Contents

THE PUBLIC LIFE: LEGISLATION AND CHURCH PLANS

The Confession presented to the Parliament of 1560 was one of a group which sprang as if from the soil, in almost every country in Europe. They had all a strong family likeness; but not because one imitated the other. They were honest attempts to represent the impression made on the mind of that age by the newly discovered Scriptures, and that impression—the first impression at least—was everywhere the same. And everywhere it was overwhelmingly strong. So far as Knox at least is concerned, he plainly held the extreme view, not only that no one could read the Scriptures without finding in them the new doctrine, but that—as he quite calmly observed on one memorable occasion in St Giles—'all Papists are infidels,' either refusing to consult the light, or denying it when seen. And, of course, nothing was more calculated to confirm this view than a scene like that which we have just described, and which had been recently rehearsed in innumerable cases in Scotland and elsewhere. But, in truth, the new light dazzled all eyes. Later on, men had to analyse it, and they found there were distinctions to be made as to its value:—for example, between truth natural and truth revealed, between the Old Testament and the New, between the truths even of the New Testament and its sacraments—distinctions which some among themselves admitted, and which others refused. The very last publication, too, of Knox in 1572 was an answer to a Scottish Jesuit; for by that time a counter-Reformation, which also was not without its convictions, had begun. But, in the meantime, the energy and the triumph were all on one side. And although only the first step had been taken, it must be remembered that the first step was, in Scotland, the great one. With the really Protestant party, and, of course, with the Puritans, the confession of truth was fundamental. Subsequent arrangements as to the State, and even as to the Church, were subordinate—they were, at the best, mere corollaries from the central doctrine affecting the individual. In every case truth comes first: and human authority a long way later on. In this transaction, for example, of the 17th August 1560, nothing is clearer than that the Parliament did not adopt the doctrine in any way on the authority of the new-born Church. All the forms of a free and deliberate voting of the doctrine as truth—as the creed of the estates, not of the Church, were gone through. Still less, on the other hand, did the Church really adopt it on the authority of the Parliament; (though it must be confessed that this expression of it—the written creed of 1560—had no formal sanction other than that of the State). But it was the confession 'professed by the Protestants,' and exhibited by them 'to the estates;' and it contained in itself abundant and adequate foundation for that independence of the Church which became so dear to Scotland in following ages, and of which Knox himself has always been recognised as, more than any other man, the historical embodiment.

The great confession in this creed that 'as we believe in one God—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—so do we most constantly believe that from the beginning there has been, now is, and to the end of the world shall be, one Kirk,' is there so deduced from the everlasting purpose and revelations of God, and is so concentrated upon the duty and the privilege of the individual man, that the church in Scotland, even had it never become national, would have stood square and perhaps risen high upon this one foundation. But it was by no means intended to stand on that foundation alone, however adequate. And it was with a view to further steps—not all of them taken at this time—that clauses as to the civil magistrate were introduced in the penultimate chapter, assigning to him 'principally' the conservation and purgation of the religion—by which, it is carefully explained, is meant not only the 'maintenance' of the true religion, but the 'suppressing' of the false. One more remark may be made. Theoretically, the Church could improve its creed. In France it was read aloud on the first day of each yearly Assembly, that amendments or alterations upon it might be proposed; and in Scotland also the view was strongly held that the only standard unchangeable by the Church was Scripture. This theoretical view, however, was not to have much immediate practical result; especially as the Confession was now ratified by the Parliament. And this was done without change or qualification, though the preface prefixed to it by the Churchmen admits its fallibility and invites amendment—a view in which Knox had long since been encouraged by his earliest teacher.[84]

The congregation had confessed the doctrine to the Parliament, and the Parliament had accepted and approved it. Had the Parliament more to do?

Some things were absolutely necessary. It had to wipe out the previous legislation against the profession of the new faith. The Evangel had to be set free by statute. Once liberated from the ban of the law under which its previous victories had been won, it could finish its work independently, and without difficulty sweep the whole of Scotland. And Knox had no doubt as to the right of the Kirk to act independently, or as to its duty to do so—if it could not do more and better. Already, before the Parliament met, the members of it who were Protestants had gathered together in Edinburgh, and arranged for fixing this and that minister of the word in the various centres of population. And once the legal obstacles to proselytism were removed, the way would be open for a more glorious advance than they had yet seen. But such a work in the future, though comparatively easy, and though in Knox's view certain in its result, would be slow. Why not do it all at a stroke? Instead of merely revoking the intolerant laws, why not turn them against the other side?

