears to have been born about 1512-13, and to have received his university training in King's College, Aberdeen, then presided over by a distinguished humanist skilled both in Latin and Greek. He acquired a knowledge of Greek—at that time a very rare accomplishment in Scotland—either from the Principal of King's College, or from a Frenchman teaching languages in Montrose. From his early years he seems to have been intimate with John Erskine, laird of Dun, and at that time also provost of the neighbouring burgh of Montrose. The earliest notice we have of him is as attesting a charter granted in favour of Erskine.[57] This lends confirmation to the tradition which Petrie, himself a native of the town, says he had heard from ancient men (who in their youth had seen and known the reformer) that then, or soon after, he was employed as assistant or successor of Marsillier, the Frenchman Erskine had brought from France to teach the languages, and that, like him, he read the Greek New Testament with some of his pupils. John Hepburn, then Bishop of Brechin, would not naturally have been quick-scented to detect heresy in one who stood so high with his good friend Erskine of Dun; but David Betoun, Abbot of Arbroath, often resided at the mansion-house of Ethie, half-way between Arbroath and Montrose, and he was both more lynx-eyed and more anxious to stamp out any approach to heresy, and he urged the bishop on.

Summoned for Heresy.

Wishart in consequence was summoned by Hepburn, but instead of appearing in answer to the summons, he, like many others in that year of grievous persecution, sought safety in England, and it is said that he was forthwith excommunicated and outlawed. He found shelter under Bishop Latimer, whose diocese comprehended Gloucester and Bristol, as well as Worcester; but in the following year he fell into fresh trouble at Bristol—not, as was at one time supposed, by denying the merits of the Virgin Mary, but by denying the merits of Christ Himself. For this he was duly convented before Archbishop Cranmer, and, after conference with him, was persuaded to recant and bear his faggot. Soon after the enactment of the bloody statute of the six articles, he, like most of the Scottish refugees, left England and sought shelter among the reformed churches on the Continent, especially those of Zürich, Basle, and Strassburg, and brought home with him, and ultimately translated into English, the First Helvetic Confession,[58] composed and agreed on by the chief theologians of these churches.

He returned to England about the close of 1542, and soon after entered into residence in Corpus Christi or Benet College, Cambridge, with the view of studying and teaching there. In one of the windows of the common-room in that college, above the arms of archbishops and nobles, distinguished alumni of the college, stands the name of George Wishart, with the martyr's crown over it; and it is to Emery Tilney, his His Appearance and Habits. pupil during the year he was in residence there, that we are indebted for our fullest description of his appearance and habits. He was, he tells us, "a man of tall stature, polled-headed, and on the same a round French cap of the best; judged to be of melancholy complexion by his physiognomy; black haired, long bearded, comely of personage, well spoken after his country of Scotland, courteous, lowly, lovely, glad to teach, desirous to learn, and was well travelled; having on him for his habit or clothing never but a mantle or frieze gown to the shoes, a black Millian [i.e. Milan] fustian doublet, and plain black hosen, coarse new canvas for his shirts, and white falling bands and cuffs at his hands,—all the which apparel he gave to the poor, some weekly, some monthly, some quarterly, as he liked, saving his French cap, which he kept the whole year of my being with him.... His charity had never end, night, noon, nor day, ... infinitely studying how to do good unto all, and hurt to none."[59]

Such, according to his pupil, was the evangelist who—in 1543 according to some, in 1544 according to others—returned to his native land, and for two years testified of the gospel of the grace of God throughout Angus and Mearns, Ayrshire and the Lothians, but whose favourite fields of labour were to be central Angus and Mearns, the towns of Montrose and Dundee. A portrait of him, as well as one of his great opponent, has been preserved in the Roman Catholic College of Blairs, and the expression of the face harmonises well with the description his pupil gives of him. Another portrait, deemed by Dr Laing not unworthy of Holbein, is in possession of a descendant of the Wisharts.[60]

It is supposed that for a short time after his return to Scotland he lived quietly at Pittarrow, in the parish of Fordoun, where the shrine of St Palladius was preserved; and being an accomplished artist, occupied himself with adorning the ancestral mansion with several beautiful fresco paintings, which, after being long covered over by the wainscot, were again brought to light in the present century, but unfortunately were destroyed before their value was perceived. Dr Leslie of Fordoun, who saw them, has thus described the most remarkable of them: "Above the largest fireplace in the great hall was a painting of the city of Rome, and a grand procession going to St Peter's.... The Pope, adorned with the tiara, and mounted on horseback, was attended by a large company of cardinals on foot, richly dressed, but all uncovered. At a little distance, directly in front of the procession, stood a A Protestant Pasquil. beautiful white palfrey, finely caparisoned, held by some persons who were well dressed, but uncovered. Beyond them was the Cathedral of St Peter, the doors of which appeared to be open. Below the picture were written the following lines:—

"In Papam.

"Laus tua, non tua fraus, virtus non gloria rerum
Scandere te fecit hoc decus eximium;
Pauperibus dat sua gratis nec munera curat
Curia Papalis, quod more percipimus.
Haec carmina potius legenda, cancros imitando."[61]

Wishart began his work as a preacher in Montrose, the scene of his early scholastic labours, expounding the rudiments of the Christian faith and practice as set forth in the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostles' Creed. At that time Montrose was frequented by many of the landed gentry in the surrounding districts who were favourable to the Reformation and the English alliance, and their hearts could not fail to be cheered and their courage raised by the exhortations of the evangelist. Dundee, however, was the chief and favourite scene of his ministrations; and it was from the great success attending them that it gained the name of the Scottish Geneva. It was even more decidedly attached to the new opinions and the English alliance than Montrose; and a reformation, as it was called—including the sacking of the monasteries in the town and neighbourhood—had taken place in the autumn of 1543. The governor confessed, when put to penance, that this had been done with his permission.[62] The martyr cannot with any certainty be connected with it, much less made to bear the blame of it; though another George Wishart, a citizen and bailie of Dundee, with whom the martyr has been recklessly confounded, was afterwards put on his trial for having taken a leading part in it.[63] If the martyr could, his enemies would hardly have failed to have brought it against him at his trial.

Preaches at Dundee.

He preached for a time in Dundee with great acceptance, expounding systematically that Epistle to the Romans, the full significance of which the recently published Commentary of Calvin had deeply impressed on the minds of his co-religionists in various lands where Wishart had been. At length he was charged by one of the magistrates in the queen's name and the governor's to desist from preaching, to depart from the town, and trouble it no more. This was intimated to him when he was in the pulpit, surrounded by a great congregation, and with a significant reminder that he had already been put to the horn, and that there was no intention to relax the law in his favour. Thereupon he called God to witness that he intended not their trouble but their comfort, and felt sure that to reject the Word of God, and drive away His messenger, was not the way to save themselves from trouble; adding, "God shall send unto yow messengeris who will not be effrayed of hornyng nor yitt for banishment."[64] He left the town forthwith, and with all "possible expeditioun passed to the west-land."[65] There he pursued his labours in the same kindly spirit, refusing to allow his followers to dispute possession of the churches by force of arms with the authorities, and choosing rather to preach in the open air wherever he found a convenient place and audience fit to listen to him.

Succours the Plague-stricken.

Soon after he left Dundee, the plague, which that year was raging in several of the towns of Scotland, extended its ravages to that place. This naturally led the citizens to bethink themselves of the treatment they had allowed the evangelist, who had laboured so devotedly among them, to suffer at the hands of his enemies, as the news of what they were suffering led him to think compassionately of his friends who were now in trouble, and stood in need of comfort. He returned to the afflicted town, and its inhabitants received him with joy. He announced without delay that he would preach to them; but it was impossible he could do so in a church. Numbers were sick of the plague; others in attendance on them were regarded as infected, and must not be brought into contact with those who were free from infection. The sick were crowded in and about the lazar-houses near St Roque's Chapel, outside the East or Cowgate Port of the town. Wishart chose as his pulpit the top of that port, which, in memory of the martyr-preacher, has been, it is said, carefully preserved, though—like Temple Bar, so long tolerated in London—it is now in the heart of the town, and an obstruction to its traffic.[66] The sick and suspected were assembled outside the port, and the healthy inside. The preacher took for the text of his first sermon the words of Psalm cvii. 20: "He sent His word and healed them;" and, starting on the key-note that it was neither herb nor plaster, but God's Word which healeth all, "He maist comfortablie did intreat [i.e. treat of] the dignitie and utilitie of Goddis Woord; the punishment that cumis for the contempt of the same; the promptitude of Goddis mercy to such as trewlye turne to Him; yea, the great happynes of thame whome God tackis from this miserie evin in His awin gentill visitatioun, which the malice of man cane neyther eak nor paire."[67] By this sermon, Knox tells us, he so raised up the hearts of all who heard him, that they regarded not death, but judged those more happy that should depart than those that should remain behind, considering that they knew not whether they should have such a comforter with them at all times.

No doubt John Wedderburn, as well as the others who had been suspected of heresy and had fled from the town in the persecution of 1539, had before this time returned, and were co-operating with Wishart in his work; and then, in all probability, was prepared that beautiful funeral hymn which passed from the Bohemians to the Germans, and from the Germans to the Scotch; and which, in addition to the original stanzas, contains in the Scottish version certain new verses having unmistakable reference to the circumstances in which they originated—in a plague-stricken town which had just before been occupied by the soldiers of the cardinal and the regent, and might well dread a similar visitation for its determined adherence to the new evangelist.

"Thocht pest or sword wald vs preuene,
Befoir our hour, to slay vs clene,
Thay can nocht pluk ane lytill hair
Furth of our heid, nor do vs deir.

Quhen fra this warld to Christ we wend,
Our wratchit schort lyfe man haif end
Changeit fra paine, and miserie,
To lestand gloir Eternallie.

End sall our dayis schort, and vaine,
And sin, quhilk we culd nocht refraine,
Endit salbe our pilgremage,
And brocht hame to our heritage."[68]

His Fearless Devotedness.

Wishart concerned himself not only about the souls but also about the bodies of his hearers in that sad time, fearlessly, like Luther on a similar occasion, exposing himself to the risk of infection, that he might minister to the diseased and the dying, and taking care that the public funds for the relief of the destitute should be properly administered. He forgot himself only too much, and the terrible risks to which, as an excommunicated and outlawed man, he was exposed in so near proximity to the cardinal, who was so eager to get him out of the way.

One day as the people were departing from the sermon, utterly unconscious of the peril menacing their favourite preacher, Knox tells us that a priest, bribed by the cardinal, stood waiting—with his whinger drawn in his hand under his gown—at the foot of the steps by which the preacher was descending from the top of the port. Wishart, most sharp of eye and swift of judgment, at once noticed him, and, as he came near, said, "My friend, what wald ye do?" and at the same moment seized the hand in which he held the dagger, and took it from him. The priest fell down at his feet and confessed the whole truth. Immediately the rumour spread that a priest had attempted to assassinate their favourite preacher, the sick outside burst open the gate, crying, "Deliver the tratour to us, or ellis we will tack him by forse." But the preacher put his arms around his would-be assassin, exclaiming, "Whosoevir trubles him shall truble me, for he has hurte me in nothing, bot ... hes lattin us understand what we may feare in tymes to come"; and so, says Knox, he saved the life of him that sought his.[69]

His Innocence.

Like Drs Laing, Lorimer, and Weir, I cannot persuade myself that the man who spoke and acted thus is the same as "a Scottish man called Wysshert," who is mentioned in a letter of the Earl of Hertford in April 1544, as privy to a conspiracy to apprehend or assassinate Cardinal Betoun, and as employed to carry letters between the conspirators and the English court.[70] There were other Wisharts in Scotland. Yea, as Dr Laing has shown, another George Wishart in Dundee, who was a zealous friend of the English alliance—not only after the conspirators got possession of St Andrews castle, but from the earlier date when the monasteries in Dundee were destroyed and sacked.[71] There was probably another about St Andrews who, while the martyr was yet a boy, was called in to attest a charter by the notorious friar Campbell in 1526. I will not venture to affirm that, with all his gentleness, Wishart might not have been tempted to maintain that violence and murderous intent—such as Betoun had twice shown to get rid of him privately—might be lawfully met and restrained by force, though even that is hardly in keeping with all we know of his gentle ways; but we may be sure that had such thoughts been cherished by him, he, like Knox, would have said this openly, and not have engaged in any secret reprisals. As an outlawed man he came down to Scotland under protection, and never seems to have travelled in it save under protection; and so he was one of the last men likely to be chosen for a secret mission to England. If anything more than the able essay of the late Professor Weir in the 'North British Review' for 1868 were needed to prove that the "pure lustre of the martyr's fame is still unsullied," it seems to me to be supplied by himself in his affecting address at the stake. "I beseech Thee, Father of heaven! to forgive them that have of any ignorance, or else have of any evil mind, forged any lies upon me. I forgive them with all my heart."[72] The cardinal was not ignorant of the volcano on which he was sitting or of the plots that had been hatched against him; and he may have suspected Wishart of being in the conspiracy. That may have been the reason why he sent two friars to him to get his last confession, and, when they failed to do so, allowed Wynram to go, as the reformer had requested. Wynram, after hearing it, returned to the cardinal and his abettors, and assured them that Wishart was innocent. This can only refer to such a suspicion of conspiracy, not to the charge of heresy which was confessed and acknowledged; and Mr Andrew Lang has failed as completely as the cardinal in his laboured attempt to produce a tittle of evidence against him.

