Scottish Reformation

“ Two periods are to be noted in the Scottish Reformation, that of Hamilton and that of Knox. It is of the first of these only that we are now to treat. The study of the beginnings of things attracts and interests the mind in the highest degree. Faithful to our plan, we shall ascend to the generative epoch of Caledonian re [4] form, an epoch which Scotland herself has perhaps too much slighted, and we shall exhibit its simple beauty.
Before the days of the Reformation, Scotland received three great impulses in succession from the Christian countries of the south. ”

“ The present revival of interest in them is like a new-discovered sense, and is undoing the spoliation and neglect of an age subsequent to the Reformation, and for which the Scottish Reformers are not to blame. Theirs was no easy work, and history has vindicated its results in the progressive genius of the Scottish people. The Reformation saved religion, but the alienation of the religious endowments to secular purposes, often by unworthy hands, is the chief cause of the ruins which tell of a beauty that has left the earth, and it has deprived the Church of so many of its venerable heirlooms. ”

“ Thanks to the quarrels of the sees of York and Canterbury, the Scottish clergy managed to secure their ecclesiastical independence from either English see; and became, finally, the most useful combatants in the long struggle for the independence of the nation. Rome, on the whole, backed that cause. The Scottish Catholic churchmen, in fact, pursued the old patriotic policy of resistance to England till the years just preceding the Reformation, when the people leaned to the reformed doctrines, and when Scottish national freedom was endangered more by France than by England. ”

“ 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 Lords took it up by resolving that they would answer the summons and appear along with their preachers. A letter was addressed to the Regent (May 6th, 1559) by “The professouris of Christis Evangell in the realme of Scotland.” It was an admirable statement of the principles of the Scottish Reformation, and may be thus summarised:
“It records the hope, once entertained by the writers, that God would make her the instrument of setting up and maintaining his Word and true worship, of defending his congregation, and of downputting all idolatry, abomination, and superstition in the realm ”

“ The bishops and clergy came actually to be held in contempt among the people, who really tried to be religious. Then came what we call the Protestant ‘Reformation.’ Things were so bad in Scotland that it seemed to the reformers of no use to try and purify the old system; they resolved to bring in a new order of things altogether; and so by an act of parliament passed in Edinburgh in 1560 they destroyed the old church and in its place put an entirely new church, invented by themselves, and established by themselves. ”

“ Church and State never was a popular cry in Scotland, and the peculiar religious tendencies which had been exhibited by a large portion of the nation, at the time of the Reformation, rendered the return of tranquillity hopeless until the hierarchy was displaced, and a humbler form of church government, more suited to the feelings of the people, substituted in its stead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His eyes were naturally turned towards the English hierarchy, which had been modelled, by the despotic Henry VIII., into such a form, as to connect indissolubly the interest of the church with that of the regal power. [A] The Reformation, in England, had originated in the arbitrary will of the prince; in Scotland, and in all other countries of Europe, it had commenced among insurgents of the lower ranks. Hence, the deep and essential difference which separated the Huguenots, the Lutherans, the Scottish presbyterians, and, in fine, all the other reformed churches, from that of England. ”

“ By the time at which reforming influences began manifestly to show themselves in Scotland, that grand medieval organisation, which had supplanted the simpler arrangements of the old Celtic church, had in its turn exhausted its life powers, and shown unmistakable signs of deep-seated corruption and hopeless decay. ”

“ But it is too frequently forgotten that the era of Scotland’s highest achievement in arms and in poetry was not the era of Knox and Buchanan, but the era of Bishop Lamberton, Archdeacon Barbour, [1] and the preaching friar Dunbar. Against the unquestionable benefits of the Reformation in Scotland must be set [4] the fact that it not only broke the stem of the existing feudal civilization, but itself, intent only upon things of a future life, and modelled overmuch upon Judaic ideals, gave scant encouragement to the carnal arts of this world. ”

“ Such are the verses, in which a modern bard has painted the desolate state of Scotland, during a period highly unfavourable to poetical composition. Yet the civil and religious wars of the seventeenth century have afforded some subjects for traditionary poetry, and the reader is here presented with the ballads of that disastrous aera. Some prefatory history may not be unacceptable.
That the Reformation was a good and a glorious work, few will be such slavish bigots as to deny. ”

“ So, notwithstanding all measures of repression, the desire for a reformation quietly grew and spread throughout the nation, especially among the smaller landed proprietors in Angus and Mearns, in Perthshire and Fife, in Kyle and Cunningham, as also among the more intelligent burgesses in the various burghs, and, above all, among the élite of the younger inmates of the monasteries and of the alumni of the University. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I am not ashamed to avow that it has long appeared to me that there is somewhat to be said in favour of the opinion that Scottish presbyterianism gained quite as much as, nay, more than, it lost, by being brought into contact with the broader, richer, and decidedly more catholic spirit of the south, and adding to its earlier symbolical books those which it still holds in common with almost all the orthodox presbyterians of the Anglo-Saxon race. ”

