Extract From "History of Protestantism", by James Wylie
At last one not unworthy to succeed Knox came forward to
fill the place where that great leader had stood. This man was Andrew Melville,
who in 1574 returned from Geneva to Scotland. He was of the Melvilles of
Baldovy, in the Mearns, and having been left an orphan at the age of four
years, was received into the family of his elder brother, who, discovering his
genius and taste for learning, resolved to give him the best education the
country afforded.
He acquired Latin in the grammar-school of Montrose, and
Greek from Pierre de Marsilliers, a native of France, who taught in those
parts; and when the young Melville entered the University of St. Andrews he
read the original text of Aristotle, while his professors, unacquainted with
the tongue of their oracle, commented upon his works from a Latin translation.
From St. Andrews, Melville went to prosecute his studies at that ancient
seat of learning, the University of Paris. The Sorbonne was then rising into
higher renown and attracting greater crowds of students than ever, Francis I,
at the advice of the great scholar Budaeus, having just added to it three new
chairs for Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. These unlocked the gates of the ancient
world, and admitted the student to the philosophy of the Greek sages and the
diviner knowledge of the Hebrew prophets. The Jesuits were at that time
intriguing to obtain admission into the University of Paris, and to insinuate
themselves into the education of youth, and the insight Melville obtained
abroad into the character and designs of these zealots was useful to him in
after-life, stimulating him as it did to put the colleges of his native land on
such a footing that the youth of Scotland might have no need to seek
instruction in foreign countries.
From Paris, Melville repaired to
Poitiers, where, during a residence of three years, he discharged the duties of
regent in the College of St. Marceon, till he was compelled to quit it by the
troubles of the civil war. Leaving Poitiers, he journeyed on foot to Geneva,
his Hebrew Bible slung at his belt, and in a few days after his arrival he was
elected to fill the chair of Humanity, then vacant, in the famous academy which
Calvin had founded ten years before, and which, as regards the fame of its
masters and the number of its scholars, now rivaled the ancient universities of
Europe. His appointment brought him into daily intercourse with the scholars,
ministers, and senators of Geneva, and if the Scotsman delighted in their
urbanity and learning, they no less admired his candor, vivacity, and manifold
acquirements. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew took place during Melville's
residence in Geneva, and that terrible event, by crowding Geneva with refugees,
vastly enlarged his acquaintance with the Protestants of the Continent. There
were at one time as many as 120 French ministers in that hospitable city, and
among other learned strangers was Joseph Scaliger, the greatest scholar of his
age, with whom Melville renewed an acquaintance which had been begun two years
before. The horrors of this massacre, of which he had had so near a view,
deepened the detestation he felt for tyranny, and helped to nerve him in the
efforts he made in subsequent years for the liberties of his native land.
Surrounded with congenial friends and occupied in important labours, that land
he had all but forgotten, till it was recalled to his heart by a visit from two
of his countrymen, who, struck with his great capabilities, urged him to return
to Scotland.
Having obtained with difficulty permission from the Senate and
Church of Geneva to return, he set out on his way homeward, with a letter from
Beza, in which that illustrious man said that "the Church of Geneva could not
have a stronger token of affection to her sister of Scotland than by despoiling
herself of his services that the Church of Scotland might therewith be
enriched." Passing through Paris on the very day that Charles IX died in the
Louvre, he arrived in Edinburgh in July, 1574, after an absence of ten years
from his native country. "He brought with him," says James Melville, "an
inexhaustible treasury of learning, a vast knowledge both of things human and
divine, and, what was better still, an upright and fervent zeal for true
religion, and a firm resolution to devote all his gifts, with unwearied
painfulness, to the service of his Kirk and country without recompense or gain.
On his arrival in Scotland he found the battle against the Tulchan
episcopate, so incongruously joined on to the Presbyterian Church, halting for
one to lead. Impressed with the simple order which Calvin had established in
Geneva, and ascribing in large degree to that cause the glory to which that
Church had attained, and the purity with which religion flourished in it, and
believing with Jerome that, agreeably to the interchangeable use of the words
"bishop" and "presbyter" in the New Testament, all ministers of the Gospel were
at first equal, Melville resolved not to rest till he had lopped off the
unseemly addition which avaricious nobles and a tyrannical Government had made
to the Church of his native land, and restored it to the simplicity of its
first order. He began the battle in the General Assembly of 1575; he continued
it in following Assemblies, and with such success that the General Assembly of
1580 came to a unanimous resolution, declaring "the office of a bishop, as then
used and commonly understood, to be destitute of warrant from the Word of God,
and a human invention, tending to the great injury of the Church, and ordained
the bishops to demit their pretended office simpliciter, and to receive
admission as ordinary pastors de novo, under pain of excommunication."Not a
holder of a Tulchan mitre but bowed to the decision of the Assembly.
While,
on the one hand, this new episcopacy was being cast down, the Church was
labouring, on the other, to build up and perfect her scheme of Presbyterian
polity. A committee was appointed to prosecute this important matter, and in
the course of a series of sittings it brought its work to completion, and its
plan was sanctioned by the General Assembly which met in the Magdalene Chapel
of Edinburgh, in 1578, under the presidency of Andrew Melville. "From this
time," says Dr. McCrie, "the Book of Policy, as it was then styled, or Second
Book of Discipline, although not ratified by the Privy Council or Parliament,
was regarded by the Church as exhibiting her authorized form of government, and
the subsequent Assemblies took steps for carrying its arrangements into effect,
by erecting presbyteries throughout the kingdom, and committing to them the
oversight of all ecclesiastical affairs within their bounds, to the exclusion
of bishops, superintendents, and visitors."
It may be well to pause and
contemplate the Scottish ecclesiastical polity as now perfected. Never before
had the limits of the civil and the ecclesiastical powers been drawn with so
bold a hand as in this Second Book of Discipline. In none of the Confessions of
the Reformation had the Church been so clearly set forth as a distinct and, in
spiritual matters, independent society as it was in this one. The Second Book
of Discipline declared that "Christ had appointed a government in his Church,
distinct from civil government, which is to be executed in his name by such
office-bearers as he has authorized, and not by civil magistrates or under
their direction." This marks a notable advance in the Protestant theory of
Church power, which differs from the Popish theory, inasmuch as it is
co-ordinate with, not superior to, the civil power, its claims to supremacy
being strictly limited to things spiritual, and subject to the State in things
temporal.
Luther had grasped the idea of the essential distinction between
the two powers, but he shrank from the difficulty of embodying his views in a
Church organization. Calvin, after a great battle, had succeeded in vesting the
Church of Geneva with a certain measure of spiritual independence; but the
State there was a theocracy with two branch the spiritual administration
of the consistory, and the moral administration of the senate and hence
the impossibility of instituting definite boundaries between the two. But in
Scotland there was more than a city; there were a kingdom, a Parliament, a
monarch; and this not only permitted, but necessitated, a fuller development of
the autonomy of the Church than was possible in Geneva. Hence the Scottish
arrangement more nearly resembles that which obtained in France than that which
was set up in Geneva; besides, Mary Stuart was Romish, and Knox could not give
to a Popish sovereign the power which Calvin had given to the Protestant senate
of Geneva.