A very strong petition had been already presented against the Romish Church, and exactly a week after the ratification of the Confession, three Acts were passed.[85] These three Acts, with that ratification, constituted the public 'state of religion' during the seven years of Mary's reign, and they were re-enacted on her abdication in 1567 as the foundation of the regime of Protestantism. Of the three, the first was only ambiguously intolerant, for though it ordained that the Pope 'have no jurisdiction nor authority within this realm,' that might be held to reject mainly the Papal encroachment upon civil power. The second was not intolerant at all, and as being well within the power and duty of the nation, it ought to have come first. By it all Acts bypast, and especially those of the five Jameses, not agreeing with God's Word and contrary to the Confession, and 'wherethrow divers innocents did suffer,' were abolished and extinguished for ever. But the third, passed the same day, proceeded on the preamble that 'notwithstanding the reformation already made, according to God's Word, yet there is some of the said Papist Kirk that stubbornly persevere in their wicked idolatry saying Mass and baptising.' And it ordained, against not only them but all dissenters and outsiders for all time, 'that no manner of person in any time coming administer any of the Sacraments foresaid, secretly or any other manner of way, but they that are admitted, or have power to that effect.' And lastly, with regard to the large minority (if, indeed, it was not a clear majority) of the nation who still clung to their ordinary worship, it provided that no one 'shall say Mass, nor yet hear Mass, nor be present thereat,' under the pains, for the first fault, of confiscation of goods and bodily punishment, for the second, of banishment, and for the third, of death.

This has always remained the fundamental positive ordinance among the statutes of the Reformation; though it may be fair to take along with it the first of these three Acts, and especially a positive clause in it which forbids bishops to exercise jurisdiction by Papal authority. No farther establishment of the Church was at the time attempted; and there was indeed no farther legislation till Mary's downfall in 1567. In that year the three Acts of 1560 were anew passed; and they were followed by the formal statement (more or less implied even in the legislation of 1560) that the ministers and people professing Christ according to the Evangel and the Reformed Sacraments and Confession are 'the only true and holy Kirk of Jesus Christ within this realm.' An Act followed by which each king at his coronation was to take an oath to maintain this religion, and also, explicitly, to root out all heretics and enemies 'to the true worship of God that shall be convict by the true Kirk of God.' It seems difficult for statutory religion to go farther: but the solid system and block of intolerance was completed by a group of statutes in 1572, the year of Knox's death. They ordain that Papists and others not joining in the Reformed worship shall after warning be excommunicated by the Church (of which a previous Act, somewhat inconsistently, had declared them not to be at all members); and that 'none shall be reputed as loyal and faithful subjects to our sovereign Lord or his authority, but be punishable as rebels and gain-standers of the same, who shall not give their confession, and make their profession of the said true religion.'

Scotland had taken the wrong legislative turning. The only defence of these statutes, and it is a very inadequate one, is that they could not be fully enforced and were not, and that perhaps they were not quite intended to be enforced. In point of fact Scotland in the Reformation time had little blood-shedding for mere religion on either side to shew, compared to the deluge which stained the scaffolds of continental Europe. That is no answer to the criticism that the only law now needed was one to 'abolish and extinguish' the persecuting laws which had been enacted of old. But even to such a critic, and on the ground of theory, there is something to be said. It is not true that the new theory was worse than the old. On the contrary, the old theory allowed no private judgment to the individual at all; he was bound by the authority of the Church, and it was no comfort to him to know that the state was bound by it too. On the Protestant theory neither the individual nor the state were in the first instance so bound; both were free to find and utter the truth, free for the first time for a thousand years! It was this feeling—that the state was free truthwards and Godwards—which accounted for half of the enthusiasm in the Scots Parliament a week before. And it was not at once perceived, there or elsewhere, that for the state to make use of this freedom by embracing a creed itself—even though it now embraced it as the true creed and no longer as the Church's creed—was perilous for the more fundamental freedom of the individual. He would be sure to feel aggrieved by his state adopting the creed which was not his. And the state might readily be led into holding that it had adopted it not for its officials only but for its subjects, and might shape its legislation accordingly.