“ In Scotland, the knowledge of the scriptures was diffused among the people, before a single instance had, so far as is known, occurred of a public teaching of the reformation doctrine (M'Crie, Life of Knox, 20) . The decree of the Scottish bishops against which Alesius protested accordingly possesses considerable importance in the history of the religious conflict in Scotland. ”

“ The rude gravestones which mark the spots where those were laid who bore testimony to "the covenanted work of reformation, and Christ's kingly government of His house," bring before us in the most lively, because in the most condensed, authentic, original form, the excited feeling of the time and the most peculiar traits of the religion of the Scottish people ”

“ In the next year the London clergy were recalcitrant. The Spanish ambassador improved the occasion. In reply, Elizabeth told him that the disobedient ministers were "not natives of the country, but Scotsmen, whom she had ordered to be punished." Literal truth she was not telling, and yet there was truth of a sort in her words. From this time onwards, the historian of the English Church must be often thinking of Scotland, and the historian of the Scottish Church must keep England ever in view. Two kingdoms are drifting together, first towards a "personal" and then towards a "real" Union ”

“ There, as well as at the French ports named, there was a community of Scottish merchants, probably by this time enjoying the ministrations of John Gaw or Gall, another St Andrews alumnus, early won over to the cause of the Reformation. The community of Malmö, a year or two before, had given its adhesion to the same cause, and its leading ministers, as well as the Scottish chaplain, were, therefore, prepared to welcome and treat with all kindness their exiled co-religionist, as he himself, twenty-five years after, feelingly narrates. ”

“ The inspiration and the education which the Scottish Church has given to the Scottish people has found one result in the impulse it has afforded to the growth of material prosperity, and it is not easy to regret that Scotland, at the date of the Reformation, was free to work out its own ecclesiastical destiny. ”

“ It lies in the distinctive character of the two great classes into which the Scotch have been divided since the Reformation, called, at the early period of Scottish song, the Covenanters and the Cavaliers. The one party bowed before religion, most scrupulously abstained from all worldly pleasures, and regarded and denounced as sin, or something akin to it, every approach to levity or frivolity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus the bishops themselves were the unwitting instruments of first setting aside a partially liturgic, and introducing instead a wholly extemporary, form of worship into Scotland. There is no reason, however, for maintaining that the Book of Common Order, while it continued in authority, was regarded as more than a guide or model, at least to the ordained ministers, or can be so regarded by any one who studies with care its rubrics and general [Pg 134] contents, far less was observed as a rigid liturgy, every word of which must be repeated unvaryingly by the officiating minister. ”

“ So far as poetry is concerned the statement must be taken as true in Scotland to a modified extent. No one would be so foolish as to deny the immense advantages, in the purification of morals and the setting up of new perfervid ideals, which the Reformation brought to the north. ”

“ The effective check lay in the new Church's lack of revenue, the lands of the old Church having of course been retained by the nobles, who carried through the Reformation simply in order to get them. But even in its poverty, with an indifferent nobility [1063] in possession of the feudal power, the Scottish clergy were nearly as tyrannous socially as their teacher Calvin had been at Geneva ”

“ The leaders of the English parliament, worsted in the Civil War, implored the aid of the Scots, which was promised on condition that the Scottish system of church government was adopted in England. After some haggling a document called the Solemn League and Covenant was drawn up. This was practically a treaty between England and Scotland for the preservation of the reformed religion in Scotland, the reformation of religion in England and Ireland “according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed churches,” and the extirpation of popery and prelacy. ”

“ And all so effectually, that from that hour to this, Rome, in all her back-surgings upon the ground she lost in the sixteenth century, was never able to put Scottish Protestantism once in the slightest danger. Undoubtedly, if there be merit in a faithful contending for what is felt to be all-important truth, it was a worthy thing, and one that shewed there was some5 good metal in the constitution of the Scottish mind. It could not surprise one that a people who acted thus, should also prove to be a valiant and constant people under physical difficulties ”

“ Again, there has always appeared to me to be in the West Highlands far less of the antagonism which in Ireland separates Catholics and Protestants. They live together as good neighbours, and, unless you actually make enquiry, you cannot easily discriminate between them.
SCOTTISH PROTESTANT CLERGY
No feature in the social changes which Scotland has undergone stands out more47 conspicuously than the part played in these changes by the clergy since the Reformation. This clerical influence has been both beneficial and baneful. ”