The care and anxiety of our reformers were not confined to the adult members of the church. They were extended in a special manner to the young, and were manifested towards them, if possible, with more intense earnestness and loving tenderness. Though parish schools, in the later sense, were not yet devised, detailed arrangements were made that the readers at the several kirks should impart religious knowledge and the elements of primary education to the young of the flock, and that those who showed an aptitude for learning and capability of being trained to be of service to kirk or common-weal should have access at various centres to higher training. "Seeing," they say in their importunate pleading with the nobles on their behalf, "that God hath determined that His kirke here in earth shall be taught not by angels but by men, and seeing that men are borne ignorant of God and of all godlinesse, ... of necessity it is that your honours be most careful for the vertuous education and godly upbringing of the youth of this realm, if either ye now thirst unfainedly [for] the advancement of Christ's glorie or yet desire the continuance of His benefits to the generation following; for as the youth must succeed to us, Schools. so we ought to be carefull that they have knowledge and erudition to profit and comfort that which ought to be most deare to us, to wit, the kirk and spouse of our Lord Jesus."[213] To secure this noble end it was deemed necessary that, besides the readers' schools, every considerable town should have at least one schoolmaster appointed who was competent to teach grammar and the Latin tongue; and that in the more notable towns, especially the old cathedral cities, where the revenues of the prebendaries or of the monks might be made available, there should be a college in which at least logic, rhetoric, and the languages—i.e., Latin and Greek—should be taught by competent masters, for whom and for the poorer scholars attending them suitable stipends and bursaries should be provided out of the aforesaid revenues. The fruit of such an organisation, it is affirmed, would soon appear. "For first, the youthhead and tender children shall be nourished and brought up in vertue in presence of their friends, by whose good attendance many inconveniences may be avoyded in which the youth commonly fall either by overmuch libertie which they have in strange and unknowne places while they cannot rule themselves, or else for lack of good attendance and of such necessaries as their tender age requires. Secondly, the exercise of children in every kirke shall be great instruction to the aged and unlearned," who had never been taught to read, and in whose presence in the Sunday afternoon service they were examined. Lastly, "the great Schooles called the Universities shall be replenished with these that shall be apt to learning; for this must be carefully provided that no father, of what estate or condition that ever he be, use his children at his own fantasie especially in their youthhead; but all must be compelled to bring up their children in learning and vertue." Thus boldly did our reformers lay down the principle of compulsory education, which men in our own day have only hesitatingly adopted, but with greater consistency or daring than our contemporaries have yet evinced, for they proposed to apply the principle to the children of the rich and potent, as well as to those of the poor and vicious. Those higher classes, they say, "may not be permitted to suffer their children to spend their youth in vaine idleness as heretofore they have done, but they must be exhorted, and by the censure of the kirk compelled, to dedicate their sonnes by training them up in good exercises to the profite of the kirk and commonwealth." This they expect the rich to do at their own expense, while they desire the children of the poor to be supported at the charge of the kirk. The sons neither of rich nor poor are to be permitted to reject learning if they develop any aptitude for it, but are to be "charged to continue their studie that the commonwealth may have some comfort by them." To secure this object, discreet and learned men are to visit the schools every quarter, and examine what proficiency the pupils have attained.[214]
Value of Learning.
To these suggestions regarding primary and secondary schools succeeds a very detailed statement of the changes desired in the universities to adapt them to the new order of things. And then they conclude as follows: "All other things touching the books to be read in ilk classe, and all such like particular affaires, we referre to the discretion of the masters, principals, and regents, with their well-advised counsel; not doubting but if God shall grant quietnesse, and give your wisedomes grace to set forward letters in the sort prescribed, ye shall leave wisdome and learning to your posterity—a treasure more to be esteemed than any earthly treasure ye are able to amasse for them, which without wisdome are more able to be their ruin and confusion than their help and comfort. And as this is most true, so we leave it with the rest of the commodities to be weighed by your honours' wisedome, and set forwards by your authority to the most high advancement of this commonwealth committed to your charge."[215]
These touching appeals were not made altogether in vain. Though neither quietness nor a large measure of grace was granted to the rough barons so earnestly and tenderly addressed, yet the goodly fabric of our church and commonwealth was reared up in those troublous times. The full and liberal adoption of the plan of national education sketched by our reformer and his associates still remains in part to be desiderated, and is worthy to be striven for by the churches which claim to represent them. The partial carrying out of their views, more than any other influence that can be named, has conduced to elevate our people and raise Scotland to the rank it now holds among the nations; and we can hardly doubt that the more complete realisation of them in the careful Christian training of the young and the adult members of the church, and the extension of the blessings of education and religion to the masses so long left to grow up in ignorance and vice, would tend greatly to bring back the disaffected to the paths of peace and life, to raise the members of the church in the scale of intelligence and virtue, to make the nobles more than ever heretofore the decus et tutamen patriæ, and to bind all, both classes and masses, closely together in the bonds of mutual Christian affection and true patriotism.