His Constancy.

From the time of Wighton's attempt the reformer had a clearer view of the perils which beset him, and a mournful conviction of the issue which awaited him if he would not flinch or flee. By his success in Dundee the rage of his adversaries was lashed into a fury which appalled his friends in various districts; but none of these things moved him that he might finish his course with joy, and make full proof of his ministry. As soon as the plague abated in the city, heedless of the new proofs he then had of the cardinal's relentless determination to capture or trepan him, and the earnest warnings of his northern friends that they could not be answerable for his safety, he took his last farewell of his kirks in Montrose and Dundee. At all hazards he was determined to fulfil his engagement to meet his western friends in Edinburgh, to prosecute his work there under their promised protection, and to seek a public disputation with some of the popish clergy who about that time were to meet in Synod in the capital. Disappointed of the presence and protection of the western men, he laboured for a brief season in Leith, Inveresk, and East Lothian without much success. At last, forsaken by many of those who should have stood by him, he was seized at Ormiston, under cover of night and promise of safe keeping, by the Earl of Bothwell, Sheriff Principal of the county. The Earl pledged his honour not to give him up to his enemies, but was soon persuaded to deliver him to the governor, as was the governor to hand him over to the cardinal, though he finally protested against his being tried or condemned by the churchmen in his own absence. A full account of his labours during these days of despondency has been given by Knox, who got from him, it is said, the first rudiments of Greek, and who—having rendered his first service to the cause of the Reformation by bearing the two-handed sword for his protection—was dismissed on the night of his betrayal with the significant words, "One is sufficient for one sacrifice," showing what fate he now anticipated for himself.

I cannot enlarge on these things, nor on the sad scenes which took place at St Andrews on the last day of February and 1st of March 1545-46, when the cardinal, regardless of the remonstrances His Martyrdom. of the regent and the murmurs of the people, but with the assent of the Council which he had adjourned from Edinburgh to St Andrews, condemned him to the stake. Throughout all these trying scenes he comported himself as nobly as Patrick Hamilton had done; and not less plentifully did his blood prove the seed of the church, verifying his words, that few would suffer after him before the glory of God evidently appeared. No doubt his cruel martyrdom hastened the removal of that tyrant who set himself above all restraint of civil law, and breathed forth threatenings against the saints of God,—though that removal had not been plotted by him, nor would have been approved by him. The words attributed to him at the stake by Buchanan and Lindsay of Pitscottie, foreshadowing his persecutor's approaching fate, are not generally regarded as authentic. Knox says nothing of them, nor Foxe, nor Spottiswoode; nor does Sir David Lindsay, in his 'Tragedy of the Cardinal,' make any reference to them. It seems better authenticated that he made the following general statement: "I beseech you, brethren and sisters, to exhort your prelates to the learning of the Word of God, that they at the last may be ashamed to do evil and learn to do good, and if they will not convert themselves from their wicked error, there shall hastily come upon them the wrath of God, which they shall not eschew."[73] It is easy to see—especially after the events which so speedily occurred—how a statement which referred to the prelates generally should come to be applied specifically to their imperious chief, just as the example of Eli had, in a well-known ballad, been similarly used for warning by the Reformation poet to the aged James Betoun for his weak indulgence to his nephew and the younger Prior Hepburn, notwithstanding their scandalous excesses.[74]

Such was the end of the life and ministry of George Wishart, one of the most zealous and winning evangelists, and one of the most heroic and steadfast confessors, that our country has ever produced. The remembrance of him was fondly cherished, especially in that district where he chiefly laboured, and where he wrought a work not less memorable than that which M'Cheyne and Burns were honoured to do in our own day. His influence was but deepened by his cruel fate, and he "lived again," as Dr Lorimer has eloquently said, "in John Knox.... The zealous disciple, who had counted it an honour to be allowed to carry a sword before his master, stood forth immediately to wield the spiritual sword which had fallen from the master's grasp, and to wield it with a vigour and trenchant execution superior even to his."[75]

Church Organisation.

It may not be inappropriate to state how far the organisation of the Reformed Church had by this time advanced in Scotland. Patrick Hamilton seems to me to have laboured to the last for the revival of Scriptural teaching and Christian living within the old church rather than apart from her. Alesius, and some others of his disciples, were for a time reluctant to separate from her, if her rulers could have been persuaded seriously to set about repairing acknowledged evils and defects. But Wishart, and those who came under his influence, seem to have abandoned this struggle, and to have striven for the formation of a new organisation apart from the old one. He formed kirks or congregations—at least in Montrose and Dundee; the former consisting probably mainly of the lesser gentry in the adjacent districts of Angus and Mearns, and the latter chiefly of the substantial burghers of the town of Dundee. I suppose that some forms of discipline began to be put in practice in the Dundee congregation, and that it was on that account, as well as from the remarkable revival which had taken place under his ministrations, that the town came to be spoken of as "the Scottish Geneva." The New Testament of Tyndale's translation had been introduced both there and in Montrose as early as 1526; and by this time the subsequent editions had been largely imported, and since 1543 might be openly read.[76] John Wedderburn was then in his native city, and I suppose by that date had published, in its most rudimentary form, his 'Psalms and Spiritual Songs,' largely translated from the German. John Scott, the printer, was also there, and under suspicion of the authorities in Edinburgh. Of the psalms and hymns, one, as I have already mentioned, bears unmistakable reference to the pest then infesting the town of Dundee; another was sung by Wishart that evening on which he was apprehended in East Lothian; a third is certainly referred to in the 'Complaynt of Scotland,' which, being published as early as 1549, is a guarantee for the earlier existence of the hymn.[77] This rudimentary collection of 'Psalms and Spiritual Songs' was the book of praise in family and social gatherings of the reformed until the 'Genevan Psalter' came into use.[78] The earliest editions of it have perished. A nearly complete copy of the edition of 1567 has, however, been preserved, and now at last reprinted.[79]

Helvetic Confession and Communion Office.

The translation of the First Helvetic Confession, which Wishart made, was no doubt meant as the Confession of the churches he formed, though it may only have been extant then in manuscript, and not published till 1548. That fragment of the Communion Office which was used by Knox in the administration of the Lord's Supper at Berwick in 1550, and perhaps had been used by him at St Andrews in 1547—and which was recently brought to light again by Dr Lorimer from among the MSS. in Dr Williams' library in London[80]—was almost certainly derived from Wishart, for part of it is translated from the Office of the Church of Zürich, with which he could not fail to have become acquainted during his residence there, and part from other German Offices, which were more likely to have fallen in his way (who had been a traveller on the Continent) than in Knox's. It may even have been used by Wishart in 1545, when he dispensed the communion in both kinds at Dun. The same may be said of that interesting burial-service which purports to have been used in the kirk at Montrose, and has been reprinted in the Miscellany of the Wodrow Society;[81] though probably this, as we now have it, may not be the original form, but a recension of it, made later, under the auspices of Erskine of Dun, superintendent of Angus and Mearns. The foundations of the superstructure that was to be were thus laid by Wishart. It was reserved to his successor to raise it, as the martyr had predicted it would be raised, even to the copestone.

CHAPTER V.
KNOX AS LEADER OF OUR REFORMATION.

As stated towards the close of my last lecture, the sword-bearer of Wishart stood forth at once "to wield the spiritual sword which had fallen from the master's grasp, and to wield it with a vigour and trenchant execution superior even to his."

At this time Knox was full forty years of age, having been born at Giffordgate, in Haddington, in 1505. He probably received the rudiments of his education there, and matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1522. Some suppose that he may have followed Major to St Andrews in 1523, or may have come there later, to study theology or to act as a private tutor to some young men studying at that university. But there is no reference to him in the university books, nor mention of his presence by any one then resident. From 1522 up to 1545-46, when he appears as sword-bearer to Wishart, his life is to us almost a blank. But as Minerva was said to have come full armed from the brain of Jupiter, so did Knox then start up as leader of our Reformation, fully equipped and singularly matured. Whatever his early training may have been, he had by that time thoroughly mastered the subjects in controversy between the two churches, and possibly, as Bayle supposes, had made himself aquainted in his retirement with the writings of that great doctor of the western church to whom Luther, Calvin, and Alesius were largely indebted. I believe no man in recent times has in brief space sketched his character, both on its brighter and darker sides, with less partisan feeling than Dr Merle D'Aubigné, when he says: "The blood of warriors ran in the veins of the man who was to become one of the most intrepid champions of Christ's army.... He was active, bold, thoroughly upright and perfectly honest, diligent in his duties, and full of heartiness for his comrades. But he had in him also a firmness which came near to obstinacy, an independence which was very much like pride, a melancholy which bordered on prostration, a sternness which some took for insensibility, and a passionate force sometimes mistakenly attributed to a vindictive temper."[82] According to Calderwood, he received his first "taste of the truthe" from the preaching of his fellow-countryman, Thomas Guilliame or Williams, a black friar, who in 1543 became one of the chaplains of the regent, and shortly after, being inhibited to preach, retired into England.[83] The good seed sown by him was watered by Wishart, and grew up apace, "first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear."

Tragedy of the Cardinal.

On 29th May 1546, while the applause of priests and friars was still ringing in his ears, and he was proudly congratulating himself on the progress of his new fortifications, and the success of all his measures to secure the triumph of his party and his own complete personal ascendancy, the cardinal was suddenly surprised by conspirators in his stronghold, and cut off by "a fate as tragical and ignominious" as almost "any that has ever been recorded in the long catalogue of human crimes."[84] Only the deep feeling of relief thus given from merciless oppression could prompt or excuse the lines of Sir David Lindsay—

"As for the Cardinal, I grant
He was a man we weill culd want,
And we'll forget him sune;
But yet I think the sooth to say,
Although the loon is weill away,
The deed was foully dune."[85]

When it became known that the conspirators who assassinated Betoun meant to hold the castle of St Andrews, they were joined by a considerable number of their friends from among the reforming gentry of Fife, and gradually by others from a greater distance who were friendly to the Reformation and the English alliance, and in consequence were then being subjected to many annoyances at the hands of the regent and his new following. Among these last, about Pasche 1547—in charge of his pupils, the sons of certain lairds in East Lothian—came John Knox, whose life, ever since he had cast in his lot with Wishart, had been made so miserable to him by the regent's bastard brother[86]—the aspirant to the vacant archbishopric—that, but for this refuge unexpectedly opened to him, he would have found it necessary to leave his native land and follow Alesius, Fyfe, and others to Germany or Switzerland. At the time when he arrived in St Andrews there was a truce between the regent and the occupants of the castle, and with the latter the inhabitants of the city had pretty free intercourse. The reforming citizens resorted at times to the services in the chapel of the castle; and John Rough, the chaplain of the garrison, under the powerful protection he enjoyed, occasionally forced his way into the parish church and preached there to the assembled citizens.

His Call to the Ministry.

Knox was no sooner settled in St Andrews than he resumed the system he had followed with good effect in East Lothian, causing his pupils to give account of their catechism in public to all who chose to come, and opening up in a plain and colloquial manner the Gospel of St John. His great ability and success as a teacher, and his wonderful gift of persuasive speech, thus became generally known. After private but unsuccessful efforts had been made by Balnaves and others to induce him to become colleague to John Rough, a formal call to the ministry was, with the counsel of Sir David Lindsay,[87] publicly addressed to him from the pulpit by Rough, in the name of the rest, and he was solemnly adjured not to despise the voice of God speaking to him. Thus honourably called to assume the office of a public preacher in that reformed congregation, he at last entered on the work with all his heart, and made full proof of his ministry before the assembled citizens in their parish church, as well as before the rude garrison in the castle chapel. He administered the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in the simple form he always used, and continued the public catechising of his pupils, which the people of the town heard repeated till they had the substance of his teaching by heart, and thus was spread a knowledge of Gospel truth even among those who could not read. A very graphic account is given in his History of the sermons, catechisings, and disputations he held with the popish champions, by means of which the new doctrines gained a hold on the minds of the citizens of St Andrews which they never wholly lost. But times of trial were to come ere the cause should finally triumph in that city, or in his native land; and the earnest preacher, whose mouth God had opened in that old parish church, was to be taught by sad experience how hard it is to leave all and simply follow Christ, ere he was to be privileged to see the full fruit of his labours.

Those who had presumed to take into their hands "the sword of God" as they called it, and to mete out to the tyrant cardinal the punishment which human justice was too weak to award, were made to feel that they who take the sword must expect to suffer from the sword. They had been able to withstand the power of the regent and the attacks of his unskilful captains; but help and skill at last came to the aid of these from A Galley-slave. their co-religionists abroad—chief among them being a militant ecclesiastic entitled Prior of Capua—and the succour promised to the garrison by England having been again and again delayed, they were obliged to surrender the castle to the representative of the French king.[88] The occupants of the castle—those who had come to it for shelter, as well as those who were really guilty of the murder—were deprived of liberty, and dealt with as criminals of the worst class. For nineteen months[89] our reformer had to work as a chained slave on board the French galleys, generally at Rouen or Dieppe, though sometimes a cruise was taken to more distant waters. Once, at least, he was brought within sight of the towers of the city where he had begun his ministry; and then he solemnly affirmed that he believed God would once more allow him to proclaim His word there. Even then he maintained unshaken faith in God, and at times indulged in sallies of pleasantry against his popish custodiers; but he would have been more than human if the iron had not entered into his soul, and if traces of the sternness thence arising had not long been visible in his character.

His Work in England.