Knox was more responsible for the result than any other man, and for him also there is something to be said. The view that the state must adopt a religion for all its subjects and compel them all to be members of its Church, was common ground in that age; both parties proclaimed it (except when they were in too hopeless a minority), and the few Anabaptists and others who anticipated the doctrine of modern times had not been able to get it into practical politics. Knox too, in his first contact with the Reformed faith (and the contact, as we know, was a plunge), had found the tenet of the magistrate's duty in an exaggerated form. And in that form he now reproduced it. The statement of his Confession of 1560 that 'To Kings, Princes, Rulers, and Magistrates we affirm that chiefly and most principally the conservation and purgation of the Religion appertains,' is not at all stronger than that in the First Confession of Helvetia which Wishart had brought with him before 1545. Switzerland, taught by bitter experience, exchanged it for a milder statement in its Second Confession of 1566.[86] But Calvin and Beza and Knox's friends in the French Protestant Church generally had held to the stronger view of the magistrate's duty, even amid all his persecutions of them; and Knox's passionate indignation against idolatry had led him, even in his early English career, to maintain the duty not only of the magistrate, but even of the subject in so far as he had power, to punish it with death. Indeed his only chance of escaping from the vicious circle of that murderous syllogism[87] was by going back to the right of the individual to stand against the magistrate, and if need be to combine against him, in defence of truth. On this side even that early Helvetic Confession had proclaimed (in Wishart's words but in Knox's spirit), that subjects should obey the magistrate only 'so long as his commandments, statutes, and empires, evidently repugn not with Him for whose sake we honour and worship the magistrate.' And Knox in later years had travelled so far on the road of modern constitutionalism as to maintain the right of subjects to combine against and overthrow the ruler whose intolerant statutes so repugned. How far he had exactly gone would have appeared had the chapter 'of the obedience or disobedience that subjects owe unto their magistrates' appeared in the Scottish Confession unrevised. Randolph says that the 'author of this work' was advised by Lethington and Winram to leave it out. Something, if not a whole chapter, has been left out; and the consequence is that the first Confession of the Scottish Church and people is very much overweighted on the side of absolute power. But had that chapter gone in, it would have been difficult not to have recognised even then, that there was an inconsistency between the alleged high function of the magistrate as to religion, and the disobedience which on that head his subjects may 'owe unto him'—an inconsistency even in theory. The inconsistency in practice Providence was to make its early care.

It had been necessary for Parliament to revoke its old persecuting statutes. And on that side it had gone farther, proscribing the old religion and Church, and setting up, if not a new church, at least a new religion. But, on another side, and one with which Parliament alone could deal, there was also something necessary. What was to be done with the huge endowments of the Church now abolished and proscribed? And what provision was to be made by the State for that 'maintenance of the true religion' to which it had bound itself, and for its spread among a people, half of whom were not even acquainted with it, though all of them were already bound to it by law?

The question of the endowments was a more difficult one, theoretically and practically, than that of the yearly tithes. For the former had been actual gifts, made to the Church or its officials by kings, barons, and other individuals, when there was no law compelling them to give them. What right had the State now to touch these? Two things are to be recalled before answer. All these individual donors had been by law compelled not only to be members of that Church, but to accept it (whether they wished to do so or not) as the exclusive receiver of whatever charities they might desire to institute or to bequeath. For many centuries past in Scotland the proposal to do otherwise would have been not only futile, but a deadly risk to him who tried it. Then, secondly, the same law which had bound the individual to the Church as the exclusive administrator of charities, had kept him in compulsory ignorance of other objects of munificence than those which the Church sanctioned; or if by chance that pious ignorance was broken, it sternly forbade him to support them. For reasons such as these the modern European state has never been able to treat ancient endowments made under the pressure of its own intolerance with the same respect as if the donors had been really free—free to know, and free to act. The presumption that the donor or testator, if he were living now, would have acted far otherwise than he did, and that in altering his destination the State may be carrying out what he really would have wished, is in such cases by no means without foundation. Knox and others reveal to us that this feeling was overwhelmingly strong at the time with which we are dealing, especially in the minds of the descendants and representatives of the donors themselves. And in the minds of the common people, and of Knox as one sprung from them, there was lying, unexpressed, the feeling which in modern times has been expressed so loudly, that the claim of the individual, whether superior or sovereign, to alienate for unworthy uses huge tracts of territory which carry along with them the lives and labours of masses of men—and of men who have never consented to it—is a claim doubtful in its origin and pernicious in its results. All over Protestant Europe the conclusion even of the wise and just was, that, subject to proper qualifications, the ancient endowments of the Church were now the treasury of the people.

