[Sidenote: Alesius and the Scriptures.]

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 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.

[Sidenote: Norman Gourlay and David Stratoun.]

[Sidenote: Fugitives and Martyrs.]

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 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. 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.

[Sidenote: 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 Coelian Mount. "Paul III.," says D'Aubigne, "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'Aubigne'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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 elite 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: The Balance of Parties.]

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 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Supra, p. 18, n.

[28] [The saying in slightly different forms may be found in Laing's Knox, i. 42; Calderwood's History, i. 86; Spottiswoode's History, i. 130.]

[29] [Various dates, ranging between 1529 and 1533, have been assigned for Forrest's martyrdom.]

[30] [William Arth.]

[31] [It was probably in 1530 that he left Scotland.]

[32] [Howard and Barlo, in writing from Edinburgh on the 13th of May 1536, say, that to the Scots the reading of God's Word "in theyr vulgare tonge is lately prohybitede by open proclamation" (Lemon's State Papers, v. 48). Norfolk, writing to Crumwell from Berwick on the 29th of March 1539, says: "Dayly commeth unto me some gentlemen and some clerkes, wiche do flee owte of Scotland as they saie for redyng of Scripture in Inglishe; saying; that, if they were taken, they sholde be put to execution" (Ibid. v. 154). In the Epistle to James VI. prefixed to the Bassandyne Bible, it is said: "The false namit clergie of this realme, abusing the gentle nature of your Hienes maist noble gudschir of worthie memorie, made it an cappital crime to be punishit with the fyre to have or rede the New Testament in the vulgare language." One of the charges on which Sir John Borthwick was condemned, on the 28th of May 1540, was that he possessed a copy of the New Testament in the vernacular ('Register of St Andrews Kirk Session,' Scot. Hist. Soc., i. 98).]

[33] Diurnal of Occurrents, p. 15.

[34] Laing's Knox, i. 58.

[35] [Foxe alleges that Gourlay and Stratoun were condemned and burned, "because, after great solicitation made by the king, they refused to abjure and recant" (Cattley's Foxe, iv. 579); but, on the other hand, the writer of the Diurnal of Occurrents (p. 18) and Bishop Lesley (History, 1830, p. 149) assert that Gourlay did abjure.]

[36] Such was the punishment meted out to him for endeavouring to do in a scriptural way what rulers of the church were doing in disregard of the laws of Scripture as well as the laws of their church. Pitscottie knew no other cause why he was burned save that "he was in the East-land, and came home, and married a wife contrary to the form of the pope's institution because he was a priest; for they would thole no priest to marry, but they would punish and burn him to the dead; but if he had used ten thousand whores he had not been burnt" (Pitscottie's History, 1778, p. 236).

[37] [In the letter, dated 29th December 1537, granting his escheat to his father, he is described as "umquhill Walter Stewart" (M'Crie's Knox, 1855, p. 316). Calderwood places his recantation and accidental death in 1533 (History, Wodrow Society, i. 104).]

[38] [Gavin Logie is usually spoken of as Principal of St Leonard's (Laing's Knox, i. 36, n.).]

[39] Lorimer's Scottish Reformation, 1860, p. 51.

[40] D'Aubigne's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi. 131.—Like his predecessor Archbishop Forman, who—thirty years before, in the interests of France, which had richly rewarded him with the Archbishopric of Bourges—had so cruelly embroiled Scotland with England and almost courted the disaster of Flodden, Betoun never ceased either during the life or after the death of James V. to sow the seeds of discord between the two realms, and so to court reverses to the Scottish arms, and destruction to the Scottish monasteries near the southern border. He shunned no risk, shrank from no cruelty, to remove out of the way those who thwarted his schemes or favoured the better policy which in the end was to carry the day.

[41] Theiner's Vetera Monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum, 1864, pp. 608-612.

[42] [Betoun's Commission as Legate is dated 30th January 1543-44 (Lemon's State Papers, v. 443; Thorpe's Calendar, i. 46).]

[43] [There is such a reference to him in Theiner's Vetera Monumenta, p. 608.]

[44] Robertson's Concilia Scotiae, vol. i. p. cxxxvi, n.

[45] See Appendix C.

[46] D'Aubigne's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi. 132.

[47] Concilia Scotiae, vol. i. pp. cxxxix, cxl.

[48] [14th Dec. 1542.]

