III. The Prerogatives and Duties of Church Members.

[Sidenote: The Exercise.]

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



IV. Education of the Young and University Reform.

[Sidenote: Schools.]

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

[Sidenote: Value of Learning.]

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

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

V. Care of the Poor.

[Sidenote: Oppression of the Poor.]

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

[Sidenote: Exactions of the Medieval Church.]

[Sidenote: The Oppressors relentless.]

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

FOOTNOTES:

[180] [The six were John Wynram, John Spottiswoode, John Willock, John Douglas, John Row, and John Knox (supra, p. 99).]

[181] Spottiswoode's History, Spot. Soc. ed., i. 371, 372.

[182] Supra, pp. 112, 113.

[183] The appointment of such an official as chief minister of the English congregation of Frankfort had, however, been urged by Knox's opponents there, but was refused by his party (Discourse of Troubles at Frankfort, pp. xiv, xlvii, cxvii, cxxxv-cxxxviii, cxlvi, cxlvii).

[184] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 409, 410; Laing's Knox, iv. 177.

[185] The great services Coverdale had rendered to the cause of Protestantism by his translation of the Scriptures did not suffice to blot out from the minds of Elizabeth and her ministers the remembrance of his connection with Knox and Goodman. He was welcomed at the consecration of Archbishop Parker, though he came in his black gown, for they could not well do that without him; but all Grindal's efforts failed to secure for him a Welsh bishopric, or even to get him left unmolested in the parochial benefice he conferred on him.

[186] Even in St Andrews, with all its equipment of schools and colleges, the common people are represented in 1547 as welcoming Knox's offer of a public disputation, because though they could not all read his papers they could understand what he addressed to them viva voce (Laing's Knox, i. 189).

[187] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 518; Laing's Knox, ii. 185.

[188] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 526; Laing's Knox, ii. 191.

[189] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 530; Laing's Knox, ii. 194.

[190] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 530; Laing's Knox, ii. 194.

[191] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 577; Laing's Knox, ii. 233.

[192] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 578; Laing's Knox, ii. 234, 235.

[193] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 581; Laing's Knox, ii. 236, 237.

[194] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 532; Laing's Knox, ii. 195, 196. [Readers who were able to exhort and explain the Scriptures were to have their stipends augmented until they attained the honour of a minister (Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 536, 537; Laing's Knox, ii. 199, 200).]

[195] [The readers who had "any gift of interpretation" were to take part in these meetings (Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 590; Laing's Knox, ii. 244).]

[196] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 539; Laing's Knox, ii. 202.

[197] ["It is evident unto all men, diligently reading Holy Scripture and ancient authors, that from the apostles' time there hath been these orders of ministers in Christ's church: bishops, priests, and deacons" (Liturgies of Edward VI., Parker Society, p. 331).]

[198] The jest attributed to Queen Elizabeth that she had made a bishop but marred a good preacher shows this.

[199] In the chief towns, just as in Geneva, there seems from early times to have been a common or "general session," although there were several congregations in each, as in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and Perth.

[200] Even the Second Book of Discipline does not sharply distinguish between the lesser and greater eldership or presbytery; and Gillespie admits they were not distinguished in the primitive church, though he holds that both were needed in Scotland to do the work which the one presbytery did in the primitive church (infra, pp. 230-233).

[201] [The Book of Common Order distinguishes between the weekly meeting of the ministers and elders in their assembly or consistory, and the weekly meeting of the congregation for the interpretation of the Scriptures (Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 411-413; Laing's Knox, iv. 177-179). For the nature and object of the exercise see infra, pp. 170-173.]

[202] [The bull, which is printed in Concilia Scotiae, ii. 3, is dated "xiiij kalendas Junij pontificatus nostri anno nono," i.e., the 19th of May 1225.]

[203] See Schenkel's article, "Kirche," in Herzog's Real-Encyklopaedie.

[204] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 68; Laing's Knox, ii. 110.

[205] See Calvin's Institutes, book iv. chap. ii.—"As no city or village can exist without a magistrate and government, so the Church of God stands in need of a spiritual polity of its own. This is altogether distinct from the civil government, and is so far from hindering or impairing it, that it rather does much to aid and promote it."

[206] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 413; Laing's Knox, iv. 203.

[207] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 414-417; Laing's Knox, iv. 204-206. If this humanity is not observed in private as well as in public, there is danger lest instead of discipline we fall into a kind of Gehenna, and instead of correctors and educators become executioners of the brethren (Calvin).

[208] The form of absolution then appointed to be used was, with consent of Henderson, modified by the Westminster divines into the shape in which it appears in their Directory for Church Government and Excommunication, and as modified was afterwards inserted in our Form of Process of 1707.

[209] La France protestant, deuxieme edition, iii. 530.

[210] Book of Common Order, in Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 412; Laing's Knox, iv. 179.

[211] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 587-589; Laing's Knox, ii. 242, 243.

[212] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 590, 591; Laing's Knox, ii. 244, 245.

[213] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 547; Laing's Knox, ii. 209.

[214] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 548-550; Laing's Knox, ii. 209-211.

[215] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 561; Laing's Knox, ii. 220, 221.

[216] [Dr Mitchell seems to have thought that handlings should be read haldings.]

[217] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 562, 563. [The words which in this quotation are enclosed in parentheses are not in the copy of the Book of Discipline preserved by Knox (Laing's Knox, ii. 221, 222). Instead of the words, "if we permit cruelty to be used," that copy reads, "if you permit suche creualtie to be used"; and after the words, "comfort and relaxation," is the clause, "Concludit be the Lordis."]

[218] The pauper comes on the stage with the words—

"Of your almis, gude folks, for God's luife of heavin, For I have motherles bairns either sax or seavin;"

and proceeds in piteous strain—

"Gude man, will ye gif me of your charitie, And I sall declair yow the black veritie. My father was ane auld man, and a hoir, And was of age four scoir of yeirs and moir. And Mald, my mother, was four scoir and fyfteine, And with my labour I did thame baith susteine. Wee had are meir, that caryit salt and coill, And everie ilk yeir scho brocht us hame ane foill. Wee had thrie ky, that was baith fat and fair, Nane tydier into the toun of Air. My father was sa waik of blude, and bane, That he deit, quhairfoir my mother maid gret maine: Then scho deit, within ane day or two; And thair began my povertie and wo. Our gude gray meir was baittand on the feild, And our Land's laird tuik hir for his hyreild, The vickar tuik the best cow be the heid, Incontinent, quhen my father was deid. And quhen the vickar hard tel how that my mother Was deid, fra hand he tuke to him ane uther: Then Meg, my wife, did murne baith evin and morow, Till at the last scho deit for verie sorow: And quhen the vickar hard tell my wyfe was dead, The thrid cow he cleikit be the heid. Thair umest clayis, that was of rapploch gray, The vickar gart his clark bear them away. Quhen all was gane, I micht mak na debeat, Bot with my bairns past for till beg my meat. Now, haif I tald yow the blak veritie, How I am brocht into this miserie."

—Laing's Lindsay's Poetical Works, 1879, ii. 99, 102, 103.

[219] [In the Articles addressed by some of the temporal lords and barons to the queen regent, and sent by her to the Provincial Council convened in Edinburgh a few weeks before the Reformation burst like a tempest upon the country, it was requested that "the corps presentes, kow, and [um]est claith, and the silvir commonlie callit the kirk richts, and Pasch offrands quhilk is takin at Pasch fra men and women for distribution of the sacrament of the blessit body and blood of Jesus Christ," should no longer be extorted under pain of excommunication or debarring from the sacraments, but left to the free will of the givers (Concilia Scotiae, ii. 148, 149). The Council met this demand for reformation by enacting that in future the poor should be freed from mortuary dues, while those not quite so poor were only to pay them in a modified form; and the small tithes and oblations were to be taken up before Lent so as to avoid the appearance of selling the sacrament (Ibid., ii. 167, 168, 174). When, on the 27th of May 1560, the reforming vicar of Lintrathin raised a summons against his parishioners for payment of his teinds, "the cors present and umest clayth of all yeris and termes bigane restand unpayit" were specially excepted from his claim (Spalding Miscellany, iv. 121).]



