Bonnie Scotland and what we owe her

by William Elliot Griffis

Knox was a statesman as well as a theologian, possessing rare political sagacity and intuitive knowledge of men. Like St. Paul and Calvin, he was small in person and feeble in body, but irresistible in moral force.

The two sons of Knox, of his first wife, were educated at Cambridge, but died young, without issue. Of his three daughters, one, Mrs. Welch, gained access to the king to ask the royal permission for the return to Scotland of her sick husband, who had been exiled because of his Presbyterian convictions. James at last yielded, on condition that she should persuade him to submit to the bishop; but the lady, lifting up her apron and holding it toward the king, replied, as her father would have done, “Please Your Majesty, I’d rather kep [receive] his head there.”

James VI paid the brave woman’s father a high tribute when he lifted up his hands and thanked God that the three surviving bairns of Knox were all lasses, “for if they had been three lads,” said he, “I could never have bruiked [enjoyed] my three kingdoms in peace.”

It is Knox himself who relates the four or five interviews which he had with the graceful and fascinating queen, whose charms and misfortunes will ever excite sympathy and set men, who argue from opposite premises, keeping up their endless controversies about her.

A greater contrast of characters can hardly be paralleled in history. The one intensely Scotch,—the right man in the right place; the other intensely French by education and taste,—the wrong woman in the wrong place. The one in the vigor of manhood, the other in the bloom of youth and beauty. The one terrible in his earnestness, the other gay and frivolous. The one intensely convinced of God’s sovereignty, and therefore of the people’s right and duty to disobey and depose treacherous princes; she thinking him a rude fanatic and an impertinent rebel. He confronting a queen, whom he considered a Jezebel, unmoved by her beauty, her smiles, or her tears; she compelled to listen to one whom she dared not try to destroy.

It seems a very shallow judgment upon Knox, to say that he was a “woman-hater.” On the contrary, he was a lover of good women, was twice married, and wrote letters of comfort to his mother-in-law. The truth is that in matters of sin and punishment, right or wrong, truth or falsehood, there was for him neither male nor female. Men must judge John Knox as they must judge any and all who tower above their fellows, remembering that for what he believed to be his supreme duty to God and his Church, he made as full a sacrifice of his own personal consideration as of others. Carlyle declares that no matter how we may explain these interviews with Queen Mary, “not one reader in a thousand could be made to sympathize with or do justice to or in behalf of Knox.” Here, more than elsewhere, Knox proves himself—and here more than anywhere bound to be so—the Hebrew prophet in complete perfection.

One feature in the history of the Scottish conscience profoundly affected American life in its colonial and formative stages—the emphasis laid in the Kirk of Scotland on the National Covenants. They were politico-religious agreements for the maintenance and defence of certain principles and privileges. The idea was copied from Jewish precedent. They originated in that critical period when the sacred rights and convictions of the people were in imminent danger and when the religious and national sentiments were inseparably blended. They were meant to defend the doctrine and polity of the Reformed Kirk against all hostile attempts from within and from without, and the sentiment of those who made them was to die rather than to surrender. One can trace in these historical movements of the Church three periods: (1) against the Papacy (1560–1590); (2) against English prelacy (1590–1690); and (3) against patronage, until 1875.

This custom of “covenanting” had a great influence upon those people in Britain who so largely helped to make American freedom, the English Puritans and the New Englanders. To-day the outstanding feature of the independent congregations of several of the largest and most influential bodies of Christians in America is the covenant, which is taken on uniting with the church. The covenant, as the expression of the individual to his Creator and Redeemer, takes the place of the confirmation vows which are customary in the Lutheran and Anglican churches. The “covenant” was the core of the Mayflower Compact and of the Pilgrim Republic.

Dr. Schaff thus draws the religious map of Scotland: “The Puritans overthrew both monarchy and prelacy, but only to be overthrown in turn by the nemesis of history.... Romanism in the Highlands is only an unsubdued remnant of the Middle Ages, largely reinforced by Irish emigrants to the large cities. Episcopacy is an English exotic, for Scotsmen educated in England and associated with the English aristocracy. The body of the people are Presbyterians to the backbone.”

The weak point in the establishment, by Parliament in 1690, of Presbyterianism in Scotland, was the degree of dependence upon the State, which kept up a constant irritation, and which, from time to time, led to the new secessions from the Established Kirk, down to the great exodus of the Free Church in 1843. But these were not new departures, but rather, like the sects in Russia, were simply returns to the old landmarks.