Over the Protestant functionaries, five superintendents were appointed, the district of Fife and Strathearn being assigned to subprior Winram; Knox himself acting as overseer of the whole, though without any official authority, or distinguishing title. These appointments on the part of the Reformers, whatever might be the defects inherent in them, sufficiently prove that they were no friends to that system of parity which their successors have adopted; for to these superintendents, as much, and in some respects, more power was assigned over the inferior ministers than the bishops themselves enjoyed, under either the Papal or Episcopal systems, with the single but very important exception of ordination, which was abolished altogether. The office of superintendent, moreover, Knox designed should be perpetual; and accordingly it continued, with some modifications, till eight years after his death; when Andrew Melville, in his zeal for the Genevan model, found means to set it aside. Yet such was Knox's inconsistency, that he forbade any canonical consecration to his superintendents; and so true was he to his principle that "the people" are the source of all power, ecclesiastical as well as civil, that not only did he give the General Assembly power to depose the superintendents, but even the elders of their own parish churches (for each was obliged to have a parish church in addition to his being a superintendent) were authorized to call them to account and censure them, whenever they saw, or thought they saw, reason for doing so! Such an incongruous system as this did not, and could not last.1

But though the property of the Scoto-papal church had been enormous, little, it seems, could be afforded for the payment of the reformed ministers. From £7 to £12 sterling (equal to about £100 of our present money), for a minister, and about four times that amount for a superintendent, was all they could obtain; and even that was unwillingly and irregularly paid by those who had got possession of the church lands. When it is considered, observes Sir W. Scott, how liberal the ancient kings of Scotland had been to the Church of Rome, it appears that in this point, as well as in matters of doctrine, the Scottish Reformers held a line of conduct just the opposite of that pursued by their ancestors. And this unkindly parsimony was the more felt, because the principal reforming lords were the very persons by whom these miserable pittances were allotted. Wishart of Pittarrow was appointed to levy and pay those stipends to the clergy; but he was found to be as niggardly a paymaster as he was known to be a zealous reformer; so that it became a common phrase to "bless the laird of Pittarrow," as a zealous professor of the true faith, but to bid "the devil take the comptroller" as a greedy extortioner.2 In his history of the Reformation, Knox states that there was none

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1 It may be remarked here that the Reformers were friendly to lay patronage: for, in an address to the Queen in the year 1565, they distinctly state, "Our mind is, not that her majesty, or any other patron of this realm, should be deprived of their just patronages; but we mean that whensoever her majesty, or any other patron, does present any person to a benefice, the person presented should be tried and examined by the judgment of the learned men of the Kirk, such as presently are the superintendents, who are appointed thereto. As the presentation to benefices pertains to the patron, so the collation ought, in law and reason, to pertain to the Kirk; of which collation the Kirk should not be defrauded more than the patrons of their presentation."

2 History of Scotland, ii. 72.

within the realm more unmerciful to the puir ministers than were they who had the grittest rents of the kirks." In reply to the just complaints of these "puir ministers," the "unmerciful" plunderers told them that their petition for a share of the church rents was a devout imagination! In fact, the ministers contributed to bring this treatment upon their own heads. They had declaimed against the appropriation of so much wealth to sacred purposes: the nobility thought as they did in this respect, and took most of it to themselves; and having thus got the lion's share of the spoil, they had no mind to part with it. As Dr. Robertson observes, "it was found more easy to kindle zeal than to extinguish avarice." The Reformers accused the Papists of idolatry; but, if covetousness be idolatry, which we are assured by the highest authority it is, it would be difficult to say whether the Reformed or the unreformed were the greater idolaters of the two.

"The Book of the Universal Kirk of Scotland," as it is singularly called,-in other words, the Records of the General Assembly, from the Reformation down to a late date,-furnishes sad proofs of the disorder, immorality, and intolerance, which prevailed throughout Scotland at the period we are now reviewing. We read of numberless cases of fornication, adultery, and incest, some of them of a very disgusting character. Indeed, impurity seems to have been the besetting sin of Scotland at this time. In Perth alone, whose population did not exceed six thousand, there were on an average eighty convicted cases of adultery annually, even under the vigilant superintendence of their first Protestant minister, Mr. Row; and Mr. Petrie informs us that in 1570 a report was made to the General Assembly, from a very small district, of six hundred persons convicted of having so offended, and who had not yet satisfied the discipline of the kirk. In the same records we read of complaints entered against all the five superintendents, and many of the ministers, for various delinquencies, but especially pluralities, non-residence, and negligence in visiting their charges; and at one of the sittings of the assembly, twenty-seven ministers were complained of by name, that "they had wasted the patrimony of their benefices, and made no residence at their kirks.” We find also frequent petitions for more superintendents or commissioners of kirks, for more money to pay them, more kirks to preach in, and manses to live in; and several from the parishes to which the superintendents were attached, that their spiritual concerns were neglected: and, to take a case connected with St. Andrew's, the parishioners of Tynningham complained that while they paid their tithes to St. Mary's college, neither word nor sacraments were dispensed among them. We read of some ministers throwing up their office, and resorting to civil employments for want of a livelihood; and others expressing their wish to do the same, but forbidden by the Assembly; and, what is curious, there is the following question recorded as gravely proposed and answered: "Q. Whether a minister or reader may tap ale, beer, or wine, and keep an open tavern? A. A minister or reader who taps ale, beer, or wine, and keeps an open tavern, should be exhorted by the commissioners to keep decorum.' In short, we discover