But there was another part of the patrimony of the old Church on which Knox had a still stronger opinion—viz., the yearly tithes or Teinds. To these, in his view, that Church and its ministers had neither the divine right which they had claimed, nor any right at all. The 'commandment' of the State indeed had compelled men, often cruelly and unjustly, to pay them to the Church. But the State was now free to dispose of them better, and it was bound to dispose of them justly. And in so far as they should still be exacted at all, they must now be devoted to the most useful and the most charitable purposes—purposes which should certainly include the support of the ministry, but should include many other things too. One of the positions taken up by Knox in his very first sermon in St Andrews (following the views which he reports as held by the Lollards of Kyle), was, 'The teinds by God's law do not appertain of necessity to the Kirkmen.'[88] And now the Book of Discipline, under its head of 'The Rents and Patrimony of the Kirk,' demanded that

And again—

The kirk was now powerful, and the poor and the schools were weak; and Knox now as ever put forward the strong to champion those who could not help themselves. But he had long before come to the conclusion,[90] that of the classes here co-ordinated as having a right to the teinds, it was the right of the poor that was fundamental, and the claim of the ministers was secondary or ancillary, and perhaps only to be sustained in so far as they preached and distributed to the poor, or possibly only in so far as they were of, and represented, the poor. Accordingly the Assembly of 1562, in a Supplication, no doubt written by Knox, and certainly breathing what had been his spirit ever since the early days of Wishart, conjoins the cause of both in passionate eloquence:

The position that the 'patrimony of the Church' is fundamentally rather the 'patrimony of the poor,' and that ecclesiastics are merely its distributors, was anything but new. It is a commonplace[92] among the learned of the Catholic Church—the difference was that at this crisis it was possible for Scotland to act upon it, and that the state was urged to remember the poor by a man who, with all his devotion to God and to the other world, burned with compassion for the hard wrought labourers of his people. For it will be observed that here, as elsewhere, Knox is concerned, not only for the 'very indigent,' and the technically 'poor,'[93] but for those especially whom he calls 'your poor brethren; the labourers and manurers (hand-workers) of the ground.' In the Book of Discipline, before entering upon its provisions for dividing the tithe between the ministers, the poor, and the schools, he urges that the labourers must be allowed 'to pay so reasonable teinds, that they may feel some benefit of Christ Jesus, now preached unto them.' For

For Knox had now fully conceived that magnificent scheme of statesmanship for Scotland, which is preserved for us in his book of Discipline, presented, after the Confession, to the Estates of Scotland in 1560.[94] How long this project may have been in incubation in his mind, we do not know. But the germ of it may have been very early indeed. It may have come into existence simultaneously with his earliest hope for the 'liberty' and 'restitution' of the oppressed and captive kirk. For I shall now for the last time quote a passage from that early Swiss Confession which his master Wishart had brought over with him to Scotland so long ago; a passage which in its bold comprehensiveness may well have been the original even in his (Knox's) early East Lothian days, of his later 'devout imagination.' The Church, said the Swiss Reformers, as translated by the Scot (and translated, as there is high authority for believing,[95] for the express purpose of founding a Protestant Church in Scotland—or at least in those burghs of Scotland which had received his teaching), is entitled to call upon the magistrate for