Early in 1549 he was, by English influence, released from his captivity in the French galleys, and from his exile.[90] He proceeded first to London, and thereafter to Berwick, with the approval of the English Privy Council. There he was as near to his persecuted fellow-countrymen as it was safe for him to go, and there many of them might resort to him; and in fact so many did so, that the president of the English Northern Council became anxious for his transference farther south. There also, through the appointment of the Privy Council, a wide field of usefulness was opened to him among the English. Into this he entered with his whole soul, preaching the Gospel with great boldness and success not only to the garrison and citizens of Berwick, but also in the surrounding districts; and proving himself a true successor of those early Scottish missionaries who had originally won over to the Christian faith the heathen Saxons of Northumbria. At Newcastle, in 1550, he discussed, before Tonstal, Bishop of Durham, his doctors, and the Northern Council, the idolatry of the mass; and in the spring of 1551 he removed his headquarters to that more central and influential town, extending his labours at times, no doubt, into Yorkshire, as well as into Northumberland and Cumberland.

His fame as an eloquent preacher, and able and ready defender of the doctrines of the Reformation, spread southwards; and at the close of 1551, or early in 1552, he was appointed one of the royal chaplains of Edward VI. In the autumn of 1552 he was summoned to the south, and preached with great power and faithfulness before the king and his court. He persistently advocated, along with the other royal chaplains, those thoroughgoing Protestant doctrines which, in the north, he had previously held and taught and carried out in practice. In conjunction with the other five royal chaplains, he was called to give his opinion of the Articles then proposed to be adopted as the creed of the English Church, and of the revised Communion Office then prepared to take the place of that of 1549. His objections to the act of kneeling in receiving the elements in the Lord's Supper helped to procure the insertion of that rubric which high-churchmen term "the black rubric." He refused both an English bishopric and a London rectory, and continued to labour on, faithfully and devotedly, as a preacher unattached. He had a presentiment that the time he would have to do so would be brief, and he improved it to the uttermost. The Reformation in England at that date had been forced on by its courtly patrons and their earnest preachers beyond what was warranted by the hold it had as yet gained on the mass of the people. When the good King Edward[91] was succeeded by the bigoted Mary, nothing remained for the Protestant bishops and preachers but either to prove the sincerity of their convictions in prison and at the stake, or to leave the country and reserve themselves in exile for happier times. Knox, as a foreigner, was especially warranted to choose the latter course; and at the urgent request of his friends in the north he did so, when it was only not yet too late to escape.

The five years of the reformer's life which followed were not less eventful for himself nor for those of whom he now became the chosen leader. After an unsuccessful attempt to set up a substantially Puritan church among the English exiles at Frankfort, Whittingham and he obtained at Geneva, through the favour of Calvin, an asylum for themselves and their like-minded fellow-exiles, where they might be allowed peacefully to carry out their own forms of worship and discipline. But he had not been long there till, Visits Scotland. at the earnest invitation of the reforming party, he paid a visit to his native land—a visit which was memorable for its immediate, and still more for its ultimate, results. For several years the cause of the Reformation had been making quiet progress. Those who could read the Scriptures had been drinking the waters of life from the fountain-head. Those who could not, drank from the streams opened by the Reformation poets, whose verses were carefully committed to memory. Then came the voice of the living preacher, accompanied, as it had never yet been in Scotland, with the demonstration of the Spirit and with power from on high. The reformer wrote that he would be content to sing his nunc dimittis after forty such days as he had had three of in Edinburgh. He prolonged for six months a visit which he had intended to complete in as many weeks; and, when he was at last recalled to Geneva by the urgent letters of the congregation there, he promised to his friends in Scotland that he would return whenever they saw meet to summon him and to assure him of protection from persecution.

The few quiet years which Knox and his fellow-exiles passed at Geneva were to be richly blessed to themselves and to their fatherland. He, at least, had not gone there to have his views of Christian doctrine or church order formed or materially changed. He went to see the pure reformed faith (which he and Calvin in common believed, and independently had drawn from the Holy Scriptures and from the writings of the great doctor of the ancient church) exhibiting its benign influence in quickening to higher life, and moulding into a united community the volatile citizens of Geneva. He came to have his wearied spirit revived and refreshed by communion with devoted Christian brethren; and, by witnessing the success of their labours, to be nerved for further achievements in the service of their common Lord and for the good of his native land.

Genevan Benefits.

It was there that Puritanism was organised as a distinct school, if not also as a distinct party, in the church. If it had done nothing more than what it was honoured to do in the few peaceful years our fathers were permitted to spend in that much loved city by the bright blue waters of the Leman Lake, it would have done not a little for which the church and the world would have had cause to be grateful to it still. There were first clearly proclaimed in our native language those principles of constitutional government, and the limited authority of the "upper powers," which are now universally accepted by the Anglo-Saxon race. There was first deliberately adopted and resolutely put in practice among British Christians a form of church constitution which eliminated sacerdotalism, and taught the members of the church their true dignity and responsibility as priests to God and witnesses for Christ in the world. There was first used that Book of Common Order which was long to be the directory for public worship in the fully reformed Church of Scotland, and whose simple rites Bishop Grindal was forced to own, in his controversy with the English Puritans, he could not reprove. There was nearly completed, after the model of the French version, the English Metrical Psalter. There was planned and executed a translation of the Scriptures into our mother tongue, which for nearly half a century continued to hold its place alongside of others executed at greater leisure and more favoured by authority.[92] That was how our reformer and his tireless associates occupied themselves when left freely to follow their own bent. That was how he was ultimately prepared for the great work he was to accomplish in his native country when finally invited to return to it.

Immediately after the accession of Elizabeth to the English throne in the autumn of 1558,[93] the English exiles on the Continent began to break up their congregations and return to their native land. Those at Geneva were among the first who commenced to do so; but those of them who had been occupying themselves in that translation of the Bible into English which was to prove such a blessing to their countrymen decided to remain where they were until they had finished that work.[94] Those who returned were at first favourably received by the queen and her advisers, and taken into service in the reconstituted church; but when it was found that they were generally averse to comply fully with the ceremonies which she fostered, a change took place.

Returns to Scotland.

Knox, who does not seem to have been one of the translators, appears to have left Geneva among the earliest. In February 1558-59 we find that he had gone to Dieppe, whence, while assisting in the French Protestant services, he sent a request to Cecil for leave to pass through England on his way to Scotland, and to converse with him on some matters which deeply concerned the welfare of the Protestants in both realms.[95] But his 'First Blast of the Trumpet' was an insult which Elizabeth could not brook, and so, after waiting in vain for the desired permission for a reasonable time, he set sail from Dieppe for Scotland, and arrived in Edinburgh on the 2nd of May 1559, much to the consternation of the popish council then assembled in the city. It dissolved forthwith; but care was taken to get Knox's name, as that of an already condemned heretic, added to the list of Protestant preachers then under summons to appear before the queen regent and her council to answer for their persistence in preaching.[96] Knox at once resolved to throw in his lot with his brethren, and went north to Dundee where the zealous Protestants of Fife, Angus, and Mearns were already assembling, determined to make common cause with their preachers, and to go forward in peaceful form to Stirling in order that they might do so, and leave the queen and her council in no doubt as to the position which they were henceforth to occupy towards her and them. They accordingly marched forward from Dundee to Perth, and sent on Erskine of Dun to Stirling to apprise the queen and council of their attitude and intentions. It is said that she promised Erskine that the prosecution of the preachers would be abandoned, but they were condemned in absence and outlawed, and the breach between the two parties thus became irrevocable. Nothing remained for the queen, from her point of view, but to prosecute the matter to the bitter end, if thereby she might succeed in silencing and repressing the Protestants.

After the regent's falsehood to Erskine and persistence in her fatal policy, the reformers proceeded at once to set about such reform as they desired, and commenced rather roughly at Perth, where they had the majority of the population in Preaches in St Andrews. their favour. Knox, along with Moray, went to Fife as soon after as it became apparent that forcible measures must be taken to secure toleration for the Protestants. After a few brief visits to other towns he presented himself at the public preaching-place in St Andrews. Modern historians will not allow us to say that it was in that city that he had received his university training, or had first listened to the preaching of the reformed doctrines, or been brought to a personal knowledge of the truth; but they leave untouched, as previously stated, the more important facts that it was there, when in charge of his pupils at the university, that he had first ventured at the hazard of his life openly to make known to others that which had been blessed of God to the quickening of his own soul, and publicly to exert in the cause of the Reformation those rare gifts of telling argument and persuasive speech which were destined so signally to contribute to its ultimate and permanent triumph throughout the land. It was there, probably in the old parish church, that he had been first solemnly called to the ministry of the Word in the reformed church; and there, in the chapel of the old and now ruined castle, that he had first celebrated the Lord's Supper with the same purity and simplicity with which it was afterwards observed in the fully reformed Church of Scotland.[97] Even in exile and working as a slave in the galleys his heart had turned with special pleasure to the scene of his first labours, and he had cherished the confident expectation that God would again bring him to the place where he had first opened his mouth, and permit him again to preach from its pulpit the precious truths of His Holy Word.[98]

This expectation he believed that God had then fulfilled, and neither the threats of adversaries could make him quail from his purpose, nor the counsels of timid friends move him to let slip the opportunity which he believed God had then given him of bearing full and faithful testimony to the truth of God in that important city.[99] He therefore boldly proclaimed before the dignitaries of the church, the doctors of the university,[100] and The Victory. the magistrates of the burgh, as well as before more humble citizens, that doctrine of the grace of God which had long been his own solace and support, and was then being more generally recognised and embraced by his countrymen. Having thus seized the opportunity and improved it to the utmost, his efforts were so abundantly blessed by God that the cause of truth and right finally triumphed there. The reformed worship was by general consent peaceably set up, and the authority of the archbishop was virtually ended in the very stronghold of his power. That which, with the divine blessing, the reformer's preaching then accomplished in St Andrews, was by the same or similar means effected in the chief cities of the kingdom, and throughout the greater part of the lowlands, almost within the compass of a single year. In fact, four months after his arrival, he could write to his friends: "Nothwithstanding the fevers have vexed me, ... yitt have I travelled through the most part of this realme where (all praise be to His blessed Majestie) men of all sorts and conditiouns embrace the Truthe.... We doe nothing but goe about Jericho, blowing with trumpets as God giveth strenth, hoping [for the] victorie by His power alone."[101] The reformer's expectation of victory, and of victory by the persuasive means which Bishop Hooper affirmed were alone legitimate and in accord with Christ's will, was neither disappointed nor long deferred. The great body of the nation, with unexampled rapidity and unanimity, embraced the truth, and submitted to the discipline of their teacher, and under its salutary influence, as Stähelin in his 'Johannes Calvin' affirms, from being one of the rudest, most ignorant, indigent, and turbulent peoples, grew to be one of the most civilised, educated, prosperous, and upright which our family of nations can show.

Believing that we have no cause to be ashamed of the great revolution which was thus effected, or of aught which has legitimately followed from it, but that we need to have our pure minds stirred up by way of remembrance of the great things the Lord has done for us, I proceed to direct attention to the distinctive characteristics of the Scottish Reformation in respect of doctrine, worship, government, discipline, and church life, and the lessons which such a review should tend to rivet on the hearts of those who still hold fast its principles and long to see them more fully carried out.

CHAPTER VI.
THE OLD SCOTTISH CONFESSION OF 1560.

Knox, in his 'History of the Reformation,' has stated that the preparation of this Confession was entrusted to the same six ministers who were commissioned to draw up the Book of Discipline—viz., Wynram, Spottiswoode, Willock, Douglas, Row, and himself.[102] It has been frequently taken for granted that the Confession was prepared and revised within four days after the formal charge to frame it was issued by the Parliament, and that the Book of Discipline was not ordered to be prepared till after the Parliament of 1560 was adjourned. It is evident, however, from the dates specified in the Introduction, and at the conclusion of the copy of the Book of Discipline engrossed by Knox,[103] that the original charge to frame it had been granted on the 29th April 1560, or just two days after the nobles and barons signed one of those "godly bands" or covenants[104] by which they pledged themselves to stand by each other in setting forward the Reformation of religion according to God's Word; and it can hardly be supposed that that book should have been taken in hand some months before the Parliament met, and that no attempt should have been made in this interval to prepare materials for the 'Confession of Faith.' Besides, Knox has not stated that within four days after the charge was formally issued the Confession was prepared, but only that it was presented, so that we may hold with Dr M'Crie that "the ministers were not unprepared for this task," which was then formally devolved on them by the Parliament. Knox has further stated that the Confession was accepted by the Parliament in the form in which it was laid before them without change of a single sentence.[105] Others supplement his statement by explaining that before it was publicly presented it was submitted privately to certain lords of Parliament, and by their direction was handed for revision to the rather time-serving Wynram and the anon Alleged Omission of a Chapter. time-serving and vacillating Laird of Lethington, who softened many harsh expressions in it, and even recommended the omission of a chapter or part of a chapter from it. This they say was a chapter bearing the title, "Of the obedience and disobedience due from subjects to magistrates."[106] But the chapter on the "Civil Magistrate" still found in the Confession treats so fully and expressly of the obedience due to magistrates, that it is difficult to see how place could ever have been sought for an additional chapter on the same subject. There may possibly at first have stood in the chapter still retained some such clause or sentence regarding the limits of obedience as we find in the corresponding chapter of some of the Genevan symbolical books,[107] and this may have been the matter deemed unfit to be "entreated of" at that time, and recommended by the revisers to be omitted; or it may be that, after all, their recommendation and the suggestions of the English ambassador on the subject were not followed in this instance, and that we have the chapter still as it was originally framed by Knox and his associates.[108]

In endeavouring to form an estimate of the real merits of this Confession, we must make due allowance for the circumstances in which it was composed. Even though we suppose that the materials of it had been collected beforehand, only four days seem to have been allowed to the committee to put them into final shape.