CHAPTER IX.

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN KNOX.

[Sidenote: Assassination of the Good Regent.]

The eighth decade of the sixteenth century was memorable in the history of Protestantism in its Presbyterian or Calvinistic form, and the year 1572 has been termed its annus mirabilis. It marked a crisis in the long and bloody struggle of the Protestants in the Netherlands with their Spanish oppressors,—a struggle which issued in securing the independence of the Dutch people, and settling on a Calvinistic basis the Reformed Church of Holland. It formed the turning-point in the tragic fortunes of the Reformed Church of France, at which, from being able to claim as adherents a majority of the landed gentry and a large minority of the more intelligent and wealthy bourgeois in the provincial towns, and being only weak among the citizens of the capital and the peasantry of northern and central France, she was, by an act of base treachery and fiendish cruelty, hurled from her promising position, sadly crippled in numbers and influence, permanently weakened and cast down, though not crushed or driven to despair.[220] This decade was especially memorable in the history of the Reformed Church of Scotland as having witnessed the removal of the ablest and best of the lay defenders of the Reformation, the death of our great reformer himself, and the return to Scotland of the intrepid and devoted man who was to take up and complete the work, from which failing health and a grieved spirit had obliged Knox to withdraw. The assassination of the Good Regent (as the Earl of Moray was deservedly surnamed) was unquestionably the most disgraceful of all the murders perpetrated in Scotland in the interests of faction during those years of confusion and strife.[221] It brought no permanent advantage to the party of reaction. It wrought much woe to the country, which under his firm yet kindly rule had begun to settle into order and to recover its prosperity.

[Sidenote: He leaves Edinburgh.]

This great national calamity preyed on the spirit and broke the already waning strength of Knox. In the month of October in that year[222] he had a stroke of paralysis or of apoplexy, which for a time laid him aside altogether from work, and permanently enfeebled his constitution. As in the case of Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, his opponents exulted over his misfortune, and circulated maliciously exaggerated accounts of his condition, on which probably their more malicious and notoriously fictitious accounts of his last illness were founded. But this first seizure was not so severe as to put a final arrest on his activities. Before many weeks were over he had so far recovered as to be able, in part at least, to resume his labours. He was able in a measure to continue them through the anxious and unquiet months of the succeeding winter and spring—bearing faithful testimony to the principles, religious and political, which he had long professed; standing up resolutely in defence of the authority of the young prince, when many, who had formerly sworn allegiance to him, led by the intriguing laird of Lethington and the "fause" house of Hamilton, went over to the party of his popish mother. He exposed their sophistries, and fearlessly rebuked their defection, even after they had gained for the time the supremacy in Edinburgh. Others might truckle to them or quail before them, but that palsied old man, with all his former plainness and much of his former fire, persevered in denouncing their treachery and discrediting their proposals. Threatenings were uttered against his life if he persisted in his course; protection seems to have been refused him by the party against the violence of their lawless followers; and one evening (as had often happened to Calvin in his years of conflict) a musket-ball was fired in at the window of his house, and lodged in the roof of the apartment in which he was sitting. Again and again faithful citizens, an attached kirk-session, and John Craig, then his colleague in the ministry, entreated him to remove for a time to some place where his life would be safe from violence, and whence he could return to his loving and beloved flock as soon as the prevailing faction should be put down, or should vacate the city. But he heard them all unmoved, until at last they were constrained to tell him plainly that if he was attacked they had made up their minds to peril their lives in his defence, and if they were compelled to shed blood in the contest it must lie on his head. Thus "sore against his will,"[223] as one of the earliest historians of his declining years tells us, and "almost thrust out by the authority of the church court,"[224] as another of them has it, he, on the 5th May 1571, took farewell of Edinburgh for a time, and crossing the Firth of Forth at Leith moved on by short and easy stages through Fife to the city in which "God had first opened his mouth" to proclaim His truth, and for which to the last he, as well as the Good Regent, cherished a special affection. As Mr John Davidson, then a teacher in one of the colleges, has expressed it in homely Scotch:—

"Thou knawis he lude the by the lave, For first in the he gave the rout Till Antechrist that Romische slave, Preicheing that Christ did only save. Bot last of Edinburgh exprest, Quhen he was not far fra his grave He came to the by all the rest."[225]

[Sidenote: His preaching in St Andrews.]

In St Andrews the reformer was sure to be free from personal danger, and on the whole to have the sympathy of the citizens; though it was not to be supposed that—in the city and university where the late Archbishop Hamilton had been long supreme, and had recently been claiming to exercise the authority of Chancellor of the University, and new founder of St Mary's College,[226] and where he had left behind several relations and dependents more compliant with the new order of things than himself—there were not to be found in this crisis several influential persons who had more sympathy with their late chief and with the selfish and crooked policy of the Hamiltons than with the straightforward course and steadfast fidelity of the dauntless reformer, and who would have little relish for his earnest warnings and stern reproofs. The notices preserved to us regarding this last and, so far as is yet known, longest visit of Knox to St Andrews are both detailed and interesting. From the simple and loving Memorials of his attendant, Richard Bannatyne, we learn that all the time he was there—i.e., from the beginning of July 1571 to the 17th of August 1572—he preached every Sunday, and expounded the prophecies of Daniel to the middle of the ninth chapter, applying the words of the prophet to the circumstances of Scotland at the time, and inveighing in the strongest terms against "the bloody house of Hamilton" and its abettors for their deceit, treachery, and turbulence, their base murder of the Good Regent, and cunning plot to restore a popish queen.[227] These themes, to which in the applications of his sermons he ever and anon returned, woke up all the fire and fervour of the old man eloquent; and if it might not be said, as in earlier days, that every sermon was of more value to the cause he defended than five hundred armed men, yet the report of his untiring zeal and unswerving fidelity would still contribute greatly to animate and cheer the adherents of the young prince and of the new regent in all parts of the land.

As I have hinted, there were some in the city to whom such discourses could not fail to be distasteful—some who refused to attend on his ministry, and were perhaps so stung by what was reported of his sharp but not undeserved reproofs that they were compelled to throw off the mask they had hitherto worn, and soon after openly to apostatise from the faith which for several years they had professed and taught. But the effect on many of the young men in attendance on the university, or acting as regents in its colleges, was salutary and enduring; and perhaps it was not without special intention that, when the door was shut against him in Edinburgh and the ears of the men in power there were closed against his counsels, he betook himself to what was still the principal university in the realm, and made his last appeals to the rising hopes of the church and country there. Such discourses as he then delivered, coming from one they had already learned to venerate, could not fail to form or foster in their ingenuous minds that fidelity to the reformed faith, that jealousy of popery, and that hatred of its cruelty and tyranny, which distinguished them to the last.

[Sidenote: Melville's sketch of Knox.]