"3

1 Scott's Lives of the Protestant Reformers, pp. 185, 186.

12

2 Book of the Universal Kirk, with Calderwood's Additions, p. 376.

3 Ibid. p. 378.

instances of the prevalence of all kinds of vice, and of those who committed them promising to amend, but seldom performing—instances of readers usurping the office of ministers by dispensing the sacraments-of Papists commanded to join themselves to the new establishment on pain of excommunication — of orders to suppress all heretical books, and not to allow them to be imported or printed-of compulsory abolition of the fasts and festivals of the church-of the refusal of lay commendators to pay their thirds of benefices-of simony, &c., &c.1

The following extract, from a sermon preached by Mr. Ferguson, a minister of Dunfermline, at Leith, before the Regent Marr, the General Assembly, and many of the nobility, in January, 1571, strikingly confirms the foregoing account of the state of religion in Scotland at the period in question :

"Then, the same accusations and complaints that God used of old by his prophet against the Jews serve this day against them that are like the Jews in transgression; yea, they serve against us. For this day Christ is spoiled amongst us, while that which ought to maintain the ministry of the kirk and the poor is given to profane men, flatterers in court, ruffians, and hirelings: the poor, in the mean time, oppressed with hunger, the kirks and temples decaying for lack of ministers and up-holding, and the schools utterly neglected. But now to speak of your temples, where the word of God should be preached, and the sacraments ministered—all men see to what miserable ruin and decay they are come; yea, they are so profaned that, in my conscience, if I had been brought up in Germany, or in any other country where Christ is truly preached, and all things done decently and in order, according to God's word, and heard of that purity of religion that is among you, and for the love thereof had taken travel to visit this land, and then should have seen the foul deformity and desolation of your kirks and temples, which are more like sheep-cots than the house of God, I could not have judged that there had been any fear of God or right religion in the most part of this realm. And as for the ministers of the word, they are utterly neglected, and come in manifest contempt among you: ye rail upon them at your pleasure. Of their doctrine, if it serve not your turn, and agree not with your appetites, ye are become impatient; and, to be short, we are now made your tabletalk, whom ye mock in your mirth, and threaten in your anger. This is what moves me (let men judge as they list) to lay before your eyes the miserable estate of the poor Kirk of Scotland, that thereby ye may be provoked to pity it, and to restore the things that unjustly ye spoiled it of. Cleanse, then, your hands of all impiety, specially of sacrilege, whereby ye spoiled the poor, the schools, the temples, and ministers of God's word, yea, Christ himself. I grant that our fathers, out of their immoderate zeal, besides the teinds and necessary rents of the Kirk, gave thereunto superfluously, and more than enough. What then is to be done? but that the preachers of God's word be reasonably sustained (seeing that there is enough and too much for that purpose), the schools and the poor be well provided, as they ought, and the temples honestly and reverently repaired, that the people may, without injury from wind and weather, sit and hear God's word, and participate in his holy sacraments. And if there rest

1 Book of the Universal Kirk, with Calderwood's Additions, passim.

anything unspent when this is done (as no doubt there will), in the name of God let it be bestowed on the next necessary affairs of the commonwealth, and not to any man's private commodity."

It

The above sermon was printed at St. Andrew's the following year. was read and approved by John Knox, who was near his latter end at the time, and who thus attested his opinion of it: "John Knox, with my dead hand, but glad heart, praising God that, of his mercy, he leaves such light to his kirk in this desolation."