We must not look either on the one hand for an exhaustive and logical elaboration of the several doctrines of the system and nicely balanced statement of complementary truths, or on the other for a careful avoidance of incidental expressions which seem dogmatically to determine points not fully or directly handled in the places where we should have expected them to be so. Yet, if we make such due allowance, look at it from the proper point of view, and peruse the work not only in the now obsolete Scotch, but also in the neat Latin version which often accompanies it, and is said to have been the work of Archbishop Adamson,[109] we shall not Character of the Confession. hesitate to own that it holds a distinguished place among the Confessions of that age, and is a credit to our reformer and his associates. Coinciding not infrequently in expression and agreeing generally in its definitions of doctrine with the other Reformed or Calvinistic Confessions (an agreement which its framers explicitly testified by inserting among the subordinate standards of their church, first Calvin's Catechism, and a few years after the Later Helvetic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism), the Scottish Confession of 1560 had characteristics of its own,—a framework rather historical than dogmatic, and a liberal and manly, yet reverent and cautious spirit. It probably contributed to mould the early Scottish theology into a form somewhat less minute and rigid than the Swiss, yet considerably less vague and indefinite than the earlier English.

The first topic deserving of notice, from the place it holds both in the preface and in the body of this treatise, is the distinct and hearty acknowledgment of the supreme authority of the written Word of God, or "the buiks of the Auld and New Testamentis," which books are briefly but sufficiently defined as those "quhilk of the ancient have been reputed canonicall."[110] In these they affirm "that all thingis necessary to be beleeved for the salvation of mankinde is sufficiently expressed," and to these they desire in all things to conform, protesting that, if any man should note any article or sentence in their Confession contrary to the Scriptures, and should "of his gentleness" admonish them of the same, they "do promise unto him satisfactioun fra the mouth of God, that is, fra His Haly Scriptures, or else reformation of that quhilk he sal prove to be amisse."[111]

The Fall and the Remedy.

In the opening chapter the unity and attributes of God, and the trinity of persons in the Godhead, are briefly but definitely treated of.[112] In subsequent chapters the divinity of our blessed Lord is fully asserted, and the "heresies of Arius, Marcion, Eutyches, Nestorius, and sik uthers as either did denie the eternitie of His Godhead, or the veritie of His humaine nature, or confounded them or zit devided them," are specifically rejected.[113] The second chapter treats of the creation and fall of our first parents, while the third treats of the effects of the fall in language no less explicit than that of the other Protestant Confessions, Lutheran and Reformed; and as it not only clearly embodies the teaching of our reformers on this subject, but gives a brief summary of their views regarding the application of the Gospel remedy, it may be as well I should quote it at length. It is as follows: "Be quhilk transgressioun, commonlie called original sinne, wes the image of God utterlie defaced in man, and he and his posteritie of nature become enimies to God, slaves to Sathan, and servandis unto sin.[114] In samekle that deith everlasting hes had and sall have power and dominioun over all that have not been, ar not, or sall not be, regenerate from above: quhilk regeneratioun is wrocht be the power of the Holie Gost, working in the hartes of the elect of God ane assured faith in the promise of God reveiled to us in His Word, be quhilk faith we apprehend Christ Jesus with the graces and benefites promised in Him."[115]

The Eternal Decree.

After this follow several chapters on the history of the promises of redemption, the preparation for the coming of the promised Redeemer, the dignity and constitution of His person, His incarnation, sufferings, and death, His resurrection and ascension, and the blessed effects resulting from them to His people. In another of these chapters distinct reference is made to "the eternall and immutable decree" from which the appointment of the God-man as our Redeemer, and "al our salvatioun springs and depends";[116] and in another all that is good in us is traced up to that decree of the eternal God who of mere grace elected us in Christ Jesus His Son before the foundation of the world was laid. The same mysterious subject is again referred to in the sixteenth chapter, which treats of the church, and, like the earlier Confession used by Knox's congregation at Geneva and our later Confession, identifies that invisible but real church, which is "the bodie and spouse" of Christ Jesus, with the elect of all ages, nations, and tongues, so that "as without Christ Jesus there is nouther life nor salvation, so sal there nane be participant therof bot sic as the Father hes given unto His Sonne," and who in time come unto Him.[117] Many individual expressions occurring in these chapters can be clearly traced to one or other of Calvin's Confessions, or to the earliest edition of his Institutes;[118] but the only Confession I can remember in which a similar, though shorter, history of the preparation for the coming Redeemer is Alasco's Influence. given, is the 'Summa Doctrinæ' of John Alasco,[119] which may be regarded as the Confession of Faith, not only of the ministers but also of the members of the church of the foreigners in London. Knox was brought into contact with them both in London and in Frankfort, agreed with them generally in opinion, and largely adopted their forms and arrangements in matters of worship and discipline.

A group of chapters[120] treats of the nature and work of the Holy Spirit, the cause of good works, the works which are reputed good, the perfection of the Law of God, and the imperfection of man. Those who have overlooked the explicit statement in the third chapter concerning the depravity of man have generally overlooked or failed to perceive the full significance of the emphatic statements in the twelfth chapter regarding our entire dependence for spiritual renovation, and all good, on the Holy Spirit. The words are: "Of nature we are so dead, so blind, and so perverse, that nether can we feill when we ar pricked, see the licht when it shines, nor assent to the will of God when it is reveiled, unles the Spirit of the Lord Jesus quicken that quhilk is dead, remove the darknesse from our myndes, and bowe our stubburne hearts to the obedience of His blessed will;"[121] and again, "As we willingly spoyle ourselves of all honour and gloir of our awin creation and redemption, so do we also of our regeneration and sanctification."[122] These statements, however they may be viewed by others, seem to me no less explicit than those of the later Confession, which have been sometimes contrasted with them. "This effectual call is of God's free and special Grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, who is Justification. altogether passive therein until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the Grace offered and conveyed in it."[123] The last of this group of chapters contains the fullest and most direct exposition the Confession embodies of the views of its framers in the article of Justification. It is as follows: "It behovis us to apprehend Christ Jesus with His justice and satisfaction, quha is the end and accomplishment of the Law, be quhome we ar set at this liberty that the curse and malediction of God fall not upon us, albeit we fulfill not the same in al pointes. For God the Father, beholding us in the body of His Sonne Christ Jesus, acceptis our imperfite obedience as it were perfite, and covers our warks, quhilk ar defyled with mony spots, with the justice of His Sonne."[124] To the same effect it is said in chapter xxv. that "albeit sinne remaine and continuallie abyde in thir our mortall bodies, zit it is not imputed unto us, bot is remitted and covered with Christ's justice."[125] It has been questioned, however, whether we have in these statements the doctrine taught generally in the reformed churches regarding the articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ. This can be a question only with those who forget that the church which received this Confession, and required her adult members to assent to the heads of it, appointed for the instruction of her youth the Catechism in which this doctrine of Calvin is stated in his own words; and that the very men[126] who in 1560 drew it up, in 1566, along with their brethren of the General Assembly, declared of the Later Helvetic Confession—which is admitted to contain what has been termed "the Lutherano-Calvinian view" of justification—that therein was "most faithfully, holily, piously, and indeed divinely explained" what they themselves had for eight years been constantly teaching, and still by the grace of God continued to teach, and that in consequence they felt constrained not only to express their approval, but their "exceeding commendation of every chapter and of every sentence," save the one relating to holidays.[127] It may be taken for granted that they knew their own meaning, and that of their Swiss brethren;[128] the more especially as in our day Stähelin, whose impartiality and historical reputation will not be challenged, has adduced the statement in chapter xv. as one of his proofs that Calvin himself could not have framed the Scotch Confession otherwise than Knox has done.[129]

The nature of the church, and the notes by which the true church is to be discerned, are explained in chapters xvi. and xviii. As in most of the other Reformed or Calvinistic Confessions, greater prominence is assigned to the Invisible Church, consisting of the elect of all times and nations, than to the general visible church subsisting at any particular time in the world and embracing all who profess faith in Christ and submit to the godly discipline He has prescribed. The notes by which it may be discerned whether any branch of the professing church is indeed part of the true Kirk of Christ are stated negatively—not to be "antiquitie, title usurpit, lineal descente, place appointed, nor multitude of men approving," as Roman Catholics were wont to allege; and positively to be "the trew preaching of the Worde of God," "the right administration of the Sacraments," and "ecclesiastical discipline uprightlie ministred as Goddis Worde prescribes."[130] "These articles," as Principal Notes of the True Church. Lee has so pithily expressed it, "have been almost as disagreeable to some Episcopalian writers as they were to the most servile adherents of the pope. It is thought a most dangerous omission to make no mention of uninterrupted succession and conveyance of authority from the apostles. This omission has been somewhat incorrectly charged against the reformers of our church. They do certainly mention lineal succession, but they mention it only to disown it. They say that though the Jewish priests in our Saviour's time 'lineally descended from Aaron,' yet no 'man of sound judgment will grant that they were the Church of God.'"[131] They further assert that wherever the three notes given above are found and continue for any time (be the number never so few above two or three), there without all doubt is the true Kirk of Christ, who according to His promise is in the midst of them; and in this they are borne out not only by Calvin but by Luther, who boldly affirmed: "Were I the only man on earth that held by the Word, I alone would be the church, and I would be justified in pronouncing of all the rest of the world that it was not the church."

The only other parts of the Confession I deem it necessary to refer to in this review of it are the chapters relating to the sacraments and the right use of them. It was asserted some years ago by a leader of modern thought in Scotland that Knox did not go beyond the Zwinglian doctrine regarding the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper; and that his Order for the administration of it was a bold protest against the "mystical jargon" which Luther employed, and from which Calvin was not free. When he made this assertion he seems to have forgot that the address in Knox's Order for the administration of the Lord's Supper was little else than a translation of that in Calvin's Liturgy, and teaches exactly the same mystical doctrine. This doctrine is no less explicitly taught in the Confession; and Stähelin, whose competence to judge in the matter cannot be questioned, maintains that the Zwinglian doctrine is as explicitly rejected as the Romano-Lutheran; and that the language as well as the doctrine closely resembles Calvin's.Two Sacraments only. The text of the common editions of the Confession speaks of two chief sacraments only as being appointed under the New Testament as well as under the Old. From this expression, some, who are more familiar with Anglican than with Calvinistic formularies, have concluded that Knox, like several of the earlier English reformers, attributed a quasi-sacramental character to some of the other rites regarded as sacraments by the Romanists. But in the copy of the Confession reprinted in Dr Laing's edition of Knox's History the word chief is omitted in the second instance, and the clause runs two sacraments only.[132] Perhaps it will be accepted as some confirmation of the correctness of this reading that it is identical with that found in Alasco's 'Epitome Doctrinæ Ecclesiarum Frisiæ Orientalis,' from which treatise the opening sentence of chapter xxi. of the Scottish Confession may possibly have been taken,[133] though the verbal coincidence with the early edition of Calvin's Institutes is in some respects more marked.

Such are the main contents and general bearing of this ancient Scottish Confession. Notwithstanding the confident assertions to the contrary made of late both within and without the Presbyterian churches, I venture to think that no one who, with a good conscience and honest intent, could sign that Confession, and answer in the affirmative the questions regarding election put to candidates for the ministry at their ordination, need hesitate to put his name to that which in 1647 was received as "in nothing contrary" to the former, and held its place alongside of it even after the restoration of Charles II., and under the episcopal régime.[134] Most assuredly at least no one need hesitate to do so who would have put his name to that Confession which was drawn up in the time of the first episcopacy,[135] and which is quite as distinctively Calvinistic as the Westminster Confession, while it ventures incidentally to determine some points the Westminster divines have wisely left undetermined.[136] The old Confession can advance no claim to the terse English style, the logical accuracy, the Type of Scottish Theology. judicial calmness, and intimate acquaintance with early patristic theology which characterise that mature product of the faith and thought of the more learned Puritans of the south. I am not ashamed to avow that it has long appeared to me that there is somewhat to be said in favour of the opinion that Scottish presbyterianism gained quite as much as, nay, more than, it lost, by being brought into contact with the broader, richer, and decidedly more catholic spirit of the south, and adding to its earlier symbolical books those which it still holds in common with almost all the orthodox presbyterians of the Anglo-Saxon race. No one who will take the trouble to read the report of the discussion on Arminianism in the Scottish General Assembly of 1638[137] will, I am sure, be so bold as to affirm that the type of theology then prevalent among Scottish ministers was in any material respect different from that which was set forth in the Confession of 1647, and which has never since, either under episcopal or presbyterian régime, been set aside in the National Church. The teaching of the latest of our symbolical books imposes nothing in regard to the doctrines known as Calvinistic[138] but what is explicitly contained in or fairly deducible from the earliest Confession drawn up for the English church at Geneva, of which Knox was pastor, and adopted (along with the larger one on which I have been commenting) at the beginning of the Reformation in Scotland, and printed in Scotch psalm-books[139] as late as 1638, in which it is asserted "which church is not seene to man's eye but only knowne to God, who of the lost sonnes of Adam hath ordained some as vessels of wrath to damnation, and hath chosen others as vessels of His mercy to bee saved, the which also in due time He calleth to integritie of life and godly conversation to make them a glorious church to Himselfe."[140]

Unmeasured Language.