James Melville, whose plastic nature and gentle spirit retained through life the impressions then made, supplements in his Diary the notices in Bannatyne's Memorials, and, in a passage which has been often quoted, gives a very fresh and vivid sketch of the old reformer. "Bot of all the benefites I haid that yeir"—the first year he was a student in St Andrews, and had "drunk of St Leonard's well"—"the greatest," he tells us, "was the coming of that maist notable profet and apostle of our nation, Mr Jhone Knox, to St Androis; wha be the faction of the Quein occupeing the castell and town of Edinbruche was compellit to remove thairfra with a number of the best, and chusit to com to St Androis. I hard him teatche ther the prophecie of Daniel that simmer and the wintar following. I haid my pen and my litle book, and tuk away sic things as I could comprehend. In the opening upe of his text he was moderat the space of an halff houre; bot when he enterit to application he maid me sa to grew and tremble that I could nocht hald a pen to wryt. I hard him oftymes utter these thretenings [against the faction then] in the hicht of their pryde, quhilk the eis [i.e., eyes] of monie saw cleirlie brought to pass within few yeirs upon the captean of that castle, the Hamiltones, and the Quein hirselff. He ludgit down in the Abbay besyde our Collage."[228] So far was it from being true, as is commonly asserted, that he had caused the destruction of the abbey and of the abbey church or cathedral in 1559, that in 1571 he found a habitable building there, in which he, a frail old man, with his wife and children, could pass the winter in comfort. It, we know from a letter of his antagonist, Archibald Hamilton, was "the new ludgene of the abbey,"[229] or novum hospitium, built for the reception of Mary of Guise, the queen of James V.[230] It was in the immediate vicinity of St Leonard's College, and our diarist further tells us: "Our regents, Mr Nicol Dalgleise, Mr Wilyeam Colace, and Mr Jhone Davidsone, went in ordinarilie to his grace [or devotional exercises] efter denner and soupper.... Mr Knox wald sum tymes com in and repose him in our Collage yeard [that is the gardens immediately to the west of the novum hospitium, adjoining St Leonard's College], and call us schollars unto him and bless us, and exhort us to knaw God and His wark in our contrey, and stand be the guid cause, to use our tyme weill, and lern the guid instructiones, and follow the guid exemple of our maisters."[231] No wonder, in these circumstances, that he is able to add, "Our haill collage, maisters and schollars, war sound and zelus for the guid cause," or that we can now still further add that thence proceeded several of the men who were to uphold it most resolutely in the evil days which followed.

[Sidenote: Opposition in St Andrews.]

In the New College we are told, "whowbeit Mr Jhone Dowglass, then Rector [and Principal] was guid aneuche," yet the "uther maisters and sum of the regentes war evill-myndit," and "hated Mr Knox and the guid cause";[232] and two of them, Archibald and John Hamilton, soon after apostatised, betook themselves to the Continent, and rose to high office in the Universities of Louvain and Paris, where the one in not inelegant Latin, and the other in courtly Scotch, sought to vindicate their conduct, and to traduce and refute their former co-religionists. Some of the masters of the Old College also, as Bannatyne has recorded, hated the plain-speaking reformer, though "be outward gesture and befoir his face thei wald seime and apeir to favore and love him above the rest."[233] The Hamiltons especially seem to have given him considerable occasion to complain of their bitter and unguarded criticisms, and one of them, stung by his denunciations, challenged him to defend his doctrine in the schools of the university. This he at first refused, maintaining that the pulpit was not to be controlled by the university schools, nor the church put into subjection to the academy.

[Sidenote: Patrick Adamson.]

St Andrews at that time was the rendezvous of others of the adherents of the young prince, who did not feel themselves safe under the faction then in possession of the castle and city of Edinburgh. One of these, Mr John Durie of Leith, was "for stoutness and zeall in the guid cause mikle renouned and talked of." He was an enthusiastic leader of the volunteers of his day. "The gown was na sooner af and the Byble out of hand fra the kirk, when on ged the corslet, and fangit was the hagbot, and to the fields."[234] Another was Robert Leckprevick, the famous printer, who brought his types and printing-press with him, and so did notable service to the cause. "He haid then in hand," Melville tells us, "Mr Patrik Constant's [or Adamson's[235]] Catechisme of Calvin, converted in Latin heroic vers, quhilk with the author was mikle estimed of";[236] and deservedly so, for Adamson was an accomplished scholar, was using his scholarship for the church's good, was eulogised by Lawson, Knox's colleague and successor, and had not yet developed that spirit of subserviency to the powers that be which afterwards proved his ruin.

The printer had also the honour of publishing in St Andrews the last work which engaged the thoughts of the reformer. This was his 'Answer to a letter of a Jesuit named Tyrie.' It had been drawn up some years before, but was now carefully revised and enlarged, and exhibited his matured views respecting several of the most notable subjects of controversy between the reformed and unreformed churches. Possibly it may have been because he had detected through all their disguises the secret leaning of the two Hamiltons to Romanist or semi-Romanist views regarding the apostolical succession, the nature of the sacraments, and the unfailing visibility and perpetuity of the church, that he now so fully entered into a controversy which previously he had been inclined to shun. Perhaps this is what is hinted at in the preface, in which he says: "Wonder not, gentill reidar, that sic ane argument suld proceid fra me in thir dolorous days after that I have taken gude-night at the warld and at all the fasherie of the same.... There ar sevin yeares past sen a scrole send from a Jesuite to his brother was presented unto me be a faithfull brother requyring sum answer to be maid to the same.... Amongs my other caires I scriblit that which followis, and that in few dayis; which being finished I repented of my laubour, and purposed fullie to have suppressed it. Which, na dout I had done, if that the devil had not steirit up the Jesuites of purpois to trouble godlie harts, with the same argumentis which Tyrie usis, amplifyed and set furth with all the dog eloquence that Sathan can devyse for suppressing of the free progres of the Evangell of Jesus Christ." Then, after a touching reference to the hard lot of his dispersed flock "suffering lytill les calamitie than did the faithfull efter the persecutioun of Steaphen," and an earnest petition that God would grant them one day to meet in glory, he entreats the brethren to pray for him, that God "in His mercy will pleis to put end to my long and panefull battell," as he was unable to fight as erewhile he had done, and longed for release, though still resigned to bear patiently whatsoever God saw meet to lay upon this, his "wicked carkase."[237]

[Sidenote: The St Andrews Assembly.]

In March 1572 the General Assembly was held at St Andrews in the schools of St Leonard's College.[238] This place was no doubt chosen in part at least for the convenience of the aged reformer, whose counsel in that time of trouble was specially needed. It was the last Assembly at which he was able to be present, and probably the first witnessed by Davidson and Melville. "Thair," the latter narrates, "was motioned the making of bischopes, to the quhilk Mr Knox opponit himselff directlie and zealuslie";[239] and thus probably were implanted in the youthful student's mind the germs of those presbyterian principles which were nurtured by intercourse with his uncle Andrew Melville, and were retained by him to the last with heroic tenacity.

[Sidenote: Three Kinds of Bishops.]

