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Assembly again meets, 16th October

1690.

2

The General nominis umbra-met in the Capital. As was meet, Hugh Kennedie,' a surviving Protester, was called to the Moderator's chair. From the very nature of the circumstances in which it met, it was merely a regulative directorate. It did little more than appoint a Fast. Parliament had already settled the Confession of Faith, in an unacceptable English edition, and the form of Government, which were to obtain in the revived Church, without giving that institution even an opportunity of considering any possible amendments upon that Puritanic document. Before the Church met to contract with the State as to their relations, Parliament had judged the Confession to be the test for all the national teachers. This disregard for the spiritual independence of the Church, and intrusion upon its special province, was one which both Knox and Andrew Melville would have resented. William soon made the leaders of the National Church feel the tightening of the bonds, when he indicated that the doors of the sanctuary should be wide enough to take in conforming Episcopalians as well as Presbyters. This emphatic suggestion of toleration was so inconsistent with the legis lature's stigma on Prelacy as an insupportable grievance,' that the ministers began to stiffen themselves against further encroachments upon their jurisdiction, and ultimately triumphed over the King and his untimely policy of Comprehension.

Import of the manifestoes issued by the

This work, by reference to the long series of documents issued by the Protestant Presbyterian parties in Scotland, during one hundred Covenanters and thirty years, and also to the confessions of those witnesses who justified their warfare and death on behalf of the Covenants, proves that the genuine Covenanters, from first to last, never resiled from those definite principles on which the Reformed Church in Scotland was founded. These principles, in fine, were the absolute authority of the Word of God over all men: the exclusive jurisdiction of the Church in spiritual concerns: the exclusive power of the ruler in civil affairs only, according to the Word, and in Scotland, according 1 Hugh Kennedie, 'Father Kennedy,' Bitter Beard,' minister at Mid-Calder, deposed 1660. 2 Act 25, 4th July, Act. Parl. Scot., ix. 164. 3 Innes, Law of Creeds, 77.

to its ancient Constitution. It is now manifest beyond doubt, from the authoritative documents issued by the Scottish Presbyterians, that the reason for their persistent Covenanting was an inextinguishable dread of, and revulsion from, Popery-the antithesis of their cherished principles. They also feared that diocesan Episcopacy was Popery in disguise.

This fear of Popery was like an epidemic fever seizing hold of the spirit of the Scots people, and making itself felt recurrently with the intermittent revelations of the crooked negotiations which went on between the successive Stuart sovereigns and the Popes, and regarding which the sapient Protestant leaders obtained accurate information from their well-informed foreign agents.

The quarrel of genuine Covenanters, therefore, was with (1) despisers of the Word, (2) troublers of the Church, (3) breakers of the Constitution. To them Prelacy (or superiority of certain clergy) was the 'insupportable grievance' created by men in the first category: the illegal acts of the Stuart kings placed those rulers and Purpose of their abettors among men of the second and third categories. Con- the Covenants. sequently the various Covenants were simply republications of the fundamental principles of the Reformers, made suitable to the epochs that called them forth. They were, as they were intended to be, plain standards to guide Christians, Churchmen, and Constitutionalists. "Through the malignant misunderstanding and resultant opposition of the ill-advised and worse-guided Stuart autocrats, the peaceful Covenants became Standards, in a different sense, in a Holy War, which ended in the dismissal of a family whose scions despised the Word, troubled the Church, and broke the Constitution. "Robert Burns saw the true significance of these Covenants when he thus answered a critic, who judged them to be fanatical and ridiculous:

'The Solemn League and Covenant

Cost Scotland blood-cost Scotland tears:
But it seal'd Freedom's sacred cause-

If thou 'rt a slave, indulge thy sneers.'

1 Gardiner, Hist. of England, i. 116, 221 ̊: Add. MSS., 37021, fol. 25; Eng. Hist. Rev., xx. 127 (1905).

What the National Poet by a flash of genius thus so vividly portrayed, the English historian, Froude, after years of labour, spent among historical records and unassailable State documents, also discovered; so that he was constrained to acknowledge the place of the Covenanters among the benefactors of mankind, in these terms: 'The Covenanters fought the fight and won the victory; and then, and not till then, came the David Humes with their essays on miracles, and the Adam Smiths, with their political economies, and steam-engines, and railroads, and political institutions, and all the blessed or unblessed fruits of Liberty.'1 Characteristically, too, Carlyle summed up the merits of fellow-countrymen, whom he regarded with reverence: Many men in the van do always, like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweidnitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod, and gain the honour. How many earnest rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor Peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very in rough miry places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured, be-mired,—before a beautiful Revolution of Eighty-eight can step over them in official pumps and silk-stockings, with universal three-times-three! '2

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1 Froude, The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character-Short Studies, i. 180. Cf. also Dr. James Begg, The Covenanting Struggle: What was gained by it? (Edin., n.d.).

2 Carlyle, Heroes, Lect. iv.

FINIS

APPENDIX I

LITERARY MEN AND THEIR WORKS FROM 1625 TILL 1690

A SEPARATE Volume would be required to do justice to this subject. Only a small survey is attempted here.

As far as Scotland was concerned, there was a deficiency in literary productiveness Deficiency of during the reign of Charles I., and the works obtaining recognition and in demand literature. were, as was to be expected from the temper of the time, disputative in character. While fewer than seven hundred items, including proclamations, college theses, and pamphlets, issued from northern presses, many important works were printed abroad and in London.