Probably, however, the main argument against recurring to the old Scottish Confession of 1560 is that derived from the unmeasured language of vituperation in which it, as well as the contemporary forms of recantation[141] required of priests at that date, indulges when referring to the teaching of the members of the pre-Reformation church. No doubt it might be deemed sufficient proof of this to subjoin the examples furnished in chapter xviii. on the "Notis" or marks by which "the trewe Kirk is decernit fra the false," where the old church is designated the "pestilent synagoge," "the filthie synagogue," and "the horrible harlot, the kirk malignant"[142]—the last words no doubt meant as a translation of the Vulgate rendering of Psalm xxvi. 5, ecclesiam malignantium,[143] translated "the congregation of evil doers" in our authorised English version. But I may add, in corroboration, that in chapter xxi. on the true uses of the sacraments, the papists are charged with having "perniciouslie taucht and damnablie beleeved" the transubstantiation of the bread into Christ's natural body and of wine into his natural blood,[144] and that in the last chapter the language of Rev. xiv. 11 ("the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image") is adduced in proof of the ultimate fate of those who delight in superstition or idolatry.[145]

The same unrestrained spirit is shown in some contemporary Confessions, notably in the earliest Danish one, the framers of which seem to have kept closer to Luther than to the more gentle Melanchthon: but however excusable it may have been in the fierce battle then forced on them, there can be no doubt that the calmer and more measured language of the later Confession is a decided improvement on the statements of the earlier one; and I do not hesitate to say that, with the simpler formula of 1693-94 recently restored, and the explanatory act which accompanies it—emphasising the distinction between matters of minor importance and the great doctrines of the faith—the position of the ministers of our church in these respects is as nearly what it should be as is that of the ministers in any of the allied Presbyterian churches.

CHAPTER VII.
THE BOOK OF COMMON ORDER.

This, though in point of time the first composed of the symbolical books of the Scottish Reformation, was the last to be formally assigned its honoured place. The title it commonly bore in that age was the Book of Common Order. In the First Book of Discipline it is called "the Order of Geneva" and "the Book of our Common Order."[146] In recent times it has been more generally designated as Knox's Liturgy. It has usually been deemed sufficient to say that it was drawn up and first privately and then publicly printed at Geneva, and was directly taken from the liturgy then used there, as well as approved by Calvin. But this is only partially true. The first English congregation on the Continent which invited Knox to be one of its pastors was that formed at Frankfort in 1554, and admitted to hold its services in the same church as the congregation of French-speaking exiles on condition of using the same ceremonies and Confession of Faith as the French.[147] The minister and other office-bearers accordingly signed the Confession of Faith along with those of the French congregation, and it was ultimately incorporated into the Book of Common Order as the exposition of the Apostles' Creed in the baptismal service. The first draft of the Book of Common Order was drawn up before the end of 1554, and privately printed,[148] At Frankfort. to implement the stipulation for conformity with the French in ceremonies as well as in Confession of Faith, and it seems to have been mainly owing to Knox that it was not adopted at once, but that time was given for circulating and examining it. Unfortunately the ambitious plan was taken of inviting the English exiles at Strassburg and Zurich to join with them in their proposed action, which led to those unfortunate disputes, chronicled at length in the 'Troubles at Frankfort,' and to the departure of a large number of the English exiles to Geneva, where through the kindness of Calvin a hospitable reception was promised them, and the Church of Marie la Neuve was assigned for their services and those of the Italian exiles, but without any hampering clause about identity of ceremonies or Confession of Faith. The congregation which shared with the English exiles the church of "the white ladies," or Cistercian nuns, at Frankfort, consisted chiefly of the company of French-speaking exiles which had been originally gathered at Strassburg by Farel, tended for several years by Calvin, and then by Poullain, or Pollanus, under whom, when the Interim was imposed on the city, they had to seek a new home. This they ultimately found in England, to which Bucer and Martyr from the same city had already been invited and had gone. Glastonbury Abbey was assigned for their residence by the king and council, and there they lived in peace and quiet till the close of the reign of Edward VI. In 1551 Pollanus published the first edition of his 'Liturgia Sacra seu Ritus ministerii in ecclesia peregrinorum profugorum propter Evangelium Christi Argentinæ.' No doubt he had heard that the favour shown to Alasco and his congregations of French and Flemings in London was intended to help on further reformation in the Church of England also, and so in a lengthy dedication to the king he bespeaks his favour not only to his congregation but also to their book, affirming "ut in cultu Dei externo ita etiam in disciplina morum nullam esse puriorem aut quæ propius accedat ad illam quæ fuit temporibus Apostolorum." No doubt it was in a similar spirit and in similar terms that he pressed the forms of his book on the acceptance of the English exiles at Frankfort, and to a great extent with success. Their Book of Common Order is founded on Farel's and Calvin's services, but is so after these services have passed through the alembic of Pollanus and been modified and supplemented by him. This will appear from several of the notes subjoined, and will be more fully shown in the Appendix.[149]

Its Authority.

The exclusive authority of this book—previously drafted but first used in Knox's congregation at Geneva—was not asserted by the General Assembly till 1564: nevertheless, even in 1560, the Book of Discipline indicated a very marked preference for its regulations, speaking not only of it as the book of our Common Order, already used in some churches, but specially commended its form for administration of the Lord's Supper; and in giving directions for the celebration of the sacraments and marriage, and for the burial of the dead, it followed closely the regulations of this book. In 1561 Quintine Kennedy, Abbot of Crossraguel, in his oration against the Protestants, alluded to it in such a way as implied that it was already well known and in general use in Scotland.[150] In 1562 the General Assembly enjoined the observance of a uniform Order in the administration of the sacraments and the celebration of marriage according to the "Booke of Geneva"—i.e., the Order used by Knox's congregation there;[151] and in 1564 it further ordained that "everie minister, exhorter, and reader sall have one of the Psalme Bookes latelie printed in Edinburgh, and use the Order contained therein [that is, the Order in Knox's Book] in prayers, marriage, and ministration of the sacraments."[152]

There seems sufficient reason to believe that for some years before the establishment of the Reformed Church, the morning and evening prayers, along with the lessons from Holy Scripture, as contained in the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI., were used at least in part of the assemblies held by the reformed for worship and mutual edification;[153] and perhaps they may have continued Early Practice in Scotland. to be so used for a year or two afterwards, though no formal sanction was ever given by the General Assembly even to those parts of that book, still less to the other parts to which Knox's party had always objected. But it is now ascertained that as early as 1556, or at least 1557, Knox had recommended, and that soon after some of the more fully organised congregations adopted, a form of service more simple, and more nearly resembling the Genevan than the Anglican.[154] It is known that when the treaty of peace between France, England, and Scotland was being negotiated in July 1560, the ministers and congregation of Scotland, thinking their own profession after the order and discipline of Geneva to be more pure than the Anglican, as containing no other ceremonies than are expressly mentioned in the Scriptures, "wald not ressave or admitt any uther."[155]

Randolph, the English ambassador, in his letters to his Government, not only admits that they were "lothe to remytte anie thing of that that thei have receaved,"[156] but also leads us to conclude that the practice of their leading ministers in public worship at this early date was not very dissimilar to that of their successors in the next century. "The Byshop of Athens," he says, "preacheth earnestly, and prayethe hartely for the Queene's Majestie our Soveraigne, and greatly extollethe her benefyttes; Mr Wyllocke specially by name prayethe both for France and Englande; Mr Knox, universally for all Prynces lyvinge in the feare of God, desyring Him to turne the hartes of other, and to sende them in the rycht way."[157] About the same period, in one of his letters to Mrs Lock, Knox links together "Mr Parson's pattering of his CONSTRAINED prayers" and "the masse-munging of Mr Vicar and of his wicked companions," in such a way as shows that he was no great admirer of the one or the other.[158] In tolerating for a little the use of the morning and evening services of the Prayer Book of Edward VI., our reformers can be judged inconsistent only by those who do not know that in the time of the good King Edward considerably greater latitude was allowed in the celebration of those services than has ever since been suffered in the sister church. The minister, for instance, was expressly permitted to shorten them according to his discretion when a sermon or other divine ordinance was to follow. He had a sort of sanction for any neglect of minuter directions as to kneeling, crossing, &c., from a general rubric which intimated that these things were to be left free "as every man's devotion serveth." He had also a pretty full indulgence practically conceded for deviating from the strict injunctions of the book in regard to surplices and other ecclesiastical vestments,[159] which were never adopted or tolerated by Knox and his associates, the rigid enforcement of which in the days of Queen Elizabeth produced great misery and discontent at the time, and paved the way for more and greater in the days of James and Charles, her successors.Knox and the English Liturgy. It is by no means so clear as some have recently asserted it to be, that Knox used this liturgy habitually when he was in England, acting as one of the court chaplains and special preachers in the time of Edward VI. The observance of the liturgy was not enforced in the northern part of the kingdom when Knox began his labours there. And even at the time when he removed to the southern province it was not necessary that he should use the liturgy in the office he held, as the special preachers of that day, and even the lecturers for long after, often delivered their discourses in the open air, and used before them only free prayer or a short prayer similar to that which is still employed by the university preachers at Oxford and Cambridge. It was not till a considerably later period that "to gall tender consciences" it was required of all lecturers and special preachers that they should also personally read the liturgy so many times every year. Dr Lorimer has proved that Knox used at Berwick a simpler form of communion service, moulded so far as yet traced on Swiss and German offices.[160] And it can be established on the best of all authority—Knox's own testimony—that he neither approved of nor was willing to conform to the communion office. Then no sooner was he beyond the restraint of English law than he proposed for adoption in his congregation, first at Frankfort and then at Geneva, the form ultimately adopted in Scotland after his return thither.

A Guide or Moael.

As has been already mentioned, the exclusive authority of the Book of Common Order, as a guide and aid to ministers in conducting public worship and administering the sacraments, was asserted by the General Assembly in 1564. It continued to hold the place thus given to it down to 1637, when it was superseded, in so far as the king and his council were concerned, first, by what is known as Archbishop Laud's Liturgy, and then by an injunction of the disappointed prelates, which required that, till further order should be taken, neither the new nor the old liturgy should be used in the public services, in Edinburgh, but only those prayers which the ministers had been accustomed to make before and after their sermons.[161] Thus the bishops themselves were the unwitting instruments of first setting aside a partially liturgic, and introducing instead a wholly extemporary, form of worship into Scotland. There is no reason, however, for maintaining that the Book of Common Order, while it continued in authority, was regarded as more than a guide or model, at least to the ordained ministers, or can be so regarded by any one who studies with care its rubrics and general contents, far less was observed as a rigid liturgy, every word of which must be repeated unvaryingly by the officiating minister. It has indeed been maintained, even in recent times, and by ministers of the National Church, that "the idea of extemporaneous prayer as an appropriate vehicle of public devotion was one quite unknown to the Reformation." But this cannot be made good with respect to any of the Reformed or Calvinistic churches, and certainly least of all with respect to the National Church of Scotland at any period of its history.

Our reformers laid it down in their First Book of Discipline as a fixed principle that "it is neither the clipping of their crownes, the greasing of their fingers,[162] nor the blowing of the dumb dogges called the bishops, neither the laying on of their hands, that maketh true ministers of Christ Jesus. But the Spirit of God, inwardly first moving the heart to seeke to enter in the holy calling for Christ's glory and the profite of His Kirk, and thereafter the nomination of the people, the examination of the learned, and publick admission, ... make men lawfull ministers."[163] They distinctly taught that no one was to be regarded as a lawful minister of Christ into whose mouth Christ had not put some word of exhortation or vouchsafed some gift of expounding and preaching the Word of God,[164] and they expressly encouraged their ministers to look for their Master's aid and guidance in praying as well as in preaching. Hence throughout their Book of Common Order they carefully abstained from imposing the ipsissima verba of particular forms as rigidly binding, or even from encouraging their ministers to rest contented with the stated repetition of them.

Its tolerant Rubrics.

