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
'Two sorts of men, that is to say, the ministers and the poor,
together with the schools, when order shall be taken thereanent,
must be sustained upon the charges of the church.'[89]
And again--
'_Of the teinds_ must not only the ministers be sustained, but
also the poor and schools.'
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 Poor be of three sorts: the poor labourers of the ground;
the poor desolate beggars, orphans, widows, and strangers; and
the poor ministers of Christ Jesus His holy Evangel: which are
_all_ so cruelly treated.... For now the poor labourers of the
ground are so oppressed by the cruelty of 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 giveth light and heat to the earth where
God's name is so frequently called upon, and no mercy, according
to His commandment, shown to His creatures. And also for the
ministers, their livings are so appointed, that the most part
shall live but a beggar's life. And all cometh of that
impiety--'[91]
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
'With the grief of our hearts we hear that some gentlemen are
now as cruel over their tenants as ever were the Papists,
requiring of them whatever before they paid to the Church, so
that the Papistical 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 suffer the Church to be restored to her
liberty, that in her restitution, the poor, who heretofore by
the cruel Papists have been spoiled and oppressed, may now
receive some comfort and relaxation.'
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
'A right and diligent institution of the discipline of citizens,
and of the schools a just correction and nurture, with
liberality towards the ministers of the Church, with a
solicitate and thoughtful charge of the poor, to which end all
the riches of the Church [in German, _die Güter der Kirche_] is
referred.'[96]
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--
'That it was their duty to preach to the people the Word of God
truly and sincerely, and to crave of the auditors the things
that were necessary for their _sustentation_, as of duty the
pastors might justly crave of their flock.'[99]
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
Not the less, in consideration [of] the law of God ordains the
persons who hear the doctrine of salvation at the mouths of his
ministers, and thereby receive special food to the nourishment
of their souls, to communicate temporal _sustentation_ on [to]
their preachers: 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 shall please them to give for their
sustentation, if it were but bread and water, neither will they
refuse it, nor desist from the vocation. But to take from others
contrary to their will, whom they serve not, they judge it not
their duty, nor yet reasonable.'[100]
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.
[84] The writers of the Scottish Confession in 1560 protest 'that if any
man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugning
to God's holy word, 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 promise unto him satisfaction from the mouth
of God (that is, from His Holy Scriptures), or else reformation of that
which he shall prove to be amiss.'--'Works,' ii. 96.
Wishart, the translator in or before 1545 of the First Helvetic
Confession, adds to it this similar and very beautiful declaration:--
'It is not our mind for to prescribe by these brief chapters a certain
rule of the faith to all churches and congregations, for we know no
other rule of faith but the Holy Scripture; and, therefore, we are well
contented with them that agree with these things, howbeit they use
another manner of speaking or 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 attempt to
corrupt the true meaning of this our Confession, he shall hear both a
confession and a defence of the verity and truth. It was our pleasure to
use these words at this present time, that we might declare our opinion
in our religion and worshipping of God.'--'Miscellany of Wodrow
Society,' i. 23.
This 'declaration' is not in the original Confession, either in Latin or
German, and must have been written, probably by Wishart himself, rather
for the English readers or the Scottish churches for whom the rest was
translated. It is a remarkable legacy.
[85] As now in the Statute Book, 1567, chaps. 2, 3, and 5.
[86] It may be interesting to read the statement of the First Helvetic
in Wishart's translation (though this is one of the paragraphs in which
that translation mangles the Latin and German originals). It is given in
the 'Miscellany of the Wodrow Society,' i. 21:
'Seeing every magistrate and high power is of God, his chief and
principal office is (except he would rather use tyranny) to defend the
true worshipping of 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 justice, &c.' (Sec. 26); and (Sec. 24), 'They
that bring in ungodly sects and opinions ... should be constrained and
punished by the magistrates and high powers.'
The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 rather inverts the order put by
the First. 'The magistrate's _principal_ office is to procure and
preserve peace and public tranquillity. _And_ he never can do this more
happily' than by promoting religion, extirpating idolatry, and defending
the Church.... For 'the care of religion belongs,' not to the magistrate
simply, but 'to the pious magistrate.'
[87] See page 67 and note.
[88] 'Works,' i. 8, 194.
[89] 'Works,' ii. 221, 222.
[90] Knox's opinion was asked upon the point in or before 1556, and he
answered ('Works,' iv. 127), 'Touching Tithes, by the law of God they
appertain to no priest, for now we have no levitical priesthood; but by
law, positive gift, custom, they appertain to princes, and by their
commandment to "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 sustentation of the same, making just
account of the rest, how it was to be bestowed upon the poor, the
stranger, the widow, the fatherless, _for whose relief all such rents
and duties were chiefly appointed to the church_. Secondly, that
provision should be made for the ministers of the church, &c.'
[91] 'Works,' ii. 340.
[92] Thomassin, a very great authority, devotes no fewer than eight
chapters of his third folio _De Beneficiis_ to proving from Councils and
the Fathers that 'Res Ecclesiae, res et patrimonia sunt pauperum. Earum
beneficiarii non domini sunt sed dispensatores.' After voluminous
evidence from all the centuries, he holds it superfluously plain that
all beneficed men 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 have a certain suggestion and savour of
destitution--_necesse est paupertatis odore aliquo perfundi_.
Thomassin, of course, holds that the Church has a divine right to
tithes; but it is a divine right to administer, not to enjoy, them. Knox
and the Reformers denied the divine right even to administer: they urged
that the State should make the Kirk _its_ administrators.
[93] For them too, and even for the strong and sturdy and the Jolly
Beggars among them, he had a certain fellow-feeling; as is witnessed by
the zest with which he records their 'Warning' (p. 82). The one point,
indeed, at which Knox and Burns come together is 'A man's a man for a'
that!'
[94] 'Works,' ii. 183 to 260.
[95] I am indebted for this view to Dr. A.F. Mitchell, Emeritus
Professor of Church History in St Andrews, to whom all are indebted who
are interested in the historical learning of either the Reformation or
the Covenant.
[96] The 'end' to which or for which all the Church patrimony is here
said to be given, does not seem to be merely the 'charge of the poor';
though Protestants as well as Catholics often urge that as fundamentally
true. It seems to be rather the whole group of good objects which are
gathered together. The Latin and German originals must be consulted.
[97] Stair's 'Institutions,' ii. 3, 36. Erskine's 'Institutes,' ii. 10,
19.
[98] 1587, c. 29.
[99] 'Works,' ii. 538.
[100] 'Book of the Universall Kirk of Scotland,' p. 46. The significance
of this utterance was long ago pointed out by the Rev. J.C. Macphail,
D.D., of Pilrig Church, Edinburgh.
[101] 1567, c. 10.