Bonnie Scotland and what we owe her

by William Elliot Griffis

It is astonishing how much alike William the Silent, John Knox, and Abraham Lincoln were in putting confidence in the plain people. William of Orange, the great moderate man of the sixteenth century, found that kings and princes were as reeds to lean upon, nobles were selfish and factious, but that the common people, when you put confidence in them, could be trusted. John Knox walked in the footsteps of William of Orange. Lincoln followed Knox.

Yet Knox was not the founder of the Scottish Reformation, which had begun before he had left the old Church; he was its nurse, not its parent. At first the Reformation in Scotland, as in some parts of Europe, was a political, not a religious movement. In the beginning the Scotch nobles hoped to be enriched from the Church lands, as their peers in England had been; but among the Scottish people there were gradually formed circles in which education of mind and heart went on. Apart from the court and nobles, the people wanted a change for the better. This general intelligence among “the commonalty” had already so undermined the structure of the old political Church in Scotland that when Knox blew his bugle blast, this semi-political edifice came tumbling down.

In two hundred years Scotland made more progress than any other country in the world. Her people, in proportion to their numbers, have probably done more for the general advancement of the race than those of any other modern nation. Yet the foundation of Scotland’s prosperity was laid by John Knox and his successors. Hamerton, who wrote that charming book, “A Painter’s Camp in the Highlands,” said in one of his works that, in proportion to their small numbers, the Scots are the most distinguished little people since the days of the ancient Athenians, and the most educated of the modern races. “All the industrial arts are at home in Glasgow, all the fine arts in Edinburgh, and as for literature it is everywhere.”

Twice the Scots signally nullified the ambition of kings. Edward I, whom the English count one of their greatest kings, conquered Wales and made it a permanent part of the British Empire. He thought he had done the same thing with Scotland, but there he met a different foe, and twenty years later, Scottish valor at Bannockburn gave Scotland her independence forever. How strange that this same reign saw the death of Roger Bacon, the culmination of Christian architecture, and the expulsion of Jews from England!

When King James came to London, in 1604, he found himself in such a totally different atmosphere that he tried to use the power of England behind him to force the rule of the bishops, in place of elders, upon his Scottish subjects. In England the Church lords told King James, when discussing religious matters, that he was inspired of God. Those who have read the disgustingly fulsome praise of King James, made in their preface by the translators of the English Bible in 1611, can see that they believed in the divine right of kings. On the contrary, in 1596, Andrew Melville, the preacher, in a public audience, called James VI “God’s silly vassal.” Said he to him, “I tell you, sir, there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James VI is, and of whose kingdom, not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. And they whom Christ hath called to watch over his Kirk and govern his spiritual kingdom have sufficient power and authority to do so both together and severally.”

The Scottish commons, as Froude says, are the sons of their religion, and they are so because that religion taught the equality of man.

The literature of the subject of the relation of the king to the people, which now holds its place triumphantly in England, shows that this theory, regnant in the twentieth century, originated and was elaborated in Scotland. The idea that the royal government arises from popular electoral choice, and that for a king to break his part of the contract makes him forfeit his right and justifies war against him,—which has always been the American idea,—was first wrought out in Scotland. The true theory of the relations between a king and his subjects first appeared in a book published in Edinburgh, in 1580. It was written by George Buchanan, and was the same that was burned by Englishmen at Oxford in 1683.

It was not until 1594 that Hooker, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity,” developed the idea of a social compact, which later was expanded by John Locke, who was so much read by our fathers. Yet even before Buchanan, French writers had discussed the rights and duties of kings on the same democratic lines, and William of Orange, in his “Apology” of 1570, had lengthily exploited the idea and demonstrated in his life the right to take up arms against princes who abused their trust. The “Apology” was but the preface to the Dutch Declaration of Independence in July, 1581—the political ancestor of ours of 1776.

One who would find out and appraise with exactness the influence of Scotland upon English thought, previous to the eighteenth century,—that is, during the period of the colonization of New England, before the Commonwealth, and later, when American institutions were taking definite form,—will not find much to the point in English books or documents. That Scottish writers and preachers were most influential with English Puritans—the same who settled America—cannot be gainsaid.

Neither can it be denied that Puritanism took on some dark and unlovely forms. Yet we must remember that the work of Claverhouse and the massacres of Scottish Christians by Englishmen were taking place within a few score miles of these very people who first left England, to find a permanent home beyond the Atlantic. These English Puritans got their idea of the equality of man and that sense of human dignity, which lies at the foundation of civil liberty, in large measure from the Scots, who had already shown their hatred of oppression and their contempt for differences of rank founded only on the accident of birth.