Still the First Book of Discipline was incomplete as regards its
arrangements. It was compiled to meet an emergency, and many of its provisions
were necessarily temporary. But the Second Book of Discipline contained a
scheme of Church polity, developed from the root idea of the supernatural
origin of the Church, and which alike in its general scope and its particular
details was framed with the view of providing at once for the maintenance of
the order, and the conservation of the liberty of the Church. The Parliament
did not ratify the Second Book of Discipline till 1592; but that was a
secondary matter with its compilers, for in their view the granting of such
ratification could not add to, and the withholding of it could not take from,
the inherent authority of the scheme of government, which had its binding power
from the Scriptures or had no binding power whatever. Of what avail, then, was
the ratification of Parliament. Simply this, that the State thereby pledged
itself not to interfere with or overthrow this discipline; and, further, it
might be held as the symbol of the nation's acceptance of and submission to
this discipline as a Scriptural one, which, however, the Church neither wished
nor sought to enforce by civil penalties. It was out of this completed
settlement of the Presbyterian polity that that great struggle arose which
ultimately involved both England and Scotland in civil war, and which, after an
immense effusion of blood, in the southern kingdom on the battle-field, and in
the northern on the scaffolds of its martyrs, issued in the Revolution of 1688,
which placed the Protestant House of Orange on the throne of Great Britain, and
secured, under the sanction of an oath, that the constitution and sovereigns of
the realm should in all time coming be Protestant.
CHAPTER 12 BATTLES
FOR PRESBYTERIANISM AND LIBERTY
In 1578, James VI, now twelve years of
age, took the reins of government into his own hand. His preceptor, the
illustrious Buchanan, had laboured to inspire him with a taste for learning
the capacity he could not give him and to qualify him for his
future duties as a sovereign by instructing him in the principles of civil and
religious liberty. But unhappily the young king, at an early period of his
reign, fell under the influence of two worthless and profligate courtiers, who
strove but too successfully to make him forget all that Buchanan had taught
him. These were Esme Stuart, a cousin of his father, who now arrived from
France, and was afterwards created Earl of Lennox; and Captain James Stuart, a
son of Lord Ochiltree, a man of profligate manners, whose unprincipled ambition
was rewarded with the title and estates of the unfortunate Earl of Arran. The
sum of what these men taught James was that there was neither power nor glory
in a throne unless the monarch were absolute, and that as the jurisdiction of
the Protestant Church of his native country was the great obstacle in the way
of his governing according to his own arbitrary will, it behoved him above all
things to sweep away the jurisdiction of Presbyterianism. An independent Kirk
and an absolute throne could not co-exist in the same realm.
These maxims
accorded but too well with the traditions of his house and his own
prepossessions not to be eagerly imbibed by the king. He proved an apt scholar,
and the evil transformation wrought upon him by the counselors to whom he had
surrendered himself was completed by his initiation into scenes of youthful
debauchery. The Popish politicians on the Continent foresaw, of course, that
James VI would mount the throne of England; and there is reason to think that
the mission of the polished and insinuating but unprincipled Esme Stuart had
reference to that expectation. The Duke of Guise sent him to restore the broken
link between Scotland and France; to fill James's mind with exalted notions of
his own prerogative; to inspire him with a detestation of Presbyterian
Protestantism, the greatest foe of absolute power; and to lead him back to
Rome, the great upholder of the Divine right of kings. Accordingly Esme Stuart
did not come alone. He was in due time followed by Jesuits and seminary
priests, and the secret influence of these men soon made itself manifest in the
open defection of some who had hitherto professed the Protestant faith.
In
short, this was an off-shoot of that great plot which was in 1587 to be smitten
on the scaffold in Fotheringay Castle, and to receive a yet heavier blow from
the tempest that strewed the bottom of the North Sea with the hulks of the
"Invincible Armada," and lined the western shores of Ireland with the corpses
of Spanish warriors. The Presbyterian ministers took the alarm. This flocking
of foul birds to the court, and this crowding of "men in masks" in the kingdom,
fore-boded no good to that Protestant establishment which was the main bulwark
of the country's liberties: The alarm was deepened by intercepted letters from
Rome granting a dispensation to Roman Catholics to profess the Protestant faith
for a time, provided they cherished in their hearts a loyalty to Rome, and let
slip no opportunity their disguise might offer them of advancing her interests.
Crisis was evidently approaching, and if the Scottish people were to hold
possession of that important domain of liberty which they had conquered they
must fight for it. Constitutional government had not indeed been set up as yet
in full form in Scotland; but Buchanan, Knox, and now Melville were the
advocates of its principles; thus the germs of that form of government had been
planted in the country, and its working initiated by the erection of the
Presbyterian Church Courts; limits had been put upon the arbitrary will of the
monarch by the exclusion of the royal power from the most important of all
departments of human liberty and rights; and the great body of the people were
inflamed with the resolution of maintaining these great acquisitions, now
menaced by both the secret and the open emissaries of the Guises and Rome. But
there were none to rally the people to the defense of the public liberties but
the ministers. The Parliament in Scotland was the tool of the court; the courts
of justice had their decisions dictated by letters from the king; there was yet
no free press; there was no organ through which the public sentiment could find
expression, or shape itself into action, but the Kirk. It alone possessed
anything like liberty, or had courage to oppose the arbitrary measures of the
Government. The Kirk therefore must come to the front, and give expression to
the national voice, if that voice was to be heard at all; and the Kirk must put
its machinery in action to defend at once its own independence and the
independence of the nation, both of which were threatened by the same blow.
Accordingly, on this occasion, as so often afterwards, the leaders of the
opposition were ecclesiastical men, and the measures they adopted were on their
outer sides ecclesiastical also. The circumstances of the country made this a
necessity. But whatever the forms and names employed in the conflict, the
question at issue was, shall the king govern by his own arbitrary irresponsible
will, or shall the power of the throne be limited by the chartered rights of
the people? This led to the swearing of the National Covenant. It is only
ignorance of the great conflict of the sixteenth century that would represent
this as a mere Scottish peculiarity.
We have already met with repeated
instances, in the course of our history, in which this expedient for cementing
union and strengthening confidence amongst the friends of Protestantism was had
recourse to. The Lutheran princes repeatedly subscribed not unsimilar bonds.
The Waldenses assembled beneath the rocks of Bobbio, and with uplifted hands
swore to rekindle their "ancient lamp" or die in the attempt. The citizens of
Geneva, twice over, met in their great Church of St. Peter, and swore to the
Eternal to resist the duke, and maintain their evangelical confession. The
capitals of other cantons also hallowed their struggle for the Gospel by an
oath. The Hungarian Protestants followed this example. In 1561 the nobles,
citizens, and troops in Erlau bound themselves by oath not to forsake the
truth, and circulated their Covenant in the neighboring parishes, where also it
was subscribed.