"When the congregation is assembled," run its tolerant rubrics, "the minister useth one of these two confessions, or like in effect."[165] "This done, the people sing a psalme altogether in a plain tune, which ended, the minister prayeth for the assistance of God's Holie Spirit as the same shall move his heart, and so proceedeth to the sermon. The minister, after the sermon, useth this prayer following, or such like."[166] "Then the people sing a psalme, which ended, the minister pronounceth one of these blessings, and so the congregation departeth."[167] Such are its few and simple directions for the ordinary form of public worship; and as if even these might fail to beget in the minds of some of the old priests a sense of their freedom from minute restrictions and a burdensome ritual, it is added: "It shall not be necessarie for the minister daylie to repeat all these things before mentioned; but, beginning with some maner of confession, to proceede to the sermon, which ended, he either useth the prayer for all estates before mentioned, or else prayeth as the Spirit of God shall move his heart, framing the same according to the time and matter which he hath entreated of."[168] To the same effect, in the First Book of Discipline, after recommending that in all the large towns there should every day be either sermon or common prayers with reading of Scriptures, it is said: "What day[169] the publick sermon is, we can neither require nor greatly approve that the common prayers be publickly used, lest that we should either foster the people in superstition, who come to the prayers as they come to the masse; or else give them occasion, that they think them no prayers which be made before and after sermons."[170] Even in the most solemn of its Calderwood's Testimony. special services and in the most solemn part of it, the prayer of thanksgiving and consecration in the communion, the rubric is: "The minister ... giveth thanks either in these words following or like in effect."[171] The same thing is confirmed by many of the rubrics of the other occasional services in the Book of Common Order,[172] and by the express testimony of Calderwood, Row, and others who officiated as ministers of the church while the book was in use. The first named of these, though entertaining so strong a regard for its venerable forms that even on the approval of the Westminster Directory in 1645 he is said to have opposed the adoption of any Act expressly abrogating the Book of Common Order, had not hesitated when contrasting it with the English Liturgy thus to speak of the nature and extent of the submission expected to be given to it: "Habemus quidem nos etiam in Ecclesiâ nostra Agendas, et ordinem in sacris celebrandis servandum, sed nemo alligatur precibus aut exhortationibus liturgiae nostrae, proponuntur tantum ut peradigmata, quibus precum aut exhortationum materia et forma quoad substantialia indicantur, non ut eisdem verbis adstringantur ministri. Totos ego tredecim annos, quibus functus sum ministerio, sive in sacramentis, sive in aliis sacris celebrandis, exhortationibus aut precibus quae extant in Agendâ nostrâ, nunquam usus sum. Sic etiam alii complures; et omnibus etiam liberum est idem facere."[173]prayers and exhortations were merelie Row's Opinion. While in regard to the Liturgy by which it was attempted in 1637 to supplant the Book of Common Order, Row thus expresses himself: "Though they amend all those errours, and that in all the Service Book there were no materiall errour at all, neither masse nor popish ceremonie; and though they should read nothing but Canonicall Scripture, yea say that all their words of Holie Scripture, yit it is not lawfull to introduce a reading ministrie, and to stint men (gifted of God, who has the spirit of their calling, able ministers of the gospell who hes the Spirit of adoption teaching them to pray, Gal. iv. 6; Rom. viii. 26; and to whom God hes opened a doore of utterance, to speak the gospell with boldness, haveing touched their lips with a coall from His awin altar) to such a Liturgie as is to be made the onlie forme of God's publict worship. For though I confess good use may be made of a formed Liturgie and publict service, to serve for a rule to other kirks to fall on the like way, finding it warranted by the Word, and to be as a monument to the posteritie, who thence may learn what forms have been, are, and ought to be used; and that it may lead the way, and be a directorie to those that are beginning in the ministrie; yit certainlie reading of prayers and exhortations is not the way whereby the Lord in His Word has appoynted His servants of the ministrie to worship Him, or to convert, edifie, and comfort, or strengthen soulls; but seing they have receaved gifts for praying and preaching, they ought to stirre up the gift of God, and putt the talent to use; and though in their privat studies they may borrow some help from other men's gifts and labours, yit neither is it lawfull for a man to tye himself, or for bishops to tye all ministers, to a prescript and stinted forme of words in prayer and exhortation."[174] Henderson says that while they had their Directory and prescribed Order, they were "not tyed to set formes and words."[175]

It is plain, therefore, that the General Assembly, by the sanction it gave to the Book of Common Order, did not mean to restrict its ordained ministers to the use of a certain unvarying form of words, but to provide such a Directory or model as would guide them in "the substance and right ordering of all the parts of divine worship," as well as guide the readers and others not fully admitted to the ministry of the Word, through whose special aid alone they were able, in a time of so great dearth of qualified ministers, to supply in part the spiritual destitution of their countrymen. Nor in granting such an amount of liberty, at least to their ordained ministers, did they follow a course which was, as has been so confidently asserted, altogether novel, but rather, as in several other things, carried out more thoroughly and consistently[176] what others of the Practice in other Reformed Churches. Reformed churches had adopted at least partially. In almost all the Reformed or Calvinistic liturgies the prayers are left partly free, and in several of them no form is furnished even as a guide or model for the prayer immediately preceding the sermon (and the same might be said of some of the earlier Lutheran Agend-bücher). In the churches of Basle, which probably in this respect only followed the general practice of the churches of East Switzerland, Hagenbach informs us that there was for fifty years after the Reformation no form of prayer, before or after sermon, imposed by public authority, and for fifty years longer only the prayer after sermon for all estates and conditions of men.[177] What, therefore, distinguished our reformers from their successors, and from the English Puritans of the seventeenth century, was not that the former disapproved of or curtailed free prayer while the latter advocated and encouraged it, but that the former retained in their Book of Common Order a variety of forms, not only as models, but also as aids to the officiating minister, while the latter put their Directory into such a shape that even the "help and furniture" it provided required the exercise of thought and care on the part of the minister to adapt it for use. This certainly was no great divergence, considering how thoroughly both parties were agreed, on the one hand, as to the liberty which should be left to ordained ministers, and, on the other, as to the limitations within which it should be confined.

From the notices given in his 'Order and Government of the Church of Scotland,' and from the specimens of Henderson's prayers which accompany his printed discourses, it is further evident that he, like Calderwood, habitually used free prayer both before and after sermon. There seems reason to suppose that in not a few cases the readers also before 1638 took the liberty of varying from the forms in Knox's Book and exercising their own gifts. The charges made against the character of their prayers, in what is called the King's Declaration, but what was in Prayers of the Readers. reality the declaration of some of his prelates, is only intelligible on this supposition.[178] And the Assembly, as I read their deliverance, rather deny that the prayers of the readers were of the particular character charged than affirm they were the identical prayers contained in Knox's Book.[179]

CHAPTER VIII.
THE FIRST BOOK OF DISCIPLINE; OR, THE BOOKE OF THE POLICIE OF THE CHURCH.

I regard the First Book of Discipline as, in several respects, the most thoughtful, judicious, practical, and comprehensive of the documents connected with the organisation of the Reformed Church of Scotland. It was drawn up by the same six men[180] who were subsequently entrusted with the preparation of the Confession of Faith; and it has been said that they first settled the titles of the several chapters, and then apportioned the preparation of so many of them to each. But this is matter of pure conjecture. The portion on the universities, from the multitude of its practical details, we cannot but assign mainly to Douglas, the Principal of St Mary's College, and Wynram, the sub-prior of Knox's part in its preparation. the Augustinian Monastery at St Andrews. One can hardly doubt that the rest, if not actually drafted by Knox, was carefully remoulded by him; and it bears evidence of acquaintance with books which were far more likely to have been known to him than to any of the others—as Herman of Cologne's Book of the Reformation, Latin versions of some of the earlier Kirchenbücher or Kirchenordnungen of the German Protestants, and probably of the famous Ordonnances of Calvin, as drafted at Geneva after his return from exile.

I. The Government of the Church.

The opinions of our reformer and his associates respecting the government and discipline of the church are gathered partly from the opening chapters of the Book of Common Order, but mainly from the treatise ultimately entitled the First Book of Discipline. I believe that a careful study of these will lead to a pretty definite conclusion as to what these opinions actually were, and to a pretty decided conviction that, like their opinions respecting matters of doctrine and ritual, they were substantially in harmony with those to which the Scottish nation has been so long and firmly attached. It may be admitted that there were some of Knox's associates who, whatever may have been their own private sentiments, would, on grounds of expediency, have been contented to retain the former hierarchical government of the church; and if on such a point any weight is to be allowed to the assertions of Spottiswoode,[181] the popish Archbishop of St Andrews might possibly in that case not have refused to follow the course taken for a time by his relatives in St Mary's College, and to remain at his post at the head of the reformed church. But from the disastrous issue of the compromise in their case, as well as from what is known and indisputable of his own history and character, there is no reason to suppose that anything was lost, but on the contrary that incalculable gain accrued to the reformed church from this temptation not being put in his way. It was long maintained by the leaders of the Scottish episcopalians that Knox himself, to a certain extent, yielded to the wishes of his less thoroughgoing associates, and was implicated with them in certain attempts to continue or restore the semblance of a hierarchy in the new church. In fact, some of them went so far as to assert that it was not till after his death that controversy arose as to whether the episcopal or presbyterian form of government was the more primitive and scriptural. These views, if I understand rightly, are now abandoned by their ablest men; and it was full time that they should be so. The works of Whitgift, which have been republished in our own day and made more generally accessible, clearly show that the controversy about the presbyterian government of the church had been formally raised even in England at least as early as 1568; while the Later Helvetic Confession, approved by the Church of Scotland in 1566 at the request of Knox himself,[182] as clearly shows that the principles on which the controversy fell to be decided had been generally adopted by the followers of Calvin even at an earlier date. These principles were:Permanent Office-bearers. First, that the names of bishop and presbyter are in Scripture used indiscriminately to denote the holder of the same office; second, that the only office-bearers of permanent divine appointment in the church are the pastor, the doctor, the elder, and the deacon. In fact, at the head of Calvin's Ordonnances Ecclesiastiques, drawn up, if not printed, as early as 1541, we find the following: "Il y a quatre ordres d'offices que notre Seigneur a institue pour le gouvernment de son eglise, premierement les pasteurs, puis les docteurs, apres les ancients, quatrement les diacres," which passed substantially into the Book of Common Order in 1556. This being the case, we are not guilty of any anachronism in attributing substantially presbyterian opinions to our reformer, even if we have to grant that the particular church court first known as the greater eldership or presbytery, and now exclusively enjoying the title of presbytery, existed at that time only in a rudimentary form.

The Book of Common Order of 1556 is the earliest authentic document casting light on the opinions of our reformers respecting the government and discipline of the church. The introductory part of the book treats at length of the permanent office-bearers of the church, the manner of their election, the duties of their respective offices, and the assemblies they were to hold in common for government and discipline. The enumeration of the office-bearers and the description of their duties is quite in harmony with what the Books of Discipline subsequently laid down. The office-bearers recognised are the minister, the elder, the deacon, and the doctor; and the duties assigned to each are such as have generally been allotted to these functionaries in the presbyterian churches. The terms in which the last-named of them is referred to are specially deserving of notice. They effectually close a loophole, that might otherwise have been imagined to be left, Superintendents temporary. for the introduction of either bishop or superintendent as an essential and ordinary office-bearer in the church on the pretext that, even if he were so, he could be of little use in the single English congregation at Geneva.[183] "Wee are not ignorant," it is said, "that the Scriptures make mention of a fourth kind of ministers left to the church of Christ, which also are verie profitable where time and place doth permit; but for lack of opportunity in this our dispersion and exile we cannot well have the use thereof, and would to God it were not neglected where better occasion serveth. These ministers are called teachers or doctors, whose office is to instruct and teach the faithfull in sounde doctrine, providing with all diligence that the puritie of the Gospel be not corrupt either through ignorance or evill opinions."[184] Now, can it be supposed that Knox would have said all this of the doctor and not a word of the superintendent, if he had deemed both to be of like permanence and necessity in the church of Christ; or that he would have devoted several pages to explain the duties of the office-bearers, and their assemblies for the interpretation of the Scriptures and the administration of discipline, and not have uttered one word about the bishop, had he believed that that official was the chief or even an essential minister of the church? Can it be supposed likely that he would have been so silent, even if there had been no bishop, as confessedly there was no doctor, among the English in Geneva; or possible that he could have been so with Miles Coverdale,[185] a regularly consecrated bishop attending on his ministrations and acting as an elder in his congregation, unless he had regarded (and wished it to be known that he regarded) the simple presbyter as jure divino on a level with the diocesan bishop, to say nothing of the fact that his party at Frankfort had refused to have a bishop or superintendent over their congregation?

This examination of the introductory chapters of the Book of Common Order will enable us the better to understand and explain the parts of the Book of Discipline drawn up in 1560 respecting Necessity of Preaching. the ministers and office-bearers of the church. Even the ordinary ministers of the church must all be well qualified to preach the gospel of salvation, as many of the common people were unable to read,[186] and could only be saturated with its teaching by the living voice of the preacher who, by sermons and catechising on the Lord's day, and in the towns also by the sermon during the week, was to his utmost to carry home the truth to their hearts. Our reformers judged it necessary "that His Gospell be truely and openly preached in every church and assembly of this realme";[187] that no one "unable to edifie the church by wholesome doctrine" should be promoted to or retained in ecclesiastic administration;[188] and held that the sacraments cannot be "rightlie ministred by him in whose mouth God hath put no sermon of exhortation."[189] Instead of entrusting parishes, as was so often done in England, to men able only to read homilies prepared by others, they affirmed that it was alike to have no minister at all and to have an idol in place of a true minister, yea, in some cases it was worse.[190] Men of best knowledge of God's Word and cleanest life were to be nominated annually for election as elders and deacons.[191] The former were to assist the minister in all affairs of the kirk, to hold meetings with him for judging of causes, admonishing evil livers, yea, to take heed to the life, manners, diligence, and study of the ministers, as well as of the flock.[192] The deacons were to assist in judgment, but chiefly to collect and distribute what was provided for the poor. They might also, as in the French Church, be admitted to read the Scriptures and common prayers in the congregation if required and qualified to do so.[193] Besides ministers, elders, and deacons, generally recognised in the reformed churches as holding offices of divine institution, and being of "the ministry" or consistory of the church, certain other functionaries are mentioned in this Book of Discipline, to whom special duties are assigned, at least for a time. These are the readers, or exhorters, and the superintendents, and both classes appear to be spoken of in such a way as to make it clear that they were not to be permanently retained as orders of office-bearers in the church distinct from those above named.

Readers.

