mountain-ash has twined its roots amid the rocky crevices. But the wild ravine is associated with memories not its own. Rock, cave, tree, torrent speak still of the deeds and sufferings of those who bled and died for the independence of Scotland, who "fell devoted, but undying." And though those men have been dead near 600 years, the eye of the dullest peasant in Scotland will still brighten at the very sound of their names. The heaths, the mountains, the crumbling ruins of the rock-built castles are all consecrated by the same memories: and form the imperishable monument of those who have no other sepulchre, to whom the barbarous policy of the English invader refused even a grave; affording a striking illustration of the truth of the words in the funeral oration of Pericles, in Thucydides, that "of illustrious men all their native land is the sepulchre." 1 In Scotland, the whole of the property which had belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, and which has been estimated as amounting at the time of the Reformation to "little less than one-half of the property in the nation,' was seized by the nobility and gentry. This seizure, in all cases an act of public robbery, was in some instances attended with the most savage cruelty. Nor was it likely that those, who had thus gotten possession of all this property, would give up their prey at the solicitation of the reformed clergy. When the latter proposed a plan for the

1 ἀνδρῶν ἐπιφανῶν πᾶσα γῆ τάφος Thueyd. II. 43. Hobbes translates these words "to famous men all the earth is a sepulchre," which, though the word is ambiguous, was not what was here meant; the meaning, as is apparent from the context, being not the whole earth absolutely, but only the whole earth or territory of Attica. 2 "The Scottish Clergy paid onehalf of every tax imposed on land;

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and as there is no reason to think that, in that age, they would be loaded with any unequal share of the burden, we may conclude that, by the time of the Reformation, little less than one-half of the property in the nation had fallen into the hands of a society which is always acquiring and can never lose."-Robertson's Hist. of Scotland, vol. i. pp. 141, 142, 4th edn., London, 1761.

maintenance of a national Church out of this national property, and also of hospitals, schools, and universities, though they did not go farther than Henry the Eighth so liberal in promises had done, the lords who had seized the Church property said the plan of John Knox was a "devout imagination," but visionary and impracticable; and they retained by force the whole of the church property for their own use. Hence not only the poverty of the church, but of the universities in Scotland, and the consequent discouragement and decay of sound learning, together with many consequences of this, tending to a slavish subjugation on one side and an exorbitant insolence on the other. And hence those revenues of a few individuals in Scotland; revenues which at the present day by the enormous increase of rent within the last century, if devoted to their legitimate purpose, would not only educate the great bulk of the people well, and give to those who evinced superior abilities a superior education, but would relieve all classes nearly altogether from taxation.

1

The passage which I have quoted in a note a page or two back from a contemporary historian describes the Presbyterian form of Church government as supported by two classes of men, the one consisting of the powerful laymen who looked to the plunder of the old Church, the other of the clergy who hoped to attain power and popularity by popular eloquence. Besides these two classes, there was a third class consisting of the great body of the people who, having been kept in a state of very dense ignorance by the Romish priesthood, were in a condition to receive any impressions which their new teachers and preachers sought to stamp on their dark and uncultured minds. For convenience these two last classes, the clergy

1 Johnston, Rer. Brit. Hist. Lib. I. p. 16, 1655.

and the people, may be treated as one, as they both partook largely of the popular or democratical element. We have thus two classes of Scottish Presbyterians, the one oligarchical, the other democratical.

It is a remarkable feature in the history of the Scottish Presbyterian Church that, though in the scramble at the overthrow of the power of the Church of Rome in Scotland, the nobility contrived to appropriate to themselves even more of the wealth of that church than the nobility in England had done, leaving in fact nothing at all to the Reformed Church, while in England a good deal had been left to the church and universities, yet in Scotland the reformed clergy, unlike the reformed clergy in England, arrogated to themselves all, if not more than all, the power which the pope of Rome had formerly claimed. In the second declinature of Black, of the King and Council, God, it is said, has given the keys of the kingdom of heaven to the church; and the clergy-(the clergy being "they whom Christ hath called-Christ's servants")" are empowered to admonish, rebuke, convince, exhort, and threaten, to deliver unto Satan, to lock out and debar from the kingdom of heaven." 2 And Mr. Black further says, "the discharge and form of delivery of my commission should not nor cannot be lawfully judged by them to whom I am sent, they being as both judge and party, sheep and not pastors to be judged by this word, and not to be judges thereof.":

The Scottish Presbyterians being composed of several distinct parts, we must be careful to assign to each part what belonged to it. Such care is the more needed inasmuch as the clerical part has come in for a larger share of blame than belongs to it. Nevertheless with all the care we can 1 Calderwood, pp. 329, 330. 2 Calderwood, p. 347. 3 Calderwood, p. 348.

bestow on the subject, though some modern writers have written about the clergy's treatment of Charles II. and their interference with military affairs with as much confidence as if they had been present, it is extremely difficult if not absolutely impossible to give an account which shall be more than an approximation to the truth.

We have nothing approaching to a good contemporary picture of the Scottish Presbyterian clergy of that time. The representations of them drawn by two literary artists more than a century after, Hume and Scott, are rather caricatures than pictures. There can be no question of one thing, namely, that they and their successors for some two or three generations, whatever may have been their merits and their virtues, contrived to render themselves extremely disagreeable to many persons, some of whom could repay the intolerance and the long prayers and longer preachings with which they had been exercised or assailed with, the shafts of ridicule, others with even sharper weapons. The Scottish Presbyterian clergy were moreover so far true to what they announced as their mission that they were by no means disposed to look upon the sins of Charles the Second and the Duke of Buckingham with the lenient eye with which Archbishop Laud had regarded the sins of Charles's grandfather and Buckingham's father. Besides the exaggerated picture of the interference of the Presbyterian clergy in political and military affairs, (and it can be shown that the interference with the military commanders that led to so many disasters—at Kelsyth, at Preston, at Dunbar, was not by the clergy but by the nobility of the Committee of Estates), I am inclined to think that, though the clergy no doubt interfered much, though not very much more than the Independent zealots, in matters of religion and morality, their interference was

not regarded with any great degree of observance far less of terror by the more powerful classes in Scotland. Lord Dartmouth tells a story, told him by Duke Hamilton, of the old Earl of Eglinton, which seems to show that men of that rank took the censures of the church very easily. The Earl of Eglinton was on the stool of repentance for fornication, and on the 4th Sunday the Minister called to him to come down, for his penance was over. "It may be so," said the Earl, "but I shall always sit here for the future, because it is the best seat in the kirk, and I do not see a better man to take it from me." This Earl of Eglinton, who belonged to the party of Argyle and the rigid Presbyterians, evidently found the censures of his kirk as well as her prayers and sermons bearable, if not even pleasant, provided he had a comfortable seat in the kirk, even though that seat was the stool of repentance.

The truth is, the stool of repentance had in that age been made too common and general to be so much of a distinction any way as it was in the last generation when an eccentric old Scotch peer, being told that a moderate pecuniary fine paid to the kirk session would answer all the purposes of the stool of repentance, replied "No, he should very much prefer sitting on the stool of repentance." Whitelock says under date Feb. 5, 1648 "Letters from Scotland that they bring all to the stool of repentance that were in the last invasion of England." Loudon the Chancellor, whose wife had in her own right the estate of Loudon, and threatened to divorce him for his manifold adulteries, unless he submitted to the penance enjoined by the clergy, sat on the stool of repentance in his own parish church, received a rebuke in the face of the whole

1 Burnet's History of his Own Times, vol. i. p. 281, note D, Oxford, 1833.