monial and ritual things, will come quickly to call Sacraments but outward things, and Sermons and Public Prayers but outward things in contempt. . . . Beloved, outward things apparel God, and since God was content to take a body, let us not leave Him naked and ragged.'

Lancelot Andrewes became the most influential bishop and theologian who represented matured convictions as to the Catholic heritage and position of the Church of England.1 At Cambridge he was admired as a catechist; in London he was revered as a guide in difficult cases of conscience; his sermons were valued above any others of that period. And though men might steal his sermons, none could steal his preaching. He knew fifteen languages, and Bacon submitted his writings to the judgement of Andrewes. He cared far more for Christianity than he cared for controversy, but he could not stand aside when King James wished him to enter the lists against Bellarmin. In opposing Bellarmin he defended unequivocally the Catholicity of the English Church as judged by the standards of antiquity. To him this Catholicity was no matter of dry-as-dust speculation. In his teaching he always fixed his thoughts on the certainties which the Christian world believes to be known through Christ, and not on the mysteries of predestination about which men were wrangling in the market-place and the pulpit. He tried to bring a breath of sweeter, fresher air into the hot and narrow rooms of pamphleteers and plotters. He spoke respectfully of Calvin, and fond as he was of the outward adornments of worship, the copes, the incense, the tapers, he did not enjoin these things on others as vital. In his Devotions, the book which carried his influence to modern times, he appears as a wide-hearted

1 The one and only blot alleged to exist on his character is that he was one of the majority which decided that the marriage of Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, with Frances Howard, was null. The marriage, however, was not consummated, and it is doubtful if it could have been. See Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xiv, p. 440, article 'Devereux'.

saint, interceding for all classes and conditions of men. He refused to forget, and he taught others to remember, that as there is a universal historical Church, we have our duty towards the whole body, a duty suggested by the very title-page of the English Prayer Book where the Church is placed first and the Church of England is placed second. Therefore, in his own words he prayed for the Catholic Church, its confirmation and enlargement; for the Eastern, its deliverance and unity; for the Western, its adjustment and peace; for the British, the supply of what is wanting, the establishment of what remains '.

Archbishop Laud, who revered Andrewes as 'a light of the Christian world', was equally convinced of the continuity of the Church of England, a spiritual and not a merely legal continuity, with its life in past ages. He, too, was obliged to defend the Anglican against the Roman position. And he did this on a logical and intelligible ground. He maintained that a national Church has the right to reform itself while yet remaining a part of the Catholic body. And it may do so without the Pope if necessary, because papal jurisdiction is not indispensable. Following a line suggested by some great mediaeval writers, and one in close agreement with Eastern Orthodox theology, he denies that the earthly government of the Church is monarchical,1 and asserts that power does not flow into the Church from the Pope, but from Christ, the Head, into the whole body, a body most adequately represented in an Oecumenical Council. His theory leaves room for the rights of the whole Church and of a national Church, and of both clergy and laity as active members of the same.

Laud's ecclesiastical policy was to enforce a moderate uniformity in the conviction that out of this uniformity a unity of spirit would be generated. It would come with the gradual formation of habit. He did not expect immediate Works, vol. ii, p. 252 (Parker, Oxford, 1849).

success, but he had the courage to work for it. He made a disastrous mistake in trying to use force, and especially the force of royal authority, to secure discipline in the Church. But that mistake was in that age almost universal, and in England we have only seen it vanish during the last twenty years. It is a malicious misunderstanding which has prompted the saying that the one element in the Church which to him was all essential was its visibility'. And the question whether he or his opponents attached the greater importance to outward details of worship should not be decided by any one who has not studied the Puritan discussion concerning the wearing of the hat during divine service. The very first thing which his enemies demanded was uniformity in religion', and their confederacy, as Heylin remarks, was 'cemented with blood'. It was the blood of Laud, in whose trial there was no semblance of real justice. He was cheerful and loyal, a liberal patron of learning and upholder of good morals, and he resembled John Knox in his unselfish disregard of money. If he made some of the mistakes of a martinet, it is equally true that he had the virtues of a martyr.