Readers, or exhorters, were to be provided for those churches which could not presently be supplied with ministers. These readers were to be men judged most apt distinctly to read the common prayers and the Scriptures, but they were to be encouraged and urged so to exercise their gifts that they might grow in knowledge and utterance, and in time might come to be entrusted with the power of preaching the Word, administering the sacraments, and discharging all the functions of the ordinary pastor.[194] Special provision was made for the spiritual improvement of these readers or exhorters in those weekly meetings for the interpretation of Scripture which, originally introduced among the exiles at Frankfort and Geneva, were after their return set up by them in England under the name of prophesying, and in Scotland under the name of the exercise.[195]

The portion of the book relating to the superintendents opens with a statement of the reasons which had led its framers "to make difference betwixt preachers at this time."[196] These last words, as has often been remarked, would have been unmeaning had they regarded the superintendent's office as by divine institution permanent in the church and superior to that of the ordinary minister. Accordingly, when they proceed to state in detail the reasons which induced them to sanction such a difference, these are found to be—not, as in the Anglican Ordinal, that there have always been in the church of Christ distinct orders of bishops and presbyters,[197] nor even as in Alasco's book that such offices were in some sort necessary, though, save in matters executive, in no way superior to their brethren the ordinary ministers of the church, but—that the dearth of qualified preachers or ministers at that time in Scotland was so great, that if each were to be settled in a single town or parish, and allowed to make continual residence therein, the larger part of the realm would be left altogether destitute of that efficient spiritual instruction, oversight, and training which the people themselves eagerly longed for, and the reformed leaders earnestly desired to provide for them. To meet this emergency, without being obliged to avail themselves so generally and unrestrictedly as the English had done of the former popish incumbents, they deemed it most expedient that these should, for a time at least, be restricted to the humbler duties of readers; and that from the whole number of godly and learned men then in the realm ten or twelve should be selected, and one of them assigned to each of the proposed provinces, which he should visit annually through its whole extent, preaching from time to time in every parish not provided with an ordained and preaching minister, seeing to the administration of the sacraments and of church discipline in such parishes, and presiding at the meetings of the provincial synod, and at the examination and admission of ministers and readers appointed to serve at the churches.

Superintendent and Bishop compared.

It used to be maintained by Scottish episcopalians, and has been reiterated even in our own day, that there is hardly any difference to be discerned between these superintendents and the old bishops save the substitution of a name which is bad Latin for one which is good Greek. This is more smart than true. The following very material differences will at once occur to any one acquainted with the First Book of Discipline, and with the constitution and practice of episcopal churches. (1) The bishop in the latter must be consecrated to his office by three, or at least two, bishops who have derived their office in the like lineal succession from their predecessors; while the superintendent, according to the practice of the Church of Scotland, and the constitution of the Church of the Foreigners in London, might be set apart to his office by a simple presbyter or ordinary minister of the church. (2) The distinctive duties of the bishop are such as, according to the practice of the churches recognising the necessity of his office, cannot be delegated save to one of his own order, while there was no duty entrusted to the superintendent in the Church of Scotland which might not be devolved on a mere presbyter; and it was the custom of the General Assembly to delegate to ordinary ministers the whole functions of visitation and superintendence in provinces not provided with a permanent superintendent, and to do so at times even in the case where the former popish bishop of the diocese had joined himself to the Reformed Church. (3) It is not generally recognised in episcopal churches as a duty specially incumbent on the bishop to preach regularly in the several churches of his diocese (certainly it was not expected of the English bishops who were contemporary with the Scottish superintendents);[198] but it was one of the main duties expected of these superintendents, and one of the chief reasons assigned for the institution of their office, that the Gospel might be preached from time to time in all those parishes not provided with a more stated ministry, and that thus men in every corner of the land might attain some knowledge of the truths of our holy religion, as well as some feeling of godliness. (4) Finally, the bishop in all episcopal churches, so far as my knowledge extends, is allowed to claim a negative voice in synods of his clergy, and can in no case be taken under discipline and judged by them, but only by a synod of his own order; while the superintendent in the Scottish Church was merely the permanent Moderator of Synod, and was bound to give effect to the decision of the majority, or to carry it by appeal before a higher court; and he was not only liable to be judged and punished for neglect of duty and for personal misconduct by the General Assembly, but was also liable to be charged with such offences before his own synod, and to be judged and punished by it. On these grounds I am so far from admitting that the superintendent was in all respects identical with the bishop, that I am inclined to hold that it was just because he was so completely stripped of all real episcopal power that, when the hierarchy was revived, even the most moderate of the bishops found they could not contain themselves within the limits prescribed to the superintendents in the First Book of Discipline; and that one of the main obstacles in the way of their success in the struggle with their refractory presbyters was occasioned by their own hasty promise to observe the caveats founded on the previous practice in the case of superintendents, and especially by their promise to be subject to the judgment and censure of the General Assembly.

Gradation of Church Courts.

The form of church government in Scotland was still further connected with that of the Calvinistic churches on the Continent (particularly that of France) by the establishment and gradation of church courts—the General Assembly having jurisdiction over the whole church, the provincial synod over the ministers and congregations within a particular province, and the session or lesser eldership or consistory over one or more neighbouring congregations.[199] What afterwards came to be known as the greater eldership, or presbytery, or classical consistory,[200] does not appear at first under that distinctive name; but even the germ of this was implanted in that weekly meeting of ministers and elders for the interpretation of Scripture termed the exercise, which was authorised both by the Book of Common Order and the First Book of Discipline.[201] It was soon established in all the considerable towns in Scotland where there was a fully constituted reformed church, and though at first it may possibly have confined itself to the object it was immediately intended to serve, and may have intervened only by advice in matters of discipline, yet it was not in the nature of things that such a gathering of ministers and elders from neighbouring churches should take place from week to week without such cases as occupied the attention of parochial consistories being discussed and advised on, as well as the doctrinal and critical questions arising out of their exercises, which they were expressly empowered to dispose of. The tendencies of the institution were so manifest, and the powers it speedily assumed so undisguised, that Queen Elizabeth became alarmed, and insisted on the suppression of it throughout the province of Canterbury, notwithstanding the remonstrances and entreaties of the good Archbishop Grindal, and his repeated and urgent petitions that she would rather endeavour to confine it to the original purpose, in which it had been of great service, than suppress it altogether. In the province of York, where the institution had taken firmer root, and where the contentions between Papists and Protestants had gained more prominence than those between Puritans and anti-Puritans, it was tolerated for a considerably longer period. When in 1581 Scotland was regularly divided into presbyteries, the exercises previously existing in particular towns were merged in, and their work devolved on, these; and in the beginning of the seventeenth century, when episcopacy was restored, the name of presbytery was again frequently exchanged for that of exercise.

The General Assembly.

Of these several church courts perhaps the most distinctive as well as the most important was the General Assembly, which was originally held to represent the whole church; and which may still, after the lapse of ages, be held substantially to do so—having representatives not only from each of the presbyteries but also from each of the universities and royal burghs in the kingdom. It has been wont to meet not (as such national synods have generally done elsewhere) occasionally and chiefly for legislative purposes, that is, authoritatively to explain the church's creed and enact canons to regulate the administration of discipline, but frequently and at short stated intervals to review the proceedings of the inferior judicatories of the church, as well as to legislate regarding matters of doctrine and discipline. Whether its peculiar vitality in the Scottish Church is to be ascribed to its popular constitution, or to the fact that it has in general faithfully represented the national sentiments in those controversies which in successive generations have been agitated in our country; or whether the groundwork of it had not been laid long before in those national councils of the church which the popish ecclesiastics had, under the bull of Pope Honorius III.,[202] deemed themselves warranted to hold every year, and at which the king and his nobles appear often to have been present, and whether, therefore, in the maintenance of this quasi-Gallican liberty, as well as in some minor matters enumerated by Lord Hailes, there may not have been a closer and more real connection between the pre- and post-Reformation church in Scotland than has been commonly admitted, it would now, perhaps, be very difficult to determine. But it will be allowed on all hands that this venerable court—which was so early established and has subsisted almost uninterruptedly since the Reformation, and has exercised such extensive legislative and judicial powers—is the most distinctive characteristic of the Scottish Church, and has had great influence in the development of Scottish opinion and religious life.

II. The Discipline of the Church.

The opinions of our reformer and his associates regarding the discipline and practical organisation of the church have hardly ever been made a subject of serious controversy, even by those who have so long called in question the generally received ideas regarding his opinions on the government of the church. That which marked out the early Reformed Church of Scotland most distinctively among the churches of the Reformation was the fact that she advocated, and resolutely carried into practical operation, that "godly discipline" which they all admitted had been used in the primitive church in her best and purest days, and the restoration of which, they perhaps ventured to hint, was much to be desired, but which yet they had not the courage to demand from the civil power as of essential concern to the wellbeing of their churches. Even Luther, who began so well, hesitated and quailed before the claims of the civil powers, and left it to Calvin to carry out his own earlier conceptions, and those of the Hessian Synod of 1528.[203] Our reformers, however, boldly laid down the absolute necessity of it in their Book of Common Order, and named in their Confession as one of the three distinctive marks of a true church of Christ, "ecclesiastical discipline uprightlie ministred as Goddis Worde prescribes, whereby vice is repressed and vertew nurished."[204] Not content to exercise such a discipline merely under this clause of their State-ratified Confession, they sought and obtained an explicit acknowledgment of the church's privileges in special Acts of Parliament, which continue in force at the present day, and have enabled the Church of Scotland to maintain a stricter and more efficient discipline than any other established church has ventured to aim at.

Nature and Ends of Discipline.

The nature and ends of this discipline are pretty fully explained in the introductory chapters of the Book of Common Order, in the Book of Discipline, and the Order of Excommunication and Public Repentance. "As no citie, towne, house, or family," it is affirmed in the first of these treatises, "can maintaine their estate and prosper without policy and governance, even so the Church of God, which requireth more purely to be governed than any citie or family, cannot without spirituall policy and ecclesiastical discipline continue, increase, and flourish;[205] and as the Word of God is the life and soule of this church, so this godly order and discipline is, as it were, sinews in the body, which knit and joine the members together with decent order and comelinesse; it is a bridle to stay the wicked from their mischiefs, it is a spurre to pricke forward such as be slow and negligent; yea, and for all men it is the father's rod, ever in a readiness to chastise gently the faults committed, and to cause them afterward to live in more godly feare and reverence."[206] Three causes are assigned why such discipline should be retained and practised in the church—viz., that evil men may not be numbered among God's children, that the good may not be infected by association with the ungodly, and that the individual taken under discipline may be made ashamed of his fault, and so may be induced to repent and amend. This is said to be the object even of excommunication—the highest censure the church can inflict on an offending brother—that he, being brought to a due sense of his sin and misery, may be saved in the day of the Lord. It is expressly provided that, in regard to this last and highest censure, nothing is to be attempted without the determination of the whole church—i.e., of the ordinary members of the church—and they are affectionately reminded that it is their duty to take good heed "that they seeme not more ready to expell from the congregation than to receave againe those, in whom they perceave worthy fruits of repentance to appeare," and "that all punishments, corrections, censures, and admonitions stretch no farther than God's Word with mercy may lawfully beare."[207]

Order of Excommunication.

The Order of Excommunication and Public Repentance, sanctioned by the General Assembly in 1569, long continued to be used as a directory in the administration of discipline. It was compiled by Knox, or rather abridged by him from Alasco's 'Modus ac Ritus Excommunicationis' and his 'Forma ac Ratio Publicæ Penitentiæ,' used with the approbation of Edward VI. in the Church of the Foreigners in London. It breathes throughout a spirit of tender regard for erring brethren and earnest longing for their recovery, quite as strongly as it manifests a spirit of holy zeal for the glory of God and the purity of His church. In all save the most notorious and urgent cases, the offender was to be dealt with repeatedly both in private and in public to confess his aggravated offence before the extreme penalty was inflicted on him. If these dealings and admonitions proved ineffectual, the minister was once more to explain the nature of his offence, and the frequency of the public and private admonitions addressed to him, was then to appeal to the elders and deacons to confirm the truth of what he said, and finally was to ask of the whole church if they thought such a contempt should be suffered amongst them, and only in the event of no man making further intercession for the erring and obstinate was the minister to proceed to pronounce the fearful sentence.[208]

Discipline under Prelacy.

In the times of declension which arose after James VI. took the government into his own hands, the strict exercise of such discipline became specially odious to the king and his gay courtiers, and incessant efforts were made to relax its rigour. These, however, were in general directed to effect this object rather by means of than in spite of the church, by securing that cases involving the sentence of excommunication should be reserved for the determination of the higher courts of the church, on which the king and his friends could bring their influence to bear with most effect. Even during the domination of the Second Episcopacy it is well known, from records still extant, that kirk-sessions and presbyteries were continued, and were allowed, with the sanction of the bishop, to maintain a discipline which in the present day would not be generally accounted lax. The grotesque penances so often resorted to in the times immediately succeeding the Reformation, and for the use of which our forefathers have been subjected to so much abuse and ridicule, were by no means confined to them, and probably had been suggested by similar grotesque ones in use before, and were employed by the Court of High Commission, by the Church of England, and by other churches too, in so far as they ever ventured to exercise discipline on notorious offenders. Even those melancholy trials of witches, for which they have been so severely blamed, were not originated by them, and were countenanced quite as much by their opponents, and by no one more than by the pope and his entourage, as well as by James VI., the great patron of the bishops, and for long were clamoured for by the people.