Two months before this a convention at Leith had given its sanction to a sort of mongrel episcopacy, nominally to secure the tithes more completely to the church, but really to secure the bulk of them by a more regular title to certain covetous noblemen who sought in this way to reimburse themselves for their services in the cause of the Reformation.[240] Chief among these noblemen was the Earl of Morton, then one of the chief supporters of the young prince, and soon after regent of the kingdom. Having secured a presentation to the Archbishopric of St Andrews for Mr John Douglas before mentioned, he came over to the city, had him elected by the chapter in terms of the convention, and on the 10th of February inaugurated into his office. This function was performed by Wynram, Superintendent of Fife, according to the Order followed in the admission of Superintendents, save that the Bishop of Caithness, the Superintendent of Lothian, and Mr David Lindsay, who sat beside Douglas, laid their hands on his head. Knox had preached that day as usual; but, as Bannatyne is careful to tell us, had "refuised to inaugurat the said bischope";[241] and as others add had "denounced anathema to the giver, anathema to the receaver,"[242] who as rector and principal had already far more to do than such an aged man could hope to overtake.[243] It was in reference to the same appointment that Adamson, as yet uncorrupted by Court influences, had a few days before in a sermon from the same pulpit given utterance to his famous distinction of three kinds of bishops, my lord bishop, my lord's bishop, and the Lord's bishop, the first of whom had been in time of popery, the second was now brought in merely to enable my lord to draw the kirk rents, and the third was the evangelical pastor as he should be in times of thorough reformation.[244]

One more brief sketch from the Diary of the quaint but graphic chronicler on whom I have repeatedly drawn may conclude our notice of these last labours of the reformer, and bring us to his last illness and death. "The town of Edinbruche recovered againe [out of the hands of the queen's faction] and the guid and honest men therof retourned to thair housses,[245] Mr Knox with his familie past hame to Edinbruche." During the time of his residence in St Andrews he was very weak. "I saw him everie day of his doctrine," says Melville, "go hulie and fear with a furring of martriks about his neck, a staff in the an hand, and guid godlie Richart Ballanden, his servand, halding upe the uther oxtar, from the abbey to the paroche kirk; and be the said Richart and another servant lifted upe to the pulpit, whar he behovit to lean at his first entrie; bot or he haid done with his sermont he was sa active and vigorus that he was lyk to ding that pulpit in blads, and fly out of it."[246]

[Sidenote: His Message to Charles IX.]

Soon after his return to Edinburgh he found himself quite unable to preach in the large church which he had formerly occupied, and a smaller one was fitted up for him in the western part of the nave of St Giles.[247] But not even so were his services to be long available. On one occasion only after his return may it be said that the old fire burst out with all its former fierceness and brilliancy. This was in September, when tidings reached him of the bloody massacre of St Bartholomew's day in France. "Being conveyed to the pulpit," Dr M'Crie tells us, "and summoning up his remaining strength, he thundered the vengeance of God against 'that cruel murderer and false traitor, the King of France,' and [borrowing the language of the Old Testament prophets] desired Le Croc, the French ambassador, to tell his master that sentence was pronounced against him in Scotland, that the divine vengeance would never depart from him nor from his house, if repentance did not ensue; but his name would remain an execration to posterity, and none proceeding from his loins should enjoy his kingdom in peace."[248] The only further notice of his work is by Melville, who simply informs us that after "instituting in his roum, be the ordinar calling of the kirk and congregation, Mr James Lawsone, a man of singular learning, zeal, and eloquence, ... he tuk him to his chamber and most happelie and comfortablie departed this lyff."[249]

With this kindly notice by his youthful admirer this lecture would have ended, had I not promised to the late Dean Stanley several years ago that, when a suitable opportunity occurred, I would not fail publicly to advert to a shameless misrepresentation of the closing scene to which he had directed my attention. This originated with Archibald Hamilton, already referred to as one of the two masters of the New College, who apostatised from the Protestant faith, and after his flight to the Continent published the most barefaced lies of his old antagonist and the noble men who were associated with him in his hard battle and well-earned triumph. These lies were exposed and refuted at the time by Principal Smeton of Glasgow, himself a convert from that Society of Jesus which Hamilton ultimately joined. But as they have been revived in our own day, and distributed in the form of a tract by Popish emissaries at the doors of Protestant churches in London, and as one of a series bearing the sensational title of "Death-bed Scenes," I shall, in fulfilment of my promise, subjoin a brief account of the reformer's last illness and death, taken almost exclusively from the contemporary narratives of Bannatyne and Smeton, the former of whom was an eye-witness, and the latter of whom had full information from Lawson,[250] who also was an eye-witness of all. This, I feel assured, is all that is required to set matters in their true light.

[Sidenote: Popish Calumny.]

The vague charges of immorality brought against the reformer by those calumniators, ancient and modern, may be dismissed at once as nothing more than the stock-in-trade of hard-pressed controversialists in the sixteenth century. Had there been the slightest foundation for them, some of Knox's many opponents in Scotland—Ninian Winzet, or the Abbot of Crossraguel, or Tyrie the Jesuit, or Hamilton himself before he left the country—would not have scrupled openly to upbraid him with them. Neither would the culprits among the Protestant clergy and laity, whom at various times he subjected to so rigorous a discipline, have borne this patiently at his hands had he himself been a known offender. It was his character which gave him his influence both at home and abroad, both with friends and with foes, and could it have been successfully assailed, it would not have been left to two Jesuits in a foreign land to lead the assault after he was silenced in death.

Such, however, I hardly need to assure you was not the end of the restorer of a really holy church in Scotland, if aught of credit is to be given to the unanimous testimony of those who attended him during his last illness and witnessed its closing scene, though it may have been the end which Popish controversialists in the sixteenth century deemed meet for him—as well as for Luther and Calvin and many more of whom the world was not worthy—as it is in one of the foulest legends with which their successors in the nineteenth century think it fair to supplement the legends of their predecessors in the sixteenth. According to them Luther was the child of a demon, not figuratively but literally; Calvin was eaten up of worms, like Herod who slew the children of Bethlehem and was smitten by the judgment of God, because (though apparently in this they confound him with a later Herod) he affected divine honours. To mention such slanders, as the sceptical Bayle has said with special reference to the case of Knox, is all that is needed to refute them. They are the product of malignity so evident that it defeats itself. I know but one parallel to them in our literature, and it has the excuse that it has come down to us from the dark ages.[251] Some would persuade us that the time has come when we might afford to forget old controversies and to shake hands with our former antagonists, but such occurrences as these tend to show that such forgetfulness and affectation of cordiality is likely to be all on one side.

And now let me simply set over against these fables, in as abridged form as I can, the unvarnished statements of Bannatyne and Smeton, the latter of which was published in reply to Hamilton who first gave shape to these charges, and which hitherto has been deemed a conclusive refutation of them.[252]

[Sidenote: His last Illness.]

[Sidenote: His Dying Exhortations.]

On the 10th of November, the day after he inducted Lawson as his colleague, he was seized with a violent cough and began to breathe with difficulty. Many, who desired ardently, if it were possible, to detain him a little longer here, advised him to call in the assistance of skilful physicians. He readily complied with their advice, though he felt that the end of his warfare was now nigh at hand. Next day he caused the wages of all his servants to be paid, and earnestly exhorted them all to be careful to lead holy and Christian lives. On the 13th, being obliged by the increase of his malady to leave off his ordinary course of reading in the Scriptures (for every day he had been wont to read some chapters of the Old and New Testaments, especially some of the Psalms and Gospels), he directed his wife and servant to read to him each day the 17th chapter of St John's Gospel, one or other of the chapters of St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, and the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. On the 14th he rose early, apparently supposing it had been the Lord's day, and being asked why he did so when he was so ill, he replied that he had been meditating all night on the resurrection of the Lord (the subject which would have fallen to be treated next in order by him in his ministry), and that he was now prepared to ascend the pulpit to communicate to his brethren the consolation he had enjoyed in his own soul. Next day, though very sick, he prevailed on Durie, already mentioned, and another friend, Steward by name, to remain to dinner with him, ordered a hogshead of wine in his cellar to be pierced for them, and desired Steward to send for some of it as long as it lasted, for he should not tarry till it was done. Little is recorded of him for several days after this, but it was probably in this interval that he was visited by many of the chief of the nobility, including the Earl of Morton, so soon to be created regent,[253] and by many members of his congregation. All of these he "solidly exhorted" and comforted. On the 20th or 21st he gave orders that his coffin should be prepared. On the 22nd he sent for the ministers, elders, and deacons of the church, that he might give them his last counsels and take final farewell of them. In the brief but solemn address which he delivered to them he called God to witness, whom he served in the Gospel of His Son, that he had taught nothing but the pure and solid doctrine of the Gospel of the Son of God, and had never indulged his own private passions, or spoken from any hatred of the persons of those against whom he had denounced the heavy judgments of God. He exhorted them to persevere in the truth of the Gospel and in their allegiance to their young sovereign, and dismissed them with his solemn blessing. To Lawson and Lindsay, whom he asked to remain behind, he gave a last earnest message for his old friend Kirkaldy of Grange, the commandant of the castle, who had gone over to the party of the queen,[254] and whose soul, notwithstanding, he said, was dear to him—as being one of his congregation in the castle of St Andrews, and a sharer in his hard lot in France—so that he would not have it perish if by any means he could save it. "Go and tell him," he said, "that neither the craggy rock in which he miserably trusts, nor the carnal prudence of that man whom he regards as a demigod, nor the assistance of foreigners, as he falsely flatters himself, shall deliver them, but he shall be disgracefully dragged from his nest to punishment and hung on a gallows in the face of the sun, unless he speedily amend his life and betake himself to the mercy of God."

