their blemished character. They were despised by the people as the tools of the court and the aristocracy. Hardly an Assembly met but it had to listen to complaints against them for neglect of duty, or irregularity of life, or tyrannical administration. The ministers, who felt that these abuses were debasing the purity and weakening the influence of the Church, sought means to correct them. But the Government took the side of the Tulchan dignitaries. The regent, Morton, declared

the speeches against the new bishops to be seditious, threatened to deprive the Church of the liberty of her Assemblies, and advanced a claim to the same supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs which had been declared an inherent prerogative in the crown of England. Into this complicated and confused state had matters now come in Scotland.

The man who had so largely contributed by his unwearied labours to rear the Scottish ecclesiastical establishment, and who had watched over it with such unslumbering vigilance, was now in his grave. Of those who remained, many were excellent men,

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and ardently attached to the principles of the Presbyterian Church; but there was no one who possessed Knox's sagacity to devise, or his intrepidity to apply, the measures which the crisis demanded. They felt that the Tulchan episcopacy which had lifted up its head in the midst of them must be vigorously resisted if Presbyterianism was to live, but a champion was wanting to lead in the battle.

At last one not unworthy to succeed Knox

1 Buik of Univ. Kirk, p. 58. Mc.Crie, Life of Melville, vol. i., p. 154.

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, com

mented upon his works from a Latin translation.1 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 Budæus, 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 Poictiers, 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 Poictiers, 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 rivalled the ancient universities of Europe. This 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 candour, 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

2

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 give 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."5

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.

4 James Melville, Autobiography, p. 42. 5 Ibid., p. 44.

6 McCrie, Life of Melville, vol. i., p. 162.

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 authorised 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."1

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 authorised, 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 organisation. 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 branches the spiritual administration of the

1 Buik of Univ. Kirk, pp. 73, 74. McCrie, Life of Melville, vol. i., p. 165.

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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.

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 capa city 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. 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 counsellors to whom he had surrendered himself was completed by his initiation into scenes of youthful debauchery.

An

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" into the kingdom, foreboded 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.' A 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

1 Mc Crie, Life of Melville, vol. i., p. 262. See also note AA, ed. 1819. Spottiswood, p. 308. Strype, Annals, vol. ii., pp. 630, 631,

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 defence 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 neighbouring

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parishes, where also it was subscribed.1 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 defence 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

1 This document is preserved in Presburg, in the library of George Adonys. (Hist. Prot. Church in Hungary, p. 78; Lond., 1854.)

Buik of Univ. Kirk, pp. 96–99. McCrie, Life of Melville, vol. i., p. 262.