The Covenant from which the Protestants of Scotland sought
to draw strength and confidence has attracted more notice than any of the above
instances, from this circumstance, that the Covenanters were not a party but a
nation, and the Covenant of Scotland, like its Reformation, was national. The
Covenanters swore in brief to resist Popery, and to maintain Protestantism and
constitutional monarchy. They first of all explicitly abjured the Romish
tenets, they promised to adhere to and defend the doctrine and the government
of the Reformed Church of Scotland, and finally they engaged under the same
oath to defend the person and authority of the king, "with our goods, bodies,
and lives, in the defense of Christ's Evangel, liberties of our country,
ministration of justice, and punishment of iniquity, against all enemies within
this realm and without." It was subscribed (1581) by the king and his household
and by all ranks in the country. The arrangement with Rome made the
subscription of the courtiers almost a matter of course; even Esme Stuart, now
Earl of Lennox, seeing how the tide was flowing, professed to be a convert to
the Protestant faith. The national enthusiasm in behalf of the Reformed Church
was greatly strengthened by this solemn transaction, but the intrigues against
it at court went on all the same. The battle was begun by the appointment of a
Tulchan bishop for Glasgow. The person preferred to this questionable dignity
was Robert Montgomery, minister of Stirling, who, said the people, "had the
title, but my Lord of Lennox (Esme Stuart) had the milk." The General Assembly
of 1582 were proceeding to suspend the new-made bishop from the exercise of his
office, when a messenger-at-arms entered, and charged the moderator and
members, "under pain of rebellion and putting them to the horn," to stop
procedure. The Assembly, so far from complying, pronounced the heavier sentence
of excommunication on Montgomery; and the sentence was publicly intimated in
Edinburgh and Glasgow, in spite of Esme Stuart, who, furious with rage,
threatened to poignard the preacher.
It shows how strongly the popular
feeling was in favour of the Assembly, and against the court, that when
Montgomery came soon after to pay a visit to his patron Lennox, the inhabitants
of Edinburgh rose in a body, demanding that the town should not be polluted
with his presence, and literally chased him out of it. Nor was he, with all his
speed, about to escape a few "buffets in the neck" as he hastily made his exit
at the wicket-gate of the Potter Row. The matter did not end with the
ignominious expulsion of Montgomery from the capital. The next General Assembly
adopted a spirited remonstrance to the king, setting forth that the authority
of the Church had been invaded, her sentences dissanulled, and her ministers
obstructed in the discharge of their duty, and begging redress of these
grievances.
Andrew Melville with others was appointed to present the paper
to the king in council; having obtained audience, the commissioners read the
remonstrance. The reading finished, Arran looked round with a wrathful
countenance, and demanded, "Who dares subscribe these treasonable articles?"
"We dare," replied Melville, and, advancing to the table, he took the pen and
subscribed. The other commissioners came forward, one after another, and
appended their signatures. Even the insolent Arran was abashed; and Melville
and his brethren were peaceably dismissed. Protection from noble or from other
quarter the ministers had none; their courage was their only shield.
There
followed some chequered years; the nobles roused by the courageous bearing of
the ministers, made all attempt to free themselves and the country from the
ignominious tyranny of the unworthy favourites, who were trampling upon their
liberties. But their attempt, known as the "Raid of Ruthven," was ill-advised,
and very unlike the calm and constitutional opposition of the ministers. The
nobles took possession of the king's person, and compelled the Frenchmen to
leave the country. The year's peace which this violence procured for the Church
was dearly purchased, for the tide of oppression immediately returned with all
the greater force.
Andrew Melville had to retire into England, and that
intrepid champion off the scene, the Parliament (1584) overturned the
independence of the Church. It enacted that no ecclesiastical Assembly should
meet without the king's leave; that no one should decline the judgment of the
king and Privy Council on any matter whatever, under peril of treason, and that
all ministers should acknowledge the bishops as their ecclesiastical superiors.
These decrees were termed the Black Acts. Their effect was to lay at the feet
of the king that whole machinery of ecclesiastical courts which, as matters
then stood, was the only organ of public sentiment, and the only bulwark of the
nation's liberties. The General Assembly could not meet unless the king willed,
and thus he held in his hands the whole power of the Church. This was in
violation of repeated Acts of Parliament, which had vested the Church with the
power of convoking and dissolving her Assemblies, without which her liberties
were an illusion.
The Reformed Church of Scotland was lying in what seemed
ruin, when it was lifted up by an event that at first threatened destruction to
it and to the whole Protestantism of Britain. It was at this time that the
storm-cloud of the Armada gathered, burst, and passed away, but not without
rousing the spirit of liberty, in Scotland. The Scots resolved to set their
house in order, lest a second Armada should approach their shores, intercepted
letters having made them aware that Huntly and the Popish lords of the north
were urging Philip II of Spain to make another attempt, and promising to second
his efforts with soldiers who would not only place Scotland at his feet, but
would aid him to subjugate England. Even James VI paused in the road he was
traveling towards that oldest and staunchest friend of despotic princes, the
Church of Rome, seeing his kingdom about to depart from him. His ardour had
been cooled, too, by the many difficulties he had encountered in his attempts
to impose upon his subjects a hierarchy to which they were repugnant; and
either through that fickleness and inconstancy which were a part of his nature,
or through that incurable craft which characterized him as it had done all his
race, he became for the time a zealous Presbyterian. Nay, he "praised God that
he was born in such a place as to be king in such a Kirk, the purest Kirk in
the world. I, forsooth," he concluded, "as long as I brook my life and crown
shall maintain the same against all deadly.
Andrew Melville had returned
from London after a year's absence, and his first care was to resuscitate the
Protestant liberties which lay buried under the late Parliamentary enactments.
Nor were his labours in vain. In 1592, Parliament restored the Presbyterian
Church as it had formerly existed, ratifying its government by Kirk-sessions,
Presbyteries, Provincial Synods, and National Assemblies. This Act has ever
been held to be the grand charter of Presbyterianism in Scotland. It was hailed
with joy, not as adding a particle of inherent authority to the system it
recognized the basis of that authority the Church had already laid down
in her Books of Discipline but because it gave the Church a legal pledge
that the jurisdiction of the Romish Church would not be restored, and by
consequence, that of the Reformed Church not overthrown. This Act gave the
Church of Scotland a legal ground on which to fight her future battles.
But
James VI was incapable of being long of one mind, or persevering steadily in
one course. In 1596 the Popish lords, who had left the country on the
suppression of their rebellion, returned to Scotland. Notwithstanding that they
had risen in arms against the king, and had continued their plots while they
lived abroad, James was willing to receive and reinstate these conspirators.
His Council were of the same mind with himself. Not so the country and the
Church, which saw new conspiracies and wars in prospect, should these
inveterate plotters be taken back. Without loss of time, a deputation of
ministers, appointed at a convention held at Cupar, proceeded to Falkland to
remonstrate with the king on the proposed recall of those who had shown
themselves the enemies of his throne and the disturbers of his realm. The
ministers were admitted into the palace. It had been agreed that James
Melville, the nephew of Andrew, for whom the king entertained great respect,
being a man of courteous address, should be their spokesman. He had only
uttered a few words when the king violently interrupted him, denouncing him and
his associates as seditious stirrers up of the people. The nephew would soon
have succumbed to the tempest of the royal anger if the uncle had not stepped
forward.