[49] [His letter to the Pope is dated 10th May 1543 (Theiner's Monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum, pp. 614, 615).]

[50] [On the 8th of September "he was enjoyned to passe to the Freres in Stirling, ... and there received open pennance and a solempne othe, in the presence and hereing of all men that was there, that he shulde never doo the same againe, but supporte and defende the professon and habit of mounkes, freres, and such other; and therupon, being absolved by the Cardinall and the Busshoppes, herde masse and received the sacramente" (Hamilton Papers, ii. 38).]

[51] D'Aubigne's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi, 206.

[52] Concilia Scotiae, ii. 294.

[53] Acts of Parliament, ii. 443. [This was on the 15th of December 1543.]

[54] [This letter is dated 20th May 1545 (Theiner's Monumenta, p. 616).]

[55] Theiner's Monumenta, p. 617. [This letter is dated 6th July 1545.]

[56] Hume Brown's Knox, i. 64, 65. Grimani's opinion, as sent from Stirling, is thus summarised by Father Stevenson: "The realm is in such confusion, so divided, so full of heresy that, but for the interposition of God, it will soon become as bad as England. The queen and the cardinal have spent all their money in the common cause; and the clergy are unable to assist, for the fruits of their benefices have been seized by the Lutherans" (Mary Stuart, 1886, p. 51).



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.

[Sidenote: 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 Zuerich, 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.

[Sidenote: His Appearance and Habits.]

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 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]

[Sidenote: A Protestant Pasquil.]

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 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: His Martyrdom.]

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 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]

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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 Zuerich, 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] [The charter is dated at Montrose on the 20th of March 1534-35. The Martyr's signature, as "M. Geo. Wischert," proves that he had already taken his degree (Register of Great Seal, iii., No. 1462).]

[58] [His translation is reprinted in the Wodrow Miscellany, pp. 7-23.]

[59] Cattley's Foxe, v. 626.

[60] [This is now in the National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.]

[61] [Cook's History of the Reformation, 1811, i. 272, 273; 1819, i. 273. Dr Cook says that Dr Leslie, minister of Fordoun, "got a short view of them," and favoured him with the account which he wrote. In a very similar notice of the paintings by Dr Leslie, it is stated that they were discovered when the old house of Pittarrow was being pulled down in 1802 ('New Statistical Account of Kincardineshire,' p. 81).] As Dr Cook long ago surmised, the lines of covert sarcasm on the pope are not original. One evening as I returned to Guildford Street after a long day in the British Museum, I had occasion to pass through Red Lion Square and the alley to the east of it, where I saw exposed in a pawnbroker's window a little antique volume, in a very dilapidated state, opened at the page which contained these lines almost verbatim. I at once purchased it, and on further examination I found it had been published at Basle in 1537—i.e., a few years before Wishart was there. [The little collection which Dr Mitchell thus refers to bears the title: "Pasqvilli de Concilio Mantuano Iudicium. Qverimonia Papistarum ad Legatum Pontificium in comicijs Schmalcaldianis. Mantua uae miseris nimium uicina Papistis. MDXXXVII."

The colophon runs thus: "Impressum Romae in porta Angelorum. M.D.XXXVII."

Wishart evidently found his lines in the following:—

"Lavs Romani Pontificis. Scripta ad placitum Romanae curiae per uenerabilem dominum Doctorem Ioannem Cochleum, Theutonicae Doctor Rotzloffel, et Georgium VVicelium cognomento, Meister Lugenmaul, Romanae Ecclesiae propugnatores egregios.

"Pauperibus sua dat gratis nec munera curat Curia Papalis quod modo percipimus Laus tua non tua fraus, Virtus non copia rerum Scandere te fecit, hoc Decus eximium Conditio tua sit stabilis nec tempore paruo Viuere te faciat hic Deus omnipotens.

"Quos uersiculos pessimus quidam haereticus, Lutheranus, iuuenilis fortasis Poeta VVittembergensis, ita de uerbo ad uerbum inuertit.

"Percipimus modo quod Papalis curia curat Munera, nec gratis dat sua pauperibus Eximium decus hoc fecit te scandere rerum Copia, non uirtus, fraus tua, non tua laus. Omnipotens Deus hic faciat te uiuere paruo Tempore, nec stabilis sit tua conditio."]

[62] Hamilton Papers, ii. 38.

[63] Maxwell's Old Dundee prior to the Reformation, 1891, pp. 92, 395.