Making every allowance for the confusion arising out of a new order of things, one cannot help coming to the conclusion, from a review of the preceding statements, that there was a radical defect in the whole system of the Scottish Reformation; and that defect seems to have been in the Reformers not being prepared with a well-ordered and apostolic system to substitute for the one which they overthrew. Instead of sweeping away, they should have purified the Roman Catholic Church, the admirable machinery of which was already prepared to their hands; and, above all, they should have avoided the fatal error of abolishing the canonical ordination of the priesthood, and the consequent distinction between the clergy and laity. In short, they should have adhered to the example of the Church Catholic in its purest period, the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, the system which had been adopted by the " one Catho lic and Apostolic Church," at all times, in all places, and by all her faithful members. Thus they would have avoided the dangers and difficulties into which they speedily fell; their successors would have escaped the changes and fluctuations to which they have ever since been liable; and instead of a "violent and disordered Reformation," as Spottiswood justly calls it, we should have had one, like England, worthy of the name; a Reformation not rashly undertaken by rapacious barons at the head of an ignorant and fanatical populace, but conducted by wise counsellors and learned prelates.

L.

[The Author of the above and former papers has consented to furnish us with the progress of the Reformation at St. Andrew's, and the first of the series will appear in our next.-ED.]

ORIGINAL SIN AND JUSTIFICATION.

4. I do embrace and receive all and every thing that hath been defined and declared in the holy Council of Trent, concerning Original Sin and Justification.

THE fourth article of the Trent Creed is on the subjects of Original Sin and Justification, and the Romanist is obliged to conform his belief to the definition of the Synod of Trent, without reference to what Scripture or the ancient fathers declare. The chief difference between the Roman and Anglican Churches, on the subject of original sin, is in the effect which the sacrament of Baptism produces on it. The council of Trent decreed :

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If any one does not confess that the first man Adam, when he transgressed the command of God in Paradise, immediately lost the holiness and righteousness in which he had been formed, and by that miscarriage

VOL. II.

2 Y

incurred the anger and indignation of God, and thus death also, which God before had threatened against him; and, together with death, captivity under the power of him that hath the power of death, that is, the devil; and that the whole Adam, through this trangression, was changed for the worse, both as regards soul and body; let him be accursed.”1

Original sin means the hereditary stain and corruption of nature, which the apostacy and breach of covenant of our first all parents entailed upon their posterity; by whom sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Adam was created in the image of God, that is in innocence; but, by doing that which he was commanded not to do, he "sinned, and came short of the glory of God.3 This shortcoming and tendency to evil became hereditary in all Adam's descendants, in whose flesh no good thing dwelleth; "for the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh." Every man finds, by daily experience, that however willing he may be to obey God's law, yet in his own unassisted strength, he is unequal to the performance of any good thing; for that which is born of the flesh is flesh," and lusteth against the Spirit. Adam's sin thoroughly corrupted his own nature, and all his descendants are consequently partakers of his corruption, are far gone from original righteousness, and strongly inclined to evil, and, being born of the flesh, are children of wrath, and disposed to bring forth the works of the flesh. In this natural or fleshly state he is destitute of those heavenly graces which formed his likeness to God, his faculties are depraved, his heart is blind and alienated from the life of God, and his understanding is darkened; he is consequently unable to seek rightly his present or future happiness without the preventing and co-operating assistance of the Holy Spirit: " for it is God which worketh in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure."7

6

When reduced to this miserable state, and driven out of Paradise to teach him that he had forfeited heaven, of which it was a type, and all the benefits of his covenant, God took compassion on Adam, and not only forgave his sin on his repentance, but also provided a remedy to satisfy his own justice and to exalt his own mercy. He graciously promised that in the fulness of time the Seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent which had deceived them; and who, as their Redeemer, should recover them from the power of the devil, and restore them to his favour. But divine justice required an atonement, and none but God could make it; Christ therefore took man's nature, and in that nature made atonement by suffering death on the cross, the looking forward to which formed the faith of the patriarchs and prophets. The sacrifice of a lamb embodied to their faith the Lamb slain, or devoted to be slain, from the beginning of the world, and whose blood represented the atoning blood of Christ; as the water in Baptism and the wine in the Eucharist now do to the faith of the Christian. In the typical shadows of the law, all things were cleansed with blood, and no man was purified and legally absolved from his sins without a bloody sacrifice. The sacrifice of Christ's blood was the covenant that God established with his Church from the beginning, and by the sprinkling of which in

1 Roman Schism, sess. v. p. 164.

2 Rom. v. 12. 3 Rom. iii. 23.

4 Gal. v. 17. 5 St. John, iii. 6. 6 Eph. iv. 18.

7 Phil. ii. 13. 8 Heb. ix. 22.