James VI and Andrew Melville stood once more face to face. For a
few seconds there was a conflict between the kingly authority of the sovereign
and the moral majesty of the patriot. But soon the king yielded himself to
Melville. Taking James by the sleeve, and calling him "God's sillie
vassal," he proceeded, says McCrie, "to address him in the following
strain, perhaps the most singular, in point of freedom, that ever saluted royal
ears, or that ever proceeded from the mouth of loyal subject, who would have
sprit his blood in defense of the person and honor of his prince: "Sir,"
said Melville, "we will always humbly reverence your Majesty in public, but
since we have this occasion to be with your Majesty in private, and since you
are brought into extreme danger both of your life and crown, and along with you
the country and the Church of God are like to go to wreck, for not telling you
the truth and bring you faithful counsel, we must discharge our duty or else be
traitors, both to Christ and you. Therefore, sir, as divers times before I have
told you, so now again I must tell you, there are two kings and two kingdoms in
Scotland: there is Christ Jesus the King of the Church, whose subject King
James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a
head, but a member... We will yield to you your place, and give you all due
obedience; but again I say, you are not the head of the Church; you cannot give
us that eternal life which even in this world we seek for, and you cannot
deprive us of it. Permit us then freely to meet in the name of Christ, and to
attend to the interests of that Church of which you are the chief member. Sir,
when you were in your swaddling-clothes, Christ Jesus reigned freely in this
land, in spite of all his enemies; his officers and ministers convened for the
ruling and the welfare of his Church, which was ever for your welfare, defense,
and preservation, when these same enemies were seeking your destruction and
cutting off. And now, when there is more than extreme necessity for the
continuance of that duty, will you hinder and dishearten Christ's servants, and
your most faithful subjects, quarreling them for their convening, when you
should rather commend and countenance them as the godly kings and emperors
did?"
The storm, which had risen with so great and sudden a violence at
the mild words of the nephew, went down before the energy and honesty of the
uncle, and the deputation was dismissed with assurances that no favour should
be shown the Popish lords, and no march stolen upon the liberties of the
Church. But hardly were the ministers gone when steps were taken for restoring
the insurgent nobles, and undermining the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The
policy adopted for accomplishing this was singularly subtle, and reveals the
hand of the Jesuits, of whom there were then numbers in the country. First of
all, the king preferred the apparently innocent request that a certain number
of ministers should be appointed as assessors, with whom he might advise in
"all affairs concerning the weal of the Church." Fourteen ministers were
appointed: "the very needle," says James Melville, "which drew in the episcopal
thread." The second step was to declare by Act of Parliament that Prelacy was
the third Estate of the Realm, and that those ministers whom the king chose to
raise to that dignity should be entitled to sit or vote in Parliament. The
third step was to enact that the Church should be represented in Parliament,
and that the fourteen assessors already chosen should form that representation.
The matter having reached this hopeful stage, the king adventured on the fourth
and last step, which was to nominate David Lindsay, Peter Blackburn, and George
Gladstanes to the vacant bishoprics of Ross, Aberdeen, and Caithness.
The
new-made bishops took their seats in the next Parliament. The art and finesse
of the king and his counselors had triumphed; but his victory was not yet
complete, for the General Assembly still continued to manage, although with
diminished authority and freedom, the affairs of the Church. The war we have
been contemplating was waged within a small area, but its issue was world-wide.
The ecclesiastical names and forms that appear on its surface may make this
struggle repulsive in the eyes of some. Waged in the Palace of Falkland, and on
the floor of the General Assembly, these contests are apt to be set down as
having no higher origin than clerical ambition, and no wider object than
ecclesiastical supremacy. But this, in the present instance at least, would be
a most superficial and erroneous judgment. We see in these conflicts infant
Liberty struggling with the old hydra of Despotism. The independence and
freedom of Scotland were here as really in question as on the fields waged by
Wallace and Bruce, and the men who fought in the contests which have been
passing before us braved death as really as those do who meet mailed
antagonists on the battlefield. Nay, more, Scotland and its Kirk had at this
time become the key-stone in the arch of European liberty; and the unceasing
efforts of the Pope, the King of Spain, and the Guises were directed to the
displacing of that keystone, that the arch which it upheld might be destroyed.
They were sending their agents into the country, they were fomenting
rebellions, they were flattering the weak conceit of wisdom and of arbitrary
power in James: not that they cared for the conquest of Scotland in itself so
much as they coveted a door by which to enter England, and suppress its
Reformation, which they regarded as the one thing wanting to complete the
success of their schemes for the total extermination of Protestantism.
With
servile Parliaments and a spiritless nobility, the public liberties as well as
the Protestantism of Scotland would have perished but for the vigilance, and
intrepidity of the Presbyterian ministers, and, above all, the incorruptible,
the dauntless and unflinching courage and patriotism of Andrew Melville. These
men may have been rough in speech; they may have permitted their temper to be
ruffled, and their indignation to be set on fire, in exposing craft and
withstanding tyranny; but that man's understanding must be as narrow as his
heart is cold, who would think for a moment of weighing such things in the
balance against the priceless blessing of a nation's liberties. The death of
Queen Elizabeth, in 1603, called James VI to London, and the center of the
conflict, which widens as the years advance, changes with the monarch to
England.
When it became known at Rome that the reign of Elizabeth was
drawing to a close, steps were immediately taken to prevent any one mounting
her throne save a prince whose attachment to Roman Catholicism could not be
doubted, and on whom sure hopes could be built that he would restore the Papacy
in England. The doubtful Protestantism of the Scottish king had, as we have
already said, been somewhat strengthened by the destruction of the Spanish
Armada. It was further steadied by the representations made to him by Elizabeth
and her wise ministers, to the effect that he could not hope to succeed to the
throne of England unless he should put his attachment to the Protestant
interests beyond suspicion; and that the nobility and gentry of England had too
much honour and spirit ever again to bow the neck to the tyranny of the Church
of Rome. These representations and warnings weighed with the monarch, the
summit of whose wishes was to ascend the throne of the southern kingdom, and
who was ready to protest or even swear to maintain any set of maxims, political
or religious, which the necessity of the hour made advisable, seeing that his
principles of kingcraft permitted the adoption of a new policy whenever a new
emergency arose or a stronger temptation crossed his path.
Accordingly we
find James, in the instructions sent to Hamilton, his agent in England in 1600,
bidding him "assure honest men, on the princely word of a Christian king, that
as I have ever without swerving maintained the same religion within my kingdom,
so, as soon as it shall please God lawfully to possess me of the crown of that
kingdom, I shall not only maintain the profession of the Gospel there, but
withal not suffer any other religion to be professed within the bounds of that
kingdom." This strong assurance, doubtless, quieted the fears of the English
statesmen, but in the same degree it awakened the fears of the Roman Catholics.
They began to despair of the King of the Scots - prematurely, we think; but
they were naturally more impatient than James, seeing the restoration of their
Church was with them the first object, whereas with James it was only the
second, and the English crown was the first. The conspirators in England, whose
hopes had been much dashed by the strong declaration of the Scottish king,
applied to Pope Clement VIII to put a bar in the way of his mounting the
throne. Clement was not hard to be persuaded in the matter. He sent over to
Garnet, Provincial of the Jesuits in England, two bulls of his apostolical
authority: one addressed to the Romish clergy, the other to the nobility and
laity, and both of the same tenor. The bulls enjoined those to whom they were
directed, in virtue of their obedience, at whatever time "that miserable
woman," for so he called Elizabeth, should depart this life, to permit no one
to ascend her throne, how near so ever in blood, unless he swore, according to
the example of the former monarchs of England, not only to tolerate the Roman
Catholic faith, but to the utmost of his power uphold and advance it.
