The Reformation in England and in Scotland.
In the progress of civilization, the middle of the sixteenth century may be taken as the turning point between the old past, with its feudalism, its authoritative church, its restricted culture, its antiquated science,—and the newer order of things from which has sprung the ever-expanding present. Since Guttenberg first used moveable types, a century had so far perfected his invention that books were becoming plentiful; and the one which is morally and socially, as well as religiously, the chief book in the world, had been translated into the mother-tongue of England. Towns were asserting their chartered privileges. The telescope was ransacking the heavens, and, for the first time, Magellan had circumnavigated the globe. Cannon were used in warfare, and iron had been smelted in England. The newspaper had been born; and Law was gradually gaining the ascendancy over disorder and old prerogative.
The Reformation of religion had established itself in Central and Northern Europe, and was now fighting its way in England and Scotland. But the battle with Papal authority and its dogmatic creeds was begun under very different circumstances, was carried on by very different methods, and had very different results in the two neighbouring countries.
How did the English Reformation come about? During nearly forty years in the first half of the sixteenth century (1509 to 1547) England was ruled by the last of her really despotic kings, Henry VIII. As everybody knows, Henry had a peculiar domestic experience,—he married in succession six wives. As fresh fancies took him, he rid himself of four of these—two by divorce, and two by the headsman’s axe. One wife, Jane Seymour, died in childbirth of his only son, who succeeded him as Edward VI. Wife No. 6, by her extraordinary prudence contrived to escape destruction, and survived the kingly monster. This is a harsh term for the historical father of the English church, and some modern historians of ability and repute have done their best—as has been done in the cases of Macbeth and Richard III., as these kings are portrayed by Shakespeare—to partially whitewash Henry. That he was, in common parlance, a great king, and a man of ability, of energy and decision, and that under him England prospered, and held an advanced position amongst the nations, few will dispute; but that he was a cruel, lustful, selfish tyrant seems equally undeniable. He made use of men and women as subservient to his will or his pleasure, and when his ends were so served, he ruthlessly destroyed them. His great minister, Wolsey, would not bend to his wishes in the matter of divorcing his first wife, so Wolsey was degraded, and in his old age sent into seclusion, to die of a broken heart. And in succession Thomas Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, and the Earl of Surrey, suffered the fate of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
Henry, when a young man, opposed the Reformation. He wrote a book against Luther and his heresies, which so pleased the Pope that he granted Henry the title of Defender of the Faith. This papal title has passed down by inheritance through all succeeding English sovereigns; every coin from the mintage of Queen Victoria bears its initial letters.
Henry first married, under the Pope’s dispensation, the widow of his elder brother Arthur, Catherine of Arragon, by whom he had a daughter, afterwards Queen Mary. But the King fell in love—if, in the passions of such a man, the noble word love can be rightly used—with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine’s lady attendants. To gain Anne, Henry, after a number of years of wedded life with Catherine, all at once became conscience-stricken that his marriage with her was an unlawful one; and he asked the Pope to recall his dispensation and annul the marriage. Now, Catherine was sister to the Emperor of Germany, Charles the Fifth, one of the Pope’s best supporters in these sad Reformation times. And, moreover, to have rescinded the dispensation would have been an admission of papal fallibility; so the Pope gave Henry a refusal.
Henry threw off his allegiance to the Pope, and had himself acknowledged by Parliament as the supreme head of the English Church. Powerful, unscrupulous, and popular, he confiscated church revenues, broke up monasteries, and by Act of Parliament, in 1537, completed politically the English Reformation. It was, so far as the King was concerned, a reformation only in name, for as to liberty of conscience, and the right of private judgment, he was as arrogant a bigot as any pope who ever wore the tiara. He vacillated in his own opinions, but enforced those he held at the time by such severe enactments, that many persons of both religions were burned as heretics.
And from the Anglican Church, so founded on despotism and intolerance, can we wonder that the shadow of Rome has never been thoroughly lifted? In the abstract it is essentially a close corporation of ecclesiastics, the mere people hardly counting as a necessary factor. Its sacraments have still miraculous or supernatural properties attached to them; no one must officiate therein who has not been ordained, and the assumed powers of ordination came through the Romish Church. From the older Church it adopted certain creeds, as dogmatic in their assertions, and intolerant in their fulminations, as were ever Papal Bulls or Decrees of Councils. Of course the mellowing influence of time, the broadening thoughts of later years, and the rivalship of Nonconformity, have done much to take out old stings and deaden old intolerance; whilst a cloud of witnesses for righteousness and progress in the Church itself, have raised it above its old self, and brought it in nearer touch with the spirit of the present age.