[Sidenote: His Consolation.]

On the 23rd the difficulty of his breathing had greatly increased, and he seems to have thought that his end was near at hand. To one of his most intimate friends who asked him if he felt great pain, he replied that that was not reckoned as pain by him which would be the end of many miseries and the beginning of perpetual joy. And soon after, apparently supposing his end was come, he repeated the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed, adding certain paraphrases of his own on each petition of the prayer and article of the creed to the great comfort of those who stood by; and then lifting up his hands to heaven he once more said, "Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." During the succeeding night he caused the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians to be read and re-read to him, and repeatedly said to himself, "O! how sweet and salutary consolation does the Lord provide for me in this chapter." The following day, about noon, he once more sat up in bed, but owing to his extreme weakness was not able to remain long in that posture. About three in the afternoon one of his eyes failed, and his tongue performed its office less readily than before. About six in the evening he again said to his wife, "Go, read where I cast my first anchor," referring to the instructions he had given on the 13th.[255]

When this had been done, he continued for some hours in troubled slumber. It is in this occurrence alone that there can be got the slightest foundation for the slanders which his traducers have circulated. And it is only necessary to quote the account given of it by those who witnessed it to show that it was as honourable to the dying confessor as the gross misrepresentation of it was dishonourable to his opponents. During these hours he uttered frequent sighs and groans, so that those who stood by could not doubt that he was contending with some grievous temptation. When he awoke they asked him what was the cause of his distress. He answered that in the course of his life he had had many contests with his spiritual adversary. Often he had been tempted to despair of God's mercy because of the greatness of his sins, often also tempted by the allurements of the world to forget his calling to endure hardness as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. But now the cunning adversary had assailed him in another form, and endeavoured to persuade him that he had merited heaven itself and a blessed immortality by the faithful discharge of the duties of his high office. "But blessed be God," exclaimed the dying reformer, "who hath brought seasonably to my mind those passages of Scripture by which I was enabled to quench the fiery dart, 'What hast thou, that thou hast not received?' 'By the grace of God I am what I am,' and 'Not I, but the grace of God in me' ... wherefore I give thanks to my God by Jesus Christ who has been pleased to grant me the victory. And I am firmly persuaded that ... in a short time, without any great bodily pain, and without any distress of mind, I shall exchange this mortal and miserable life for an immortal and blessed life through Jesus Christ."

[Sidenote: His Peaceful Death.]

This persuasion of his speedy and happy departure was soon to be justified by the event. After evening prayers Dr Preston, his physician, asked him whether he had heard them, when he replied, "I would to God that ye and all men heard them as I have heard them, and I praise God for that heavenly sound." Shortly after the signs of immediate dissolution appeared, his friends gathered round his bed, and his faithful servant addressed him: "Now, sir, the time that you have long called to God for, to wit an end of your battle, is come. And seeing all natural power now fails, remember those comfortable promises, which often times ye have shown to us, of our Saviour Jesus Christ. And that we may understand and know that ye hear us, make us some sign." And so he lifted up one of his hands, and incontinent thereafter rendered up his spirit apparently without pain or movement, so that he seemed rather to fall asleep than to die.

Such was the account of his last illness and death transmitted by those who attended on him and witnessed it, a death worthy of his noble life, and fully justifying the brief comment of Smeton, "Surely, whatever opprobrious things profane men may utter, God hath in him given us an example of the right way as well of dying as of living." It is true, as his heartless traducer takes care to remind us, no dirge was chanted over his remains, no mass of requiem was celebrated for his soul. He and his countrymen had long ceased to believe in the worth of such priestly ceremonies, or to imagine that their eternal state could be affected by them, or by aught save Christ's finished work and their own faith and repentance while God's day of grace was prolonged to them here. The brief eulogy pronounced over his grave by the stern and reserved regent[256] was a truer and more impressive testimony to his worth than the most gorgeous celebration of Romish rites which he could but have shared with a Borgia or a Betoun. The stern simplicity of his grave, which, like his master Calvin's, was till lately preserved in the memory of men without stone or bronze to mark it out, tells a tale very different from that his traducer hints at; and if his bitter taunts shall lead the reformer's countrymen now to erect a material monument to him in some measure corresponding to the benefits he has been honoured to confer on them, this attack on his fair fame will have been overruled for good.

[Sidenote: The Scottish Nation his Monument.]

But his real monument will never be one graven by art or man's device. It is one more noble, more lasting far. It is to be found in the life God enabled him to live, and the work God honoured him to do. It is to be seen in the plans he devised, in the institutions he founded, in the people he moulded anew, when the old church had confessedly failed in its mission. And while the Scottish nation continues to retain these institutions, and to bear this impress, it will continue the grandest, as it is the most telling, monument to the memory of its noble-hearted and single-minded reformer.

FOOTNOTES:

[220] Dr Lorimer in British and Foreign Evangelical Review for 1872, p. 758.

[221] [The Good Regent was assassinated on the 23rd of January 1569-70.]

[222] [1570.]

[223] Bannatyne's Memoriales, Ban. Club, p. 118.

[224] See Laing's Knox, vi. 651.

[225] M'Crie's Knox, 1855, p. 459; Rogers' Three Scottish Reformers, p. 97.

[226] [Archbishop Hamilton was hanged at the market cross of Stirling on the 7th of April 1571.]

[227] Bannatyne's Memoriales, Ban. Club, p. 255.

[228] Melville's Diary, Wodrow Society, p. 26.

[229] [Archibald Hamilton's letter or protestation is in Bannatyne's Memoriales, pp. 262, 263.]

[230] [According to Martine, it was built, not for the reception of Mary of Guise, but when James V. was married to Magdalene, the fair daughter of Francis I., in 1537, the tradition being that the physicians chose this place as peculiarly suitable for such a delicate creature; and that "so many artificers were conveened and employed, and the materials so quicklie prepared, that the house was begun and finished in a month" (Reliquiae Divi Andreae, p. 190). There is better evidence to show that Mary of Guise spent her honeymoon within its substantial walls in the summer of 1538 (Lesley's History, pp. 155, 156; Pitscottie's History, 1778, pp. 250, 251).]

[231] Melville's Diary, p. 26.

[232] Ibid.

[233] Bannatyne's Memoriales, p. 256.

[234] Melville's Diary, p. 32.

[235] [In the rather scurrilous Legend of the Bischop of St Androis, it is said:—

"Ane baxters sone, are beggar borne, That twyse his surnaime hes mensworne; To be called Constene he thocht shame, He tuke up Constantine to name.