Knox's 'Book' and scheme are an expansion of this one sentence. It was statesmanship in the fullest sense, including a poor-law and a system of education, higher and elementary, for the whole country. But it was in the first place a Book of the Church. And while its 'system of national education was realised only in its most imperfect fashion, its system of religious instruction was carried into effect with results that would alone stamp the First Book of Discipline as the most important document in Scottish history' (Hume Brown). Even on the Church side it is somewhat too despotic. The power of discipline and of exclusion which is necessary to every self-governing society was rightly preserved. But in its application it tended here, as in Geneva, to press too much upon the detail of individual life. So, too, the prominence now given to preaching, and the duty laid down of habitually waiting upon it, may seem inconsistent with the primitive Protestant authority of the Word of God alone. This, however, would have been modified, had the system of 'weekly prophesyings' (which provided for not one man only but for all who are qualified communicating their views), taken root in Scotland, as it has so largely done in Wales. And even as it was, this work of a trained ministry, and especially the preaching, passed in those early days like a ploughshare through the whole soil and substance of the Scottish character, and left enduring and admirable results.

Had Knox been able to throw himself directly upon the people, all would have been well. But the people were to be approached through hereditary rulers, whose consent was necessary for funds with which the Church might administer, not the department of religion and worship only, but those also of national education and national charity. That the Church should be administrator was not the difficulty. Whether, indeed, the selection of one religion, to be by ordinance of Parliament the religion of the subjects of the State, was justifiable, will always be gravely questioned. But, rightly or wrongly, that had already been done; and it was clearly fitting that the body which was thus in a sense made co-extensive with the nation, should undertake national duties, of a kind cognate with those properly its own. No one—except perhaps the Catholics—doubted that the new Church, with both the new learning and the new enthusiasm behind it, was better fitted to administer alike education and charity than either the Estates or the Crown. And Knox's great scheme proposed that the Church, in addition to administering its own religion and worship, should in every parish provide—1. That those not able to work should be supported; 2. that those who were able should be compelled to work; 3. that every child should have a public school provided for it; 4. that every youth of promise should have an open way through a system of public schools on to the Universities. It was a great plan, but a perfectly reasonable one. And there was abundance of money for it. For the wealth of the Church now abolished, which the law held to be, at least after the death of the existing life-renters, at the disposal of the Crown,[97] and which was indeed afterwards transferred to it by statute,[98] is generally calculated to have amounted to nearly one half of the whole wealth of the country. But the crowning sin of the old hierarchy had been that on the approach of the Reformation they commenced, in the teeth of their own canons, to alienate the temporalities which they had held only in trust, to the lords and lairds around them as private holders. And the process of waste thus initiated by the Church and the nobles was continued by the Crown and its favourites; the result being that the aristocracy so enriched became a body with personal interests hostile to the people and their new Church. Even in the first flush of the Reformation all that the Reformers could procure was an immediate 'assumption' by the Crown of one-third of the benefices. And even of this one-third, only a part was to go to the Church, the rest being divided between the old possessors and the Crown; or, as Knox pithily put it, 'two parts are freely given to the devil, and the third must be divided between God and the devil.' Even God's part, however, was scandalously ill-paid during Mary's reign, and in addition the Church objected to receiving by way of gift from the Crown what they should have received rather as due from the parishes and the people. This came out very instructively in the Assembly of December 1566. The Queen was now courting the Protestants, and had signed an offer for a considerable sum for the maintenance of the ministers. What was to be said to her offer? The Assembly first requested the opinion of Knox and the other ministers, as the persons concerned. They retired for conference, and 'very gravely' answered—

This striking reversion to the Apostolic rule—all the more striking because it is easily reconcilable with the now accepted doctrine of toleration—was, no doubt, not only in substance but in form the utterance of Knox. But so also, if we are to judge by internal evidence, was the formal answer of the Assembly. They accepted the Queen's gift under the pressure of present necessity, but

