Not the less, in consideration [of] the law of God ordains the persons who hear the doctrine of salvation at the mouths of his ministers, and thereby receive special food to the nourishment of their souls, to communicate temporal sustentation on [to] their preachers: Their answer is, That having just title to crave the bodily food at the hands of the said persons, and finding no others bound unto them, they only require at their own flock, that they will sustain them according to their bounden duty, and what it shall please them to give for their sustentation, if it were but bread and water, neither will they refuse it, nor desist from the vocation. But to take from others contrary to their will, whom they serve not, they judge it not their duty, nor yet reasonable.'[100]
The principle so admirably laid down by Knox has become the principle of modern Presbyterianism throughout the world. And even in that day it required nothing to be added to it except the recognition that Catholics, and others outside the 'flock,' who were merely statutory 'auditors,' were not bound to its pastor in the tithe, or other proportion, of their means. Elementary as this may now seem, it was of course too much for that age. The same Assembly went on to declare that 'the teinds properly pertain to the Kirk,' and while they should be applied not only to the ministers, but also to 'the sustentation of the poor, maintaining of schools, repairing of kirks, and other godly uses,' such application should be 'at the discretion of the Kirk.' It was all right, provided the intolerant establishment were to remain. For in that case the tithes as a State tax were the proper means for the State maintaining church and school and poor; and as the Church had already been set by the State over both poor and school, it was the fit administrator of all. And all this ascendancy was about to be renewed; for two months after this Assembly Bothwell murdered Darnley, and three months later Mary married Bothwell and abdicated. And the great Parliamentary settlement of 1567 commenced with the long delayed ratification of the three old statutes of 1560; two Acts being now added, one declaring that the Reformed Church is the only Church within the realm, the other giving it jurisdiction over Catholics and all others. It was fit that between these two later Acts should be interposed another,[101] giving the ministers a first claim on the 'thirds' of benefices, 'aye and until the Kirk come to the full possession of their proper patrimony, which is the teinds.' The proper patrimony of the ancient Church was, perhaps, rather the endowments which had been gifted to it; yet Knox, who abhorred the idea of inheriting anything from that old Church, took a share of that money, even from the State, with reluctance. But the tithes, to be enforced yearly from Scotsmen by the law, he claimed freely, for they were due to the poor, were due to learning and the school, and were above all due to the Kirk, as entrusted with these other interests no less than with its own.
The battle was not over. The scheme of the Book of Discipline remained, even after the statutes of 1567, a mere 'imagination,' all attempted embodiment of it being starved by the nobility and the crown. And in our own century the Church, retaining its statutory jurisdiction over Catholics and Nonconformists, has lost its statutory control over both the schools and the poor, while it has never got anything like 'full possession' or even administration of the teinds, in which all three were to share, but of which it desired to be sole trustee.
It it easy for us, looking back—superfluously easy—to see the fundamental mistake in Knox's legislation. But taking that first step of intolerant establishment as fixed, I see nothing in his proposed superstructure which was not admirable and heroic, and also—as heroic things so often are—sane and even practicable. And it was all conceived in the interest of the people—of those 'poor brethren' of land and burgh, with whom Knox increasingly identified himself. No doubt the Kirk had no right to claim administration, even as trustee, of the tenth of the yearly fruits of all Scottish industry. But when we think of the objects to which these fruits were to be applied, we shall not be disposed to deal hardly with such a claim. It is not the divided and disinherited Churches of Scotland alone—it is, even more, the 'poor labourers of the ground'—who have reason, in these later days, to join in the death-bed denunciation by Knox of the 'merciless devourers of the patrimony of the Kirk.'
Knox's statesmanship may have failed—partly because an unjust and unchristian principle was unawares imbedded in its foundation, and partly because the hereditary legislators of Scotland could not rise to the level of its peasant-reformer. But Knox's churchmanship did not fail. It might well have been contended that the freedom of the Church had been compromised by the legislation which was granted or petitioned for. But that was not the Church's view, and the internal organisation which nobles and politicians refused to sanction, the Church, claiming to be free, instantly took up as its own work. In each town or parish the elders and deacons met weekly with the pastor for the care of the congregation. And these 'particular Kirks' now met half-yearly representatively as the 'Universal Kirk' of Scotland. From its first meeting in December 1560 onwards, the General Assembly or Supreme Court of the Church was convened by the authority of the Church itself, and year by year laid the deep foundations of the social and religious future of Scotland. It was a great work—nothing less than organising a rude nation into a self-governing Church. And there were difficulties and dangers in plenty, some of them unforeseen. The nobles were rapacious, the people were divided, the ministers leaned to dogmatism, the lawyers leaned to Erastianism, the Lowlands were menaced by Episcopacy, the Highlands were emerging from heathenism, and between them both there stretched a broad belt of unreformed Popery. There were a hundred difficulties like these, but they were all accepted as in the long day's work. For in Scotland the dayspring was now risen upon men!
What we have here to remember is, that of this huge national struggle the chief weight lay on the shoulders of Knox, a mere pastor in Edinburgh. And during the first seven years of its continuance this indomitable man was sustaining another doubtful conflict, in which the issues not for Scotland only, but for Europe, were so momentous that it must be looked at separately.
FOOTNOTES
[84] The writers of the Scottish Confession in 1560 protest 'that if any man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugning to God's holy word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity's sake, to admonish us of the same in write; and we of our honour and fidelity do promise unto him satisfaction from the mouth of God (that is, from His Holy Scriptures), or else reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss.'—'Works,' ii. 96.