* * * * *

Thinking that poore professione vaine, He changed his surname ower agane; Now Doctor Adamsone at last, Whairthrow he ower to Paris past."

—Dalyell's Scotish Poems, 1801, ii. 309, 310.

He inherited both names from his ancestors, who were called Constantine or Adamson (M'Crie's Melville, 1856, p. 461).]

[236] Melville's Diary, p. 32.

[237] Laing's Knox, vi. 481, 482.

[238] [This Assembly met on the 6th of March 1571-72.]

[239] Melville's Diary, p. 31.

[240] [This convention was held in January 1571-72. See Booke of the Universall Kirk, i. 203-236; Calderwood's History, iii. 168-196.]

[241] Bannatyne's Memorials, p. 223.

[242] Calderwood's History, iii. 206.

[243] [Dr Laing has not only indicated that there has long been much uncertainty and speculation as to the parentage and social status of John Douglas, but has stated that he "was descended from the Douglasses of Pettendreich" (Laing's Knox, i. 286 n.) Principal Lee has said: "All the accounts of Douglas which I have ever seen in modern books abound with errors. He is represented as having been an obscure Carmelite friar whom the Earl of Argyle chose to employ as his chaplain, and for whom the Archbishop of St Andrews expressed the strongest aversion. He was quite a different man—a man of family undoubtedly, and most probably related to James Douglas the Earl of Morton, son of Sir George Douglas of Pinky, and, like him, a branch of the great family of Angus" (Lee's Lectures, ii. 3). When working in the Register House, I found unimpeachable evidence concerning his parentage. On the 2nd of January 1563-64, letters of legitimation were granted in favour of Mr John Douglas, Rector of the University of St Andrews, bastard son natural of quondam Robert Douglas in Langnewtoune (Register of Privy Seal, xxxii. 23).]

[244] Melville's Diary, p. 32; Calderwood's History, iii. 206.

[245] These honest men earnestly implored their pastor to return also to Edinburgh, if he could do so without serious injury to his health.

[246] Melville's Diary, p. 33.

[247] [Dr Cameron Lees says that the Tolbooth, in which Knox preached for some little time and where he delivered his last sermon, was "the portion of St Giles which had been cut off the western part of the nave, and was used for meetings of the Council" (St Giles', 1889, p. 157).]

[248] M'Crie's Knox, 1855, p. 269.

[249] Melville's Diary, p. 33.

[250] [In the opinion of Dr David Laing, Lawson was the author of the Vera Historia extremae vitae et obitus eximii viri Joannis Knoxii, appended to Smeton's Responsio ad Hamiltonii Dialogum, in 1579 (Laing's Knox, vi. 646).]

[251] Walsingham's abuse of Wycliffe. [Thomae Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ii. 119, 120; and Ypodigma Neustriae a Thoma Walsingham, p. 340; Rolls series. Translations will be found in Vaughan's John de Wycliffe, 1853, pp. 468, 469; and in Lechler's Wycliffe, Relig. Tract Soc., p. 423.]

[252] [For the substance of Archibald Hamilton's account, see M'Crie's Knox, 1855, p. 405. Bannatyne's account is in both editions of his work (Journal of Transactions, 1806, and Memoriales of Transactions, 1836). It is likewise in Laing's Knox, vi. 634-645; and there (pp. 649-660) is also given a translation of Smeton's (or Lawson's) account. The accounts of Bannatyne and Smeton do not always agree as to the exact day on which certain events happened.]

[253] [Morton was elected regent on the 24th of November 1572, the day on which Knox died (Acts of Parliament, iii. 78; Bannatyne's Memoriales, p. 280). Bannatyne places Morton's visit on the 19th; Smeton leaves the day uncertain.]

[254] For a defence of Kirkaldy see Barbe's Kirkaldy of Grange, Famous Scots Series, pp. 108-124.

[255] For a different interpretation see Taylor Innes's John Knox, Famous Scots Series, pp. 30, 31.

[256] [Morton's testimony to Knox, as recorded by Melville, was: "That he nather fearit nor flatterit anie fleche" (Diary, p. 60). As recorded by Calderwood: "Here lyeth a man who in his life never feared the face of man; who hath beene often threatned with dag and dager, but yitt hath ended his dayes in peace and honour. For he had God's providence watching over him in a speciall maner, when his verie life was sought" (History, iii. 242).]



CHAPTER X.

THE SECOND BOOK OF DISCIPLINE.

In a previous lecture I have endeavoured to give a pretty full account of the First Book of Discipline. It remains yet to say a few words about the Second Book of Discipline.

[Sidenote: The Two Books Compared.]

Principal John Cunningham has said: "The First Book exhibited a system of polity sagaciously suited to the circumstances of the country and the church: it seemed to grow out of the times."[257] I will add that it was not only suited to the times, but to many of the practical needs of the church of all times. I therefore hold that even yet it is worthy of a higher place than to be deemed merely a "collection of parchments and coins deposited beneath it [i.e., the Second Book] by which future generations may read the story of the times in which the building was begun."[258] The Second Book is more a book of constitutional law; and aims, as the Principal says, at elaborating a system from the New Testament without reference to circumstances, and bears far more resemblance to the Ordonnances of Calvin than to the less ambitious and more comprehensive Church Order Books of Germany. But the Second Book of Discipline has even fewer practical details than the ordinances of Geneva. Of course, so far as it actually abolished or modified the regulations of the First Book, these fell to be disused; but in so far as it did not actually do so, they still had a certain validity: and even in the Covenanting times it is generally the Books, not the Book of Discipline, to which reference is made in Acts of Assembly.

No one in our times, perhaps, has shown a more thorough appreciation of the real merits of the First Book than the Duke of Argyll in his well-known essay on "Presbytery." Mr Hill Burton, who depreciates it in comparison with the Second, makes far more than is warranted of the strong language in which it occasionally indulges against the old church, with which he contrasts the more restrained and balanced utterances of the Second Book.[259] I do not yield to many in my admiration of the courage and calmness of Melville; but I could no more think of placing him, scholarly and bold, yet calm, as he generally was, nor the Book attributed to him, more logical and unimpassionately didactic though it be, before the eager, impetuous, yet sagacious Knox, with his wealth of rude eloquence and thrilling tenderness, and his Book in which these qualities of head and heart are so clearly mirrored, than I would think of placing Calvin, highly as I honour him, before Luther, or his Catechism before the Wittenberg hymn-books.

I do not believe that the principles of the two Books are so widely different as they have sometimes been represented to be, or that the grand ideas of Knox concerning the place of the laity in the church, the education of the young, and the support and kindly treatment of the aged poor, were meant to be rejected or ignored by his great successor; but I do think these matters fall considerably into the background. Some of the noblest conceptions of the earlier Book are narrowed, and the whole system stiffened; and in the contests in which the church had then to engage with the young monarch, in vindication of her independence in her own province, positions were laid down which were soon pressed to consequences from which Knox and his associates would have shrunk.

[Sidenote: The Supreme Power.]

