John Knox

nt

: LEGISLATION A

he 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 af

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 A

the Parliament, and the Parliament had accepted

x 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

e 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, agains

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 intoler

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 accou

e, 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 h

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 ma

dividual 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 feel

y, 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 man

r, together with the schools, when order shall be taken ther

ag

the ministers be sustained, b

ng 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 t

f those that pay their Third, that they for the most part advance upon the poor whatsoever they pay to the Queen or to any other. As for the very indigent and poor, to whom God commands a sustentation to be provided of the Teinds, they are so despised that it is a wonder that the sun givet

ged 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 bret

stical tyranny shall only be changed into the tyranny of the lord or of the laird.'... But 'the gentlemen, barons, earls, lords, and others, must be content to live upon their just rents, and suf

ence 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)

d nurture, with liberality towards the ministers of the Church, with a solicitate and thoughtful charge

nt 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 t

rship, 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

cerely, and to crave of the auditors the things that were necessary for their

ine 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 inte

achers: Their answer is, That having just title to crave the bodily food at the hands of the said persons, and finding no others bound unto them, they only require at their own flock, that they will sustain them according to their bounden duty, and what it sha

as 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

ility 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 a

l 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

ing 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

pastor in Edinburgh. And during the first seven years of its continuance this indomitable man was sustaining another doubtfu

TNO

d, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity's sake, to admonish us of the same in write; and we of our honour and fidelity do promis

the First Helvetic Confession, adds to it t

r Confession, different partly to this of ours in words; for rather should the matter be considered than the words. And therefore we make it free for all men to use their own sort of speaking, as they shall perceive most profitable for their churches, and we shall use the same liberty. And if any man will

must have been written, probably by Wishart himself, rather for the English readers

Statute Book, 1567,

nslation (though this is one of the paragraphs in which that translation mangles the La

God from all blasphemy, and to procure true religion ... then after to judge the people by equal and godly laws to exercise and maintain judgment and justic

e and preserve peace and public tranquillity. And he never can do this more happily' than by promoting religion, extirpating idol

page 67

rks,' i.

ks,' ii.

"men of kirk," as they would be termed. In their first donation respect was had to another end, as their own law doth witness, than now is observed. For first, respect was had that such as were accounted distributors of those things that were given to churchmen, should have their reasonable su

orks,'

n are 'mere dispensers and administrators, not proprietors nor even possessors, of what is truly the patrimony of the poor,' and what is held as trustee for the indigent by Christ Himself; so much so, that when this property of the poor is diverted to support a bishop or other dignitary, he is not entitled to enjoy his house, table, or garments, unless these ha

certain fellow-feeling; as is witnessed by the zest with which he records their 'Warning' (p. 8

ks,' ii.

of Church History in St Andrews, to whom all are indebted who are intere

e 'charge of the poor'; though Protestants as well as Catholics often urge that as fundamentally true. It seems to be

s,' ii. 3, 36. Erskine's

1587,

orks,'

significance of this utterance was long ago pointed out by

1567,