V. Care of the Poor.
Oppression of the Poor.
I must still add that the same enlightened principles which guided them to make careful provision for these important objects, led them also to take a kindly interest in the humbler poor and aged, and to urge both on the state and on the members of the church the duty they owed to this long despised and neglected class of the population. First, for the poor peasantry who were not paupers, but who, they allege, had been grievously oppressed by the exactions of the clergy in the times immediately preceding, they present the following earnest plea: "With the griefe of our hearts we heare that some gentlemen are now as cruell over their tenants as ever were the Papists, requiring of them (the tiends and) whatsoever they afore payed to the kirk, so that the Papistical tyrannie shall onely be changed into the tyrannie of the lord and laird. We dare not flatter your honours, neither yet is it profitable for you that we so doe: (for neither shall we,) if we permit cruelty to be used; neither shall ye, who by your authoritie ought to gaine-stand such oppression, nor yet they that use the same, escape God's heavie and fearfull judgements. The gentlemen, barones, earles, lords, and others must be content to live upon their just rents, and suffer the kirk to be restored to her (right and) liberty; that by her restitution, the poore, who heretofore, by the cruell Papists, have been spoiled and oppressed, may now receive some comfort and relaxation, and their tiends and other exactions be cleane discharged and no more taken in time comming. The uppermost claith, corps-present, clerk-maile, the pasche-offering, tiend-ale, and all handlings[216] upaland can neither be required nor recieved of good conscience."[217]
Exactions of the Medieval Church.
The history of the world, the history of the Christian church, has few passages more noble than this, where these poor ministers, not yet assured of decent provision for their own maintenance, boldly undertake the patronage of the peasantry, and say they would rather suffer themselves than ask that teinds should be exacted from those who had been so long ground down, not only by the exaction of these from their crofts and even from their gardens, but also by a multitude of other imposts, which, although their very names are now almost forgotten in Scotland, had been long felt to be a grievous oppression. Was it any wonder that those crushed and down-trodden classes should rally round their protectors, and under their kindly and godly training should grow up to be a strength to the church and a power in the state? Charming fancy pictures are still sometimes drawn of the stately monastery—with its handsome church and kindly and cultured monks—as a centre of civilising and Christianising influences to the district in which it was erected. These influences no doubt had a certain reality in the early ages of the church, and even in the days of the good Queen Margaret; but in Scotland, at least, these days had long passed away before the sixteenth century; and the monasteries, as a whole, had become a source of weakness and scandal, rather than of strength and honour to the dominant church. In fact, their wealth, being to a large extent derived from the teinds of parishes, should have been devoted to the spiritual interests of these parishes, whereas the vicars appointed by them being generally put off with a miserable pittance and left largely dependent on these hated and oppressive exactions—corpse presents, uppermost cloth, Pasche-offerings—could not fail to alienate the peasantry from the monasteries and their rural representatives. Such charges of oppression could never have been so publicly made against them had they not been notoriously true. And if further evidence were needed, it may be found in abundance in the poems of Sir David Lindsay and the Wedderburns. The picture the former has drawn of the poor peasant driven out of house and holding[218] by these oppressive exactions The Oppressors relentless. is known to be true to the life; and contributed greatly to the overthrow of the merciless oppressors who, until the very eve of the triumph of the Reformation, could not be persuaded either to abolish or abate their dues.[219]