They, who had been obliged long to contend with a corrupt and obstinate clergy which would grant no real reform in doctrine, no substantial concessions for the alleviation of practical grievances, boldly laid down the principle that "to kings, princes, rulers, and magistrates ... chieflie and most principallie the conservation and purgation of the religioun apperteinis; so that not onlie they are appointed for civill policie, but also for maintenance of the trew religioun, and for suppressing of idolatrie and superstitioun whatsoever.... And therefore wee confesse and avow that sik as resist the supreme power doing that thing quhilk appertains to his charge, do resist Goddis ordinance, and therefore cannot be guiltles."[260] Melville, who was called to contend with a king bent on securing autocratic power in the church as well as in the state, laid down, with the utmost precision, the principle in chapter x., "Although kings and princes that be godlie, sumtymes be their awin authority whan the kirk is corruptit and all things out of ordor, place ministers and restore the trew service of the Lord efter the examples of sum godly kings of Juda and divers godly emperours and kings also in the light of the New Testament; yit quhair the ministrie of the kirk is anes lawfullie constitute and they that are placeit do thair office faithfullie, all godlie princes and magistratis aucht to heir and obey thair voice, and reverence the majestie of the Son of God speiking be them";[261] or, as in chapter i., where it is laid down, "As ministeris are subject to the judgement and punishment of the magistrat in externall things if they offend, so aucht the magistratis to submit themselfis to the discipline of the kirk gif they transgresse in matteris of conscience and religioun."[262]

[Sidenote: Limits of Ecclesiastical Power.]

Hill Burton sarcastically remarks that "if we grant that those who prepared it were what they called themselves—the Church of God, presided over by the Lord Jesus Christ as the representative of the Godhead on earth—it would be difficult to refuse assent to what follows. Nothing can be more perfect than the analysis by which the two ruling powers are separated from each other, and the ecclesiastical set above the secular."[263] If this is not quite borne out, one can hardly help feeling that more care should have been taken to mark out the limits of ecclesiastical authority, and to show that the power of ministers and elders was as distinctly limited by the laws of Christ as that of kings and magistrates ought to be by the laws of the land; or, in other words, that ministers and elders may err in interpreting the laws of Christ, just as civil rulers may err in interpreting the laws of the land. No doubt the limitation contended for is in words admitted, "the magistrat neither aucht to preich, minister the sacraments, nor execute the censuris of the kirk, nor yit prescrive any rewll how it sould be done; bot command the ministeris to observe the rewll commandit in the Word, and punish the transgressours be civill means. The ministeris exerce not the civill jurisdictioun, bot teich the magistrat how it sould be exercit according to the Word."[264] "It is proper to kings, princes, and magistrates to be callit lordis and dominators over their subjectis, whom they govern civilly; bot it is proper to Christ onlie to be callit Lord and Master in the spirituall government of the kirk, and all utheris that beiris office therein aucht not to usurp dominion therein, nor be callit lordis, bot onlie ministeris, disciples, and servantis. For it is Christis proper office to command and rewll His kirk universall, and every particular kirk, throw His Spirit and Word, be the ministrie of men."[265] But it is not made sufficiently prominent anywhere in the Book that these men are only entitled to unreserved obedience when they truly speak Christ's mind and truly follow His Word. Those who have made most of the Book have neither clearly perceived this nor have they realised the full meaning of the lucid and explicit statement made by Rutherfurd when he was contending against the Erastians and Independents of England. Had they done so, I cannot but think that the bitter divisions among Scottish Presbyterians would have been fewer, and that there would have been far less occasion for the reproach often cast on them, that new presbyter is but old priest writ large.

[Sidenote: Rutherfurd's Opinion.]

"That the magistrate is not obliged," Rutherfurd affirms, "to execute the decrees of the church without further examination, whether they be right or wrong, as Papists teach that the magistrate is to execute the decrees of their Popish councels with blind obedience, and submit his faith to them, because he is a layman and may not dare to examine whether the church doth erre or not, is clear. 1. Because, if in hearing the Word all should follow the example of the men of Berea, not relying on the testimony of Paul or any preacher, [and] try whether that which concerneth their conscience and faith be agreeable to the Scriptures or no, and accordingly receive or reject; so in all things of discipline the magistrate is to try by the Word whether he ought to adde his sanction to these decrees which the church gives out for edification, and whether he should draw the sword against such a one as a heretick and a perverter of souls. But the former is true; the magistrate's practise in adding his civill sanction and in punishing hereticks concerneth his conscience, knowing that he must do it in faith as he doth all his moral actions; ergo, the magistrate must examine what he practiseth in his office according to the Word, and must not take it upon the meer authority of the church, else his faith in these moral acts of his office should be resolved ultimate on the authority of the church, not on the Word of God, which, no doubt, is Popery, for so the warrant of the magistrate's conscience should not be 'thus saith the Lord,' but 'thus saith the church in their decrees.' 2. The magistrate and all men have a command to try all things, ergo, to try the decrees of the church, and to retain what is good (1 Thes. v. 21); to try the spirits even of the church in their decrees (1 John iii. 1). 3. We behooved [in that case] to lay down this Popish ground that ... the church cannot erre in their decrees.... Its against Scripture and reason that magistrates, and by the like reason all others, should obey the decrees of the church with a blinde faith, without inquiring in the warrants and grounds of their decrees, which is as good Popery as, Magistrates and all men are to beleeve as the church beleeveth, with an implicite faith, so ignorance shall be the mother of devotion. Whoever impute this to us—who have suffered for nonconformity, and upon this ground, that synods can erre, refused the ceremonies—are to consult with their own conscience whether this be not to make us appear disloyall and odious to magistracy in that which we never thought, far lesse [presumed] to teache and professe it to the world."[266]

[Sidenote: Gillespie's Opinion.]

Even more notable are the utterances of George Gillespie, when vindicating against the Erastians of the south that more free government of the church by its own courts from which they feared so many evils. "I dare confidently say," he affirms, "that, if comparisons be rightly made, presbyterial government is the most limited and the least arbitrary government of any other in the world."[267] And, after entering into details to make good this affirmation in regard to the papal and prelatical forms of government, he proceeds to maintain that Independents "must needs be supposed to exercise a much more unlimited or arbitrary power than the presbyterial churches do," because they exempt individual congregations from all control and correction by superior courts, and because it is "one of their three grand principles which disclaimeth the binding of themselves for the future unto their present judgement and practice, and avoucheth the keeping of this reserve to alter and retract."[268] Some who think that, after all recent changes, they more truly hold the opinions of Gillespie than we do, have laid it down very dogmatically that even although the constitution of a national church were in all other respects scriptural, yet if it did not reserve this power to alter and retract without let or hindrance, it would still be at variance with the tenets of the Covenanting times; but you see here that Gillespie affirms that that was a principle of the Independents, not of the Presbyterians, and claims[269] it as a special merit of the latter that they were willing to explain their doctrine and discipline to the civil authorities, and, getting these sanctioned, to abide by them till they were again altered by consent of church and state. He denies that in claiming a distinct government for the church the Presbyterians meant to deprive the Christian magistrate of that power and authority in matters of religion which the Word of God and the earlier Confessions of the Reformed churches recognised as belonging to his office. On the contrary, he maintains that not only in extraordinary cases when church government doth degenerate into tyranny, or those who manage it make defection from the truth, "the Christian magistrate may and ought to do diverse things in and for religion, and interpose his authority diverse wayes so as doth not properly belong to his cognisance, decision and administration ordinarily, and in a reformed and well constituted church";[270] but also that, in ordinary cases, he is free to act as his own conscience directs in giving or refusing his sanction to the government and discipline of the church; and that if he is offended with any sentence of its courts, "they ought to be ready, in all humility and respect, to give him an account and reason of such their proceedings, and by all means to endeavour the satisfaction of the magistrate his conscience, or otherwise to be warned and rectified if themselves have erred."[271]

[Sidenote: Its Influence not unmixed.]

Had the principles thus laid down been more clearly kept in view by the framers of the Second Book of Discipline, its influence for good on Scottish Christianity would have been more unmixed than it has been. Had they been more consistently acted on by Rutherfurd and his associates, who consented to their formal insertion in our later standards, many sad troubles which then and afterwards befel the church, for which they lived and laboured, would have been altogether avoided, or more easily provided against; but as it is, great misunderstandings have certainly arisen. The two Books of Discipline have been too much read apart, instead of being regarded as complementary each of the other; and while all that is liberal and progressive tends, I think, more and more to rally round the one, I believe that much that is narrower, but still earnest and resolutely Christian, will continue to draw its inspiration from the other.

