It had been a custom of the congregations in Edinburgh to hold a meeting on the Tuesday before the administration of the communion. ‘If anything was amiss in the lives, doctrines, or any part of the office of their pastors, every man had liberty to shew wherein they were offended; and if anything was found amiss, the pastors promised to amend it. If they had anything likewise to object against the congregation, it was likewise heard, and amendment was promised. If there was any variance among neighbours, pains were taken to make reconciliation, that so both pastors and people might communicate in love at the banquet of love.’ On the present occasion, the affair had much the character of a modern public meeting, and the people stood boldly up to their pastors, arguing against the innovations of worship now about to be introduced, particularly kneeling at the sacrament.—Cal.
1619.
‘At various times in the year 1621, there were private meetings of ministers and other good Christians in Edinburgh, setting apart days for fasting, praying, and humiliation, crying to God for help in such a needful time; whilk exercises, joined with handling of Scripture, resolving of questions, clearing doubts, and tossing of cases of conscience, were very comfortable.... Thir meetings the bishops and their followers, enemies still to the power of godliness and life of religion, hated to the death; and sundry ministers of Edinburgh inveighed against them, under the name of unlawful conventicles, candle-light congregations (because sometimes they continued their exercises for a great part of the night), persecuting them with odious names of Puritans, Separatists, Brownists, &c.’—Row.
One of the Edinburgh clergy ‘sent to Nicolas Balfour, daughter of umwhile Mr James Balfour, minister of Edinburgh, to advertise her that she was to be banished the town, for entertaining such meetings in her house; and reviled her despitefully, when she came to confer with him.’—Cal.
Mar. 28.
This day, being Easter Sunday, the communion was administered in the Edinburgh churches for the first time after it had been arranged that the people should kneel on receiving the elements. There being a general disrelish for this new form, the people left the town in great numbers to communicate at country churches where the order was not yet appointed. Of those who attended in town, few willingly knelt besides government officials and pauper dependents on the church contributions. ‘Some were dashed and kneeled, but with shedding of tears for grief.’ In some churches throughout the country, certain persons told the ministers: ‘The dangers, if any be, light upon your soul, not on ours!’ Some departed, ‘beseeking God to judge between them and the minister.’ ‘It is not to be passed over, how that when John Lauder, minister at Cockburnspath, was reaching the bread to one kneeling, a black dog started up to snatch it out of his hand.’—Cal.
On next Easter Sunday, the like disinclination to kneeling was shewn. In the College Kirk, where sixteen hundred people communicated, only about twenty kneeled, and it was thought that none would have done so, ‘if they had not brought the poor out of the hospital, to begin, and give a good example.’ These, ‘being aged, poor, and ignorant persons, durst not refuse;’ yet even of them, some, ‘when they were kneeling, knocked on their breasts and lifted up their hands and eyes.’
While the officers of the government and many others joined cordially in the new arrangements, the bulk of the people revolted from them. Whenever they heard of a church in the country where they might be allowed to communicate sitting, they resorted to it in great numbers; ‘whereupon the auditory of the kirks of Edinburgh became rare and thin.’
1619.