The history of the Scottish Reformation is an entirely different one. Instead of being originated and fostered by State authority, it was a fierce and obstinate battle with such authority. Scotland was then under one of its disastrous regencies, that of Mary of Guise, the widow of King James V., acting for her infant daughter Mary, known afterwards in history as the beautiful and unfortunate Queen of Scots. The Reformation in England had sent a wave of agitation into Scotland, and this wave advanced strongly as refugees from the cruel persecutions of Mary Tudor flocked into the Northern Kingdom; and as the Regent, with her coadjutor, the bigoted and relentless Cardinal Beaton, also began to persecute the new faith, and send its adherents to the stake; for it has ever been found to be a true saying, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” In revenge for the burning, in 1545, of one of the saintliest of men, George Wishart, a party of the Reformers murdered the Cardinal in his own castle of St. Andrews, from one of the windows of which he had gloated over the martyr’s cruel death.
In 1557, a number of the Reformers, including several noblemen, and styling themselves the Lords of the Congregation, entered into a mutual bond or covenant, “To defend the whole congregation of Christ against Satan and all his powers; to have prayers made and the sacraments administered in the vulgar tongue; in worship to use only the Bible, and the Prayer-book of Edward VI.” In 1559, the Regent, who was entirely under French influence, and had been gradually filling high offices with Frenchmen, and accumulating French troops, issued a proclamation, forbidding any one to preach or administer the sacraments without the authority of the bishops.
And at this period a sterling man fitted to be a leader in such turbulent times, John Knox, appears in the forefront of the conflict. He had been college-bred, and became a priest, but adopted the Reformation in its Calvinistic phase, and, as he had opportunity, disseminated the new tenets with eloquence and zeal. After Beaton’s death, his slayers, with others, and Knox amongst these, held out the castle of St. Andrews for fourteen months, but had to yield at last to their French besiegers, and were sent prisoners to France. Knox had to work in the galleys on the river Loire. But again he is in Scotland, preaching from place to place. After a powerful sermon against idolatry in a church in Perth, a priest began to celebrate mass. Heated by the glowing words of Knox, the people broke the images in the church. The Regent was very wroth, she deposed the Protestant provost of the city, and threatened it with French troops. The Congregation raised troops and appealed to Elizabeth, now on the English throne, for aid. Elizabeth sent some troops, and there was fighting with varied successes, until, by a treaty made in Edinburgh, the French agreed to abandon Scotland, and the Protestants were to be allowed the free exercise of their religion. In the Scottish Parliament of 1560 there was a solemn abjuration of the Pope and the mass. And the Geneva Confession of Faith was constituted the theological standard of the kingdom.
JOHN KNOX.
Differing from the English Church with its orders, its episcopacy, and its sovereign headship, the Scottish Reformers denied the authority of the sovereign, or secular government, to interfere in the affairs of the Church; determining that these affairs should be under the direction of a Court of Delegates, the greater number being chosen from the ministers, all of whom were of the same standing and dignity, and the remainder—with equal authority in the deliberations—of a certain number of the laity, called Elders, thus forming what is called “The General Assembly of the Church.” The sacraments were to be simple observances, spiritual only as they were spiritually received. Church edifices were regarded as merely stone and lime structures, having no claims to special regard, except during divine service. So to these Reformers, defacing in the churches what had been considered sacred statuary and ornamentation, even to the sign of the cross, was deemed a ready mode of testifying against Popish superstitions. As to the abbeys and monasteries—“Pull down the nests,” said stern John Knox, “and the rooks will fly away.”
Thus the Kirk of Scotland was essentially democratic in its origin, and, although always rigid and often intolerant, it has in the main so continued. Its theological tenets, although wordy and abstruse, were a whetstone to the intellect, and helped to develope a serious and thoughtful, a reading, and an argumentative people. Shepherds meeting each other on the hillsides, weavers with their yarn at the village beetling-stone, would, like Milton’s angels:—
“Reason high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute.”
The English Church, on the other hand, did not encourage doctrinal discussion, but simple faith in its articles, and obedience to its rubric.