[64] Laing's Knox, i. 126. [Calderwood (i. 186) and Spottiswoode (i. 150) have burning for hornyng.]

[65] Laing's Knox, i. 126.

[66] [Knox calls it "the East Porte of the Toune" (Laing's Knox, i. 129). Maxwell says that the Port which stood in the Seagate would alone correspond to that described by Knox; and he adds: "The Port yet standing in the Cowgate—which, because of its association with the honoured name of George Wishart, only was left when some of the others were demolished—really cannot be identified as his preaching-place, and should not carry the inscription which has been recently put over its archway" ('History of Old Dundee,' 1884, pp. 220-222).]

[67] Laing's Knox, i. 130.

[68] Gude and Godlie Ballatis, 1897, p. 165.

[69] Laing's Knox, i. 130, 131. The name of this priest is given as Sir John Wightone, or Weighton, by Knox, Calderwood, and Spottiswoode. Maxwell cannot find a priest of this name among those ministering in Dundee in 1550 ('Old Dundee prior to the Reformation,' 1891, p. 87, n.) The James Wichtand who was reader at Inchture and Kinnaird in 1574 (Wodrow Miscellany, p. 353) is said to have held a chaplaincy in Dundee before the Reformation. But Dr Laing holds that there was a Sir John Wighton, a chaplain in Dundee, who obtained the vicarage pensionary in the parish church of Ballumby in 1538, and who appears to have been incarcerated in St Andrews Castle in the cardinal's absence in 1543 (Laing's Knox, vi. 670).

[70] Lemon's State Papers, v. 377.

[71] Laing's Knox, i. 536. [Maxwell gives a detailed account of this other George Wishart in his 'Old Dundee prior to the Reformation,' 1891, pp. 91-95.]

[72] Cattley's Foxe, v. 635.

[73] Cattley's Foxe, v. 635. [Foxe is here quoting the account in the black-letter tract printed in or about 1547, which Knox deemed important enough to copy from Foxe into his own pages.]

[74] Gude and Godlie Ballatis, 1897, p. 180.

[75] Lorimer's Scottish Reformation, 1860, pp. 153, 154.

[76] Wedderburn and Wishart seem also to have been acquainted with Coverdale's Bible of 1535.

[77] See my Introduction to 'The Gude and Godlie Ballatis,' 1897, p. xxxviii, n.

[78] No doubt the initial Catechism was in use also. It has been conjectured that the Catechism may even have been printed separately, and that the first part of the following entry may refer to it: "The catechisme in two partes; the first in Scotch poetry, having a kalender before it. The second part in Latin and Scotis prose, entituled Catechismus ecclesiae Geneuensis.... Edinburgh: Imprinted by John Ross for Henrie Charteris, 1574" (Dickson and Edmond's Annals of Scottish Printing, 1890, p. 334).

[79] [Reprinted under the editorial care of Dr Mitchell in 1897 for the Scottish Text Society.]

[80] Lorimer's Knox and the Church of England, 1875, pp. 290-292.

[81] Wodrow Miscellany, pp. 295-300.



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'Aubigne, 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."

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: A Galley-slave.]

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 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Visits Scotland.]

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, 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Preaches in St Andrews.]

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 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]

[Sidenote: The Victory.]

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 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 Staehelin 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[82] D'Aubigne's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi. 17.

[83] Calderwood's History, i. 155, 156, 160; Laing's Knox, i. 95, 96, 105. [Calderwood says that Williams was born "beside Elstonefurde, in East Lothiane."]

[84] Lorimer's Scottish Reformation, pp. 155, 156.

[85] [Though these lines are continually attributed to Lindsay, I do not remember to have ever seen them in any edition of his works, or quoted as his by any earlier writer than Wodrow.]

[86] [According to Knox, though "called bastard brother to the governour," many deemed him to be a son of "the old Bischope of Dunkelden, called Crychtoun" (Laing's Knox, i. 105). Buchanan says he was "first callid Cuningham, estemit Cowane, and at last Abbot Hamiltoun" (Admonition to the trew Lordis). In a transcript used by Ruddiman, Givane occurs instead of Cowane.]

[87] [Laing's Knox, i. 186. Though the Lyon King was then in St Andrews, he was not one of those who were sheltering in the castle (Laing's Lindsay's Poetical Works, 1879, vol. i. pp. xxxix, xli).]