Armed
with this authoritative document, the Romish faction in the kingdom waited till
Elizabeth should breathe her last. On the death of the queen, in March, 1603,
they instantly dispatched a messenger to announce the fact to Winter, their
agent at the Court of Spain. They charged him to represent to his most Catholic
Majesty that his co-religionists in England were likely to be as grievously
oppressed under the new king as they had been under the late sovereign, that in
this emergency they turned their eyes to one whose zeal was as undoubted as his
arm was powerful, and they prayed him to interpose in their behalf. The
disaster of the Armada was too fresh in Philip's memory, the void it had made
in his treasury, and which was not yet replenished, was too great, and the
effects of the terrible blow on the national spirit were too depressing, to
permit his responding to this appeal of the English Catholics by arms. Besides,
he had opened negotiations for peace with the new king, and these must be ended
one way or the other before he could take any step to prevent James mounting
the throne, or to dispossess him of it after he had ascended it. Thus, the
English Jesuits were left with the two bulls of Clement VIII, and the good
wishes of Philip II, as their only weapons for carrying out their great
enterprise of restoring their Church to its former supremacy in England. They
did not despair, however. Thrown on their own resources, they considered the
means by which they might give triumph to their cause.
The Order of Jesus
is never more formidable than when it appears to be least so. It is when the
Jesuits are stripped of all external means of doing harm that they devise the
vastest schemes, and execute them with the most daring courage. Extremity but
compels them to retreat yet deeper into the darkness, and arm themselves with
those terrible powers wherein their great strength lies, and the full unsparing
application of which they reserve for the conflicts of mightiest moment. The
Jesuits in England now began to meditate a great blow. They had delivered an
astounding stroke at sea but a few years before; they would signalize the
present emergency by a nearly as astounding stroke on land. They would prepare
an Armada in the heart of the kingdom, which would inflict on England a ruin
sudden, strange, and terrible, like that which Philip's fleet would have
inflicted had not the "winds become Lutheran," as Medina Sidonia said with an
oath, and in their sectarian fury sent his ships to the bottom. In September,
1603, it would seem that the first meeting of the leading spirits of the party
was held to talk over the course the new king was pursuing, and the measures to
be adopted. Catesby, a gentleman of an ancient family, began by recounting the
grievances under which the Roman Catholics of England groaned. His words
kindling the anger of Percy, a descendant of the House of Northumberland, he
observed that nothing was left them but to kill the king. "That," said Catesby,
"is to run a great risk, and accomplish little," and he proceeded to unfold to
Percy a much grander design, which could be executed with greater safety, and
would be followed by far greater consequences. "You have," he continued, "taken
off the king; but his children remain, who will succeed to his throne. Suppose
you destroy the whole royal family, there will still remain the nobility, the
gentry, the Parliament. All these we must sweep away with one stroke; and when
our enemies have sunk in a common ruin, then may we restore the Church of Rome
in England."
In short, he proposed to blow up the Houses of Parliament with
gunpowder, when the king and the Estates of the Realm should be there
assembled. The manner in which this plot was proceeded with is too well known,
and the details are too accessible in the ordinary histories, to require that
we should here dwell upon them. The contemplated destruction was on so great a
scale that some of the conspirators, when it was first explained to them,
shrunk from the perpetration of a wickedness so awful. To satisfy the more
scrupulous of the party they resolved to consult their spiritual advisers. "Is
it lawful," they asked of Garnet, Tesmond, and Gerard, "to do this thing?"
These Fathers assured them that they might go on with a good conscience and do
the deed, seeing that those on whom the destruction would fall were heretics
and excommunicated persons. "But," it was replied, "some Catholics will perish
with the Protestants: is it lawful to destroy the righteous with the wicked? "
It was answered, "Yes, for it is expedient that the few should die for the good
of the many." The point of conscience having been resolved, and the way made
clear, the next step was an oath of secrecy, to inspire them with mutual
confidence: the conspirators swore to one another by the Blessed Trinity and by
the Sacrament not to disclose the matter, directly or indirectly, and never to
desist from the execution of it, unless released by mutual consent. To add to
the solemnity of the oath, they retired into an inner chamber, where they heard
mass, and received the Sacrament from Gerard. They had sanctified themselves as
the executioners of the vengeance of Heaven upon an apostate nation. They set
to work; they ran a mine under the Houses of Parliament; and now they learned
by accident that with less ado they might compass their end. The vault under
the House of Lords, commonly used as a coal-cellar, was to be let. They hired
it, placed in it thirty-six barrels of gun, powder, and strewing plenteously
over them billets, fagots, stones, and iron bars, threw open the doors that all
might see how harmless were the materials with which the vault was stored. The
plot had been brewing for a year and a half; it had been entrusted to some
twenty persons, and not a whisper had been uttered by way of divulging the
terrible secret.
The billets, fagots, and iron bars that concealed the
gunpowder in the vault were not the only means by which it was sought to hide
from the people all knowledge of the terrible catastrophe which was in
preparation. "The Lay Catholic Petition" was at this time published, in which
they supplicated the king for toleration, protesting their fidelity and
unfeigned love for his Majesty, and offering to be bound life for life with
good sureties for their loyal behaviour. When the plot approached execution,
Father Garnet began to talk much of bulls and mandates from the Pope to charge
all the priests and their flocks in England to carry themselves with profound
peace and quiet. Garnet sent Fawkes to Rome with a letter to Clement,
supplicating that "commandment might come from his Holiness, or else from
Aquaviva, the General of the Jesuits, for staying of all commotions of the
Catholics in England." So anxious were they not to hurt a Protestant, or
disturb the peace of the kingdom, or shake his Majesty's throne.
The sky is
clearing, said the Protestants, deceived by these arts; the winter of Catholic
discontent is past, and all the clouds that lowered upon the land in the days
of Elizabeth are buried in the "deep sea" of mutual conciliation. They knew not
that the men from whom those loud protestations of loyalty and brotherly
concord came were all the while storing gunpowder in the vault underneath the
House of Lords, laying the train, and counting the hours when they should fire
it, and shake down the pillars of the State, and dissolve the whole frame of
the realm. The way in which this hideous crime was prevented, and England saved
- namely, by a letter addressed to Lord Monteagle by one of the conspirators,
whose heart would seem to have failed him at the last moment, leading to a
search below the House of Lords, followed by the discovery of the astounding
plot - we need not relate. There is evidence for believing that the projected
iniquity was not the affair of a few desperate men in England only, but that
the authorities of the Popish world knew of it, sanctioned it, and lent it all
the help they dared. Del Rio, in a treatise printed in 1600, puts a
supposititious case in the confessional: "as if," says Dr. Kennet, "he had
already looked into the mine and cellars, and had surveyed the barrels of
powder in them, and had heard the whole confession of Fawkes and Catesby."
