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the system. The apparent influence and barbaric splendour of such men as the Beatons covered a rottenness at the heart more extreme than could be found in any other country of the Reformation. Nowhere else had the clergy reached such a pitch of flagrant and disgraceful immorality, and the Roman Catholic religion become such an utter corruption and mockery of all that is good and holy. The bishops and archbishops lived in open concubinage, and gave their daughters in marriage to the sons of the best families in the kingdom; livings were transmitted from father to son in the most shamelesss manner; the monasteries were, in popular belief and in reality, to a degree beyond what we can indicate, sinks of profligacy. A darker and more hideous picture, when we think of it as the formal representative of religion to a people, we cannot conceive, than that which is suggested in the scattered but sufficiently broad hints of Knox.*

And while such was the moral state of the hierarchy, it scarcely preserved even the pretence of religious service; the churches, save on festival days, were abandoned; the priests were unable to understand a single word of the prayers which they mumbled over; and preaching was entirely unknown. Every element of religion was materialised to the last degree; and blessings sold for so much, and cursings for so much. The clergy were the traffickers-they seem really to have been little more-in such supposed

History. Whatever undue severity there may be here and there in Knox's descriptions, there is no reason to doubt their general accuracy. The immoralities of such men as the Beatons, and the clerical caste in Scotland of which they stood at the head, are unhappily as well esta blished as any such facts can be.

spiritual charms; the people were the victims, in some cases honestly so, but in others obviously with a sufficiently clear view of the absurdity, if not impiety of the whole affair. Knox gives a ludicrous picture of what went on in this way, drawn from the preaching of William Airth, a friar of Dundee, who distinguished himself temporarily by his keen exposure of the papistical system. "The priest," said he, "whose duty and office it is to pray for the people, stands up on Sunday and cries, Ane has tynt a spurtill; there is a flail stollen beyond the burn; the goodwife of the other side of the gait has tynt a horn-spoon: God's malison and mine I give to those who know of this gear and restores it not.'" And the appreciation the people often had of this preaching is thus shown. "After sermon that he had at Dunfermline," Knox says, "he came to a house whare gossips were drinking their Sunday penny; and he, being dry, asked drink. 'Yes, father,' said ane of the gossips, 'ye shall have drink, but ye must first resolve a doubt which has risen among us-to wit, what servant will serve a man best on least expense.' The good angel,' said I, who is man's keeper-who makes great service without expense.' 'Tush!' said the gossip, 'we mean no such high matters; we mean, what honest man will do greatest service for least expense?' And while I was musing, said the friar, what that should mean, she said, 'I see, father, that the greatest clerks are not the wisest men. Know ye not how the bishops and their officials serve us husbandmen? Will they not give us a letter of cursing for a plack to last for a year, to curse all that look over our dyke? and that keeps our corn

better nor the sleepy boy that will have three shillings of fee, a sark, and a pair of shoon in the year.'"*

A system whose most familiar and popular expressions had sunk into such absolute dotage, whose dishonesty and immorality were so widespread and prominent, might seem powerful; but in point of fact it had no permanent elements of strength. It was a mere repressive machinery lying on the heart of the nation, so far as there was in it any true heart and living growth of moral intelligence. And not only so; not only had the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland. become a mere incubus, but an incubus in no small degree of foreign character and pretensions. Many of the higher clergy received their education in France ;+ they had engrafted on their natural rudeness and fierceness of character the polish of a culture formed in the most licentious and perfidious Court in Europe-a polish which not only left their native and essential savageness untamed, but sharpened it into some of its worst features of cruelty and baseness. This may

serve to explain the striking alienation between the hierarchy in Scotland and the genuine and growing national feeling. There are no points of attraction, not even of tolerance, between them; only the hardest attitude of unreasoning authority on the one hand, and of utter contempt and hatred on the other. Among the poorest classes there may have been a kind of sympathy with the clergy, and certain relations of goodwill on the one side and the other. The monasteries, in the very worst point of view, must have been centres of beneficence, whose influence stretched toKEITH'S Scottish Bishops, p. 21-24.

* History, Book I.

wards many humble cottages; and the bishops had each their numerous dependants, with their friends and relatives, mingled among the people. Bad as the system was, it must have possessed such points of support, and might have strengthened itself in some degree on them, had any wisdom been left to it; but ignorance and mere selfish instinct were, after all, but a poor stay for profligacy, while all the intellectual and moral interests of the country were uniting against it.

Standing between the clergy and the lowest orders, there had grown up during the preceding century or more, in Scotland, a class of traders in the towns and of gentry in the country, bound to each other by intimate ties; and it was in the growing enlightenment of this class that the future fate of Scotland lay. These burghers and gentry constituted young Scotland in the sixteenth century. They had the intelligence to understand to the full the corruptions of the Papacy; they had gathered to themselves such spiritual life as remained in the country, and this rose in horror at the immoralities which the Church embodied. They were a rising and vigorous class, proud of their sharpwittedness and the influence which their position and resources gave them; they were well informed, through their connection with the Continent, with regard to the progress of the reformed doctrines; they had high cha racter, earnest feelings, and political as well as religious aims; and they naturally ranged themselves against the hierarchy as its strong and avowed enemies.

Between these two powers the conflict of the Scottish Reformation was really waged. It was a conflict

not merely in the interest of religion, although this it was eminently, but moreover, and in a higher and more remarkable degree than elsewhere, a conflict on behalf of the independence and integrity of national life. The spiritual impulse was strongly present, but inseparably bound up with a political feeling, which gave a characteristic impress to the general movement. Amid the decay of the old political influences in the country, and the corruption of its social and ecclesiastical bonds, there was a fresh and compact vigour in the middle orders that rendered them alone more capable in moral strength than any party opposed to them; and not only did the reforming activity mainly proceed from them, but, in virtue of their self-consistency and hardihood of character, they retained the main guidance of it in their hands. They impressed their own character upon it; they gave to it, both as a doctrine and a discipline, a shape removed as far as possible from the hated hierarchical system which they subverted. Altogether unlike the growth of the English Church, the Scottish Reformed Kirk became an entirely new expression of religious life in Scotland. The old had passed away,—all things had become new,-when the reforming tide settled down, and the face of religious order reappeared. Scotland was not merely reformed, it was revolutionised. Catholicism had vanished into obscure corners, from which no royal nursing could ever again evoke it, save as a poor ghost of its former self, destined to vanish again before every fresh outburst of the national feeling.

This complete change, wrought by the Reformation in Scotland, can only be explained in the light of the

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