The principle so admirably laid down by Knox has become the principle of modern Presbyterianism throughout the world. And even in that day it required nothing to be added to it except the recognition that Catholics, and others outside the 'flock,' who were merely statutory 'auditors,' were not bound to its pastor in the tithe, or other proportion, of their means. Elementary as this may now seem, it was of course too much for that age. The same Assembly went on to declare that 'the teinds properly pertain to the Kirk,' and while they should be applied not only to the ministers, but also to 'the sustentation of the poor, maintaining of schools, repairing of kirks, and other godly uses,' such application should be 'at the discretion of the Kirk.' It was all right, provided the intolerant establishment were to remain. For in that case the tithes as a State tax were the proper means for the State maintaining church and school and poor; and as the Church had already been set by the State over both poor and school, it was the fit administrator of all. And all this ascendancy was about to be renewed; for two months after this Assembly Bothwell murdered Darnley, and three months later Mary married Bothwell and abdicated. And the great Parliamentary settlement of 1567 commenced with the long delayed ratification of the three old statutes of 1560; two Acts being now added, one declaring that the Reformed Church is the only Church within the realm, the other giving it jurisdiction over Catholics and all others. It was fit that between these two later Acts should be interposed another,[101] giving the ministers a first claim on the 'thirds' of benefices, 'aye and until the Kirk come to the full possession of their proper patrimony, which is the teinds.' The proper patrimony of the ancient Church was, perhaps, rather the endowments which had been gifted to it; yet Knox, who abhorred the idea of inheriting anything from that old Church, took a share of that money, even from the State, with reluctance. But the tithes, to be enforced yearly from Scotsmen by the law, he claimed freely, for they were due to the poor, were due to learning and the school, and were above all due to the Kirk, as entrusted with these other interests no less than with its own.

The battle was not over. The scheme of the Book of Discipline remained, even after the statutes of 1567, a mere 'imagination,' all attempted embodiment of it being starved by the nobility and the crown. And in our own century the Church, retaining its statutory jurisdiction over Catholics and Nonconformists, has lost its statutory control over both the schools and the poor, while it has never got anything like 'full possession' or even administration of the teinds, in which all three were to share, but of which it desired to be sole trustee.

It it easy for us, looking back—superfluously easy—to see the fundamental mistake in Knox's legislation. But taking that first step of intolerant establishment as fixed, I see nothing in his proposed superstructure which was not admirable and heroic, and also—as heroic things so often are—sane and even practicable. And it was all conceived in the interest of the people—of those 'poor brethren' of land and burgh, with whom Knox increasingly identified himself. No doubt the Kirk had no right to claim administration, even as trustee, of the tenth of the yearly fruits of all Scottish industry. But when we think of the objects to which these fruits were to be applied, we shall not be disposed to deal hardly with such a claim. It is not the divided and disinherited Churches of Scotland alone—it is, even more, the 'poor labourers of the ground'—who have reason, in these later days, to join in the death-bed denunciation by Knox of the 'merciless devourers of the patrimony of the Kirk.'

Knox's statesmanship may have failed—partly because an unjust and unchristian principle was unawares imbedded in its foundation, and partly because the hereditary legislators of Scotland could not rise to the level of its peasant-reformer. But Knox's churchmanship did not fail. It might well have been contended that the freedom of the Church had been compromised by the legislation which was granted or petitioned for. But that was not the Church's view, and the internal organisation which nobles and politicians refused to sanction, the Church, claiming to be free, instantly took up as its own work. In each town or parish the elders and deacons met weekly with the pastor for the care of the congregation. And these 'particular Kirks' now met half-yearly representatively as the 'Universal Kirk' of Scotland. From its first meeting in December 1560 onwards, the General Assembly or Supreme Court of the Church was convened by the authority of the Church itself, and year by year laid the deep foundations of the social and religious future of Scotland. It was a great work—nothing less than organising a rude nation into a self-governing Church. And there were difficulties and dangers in plenty, some of them unforeseen. The nobles were rapacious, the people were divided, the ministers leaned to dogmatism, the lawyers leaned to Erastianism, the Lowlands were menaced by Episcopacy, the Highlands were emerging from heathenism, and between them both there stretched a broad belt of unreformed Popery. There were a hundred difficulties like these, but they were all accepted as in the long day's work. For in Scotland the dayspring was now risen upon men!

What we have here to remember is, that of this huge national struggle the chief weight lay on the shoulders of Knox, a mere pastor in Edinburgh. And during the first seven years of its continuance this indomitable man was sustaining another doubtful conflict, in which the issues not for Scotland only, but for Europe, were so momentous that it must be looked at separately.