The answer to the supposed case, which is that of the Gunpowder Plot, the names
of the actors left out, forbade the divulging of such secrets, on the ground
that the seal of the confessional must not be violated. This treatise,
published at so short a distance from England as Louvain, and so near the time
when the train was being laid, shows, as Bishop Burnet remarks, that the plot
was then in their minds. In Sully's Memoirs there is oftener than once a
reference to a "sudden blow" which was intended in England about this time; and
King James was warned by a letter from the court of Henry IV to beware of the
fate of Henry III; and in the oration pronounced at Rome in praise of
Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV, it was said that he (Henry IV) was not
only an enemy to the Catholic religion in his heart, but that he had obstructed
the glorious enterprise of those who would have restored it in England, and had
caused them to be crowned with martyrdom. It is not easy to see to what this
can refer if it be not to the Gunpowder Plot, and the execution of the
conspirators by which it was followed.
The proof of knowledge beforehand on
the part of the Popish authorities seemed to be completed by the action of Pope
Paul V, who appointed a jubilee for the year 1605 - the year when the plot was
to be executed for the purpose of "praying for help in emergent necessities,"
and among reasons assigned by the Pontiff for fixing on the year 1605, was that
it was to witness "the rooting out of all the impious errors of the heretics.
Copely says that "he could never meet with any one Jesuit who blamed it." Two
of the Jesuit conspirators who made their escape to Rome were rewarded; one
being made penitentiary to the Pope, and the other a confessor in St. Peter's.
Garnet, who was executed as a traitor, is styled by Bellarmin a martyr; and
Misson tells us that he saw his portrait among the martyrs in the hall of the
Jesuit College at Rome, and by his side an angel who shows him the open gates
of heaven. That the Romanists should thus plot against the religion and
liberties of England was only what might be expected, but James himself became
a plotter towards the same end. Instead of being warned off from so dangerous
neighbours, he began industriously to court alliances with the Popish Powers.
In these proceedings he laid the foundation of all the miseries which
afterwards overtook his house and his kingdom. His first step was to send the
Earl of Bristol to Spain, to negotiate a marriage with the Infanta for his son
Prince Charles. He afterwards dispatched Buckingham with the prince himself on
the same errand to the Spanish Court a proceeding that surprised
everybody, and which no one but the "English Solomon" could have been capable
of. It gave fresh life to Romanism in England, greatly emboldened the Popish
recusants, and was the subject (1621) of a remonstrance of the Commons to the
king.
The same man who had endeavoured to stamp out the infant
constitutional liberties of Scotland began to plot the overthrow of the more
ancient franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of England. While the prince
was in Spain all arts were employed to bring him within the pale of the Roman
Church. An interchange of letters took place between him and the Pope, in which
the Pontiff expresses his hope that "the Prince of the Apostles would be put in
possession of his [the prince's] most noble island, and that he and his royal
father might be styled the deliverers and restorers of the ancient paternal
religion of Great Britain." The prince replies by expressing his ardent wishes
"for an alliance with one that hath the same apprehension of the true religion
with myself."
(Stay with it, we havn't finished with
Melville!)
A Papal dispensation was granted; the marriage was agreed
upon; the terms of the treaty were that no laws enacted against Roman Catholics
should ever after be put in execution, that no new laws should ever hereafter
be made against them, and that the prince should endeavor to the utmost of his
power to procure the ratification by Parliament of these articles; and that,
further, the Parliament "should approve and ratify all and singular articles in
favor of Roman Catholics capitulated by the most renowned kings." The marriage
came to nothing; nevertheless, the consequences of the treaty were most
disastrous to both the king and England. It filled the land with Popish priests
and Jesuits; it brought over the titular Bishop of Chalcedon to exercise
Episcopal jurisdiction; it lost King James the love of his subjects; it exposed
him to the contempt of his enemies; and in addition it cost him the loss of his
honour and the sacrifice of Sir Walter Raleigh. Extending beyond the bounds of
England, the evil effects of this treaty were felt in foreign countries. For
the sake of his alliance with the House of Austria, James sacrificed the
interests of his son-in-law: he lost the Palatinate, and became the immediate
cause, as we have seen in a previous part of this history, of the overthrow of
Protestantism in Bohemia.
James VI did not grow wiser as he advanced in
years. Troubles continued to embitter his life, evils to encompass his throne,
contempt to wait upon his person, and calamity and distraction to darken his
realm. These manifold miseries grew out of his rooted aversion to the religion
of his native land, and an incurable leaning towards Romanism which led him to
truckle to the Popish Powers, whose tool and dupe he became, and to cherish a
reverence for the Church of Rome, which courted him only that she might rob him
of his kingdom. And the same man who made himself so small and contemptible to
all the world abroad was, by his invasion of the laws, his love of arbitrary
power, and his unconstitutional acts, the tyrant of his Parliament and the
oppressor of his people at home.
The first part of the mighty task
which awaited Protestantism in the sixteenth century was to breathe life into
the nations. It found Christendom a vast sepulchre in which its several peoples
were laid out in the sleep of death, and it said to them, "Live." Arms, arts,
political constitutions, cannot quicken the ashes of nations, and call them
from their tomb: the mighty voice of the Scriptures alone can do this.
Conscience is the life, and the Bible awoke the conscience. The second part of
the great task of Protestantism was to make the nations free. It first gave
them life, it next gave them freedom. We have seen this order attempted to be
reversed in some modern instances, but the result has shown how impossible it
is to give liberty to the dead. The amplest measure of political freedom cannot
profit nations when the conscience continues to slumber. It is like clothing a
dead knight in the armour of a living warrior. He reposes proudly in helmet and
coat of mail, but the pulse throbs not in the limbs which these cover.
Of
all the nations of Christendom there was not one in so torpid a state as
Scotland. When the sixteenth century dawned, it was twice dead: it was dead in
a dominant Romanism, and it was dead in an equally dominant feudalism; and for
this reason perhaps it was selected as the best example in the entire circle of
the European nations to exhibit the power of the vitalizing principle. The
slow, silent, and deep permeation of the nation by the Bible dissolved the
fetters of this double slavery, and conscience was emancipated. An emancipated
conscience, by the first law of nature self-preservation
immediately set to work to trace the boundary lines around that domain in which
she felt that she must be sole and exclusive mistress. Thus arose the spiritual
jurisdiction - in other words, the Church.
Scotland had thus come into
possession of one of her liberties, the religious. A citadel of freedom had
been reared in the heart of the nation, and from that inner fortress religious
liberty went forth to conquer the surrounding territory for its yoke - fellow,
civil liberty; and that kingdom which had so lately been the most enslaved of
all the European States was now the freest in Christendom. Thus in Scotland the
Church is older than the modern State. It was the Church that called the
modern, that is, the free State, into existence. It watched over it in its
cradle; it fought for it in its youth; and it crowned its manhood with a
perfect liberty. It was not the State in Scotland that gave freedom to the
Church: it was the Church that gave freedom to the State. There is no other
philosophy of liberty than this; and nations that have yet their liberty to
establish might find it useful to study this model.
