Bygone Church Life in Scotland

Bygone Church Life in Scotland
Edited by William Andrews
LONDON: WILLIAM ANDREWS & CO., 5, FARRINGDON AVENUE, E.C. 1899.
I hope the present collection of new studies on old themes will win a welcome from Scotsmen at home and abroad.
My contributors, who have kindly furnished me with articles, are recognized authorities on the subjects they have written about, and I think their efforts cannot fail to find favour with the reader.
William Andrews.
The Hull Press, Christmas Eve, 1898.

By the Rev. Geo. S. Tyack, B.A.
The Reformation in Scotland was of a character more sweeping and destructive than is easy of realisation by an Englishman at the present day. In the southern kingdom much that as symbolism was valuable, and as art was admirable, was wantonly given over to the hammer or the flames at that time; but one learns to be thankful for the many works of glory and of beauty that were nevertheless left to us, when one turns one’s eyes to the northern realm. Carried away by the violence of the most extreme men, the Reformation there became a veritable revolution, in which everything that spoke of earlier times was condemned, and was treated as if it were a sacrament of Satan; and the attempt was seriously made to render “the King’s Daughter” yet more “glorious within” by stripping her of every shred of her “clothing of wrought gold.” Religion, that it might be more truly spiritual, was to be sent forth into the world absolutely naked of every external sign or form. The furniture of the churches was torn out, and sold or burnt; the statues of the saints were of course broken up; but the organs were also pulled down, and even the carved stalls and screens of the cathedrals were declared to be “idolatrous.” Nothing illustrates more strongly, and more curiously, the indiscriminate frenzy of destruction which for a time took possession of the people, than the fact that monuments and tombstones were even condemned as superstitious and sinful. Only a comparatively few of all the many memorials of Scottish worthies of earlier centuries escaped demolition, and this not wrought by the mere violence of a turbulent mob, but by formal resolutions of the General Assembly in the seventeenth century. In 1640 the Kirk Session of Aberdeen ordered the removal of a portrait of “Reid of Pitfoddels” from the vestry of the church, on the ground of its “smelling somewhat of Popery”; and in 1649 a similar authority at Kilmarnock condemned “a graven image” on the tomb of Lord Boyd. This action was taken, no doubt, in obedience to the summons issued by the General Assembly in 1640 to the presbyteries to complete the removal and destruction of all monuments.