JOHN KNOX’S HOUSE.
But—which we would hardly have expected from its complex system of faith, and its niceties in phraseology—the Presbyterian Kirk produced zeal and earnest devotedness in the Scottish people. Without ordination by a bishop, whose orders were presumed to have come in direct succession from the Apostles, the ministers were held in high reverence and esteem; without printed prayers its common members learned to pray. It had its army of martyrs; except amongst Puritan Nonconformists, the Scottish Covenanters have hardly their English representatives.
John Knox largely impressed the Reformed Church with his own individuality. No doubt he was rigid, and, to our modern ideas, narrow-minded and intolerant. He would not have accomplished the work he did if he had not himself thoroughly believed in it, as the greatest work which then needed to be done. He has been blamed for speaking harsh words to Queen Mary; but he had to speak what he felt to be stern truths, for which honied words could hardly fit themselves. Mary, accustomed to fascinate the eyes and sway the wills of all who approached her, demanded of Knox:—“Who are you who dare dictate to the sovereign and nobles of this realm?” “I am, Madam,” answered Knox, “a subject of this realm.” A subject, and therefore a co-partner in the realm; to the fullest extent of his knowledge and his capabilities responsible for its right government; just as the Hebrew prophets claimed a right to stand before their kings, and, not always in smooth words, to denounce sin and hypocrisy, oppression, and backslidings from the law of God.
JOHN KNOX’S PULPIT, ST. GILES’S.
(From the Scottish Antiquarian Museum.)
For supporting the introduction of bishops into the Presbyterian Church, as impairing the republican equality of its ministers, Knox had bitterly rebuked the Regent Morton. But when, in November, 1572, the Regent stood by the grave of the Reformer, it was in a choking voice that he pronounced the grand eulogium:—“There lies he, who never feared the face of man.”
At the era of the Reformation no translation of the Scriptures had yet been printed in Scotland; what copies in the vernacular had been brought from England, were in the hands of the wealthy; indeed few of the common people could then have read them. The parish school as yet was not. The old church had not encouraged inquiry into the rationale of its dogmas, and although theological discussion was in the air, it had not penetrated into the lower strata of Scottish society. And thus the popular outburst against the old church was hardly founded on conscience and conviction; in its beginnings at least, it was more a revolution against priestly domination.
GRAVE OF JOHN KNOX.
But the cry of idolatry was raised. In the destruction of images in the churches, the leading reformers found the populace only too willing agents. Even architectural ornamentation—without religious significance—was removed or destroyed, the capitals of pillars were covered with plaster, the very tombs were rifled and defaced. The parish church had been the nucleus around which, for centuries, the veneration and the spiritual thought of past times had revolved, and now the idea of its “consecration” was to be banished from the popular mind. The reformers encouraged male worshippers to enter churches with their hats on—uncovering during prayer, psalm-singing, and scripture reading, and resuming their hats when the minister gave out the text for his sermon. When the discourse touched a popular chord, there was applause by clapping of hands and stamping of feet. Rome had demanded unquestioning submission to its authority,—an unreserved veneration for its ritual; and in breaking away from this bondage, the spirit of reverence was largely impaired.
Thus to other religionists, the form of worship in a Scottish church appeared bald and careless, hardly decorous. There was no private prayer on sitting down; in the public prayers, the stubborn presbyterian knee did not bend,—all stood upright, and the eyes would roam all over the church. In singing the psalms, there was no assistance from the swelling tones of an organ; gloves were put on during the benediction, and all were prepared for a hurried exit at its Amen. Funeral sermons, and even tomb-stones, were proscribed by the early reformers. One in King James’s English retinue, accompanying him in a visit to Scotland, remarked,—“The Scots christen without the sign of the cross; they marry without the ring; and bury without any funeral service.”
Although the old psalmist said,—“O sing unto the Lord a new song,”—the Presbyterians did not seem to think that anything had occurred in the following two thousand years, to incite to new songs of praise and thanksgiving: so they continued to sing only the Hebrew psalms. It was not until 1745 that the General Assembly authorized the use of Paraphrases,—that is, metrical versions of other portions of Scripture, but many congregations refused them. Now, there are authorized hymnals—the organ is again finding its place in the churches—and other changes have come about, bringing the form of service in nearer consonance with that of other churches, and with the more ornate tendency of the present times.