Of poets, poetasters, and panegyric authors still a few poured out ephemeral verse- Scots poets. William Cargill, Alexander Forbes, Fairley, Arthur Johnston, Drummond of Haw

thornden, David Dickson, Sir Thomas Hope, Sir William Mure, and the well-known Zachary Boyd, minister of the Barony, Glasgow. Boyd's Last Battell of the Soule in Death (1629), Balm of Gilead (1629), Garden of Zion (1644), Holy Songs (1645), and other rhymed effusions, are more notable for quaintness and quantity than for inspiration. Dickson's True Christian Love (1634) is of the same character.

The hands of that day had nerves better fitted to grasp Ferrara blades than direct Boyd on his quills moved by the poetic spirit. This is what Zachary Boyd himself felt when thus he age. wrote in his booklet-The Sickman's Sore: 'There was never an age more fertile in reproofs and reproches than this: we are come to the dregges of dayes, where it is counted vertue to point out the imperfections of our brethren. Many are like the Flee that can not rest but upon a Scabbe.'1

Raban's press in Aberdeen was busy with the theses and pamphlets of Scrogie, Authors in Sibbald, Strachan, and that indefatigable antagonist of Popery, Dr. William Guild. Aberdeen. From 1608 till his death in 1657 Guild untiringly produced: The New Sacrifice of Christian Incense, The Only Way to Salvation, Moses Unveiled, Harmony of all the Prophets, Purgatory, Papist's Glorying in Antiquity, Limbo's Battery, and other works assaulting Popery. Guild's contemporary, Dr. John Forbes, Professor of Divinity and Church History in Aberdeen (1593-1648), was no less industrious with his Irenicum amatoribus veritatis (1629), Gemitus Ecclesiae Scoticanae (1630), Theologiae Moralis (1632), and Instructiones. . . de doctrina Christiana (Amsterdam, 1645).

Calderwood.

David Calderwood, minister of Crailing, from the time he opposed the Perth Articles David and flagellated the bishops, was too prominent to have his treatises published at home. His anonymous work, The Pastor and the Prelate, etc. (1628), was a bitter morsel to the prelates. Abroad, Calderwood elaborated his Altar of Damascus (1621) into Altare Damascenum ceu politia ecclesiae Anglicanae obtrusa ecclesiae Scoticanae, etc. (1623), and continued writing his indispensable True History of the Church of Scotland, published

1 Preface (Glasgow, 1628).

Archbishop

in 1678, after his death. The polyglot, Hume of Godscroft, published his Origin and Descent of the Family of Douglas in 1633, and in 1659 Sir Thomas Craig issued his learned Jus Feudale.

Calderwood's contemporary, Archbishop Spottiswood, who died in London in 1639, Spottiswood. left a valuable MS., The History of the Church of Scotland, which, with a prefatory biography by Bishop Russell, was published in 1655. This, and a treatise in reply to Calderwood's Regimine Ecclesiae Scoticanae, represent the literary productiveness of this scholarly prelate. His son, Sir Robert, left a MS. of Practicks of the Law of Scotland, afterwards published by his grandson.

Bishop
Maxwell.

George
Gillespie.

Professor
Samuel
Rutherford.

Robert Baillie.

'The Pockmanty [portmanteau] Sermon.'

Bishop Maxwell, afterwards Bishop of Killala, was a vigorous polemic and wrote The Epistle Congratulatorie of Lysimachus Nicanor, etc. (1640); Episcopacie not abjured (1641); Sancro-Sancta Regum Majestas (1644), which called forth Rutherford's Lex Rex; and The Burden of Issachar, etc., which drew out Baillie's Historical Vindication.

A freer time had arrived when George Gillespie (1612-48), minister in Edinburgh, took up the burning questions of the day in A Dispute against the English Popish Ceremonies, etc. (1637), Nihil Respondes (1645), Male Audis (1646), Aaron's Rod Blossoming (1646), A Treatise of Miscellany Questions (1649), and in other trenchant treatises, of far-reaching influence. Every Scots brain was afire with these questions.

Samuel Rutherford published, in London in 1642, his A Peaceable and Temperate Plea for Paul's Presbytery in Scotland, etc.; he gave his name on the title-page; but two years later, when he issued Lex Rex-The Law and the Prince-he suppressed the author's name. This unanswerable defence of the supremacy of the law, detested of royalists, had its highest encomium as an epoch-making work when it was destroyed by the common hangman in the interests of King Charles. The Professor's other works, The Due Right of Presbyteries (1644), Divine Right of Church Government (1646), Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist (1648), Liberty of Conscience (1649), Arminianism (1668), illustrate the learning and polemical vigour of a mind which was happier dealing with The Covenant of Life opened, etc. (1655), The Trial and Triumph of Faith, than even with his scholastic Disputation on the Divine Providence (1649); happier still penning those delightful letters, Joshua Redivivus (1664), of which Richard Baxter said: 'Hold off the Bible, such a book as Mr. Rutherford's Letters, the world never saw the like.'

Robert Baillie's pen was never idle from the time he penned those letters descriptive of the Covenanting crisis, till his death in 1662. A large catalogue indicates his polemical industry: but now only his Letters and Journals, edited by David Laing, in 1841-2, are of abiding interest.

Few preachers, and these only the leaders-Henderson, Gillespie, Rutherford, Cant, etc., speaking in great crises-used the medium of the press for circulating sermons. But these incisive pamphleteers could write sermons as chaste as those given in English pulpits. Consequently, for opponents of the Covenanters to select the sermon preached in St. Giles by James Row, sometime minister in Strowan, as illustrative of the sermons in vogue in this age, is an indication of prejudice and ignorance. Row declared there was 'a Pockmanty, and what was in it, trow ye, but the Book of Cannons and of Common Prayer, and the High Commission,' etc.1 Eccentricity was not the characteristic of the preachers of the Covenant.

1 Laing MSS., (Edin.), No. 611, p. 4.

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