[88] [Knox says that the castle was rendered "upone Setterday, the last of Julij" (Laing's Knox, i. 205); Bishop Lesley says "the xxix of Julij" (Lesley's History, 1830, p. 195). In 1547, the last of July fell not on Saturday but on Sabbath.]

[89] Laing's Knox, vi. 104.

[90] [The negotiations for the release of the captives seem to have dragged their weary length along very slowly. So early as the 29th of March 1548, Huntly wrote thus to Somerset: "The governor has agreed to exchange the men in the castle of St Andrews with Scots prisoners conform to your desire, and has sent me commission therein, as I shall show you at my coming to London: or if you send your mind to my Lord Warden, I shall appoint with him. The governor has written to the king of France to send the men taken in St Andrews to Rouen, to be ready for the exchange" (Bain's Calendar, 1543-67, p. 104).]

[91] [Edward died July 6, 1553.]

[92] [The first edition of the Genevan version was printed at Geneva by Rouland Hall in 1560. "The changes made in the Geneva Bible were the adoption of Roman type instead of the black letter, in which all English Bibles had previously been printed, and the division of the chapters into verses. These changes were the principal cause of the wonderful popularity of this version, of which about 200 editions are known. From 1560 to 1616 no year passed without one or more editions issuing from the press, in folio, quarto, or octavo. In 1599 no less than ten distinct editions were printed, each of which consisted of a large number of copies. The last quarto printed in England is dated 1615, and the last folio 1616. After this time a great many editions were printed at Amsterdam by Joost Broerss and other Dutch printers; the last folio bears the imprint of Thomas Stafford, and the date 1644.... 150,000 copies were imported from Holland after this version had ceased to be printed in England.... Owing to the vast number of copies in circulation during the three-quarters of a century that this version was the household Bible of England, it is now the most common of all early printed Bibles.... The singular rendering of the 7th verse of the third chapter of Genesis in every edition of the Genevan version has caused it to be commonly known as the 'Breeches' Bible" (Dore's Old Bibles, 1888, pp. 203, 204).]

[93] [Mary Tudor died on the 17th of November 1558.]

[94] Troubles at Frankfort, Petheram's reprint, pp. cxci, cxcii.

[95] [After making two requests by messengers, Knox wrote to Cecil from Dieppe on the 10th of April 1559, and on the 22nd sent from the same town a duplicate of that letter with a postscript added (Laing's Knox, ii. 15-22, vi. 15-21).]

[96] [The Provincial Council is said to have closed on the 10th of April (Robertson's Concilia Scotiae, ii. 151, 176; Lesley's History, p. 271); but Knox says that it sat until he arrived in Scotland (Laing's Knox, i. 291); and that the date of his arrival was the 2nd of May (Ibid., i. 318, vi. 21); and an anonymous writer alleges that the council broke up when assured that Knox had come (Wodrow Miscellany, pp. 56, 57). M'Crie suggests that, although the Acts were concluded on the 10th of April, the council may not have then closed (Life of Knox, 1855, p. 126, n.).]

[97] [While it is apparent from Knox's own narrative that his first public sermon was delivered in the parish church of St Andrews (Laing's Knox, i. 189), it is not quite so clear whether Rough addressed the call to him in that church or in the chapel of the castle, though it rather appears to have been in the former (Ibid., i. 186-188); and the precise building in St Andrews in which he first celebrated the Lord's Supper seems to me to be also uncertain (Ibid., i. 201).]

[98] Laing's Knox, i. 228.

[99] Ibid., i. 348, 349; vi. 25.

[100] [Many members of the university became Protestants. The twenty-one men in St Andrews, whom the first General Assembly deemed qualified "for ministreing and teaching," were with few exceptions professors, or regents. For the number of the ecclesiastics who joined the congregation at St Andrews in the early months of the Reformation, see supra, p. 13. In September, 1566, St Andrews was emphatically declared to be "the most flourishing city as to divine and human learning in all Scotland" (Laing's Knox, vi. 546).]

[101] Laing's Knox, vi. 78.



CHAPTER VI.

THE OLD SCOTTISH CONFESSION OF 1560.

[Sidenote: Alleged Omission of a Chapter.]

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 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.

[Sidenote: Character of the Confession.]

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 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]

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: The Eternal Decree.]

[Sidenote: Alasco's Influence.]

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 given, is the 'Summa Doctrinae' 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.