To us, living in the light and glorying in the toleration of the nineteenth century, some of these disciplinary provisions may seem harsh, several of the details frivolous, others inquisitorial; and the very principle of such a close identification of the ecclesiastical and civil, as that all offences against morality and church discipline were to be also dealt with and punished by the state, more than questionable. But to men living in the sixteenth century and just emerging out of the ignorance and licence which the old church had tolerated, and longing to be moulded into a community really holy and self-denying and quickened to a higher life—enthused with a longing to reach loftier heights in it—the iron discipline of Calvin and Knox was welcome as requiring only what they felt to be their duty and their true interest. We may extend to the disciple what the historian of French Protestantism has said of the master, and so far varying the words of Haag affirm: "The institutions of Calvin [and Knox] The People remoulded. accomplished what was proposed. In less than three generations the Genevese [and Lowland Scots] were entirely remoulded. To frivolity and licentiousness succeeded that somewhat austere strictness of morals which in earlier days distinguished the disciples of the reformer. History tells of only two [three] men who have been able permanently to impress their stamp on an entire people—Lycurgus and Calvin [and Knox], whose characters in fact have much in common."[209] The Athenians made merry over the black broth of the Spartans; but Sparta conquered Athens. How many accusations and witticisms have been launched against the Calvinistic spirit, and yet Calvinistic countries led the way in Christian activity and civil freedom, and to them even those who abuse them are largely indebted for their blessings.

III. The Prerogatives and Duties of Church Members.

The thorough agreement of our reformers' ideas respecting the nature of the church with those of the apostles and primitive Christians comes out even more emphatically in the statements they make in the First Book of Discipline and the Book of Common Order about the ordinary members of the congregation, and the arrangements there recommended for promoting their spiritual welfare, and calling forth all their gifts. Not only are they to be allowed a voice in the choice of their ministers, elders, and deacons, in the exclusion of members from the church and their readmission into it, and through their representatives in the government of the church generally; not only are they to have week-day and Sabbath services, and frequent communions for their edification and growth in grace,—but in the principal congregations there are to be weekly meetings for the study and interpretation of the Scriptures. At these meetings every man was to be allowed to speak his mind and propose his doubts, to exercise his gifts for the edification of the brethren, or to "inquire as God shall move his heart and the text minister occasion."[210] The opening paragraph of chapter xii. of the First Book of Discipline shows us whence this remarkable institution was derived, and proves clearly that Neander was not the first in post-Reformation times who discovered the full significance of certain well-known passages in St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, but only a restorer of the long-forgotten teaching of Calvin, The Exercise. Alasco, and Knox. The paragraph is as follows: "To the end that the kirk of God may have a tryall of men's knowledge, judgements, graces, and utterances; as also, such that have somewhat profited in God's Word may from time to time grow in more full perfection to serve the kirk as necessity shall require; it is most expedient that in every towne where schooles and repaire of learned men are, there be a time in one certain day every week appointed to that exercise which S. Paul calls prophecying; the order whereof is expressed by him in thir words: 'Let the prophets speak two or three and let the other judge, but if anything be revealed to another that sitteth by, let the former keep silence; for ye may one by one all prophesie that all may learne, and all may receive consolation.' ... By which words of the apostle, it is evident that in the Kirk of Corinth when they did assemble for that purpose, some place of Scripture was read, upon the which one first gave his judgement to the instruction and consolation of the auditors; after whom did another either confirme what the former had said, or added what he had omitted, or did gently correct or explaine more properly where the whole verity was not revealled to the former; and in case things were hid from the one and from the other, liberty was given for a third to speak his judgement to the edification of the kirk." The exercise or practice here authorised by the apostle, it is next affirmed, is a thing most necessary for the kirk of God this day in Scotland, "for thereby, as said is, shall the kirk have judgement and knowledge of the graces, gifts, and utterances of every man within their bodie, the simple and such as have somewhat profited shall be encouraged daily to studie and to proceed in knowledge, and the whole kirk shall be edified; for this exercise must be patent to such as list to hear and learne, and every man shall have liberty to utter and declare his minde and knowledge to the comfort and consolation of the Kirk."[211] Then after appointing some prudent regulations to prevent this liberty of prophesying from encroaching on the province of the regular ministry of the church, or degenerating into a school for the encouragement of rash speculation instead of ministering to the comfort and godly edifying of the brethren, directions are given that the ministers of the landward parishes adjacent to every important town, together with the readers within six miles, should assist those that prophesy within the towns, that they themselves may learn or others may learn from them. "And moreover," it is again repeated, "men in whom is supposed to be any gifts which might edifie the church if they were well imployed must be charged ... to joyn themselves with the session and company of interpreters.... For no man may be permitted as best pleaseth him to live within the kirk of God, but every man must be constrained by fraternall admonition and correction to bestow his labours, when of the kirk he is required, to the edification of others."[212] Such was the remarkable provision made by our reformers, that every adult member of the church should enjoy such means of grace as were fitted to promote his growth in Christian knowledge as well as in spiritual life, and should have reasonable opportunity of using for the glory of God and the good of his brethren the gifts with which the Spirit of God had furnished him. It may be questioned whether some such institution is not as much needed in the present day, if the members of the church are to be preserved from the temptations to doubt with which they are surrounded, and if they are to be encouraged to supplement the labours of their ministers and elders in winning back those who have been seduced into the paths of error or sin; and whether its influence, if it were only set about with earnestness, would be less powerful to preserve and reclaim than it was in those earlier times.

IV. Education of the Young and University Reform.

The care and anxiety of our reformers were not confined to the adult members of the church. They were extended in a special manner to the young, and were manifested towards them, if possible, with more intense earnestness and loving tenderness. Though parish schools, in the later sense, were not yet devised, detailed arrangements were made that the readers at the several kirks should impart religious knowledge and the elements of primary education to the young of the flock, and that those who showed an aptitude for learning and capability of being trained to be of service to kirk or common-weal should have access at various centres to higher training. "Seeing," they say in their importunate pleading with the nobles on their behalf, "that God hath determined that His kirke here in earth shall be taught not by angels but by men, and seeing that men are borne ignorant of God and of all godlinesse, ... of necessity it is that your honours be most careful for the vertuous education and godly upbringing of the youth of this realm, if either ye now thirst unfainedly [for] the advancement of Christ's glorie or yet desire the continuance of His benefits to the generation following; for as the youth must succeed to us, Schools. so we ought to be carefull that they have knowledge and erudition to profit and comfort that which ought to be most deare to us, to wit, the kirk and spouse of our Lord Jesus."[213] To secure this noble end it was deemed necessary that, besides the readers' schools, every considerable town should have at least one schoolmaster appointed who was competent to teach grammar and the Latin tongue; and that in the more notable towns, especially the old cathedral cities, where the revenues of the prebendaries or of the monks might be made available, there should be a college in which at least logic, rhetoric, and the languages—i.e., Latin and Greek—should be taught by competent masters, for whom and for the poorer scholars attending them suitable stipends and bursaries should be provided out of the aforesaid revenues. The fruit of such an organisation, it is affirmed, would soon appear. "For first, the youthhead and tender children shall be nourished and brought up in vertue in presence of their friends, by whose good attendance many inconveniences may be avoyded in which the youth commonly fall either by overmuch libertie which they have in strange and unknowne places while they cannot rule themselves, or else for lack of good attendance and of such necessaries as their tender age requires. Secondly, the exercise of children in every kirke shall be great instruction to the aged and unlearned," who had never been taught to read, and in whose presence in the Sunday afternoon service they were examined. Lastly, "the great Schooles called the Universities shall be replenished with these that shall be apt to learning; for this must be carefully provided that no father, of what estate or condition that ever he be, use his children at his own fantasie especially in their youthhead; but all must be compelled to bring up their children in learning and vertue." Thus boldly did our reformers lay down the principle of compulsory education, which men in our own day have only hesitatingly adopted, but with greater consistency or daring than our contemporaries have yet evinced, for they proposed to apply the principle to the children of the rich and potent, as well as to those of the poor and vicious. Those higher classes, they say, "may not be permitted to suffer their children to spend their youth in vaine idleness as heretofore they have done, but they must be exhorted, and by the censure of the kirk compelled, to dedicate their sonnes by training them up in good exercises to the profite of the kirk and commonwealth." This they expect the rich to do at their own expense, while they desire the children of the poor to be supported at the charge of the kirk. The sons neither of rich nor poor are to be permitted to reject learning if they develop any aptitude for it, but are to be "charged to continue their studie that the commonwealth may have some comfort by them." To secure this object, discreet and learned men are to visit the schools every quarter, and examine what proficiency the pupils have attained.[214]

Value of Learning.

To these suggestions regarding primary and secondary schools succeeds a very detailed statement of the changes desired in the universities to adapt them to the new order of things. And then they conclude as follows: "All other things touching the books to be read in ilk classe, and all such like particular affaires, we referre to the discretion of the masters, principals, and regents, with their well-advised counsel; not doubting but if God shall grant quietnesse, and give your wisedomes grace to set forward letters in the sort prescribed, ye shall leave wisdome and learning to your posterity—a treasure more to be esteemed than any earthly treasure ye are able to amasse for them, which without wisdome are more able to be their ruin and confusion than their help and comfort. And as this is most true, so we leave it with the rest of the commodities to be weighed by your honours' wisedome, and set forwards by your authority to the most high advancement of this commonwealth committed to your charge."[215]

These touching appeals were not made altogether in vain. Though neither quietness nor a large measure of grace was granted to the rough barons so earnestly and tenderly addressed, yet the goodly fabric of our church and commonwealth was reared up in those troublous times. The full and liberal adoption of the plan of national education sketched by our reformer and his associates still remains in part to be desiderated, and is worthy to be striven for by the churches which claim to represent them. The partial carrying out of their views, more than any other influence that can be named, has conduced to elevate our people and raise Scotland to the rank it now holds among the nations; and we can hardly doubt that the more complete realisation of them in the careful Christian training of the young and the adult members of the church, and the extension of the blessings of education and religion to the masses so long left to grow up in ignorance and vice, would tend greatly to bring back the disaffected to the paths of peace and life, to raise the members of the church in the scale of intelligence and virtue, to make the nobles more than ever heretofore the decus et tutamen patriæ, and to bind all, both classes and masses, closely together in the bonds of mutual Christian affection and true patriotism.

V. Care of the Poor.

Oppression of the Poor.

I must still add that the same enlightened principles which guided them to make careful provision for these important objects, led them also to take a kindly interest in the humbler poor and aged, and to urge both on the state and on the members of the church the duty they owed to this long despised and neglected class of the population. First, for the poor peasantry who were not paupers, but who, they allege, had been grievously oppressed by the exactions of the clergy in the times immediately preceding, they present the following earnest plea: "With the griefe of our hearts we heare that some gentlemen are now as cruell over their tenants as ever were the Papists, requiring of them (the tiends and) whatsoever they afore payed to the kirk, so that the Papistical tyrannie shall onely be changed into the tyrannie of the lord and laird. We dare not flatter your honours, neither yet is it profitable for you that we so doe: (for neither shall we,) if we permit cruelty to be used; neither shall ye, who by your authoritie ought to gaine-stand such oppression, nor yet they that use the same, escape God's heavie and fearfull judgements. The gentlemen, barones, earles, lords, and others must be content to live upon their just rents, and suffer the kirk to be restored to her (right and) liberty; that by her restitution, the poore, who heretofore, by the cruell Papists, have been spoiled and oppressed, may now receive some comfort and relaxation, and their tiends and other exactions be cleane discharged and no more taken in time comming. The uppermost claith, corps-present, clerk-maile, the pasche-offering, tiend-ale, and all handlings[216] upaland can neither be required nor recieved of good conscience."[217]

Exactions of the Medieval Church.

The history of the world, the history of the Christian church, has few passages more noble than this, where these poor ministers, not yet assured of decent provision for their own maintenance, boldly undertake the patronage of the peasantry, and say they would rather suffer themselves than ask that teinds should be exacted from those who had been so long ground down, not only by the exaction of these from their crofts and even from their gardens, but also by a multitude of other imposts, which, although their very names are now almost forgotten in Scotland, had been long felt to be a grievous oppression. Was it any wonder that those crushed and down-trodden classes should rally round their protectors, and under their kindly and godly training should grow up to be a strength to the church and a power in the state? Charming fancy pictures are still sometimes drawn of the stately monastery—with its handsome church and kindly and cultured monks—as a centre of civilising and Christianising influences to the district in which it was erected. These influences no doubt had a certain reality in the early ages of the church, and even in the days of the good Queen Margaret; but in Scotland, at least, these days had long passed away before the sixteenth century; and the monasteries, as a whole, had become a source of weakness and scandal, rather than of strength and honour to the dominant church. In fact, their wealth, being to a large extent derived from the teinds of parishes, should have been devoted to the spiritual interests of these parishes, whereas the vicars appointed by them being generally put off with a miserable pittance and left largely dependent on these hated and oppressive exactions—corpse presents, uppermost cloth, Pasche-offerings—could not fail to alienate the peasantry from the monasteries and their rural representatives. Such charges of oppression could never have been so publicly made against them had they not been notoriously true. And if further evidence were needed, it may be found in abundance in the poems of Sir David Lindsay and the Wedderburns. The picture the former has drawn of the poor peasant driven out of house and holding[218] by these oppressive exactions The Oppressors relentless. is known to be true to the life; and contributed greatly to the overthrow of the merciless oppressors who, until the very eve of the triumph of the Reformation, could not be persuaded either to abolish or abate their dues.[219]