The demise of Elizabeth
called James away before he had completed his scheme of rearing the fabric of
arbitrary power on the ruins of the one independent and liberal institution
which Scotland possessed. But he prosecuted on the throne of England the grand
object of his ambition. We cannot go into a detail of the chicaneries by which
he overreached some, the threats with which he terrified others, and the
violence with which he assailed those whom his craft could not deceive, nor his
power bend.
Melville was summoned to London, thrown into the Tower, and
when, after an imprisonment of four years, he was liberated, it was not to
return to his native land, but to retire to France, where he ended his days.
The faithful ministers were silenced, imprisoned, or banished. Those who lent
themselves to the measures of the court shrunk from no perfidy to deceive the
people, in order to secure the honours which they so eagerly coveted.
Gladstanes and others pursued the downward road, renewing the while their
subscription to the National Covenant, "promising and swearing by the great
name of the Lord our God that we shall continue in the obedience of the
doctrine and discipline of this Kirk, and shall defend the same according to
our vocation and power all the days of our lives, under the pains contained in
the law, and danger both of body and soul in the day of God's fearful
judgment."
At length, in a packed assembly which met in Glasgow in 1610,
James succeeded in carrying his measure - prelacy was set up. The bishops acted
as perpetual moderators, and had dioceses assigned them, within which they
performed the ordinary functions of bishops. Alongside of them the Presbyterian
courts continued to meet: not indeed the General Assembly - this court was
suspended - but Kirk sessions, presbyteries, and synods were held, and
transacted the business of the Church in something like the old fashion. This
was a state of matters pleasing to neither party, and least of all to the
court, and accordingly the tribunal of High Commission was set up to give more
power to the king's bishops; but it failed to procure for the men in whose
interests it existed more obedience from the ministers, or more respect from
the people; and the sentiment of the country was still too strong to permit it
putting forth all those despotic and unconstitutional powers with which it was
armed. Making a virtue of necessity, the new dignitaries, it must be confessed,
wore their honours with commendable humility; and this state of matters, which
conjoined in the same Church lawn robes and Geneva cloaks, mitred apostles and
plain presbyters, continued until 1618, when yet another stage of this affair
was reached. Seated on the throne of England, the courtly divines and the famed
statesmen of the southern kingdom bowing before him, and offering continual
increase to his "wisdom," his "scholarship," and his "theological erudition,"
though inwardly they must have felt no little disgust at that curious mixture
of pertness, pedantry, and profanity that made up James VI - with so much to
please him, we say, one would have thought that the monarch would have left in
peace the little kingdom from which he had come, and permitted its sturdy
plainspoken theologians to go their own w
ay. So far from this, he was more
intent than ever on consummating the transformation of the northern Church. He
purposed a visit to his native land, having, as he expressed it with
characteristic coarseness, "a natural and salmon-like affection to see the
place of his breeding," and he ordered the Scottish bishops to have the kingdom
put in due ecclesiastical order before his arrival. These obedient men did the
best in their power. The ancient chapel of Holyrood was adorned with statues of
the twelve apostles, finely gilded. An altar was set up in it, on which lay two
closed Bibles, and on either side of them an unlighted candle and an empty
basin. The citizens of Edinburgh had no difficulty in perceiving the
"substance" of which these things were the "shadow." Every parish church was
expected to arrange itself on the model of the Royal Chapel.
These
innovations were followed next year (1618) by the Five Articles of Perth, so
called from having been agreed upon at a meeting of the clergy in that city.
These articles were: 1st, Kneeling at the Communion; 2nd, The observance of
certain holidays; 3rd, Episcopal confirmation; 4th, Private baptism; 5th,
Private communion. A beacon-light may be white or it may be red, the colour in
itself is a matter of not the smallest consequence; but if the one colour
should draw the mariner upon the rock, and the other warn him past it, it is
surely important that he should know the significance of each, and guide
himself accordingly. The colour is no longer a trifling affair; on the
contrary, the one is life, the other is death. It is so with rites and symbols.
They may be in themselves of not the least importance; their good or evil lies
wholly in whether they guide the man who practices them to safety or to ruin.
The symbols set up in the Chapel Royal of Holyrood, and the five ordinances of
Perth, were of this description. The Scots looked upon them as sign-posts which
seduced the traveller's feet, not into the path of safety, but into the road of
destruction; they regarded them as false lights hung out to lure the vessel of
their commonwealth upon the rocks of Popery and of arbitrary government.
They refused to sail by these lights. Their determination was strengthened
by the omens, as they accounted them, which accompanied their enactment by
Parliament in July, 1621. On the day on which they were to be sanctioned, a
heavy cloud had hung above Edinburgh since morning; that cloud waxed ever the
darker as the hour approached when the articles were to be ratified, till at
last it filled the Parliament Hall with the gloom of almost night. The moment
the Marquis of Hamilton, the commissioner, rose and touched the Act with the
royal scepter, the cloud burst in a terrific storm right over the Parliament
House. Three lurid gleams, darting in at the large window, flashed their vivid
fires in the commissioner's face. Then came terrible peals of thunder, which
were succeeded by torrents of rain and hail, that inundated the streets, and
made it difficult for the members to reach their homes. The day was long
remembered in Scotland by the name of "Black Saturday." The king, and those
ministers who from cowardice or selfishness had furthered his measures, had now
triumphed; but that triumph was discomfiture. In the really Protestant parts of
Scotland - for the Scotland of that day had its cities and shires in which
flourished a pure and vigorous Protestantism, while there were remote and rural
parts where, thanks to that rapacity which had created a wealthy nobility and
an impoverished clergy, the old ignorance and superstition still lingered - the
really Protestant people of Scotland, we say, were as inflexibly bent as ever
on repudiating a form of Church government which they knew was meant to pave
the way for tyranny in the State, and a ritualistic worship, which they held to
be of the nature of idolatry; and of all his labor in the matter the king
reaped nothing save disappointment, vexation, and trouble, which accompanied
him till he sank into his grave in 1625.
Never would Scottish monarch have
reigned so happily as James VI would have done, had he possessed but a tithe of
that wisdom to which he laid claim. The Reformation had given him an
independent clergy and an intelligent middle class, which he so much needed to
balance the turbulence and power of his barons; but James fell into the
egregious blunder of believing the religion of his subjects to be the weakness,
instead of the strength, of his throne, and so he labored to destroy it. He
blasted his reputation for kingly honour, laid up a store of misfortunes and
sorrows for his son, and alienated from his house a nation which had ever borne
a chivalrous loyalty to his ancestors, despite their many and great faults.