Let us now turn to Scotland. In Scotland the Church of the later Middle Ages had been as corrupt as the Church in Rome itself. Typical of the religious condition of the country is the fact that David Beaton (d. 1546), who succeeded his uncle as Archbishop of St. Andrews, attended the marriage of one of his illegitimate children and heavily dowered her out of the Church's patrimony. Bishoprics were like 'Pocket-boroughs' in the hands of great noble families, and great ecclesiastical revenues were held by so-called spiritual peers who were merely lay commendators. But the country was backward, and bishops and abbots felt at ease in Zion and were slow to see the coming storm. There had been in Scotland a little Lollardy and a little

Lutheranism; but in 1550 Scotland had no sympathy with Protestantism and was attached to France and opposed to England. But a change came fast and furious. The Scots began to suspect the French policy of their regent, Mary of Lorraine, Protestantism spread, great lords signed a 'Covenant' opposed to Rome; the bishops burnt Walter Milne, an aged Protestant, and the same year, 1558, on St. Giles's Day, when the saint's image was carried in procession through the streets of Edinburgh, the rabble broke the image in pieces. At the beginning of the Reformation there existed a small body of intelligent and religious men who wished for reform, a reform of the kind that found expression in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI. The Church might still have been saved, but at the last moment the bishops did nothing to rescue the sinking vessel. At their final Provincial Council in 1559 they gave only a halting answer to a demand for reasonable changes, and the next year when Parliament assembled and the doctrine of the Church was called in question, they remained ignominiously silent. The Pope's authority was then abolished, and the saying of Mass was forbidden under the most extreme penalties, the third offence being punishable by death. By their cowardly inaction the bishops left the way clear for one who, if he had not the creative genius of Calvin, could fight as few but Calvin fought.

John Knox, a man hardened by vicissitude, fervid, disinterested, with a personal magnetism that reminds one of St. Ignatius de Loyola, had been a chaplain of Edward VI. His views were those of an extreme Swiss Protestantism, and when in England he had striven to prevent the custom of kneeling at holy communion. On the death of Edward he fled to Geneva. He returned to Scotland in 1555 to preach and to organize, and found powerful supporters. He left Scotland again in 1556, thinking discretion the better part of valour, but he came to his kingdom when the

Parliament of Scotland repudiated the Pope. He must in a large measure be regarded as responsible for the fact that in no country was the change of religion accompanied by more violence than in Scotland. At Perth, at St. Andrews and elsewhere, the populace indulged in a veritable orgy of destruction. A pleasant contrast is to be found farther north. In Inverness there seems to have been no animosity against the Church. A Protestant minister of very dubious character was appointed in 1560, but the old chaplains were still allowed to enjoy their stipends and for many years priests filled the office of town clerk.1

Knox, with five other ministers, was commissioned to draw up a new Confession of Faith. Its character is Calvinistic. The doctrine of predestination is stated temperately; but it is taught that in consequence of the Fall the image of God was utterly defaced in man. Like other documents of the Scottish Reformation its language is that of concentrated vituperation, the unreformed Church being described as the filthie synagogue', 'the horrible harlot ', ' the kirk malignant'. The same six ministers drew up the First Book of Discipline which organizes the ministry in agreement with Calvin's ordinances. Public worship was regulated by a crude Book of Common Order, of which the formulae can be traced back to Calvin and Farel. It provides fixed forms of prayer, but it is an astonishing fact that in the ministration of the Lord's Supper, which was to be celebrated quarterly, no form is provided for the consecration of the bread and wine.

In considering the subsequent religious troubles of Scotland it is worth remembering that Knox neither banished fixed forms of prayer nor rigidly maintained a strictly Presbyterian form of the ministry. In 1572, after twelve years' experience, he actually wrote in favour of the organization, closely copied from episcopacy, recom

1 See William Mackay, Life in Inverness in the Sixteenth Century, p. 51 (Aberdeen, Their Majesties' Printers, 1911).