[Sidenote: Its Theory of the Church.]

The Second Book of Discipline, as well as the First, failed to commend itself to the ruling powers, and to obtain a place in its full form on the statute book. Those of its clauses relating to the functions of the several church courts were inserted almost word for word in the Act of the Scottish Parliament of 1592, reckoned the charter of the presbyterian church. It was, however, several times ratified by the General Assembly, and was partially carried out by its authority from the time of its ratification; and to this extent it, as well as the First Book of Discipline, appears to have been fully recognised. The question of its authority was very fully argued in the famous Auchterarder case. The counsel for the presbytery and the minority of the judges did not venture to argue, however, that as a whole the Second Book of Discipline had received the sanction of the state save in irregular times; but they contended that the notes, contained in Spottiswoode's History, of the clauses respecting which the king and the commissioners of Parliament had come to agreement with the ministers, should be accepted as determining the extent to which it was law. It was affirmed, however, by the majority of the judges that only the clauses actually inserted in the Act of Parliament could be so regarded, and it has since been maintained by Mr Peterkin that the alleged notes of agreement between the king and the church's commissioners are not actually found in the manuscript copy of the History which is preserved in the Advocate's Library.[272] The general theory of the church, however, which may be said to underlie the most important statement of the Second Book of Discipline, is not materially different from that which finds expression in the First. "The kirk of God," it is said, "is sumtymes largelie takin for all them that professe the Evangill of Jesus Christ, and so it is a company and fellowship, not onely of the godly, but also of hypocrites professing alwayis outwardly ane true religion. Uther tymes it is takin for the godlie and elect onlie, and sumtymes for them that exercise spiritual function amongis the congregation of them that professe the truth."[273] These last, ministers, doctors, elders, and deacons, are taken to represent the church in its wider sense, and must have a lawful calling from it. This lawful calling is said to consist of two parts—viz., election and ordination. Election is defined to be the choosing out of a person or persons most able for the office that is vacant, by the judgment of the eldership and consent of the congregation to which the person or persons are appointed. Ordination is defined as the separation and sanctifying of the person appointed of God and His kirk after he be well tried and found qualified. The ceremonies of ordination are declared to be fasting, earnest prayer, and imposition of the hands of the eldership. Then follow two of the most important paragraphs in the Book, which come nearest to supplying that which I deem defective in it, a clear and distinct admission that human rulers in the church as well as in the state have but limited powers. "All thir [i.e., those various kinds of office-bearers], as they must be raisit up be God and be Him made able for the wark quhairto they ar callit, so aught they [to] knaw their message to be limitit within God's Word, without the quhilk bounds they aught not to passe. All thir sould tak these titils and names onlie ... quhilk the Scriptures gevis unto them, as these quhilks import labour, travell and wark; and ar names of offices and service, and not of idlenes, dignitie, warldlie honour or preheminence, quhilk be Christ our Maister is expresslie reprovit and forbidden.... And generallie thir twa things aught they all to respect, the glorie of God, and edifieing of His kirk, in discharging their dewties in their callings."[274]

[Sidenote: Institution of the Presbytery.]

[Sidenote: Eldership or Presbytery.]

It is generally supposed that it is in this Second Book of Discipline that we have the first clear institution of that church court which we now call the presbytery, and it admits of no dispute that it was in the year 1581, after the final adoption of the Book by the Assembly, that an attempt was made, with consent of the crown, regularly to divide the country into presbyteries. These, however, though marked out on paper in that year, were in point of fact only gradually set up, and in general they arose out of, and absorbed into themselves, the previously existing exercise, which the First Book of Discipline had sanctioned and recommended to meet weekly for the study and interpretation of the Scriptures.[275] The introduction of what are called, but erroneously, lay elders[276] to the place they have so long worthily filled in the presbyteries was a still more gradual process. The presbytery of St Andrews, even down to the close of the sixteenth century, appears to have contained no elders save the doctors, under which name were comprehended the masters of the university, both professors of divinity and professors of philosophy, and even the doctor or master of the grammar-school. The question, however, has been raised whether it is really the presbytery or the kirk-session which is meant by the word eldership, which is generally applied in the Second Book of Discipline to that court to which it asserts that it belongs to see that the Word of God is purely preached within its bounds, the sacraments rightly administered, the discipline maintained, and the ecclesiastical goods rightly distributed; to take care that the ordinances made by provincial, national, and general assemblies are duly executed; and also to make constitutions which concern [Greek: to prepon] in the kirk,[277]—all which duties by the Act of Parliament are expressly assigned to the presbytery.[278] This question has been keenly debated down to our own day. The weight of authority is certainly very decidedly in favour of the opinion which identifies this eldership with the presbytery. Among recent authorities we have Dr David Laing and Dr Cook of Haddington on this side, in opposition to the late Principal Cunningham of St Andrews; and among those of a somewhat earlier time we have Principal Lee, Dr M'Crie, and the late Dr George Cook of St Andrews pronouncing in favour of the same view. If we go to older authorities again, we have Spottiswoode, the episcopal historian, and Calderwood, the presbyterian, at one in supporting it. I know of no considerable authority in the seventeenth century which has been adduced on the other side, save that of Henderson, whose statement, however, is rather inferential than direct. In fact, the eldership is used in the Second Book of Discipline itself as a convertible term with presbytery, and is often so used in the acts of contemporary assemblies. When presbyteries came to be set up, they are sometimes designated by the name of eldership, and sometimes by that of presbytery; and where our present authorised version of Scripture reads "with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery," the Genevan version reads, "with the laying on of the hands of the companie of the eldership."[279]

[Sidenote: The Kirk-Session.]

The only other alternative is that suggested by the late Procurator Cook, that in the Second Book of Discipline the functions of the two courts were as yet undistributed; and that when they came to be legally distributed by the Act of Parliament of 1592, those which the framers of the Second Book assigned to the eldership were in nearly its very words appropriated to the presbytery, and a much more limited province assigned to the kirk-session—the court called by the Puritans of the south by the name of the Lesser Presbytery. Perhaps it may be regarded as a rather curious confirmation of this theory of Procurator Cook's, that what he supposes to have been first intended by the framers of the Book as a common court is asserted by Gillespie, the ablest of their successors in the following century, to have been really characteristic of the presbytery of the primitive church. Whatever may be thought of his argument in vindication of what he calls the two presbyteries, the fact remains that he explicitly admits there was but one in the primitive church;[280] and this will be all the more remarkable if, with Mr Cook, we hold that what the framers of the Second Book of Discipline really designed was one presbytery or eldership governing a larger or smaller number of churches in common; and that we owe the distribution of the power between the two courts rather to the Act of Parliament than to the Second Book of Discipline. I agree with Gillespie, however, that in the circumstances of the church in a thoroughly Christianised country it would have been a matter to be regretted if every congregation had not had its session or lesser presbytery, with such definitely limited powers as by the Act of Parliament, and by the later acts of the church, are entrusted to it; and I am not sure that we do not owe this arrangement to the episcopal rather than to the presbyterian party, and that it was a concession made by them as the only presbytery they could well acknowledge, if they were to leave any function for the bishop at all in this court. At least the rough draft of the clause of the subsequent Act of Parliament in regard to the kirk-session appears first in the conference held between the two parties, and is then noted as having had the express approval of the king and commissioners of Parliament,[281] which was not at that time, nor till considerably later, secured to the clauses in the Act affirming the powers of the larger presbytery.