The year of the king's death was rendered memorable by the rise of a
remarkable influence of a spiritual kind in Scotland, which continued for years
to act upon its population. This invisible but mighty agent moved to and fro,
appearing now in this district and now in that, but no man could discover the
law that regulated its course, or foretell the spot where it would next make
its presence known. It turned as it listed, even as do the winds, and was quite
as much above man's control, who could neither say to it, "Come," nor bid it
depart. Wherever it passed, its track was marked, as is that of the rain-cloud
across the burned-up wilderness, by a shining line of moral and spiritual
verdure. Preachers had found no new Gospel, nor had they become suddenly
clothed with a new eloquence; yet their words had a power they had formerly
lacked; they went deeper into the hearts of their hearers, who were impressed
by them in a way they had never been before. Truths they had heard a hundred
times over, of which they had grown weary, acquired a freshness, a novelty, and
a power that made them feel as if they heard them now for the first time. They
felt inexpressible delight in that which aforetime had caused them no joy, and
trembled under what till that moment had awakened no fear. Notorious
profligates, men who had braved the brand of public opinion, or defied the
penalties of the law, were under this influence bowed down, and melted into
penitential tears. Thieves, drunkards, loose livers, and profane swearers
suddenly awoke to a sense of the sin and shame of the courses they had been
leading, condemned themselves as the chief of transgressors, trembled under the
apprehension of a judgment to come, and uttered loud cries for forgiveness.
Some who had lived years of miserable and helpless bondage to evil habits and
flagrant vices, as if inspired by a sudden and supernatural force, rent their
fetters, and rose at once to purity and virtue. Some of these converts fell
back into their old courses, but in the case of the majority the change was
lasting; and thousands who, but for this sudden transformation, would have been
lost to themselves and to society, were redeemed to virtue, and lived lives
which were not less profitable than beautiful. This influence was as calm as it
was strong; those on whom it fell did not vent their feelings in enthusiastic
expressions; the change was accompanied by a modesty and delicacy which for the
time forbade disclosure; it was the judgment, not the passions, that was moved;
it was the conscience, not the imagination, that was called hire action; and as
the stricken deer retires from the herd into some shady part of the forest, so
these persons went apart, there to weep till the arrow had been plucked out,
and a healing balm poured into the wound. Even the men of the world were
impressed with these tokens of the working of a supernatural influence. They
could not resist the impression, even when they refused to avow it, that a
Visitant whose dwelling, was not with men had come down to the earth, and was
moving about in the midst of them. The moral character of whole towns,
villages, and parishes was being suddenly changed; now it was on a solitary
individual, and now on hundreds at once, that this mysterious influence made
its power manifest; plain it was that in some region or other of the universe
an Influence was resident, which had only to be unlocked, and to go forth among
the dwellings of men, and human wickedness and oppression would dissolve and
disappear as the winter's ice melts at the approach of spring, and joy and
singing would break forth as do blossoms and verdure when the summer's sun
calls them from their chambers in the earth. One thing we must not pass over in
connection with this movement: in at least its two chief centres it was
distinctly traceable to those ministers who had suffered persecution for their
faithfulness under James VI. The locality where this revival first appeared was
in Ayrshire, the particular spot being the well-watered valley of Stewarton,
along which it spread from house to house for many miles.
But it began not
with the minister of the parish, an excellent man, but with Mr. Dickson, who
was minister of the neighboring parish of Irvine. Mr. Dickson had zealously
opposed the passing of the Articles of Perth; this drew upon him the
displeasure of the prelates and the king; he was banished to the north of
Scotland, and lived there some years, in no congenial society. On his return to
his parish, a remarkable power accompanied his sermons; he never preached
without effecting the conversion of one or, it might be, of scores. The
market-day in the town of Irvine, where he was minister, was Monday; he began a
weekly lecture on that day, that the country people might have an opportunity
of hearing the Gospel. At the hour of sermon the market was forsaken, and the
church was crowded; hundreds whom the morning had seen solely occupied with the
merchandise of earth, before evening had become possessors of the heavenly
treasure, and returned home to tell their families and neighbors what riches
they had found, and invite them to repair to the same market, where they might
buy wares of exceeding price "without money." Thus the movement extended from
day to day. The other center of this spiritual awakening was a hundred miles,
or thereabout, away from Stewarton. It was Shotts, a high-lying spot, midway
between the two cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Here, too, the movement took
its rise with those who had been subjected to persecution for opposing the
measures of the court. A very common-place occurrence originated that train of
events which resulted in consequences so truly beneficial for Shotts and its
neighborhood. The Marchioness of Hamilton and some ladies of rank happening to
travel that road, their carriage broke down near the manse of the parish. The
minister, Mr. Home, invited them to rest in his house till it should be
repaired, when they could proceed on their journey. This gave them an
opportunity of observing the dilapidated state of the manse, and in return for
the hospitality they had experienced within its walls, they arranged for the
building, at their own expense, of a new manse for the minister. He waited on
the Marchioness of Hamilton to express his thanks, and to ask if there was
anything he could do by which he might testify his gratitude. The marchioness
asked only that she might be permitted to name the ministers who should assist
him at the approaching celebration of the Lord's Supper. Leave was joyfully
given, and the marchioness named some of the more eminent of the ministers who
had been sufferers, and for whose character and cause she herself cherished a
deep sympathy. The first was the Venerable Robert Bruce, of Kinnaird, a man of
aristocratic birth, majestic figure, and noble and fervid eloquence; the second
was Mr. David Dickson, of whom we have already spoken; and the third was a
young man, whose name, then unknown, was destined to be famous in the
ecclesiastical annals of his country Mr. John Livingstone. The rumor
spread that these men were to preach at the Kirk of Shorts on occasion of the
Communion, and when the day came thousands flocked from the surrounding country
to hear them. So great was the impression produced on Sunday that the strangers
who had assembled, instead of returning to their homes, formed themselves into
little companies and passed the night on the spot in singing psalms and
offering prayers. When morning broke and the multitude were still there,
lingering around the church where yesterday they had been fed on heavenly
bread, and seeming, by their unwillingness to depart, to seek yet again to eat
of that bread, the ministers agreed that one of their number should preach to
them. It had not before been customary to have a sermon on the Monday after the
Communion. The minister to whom it fell to preach was taken suddenly ill; and
the youngest minister present, Mr. John Livingstone, was appointed to take his
place. Fain would he have declined the task; the thought of his youth, his
unpreparedness, for he had spent the night in prayer and converse with some
friends, the sight of the great multitude which had assembled in the
churchyard, for no edifice could contain them, and the desires and expectations
which he knew the people entertained, made him tremble as he stood up to
address the assembly. He discoursed for an hour and a half on the taking away
of the "heart of stone," and the giving of a "heart of flesh," and then he
purposed to make an end; but that moment there came such a rush of ideas into
his mind, and he felt so great a melting of the heart, that for a whole hour
longer he ran on in a strain of fervent and solemn exhortation.
Five
hundred persons attributed their conversion to that sermon, the vast majority
of whom, on the testimony of contemporary witnesses, continued steadfastly to
their lives' end in the profession of the truth; and seed was scattered
throughout Clydesdale which bore much good fruit in after-years. In memory of
this event a thanksgiving service has ever since been observed in Scotland on
the Monday after a Communion Sunday. Thus the Scottish Vine, smitten by the
tyranny of the monarch who had now gone to the grave, was visited and revived
by a secret dew. From the high places of the State came edicts to blight it;
from the chambers of the sky came a "plenteous rain" to water it. It struck its
roots deeper, and spread its branches yet more widely over a land which it did
not as yet wholly cover. Other and fiercer tempests were soon to pass over that
goodly tree, and this strengthening from above was given beforehand, that when
the great winds should blow, the tree, though shaken, might not be overturned.