soon as he attempted to excuse himself the tragedy commenced. He was stripped naked and stretched out on the bars of iron, to which he was secured while the fire beneath was adjusted, so as now to burn his legs, now his shoulders, and so forth, while the earl and his brother kept basting him with oil. This procedure soon removed the abbot's scruples about the alienation of the property of the church; and when, having intimated his willingness to subscribe the deeds required, he was released from his bed of torture, his inhospitable landlord addressed him with a hypocritical impudence which is almost ludicrous. Benedicite Jesu Maria! you are the most obstinate man I ever saw. If I had known you would have been so stubborn, I would not for a thousand crowns have handled you in that sort. I never did so to man before you.' These apologies the half-roasted abbot was compelled to receive as sufficient. The story, besides being a curious picture of the age, may serve to show that by force used or menaced the nobles of Scotland extorted from the catholic beneficiaries those surrenders and alienation of the church patrimony which took place at the Reformation. But it was plain that this course of proceeding must terminate, unless there were means retained of keeping up nominally, at least, those ranks of churchmen in whom the law vested church patrimony, and from whose grants the nobles might expect to secure it to themselves. Accordingly, it seems to have been chiefly with the purpose of continuing and legalizing this spoliation, that in the year 1672, by a convention held at Leith, the Book of Discipline was reviewed, and it was resolved that the names and titles of bishops and archbishops should remain in the church, being subject to the general assemblies of the church in spiritualibus, and to the king in temporalibus. Even the resolute spirit of John Knox (though urged to resistance by Theodore Beza) seems to have acquiesced in this as a necessary measure; but we agree with the learned author of his life, that his doing so could only arise from the despair of being able effectually to oppose the introduction of this species of episcopacy. The bishops thus established as the means of transferring the church rents and tythes by lease or sale to the nobility, were long known by the name of tulchan bishops, from a stuffed skin of a calf called a tulchan, placed before a cow to induce her to suffer herself to be milked. This species of church government was a mixture of episcopacy and presbytery, both of which might be said to exist in the same time and in the same country, the latter for actually exercising the duties of the ministry, the former for managing or mismanaging what remained of the property of the church.

There ceased not to be a warm and violent opposition to the name and order of bishops in the general assembles of the kirk,

which displayed itself at various times, and with more or less suecess, untill 1580, when an act of the General Assembly declared the office of bishop, as then used in Scotland, to be an unwarrantable usurpation on the freedom of God's church. Soon after this period, however, King James, who had experienced much inconvenience, and sometimes gross insults, from the presbyterian clergy, and who was moreover desirous of obtaining and exercising a certain influence in church affairs, obtained, in 1585, from the General Assembly, a very limited acquiescence permitting the name and office of a bishop still to remain in the church. A statute, in 1598, ratified the sitting of such ministers in parliament as should be admitted by the king to the office of prelates a provision so alarming to the more rigid presbyterians that one of them likened it to the Trojan horse, and another exclaimed Busk him as bonnile and bring him in as fairly as you can, we see him well enough, we see the horns of his mitre. In 1610 the king at length succeeded in obtaining the restitution of the order of bishops. And thus the church government of Scotland fluctuated from its mixed state to proper presbytery, and from thence to moderate episcopacy.

The order of bishops was thus restored, but upon the most limited footing, and differing in many respects from the more solidly founded and highly ornamented architecture of episcopacy in England. The Scottish prelates possessed no ecclesiastical jurisdiction or pre-eminence; their sees were poorly endowed with the wretched remains of those temporalities which had not been alienated by the crown; their dress was a plain black gown, and the ceremonies used in the church were few, simple, and such as in themselves were, to say the very least, decent and unexceptionable.

But while it would be difficult for an impartial person, at the present day, to see any thing in the order of bishops, as thus reestablished, which could threaten either the Christian or civil liberties of the kingdom of Scotland, and while on the contrary it seemed to provide for the order, dignity, and stability of the church, it must be owned that, considered with reference to the state of Scotland at the time, the experiment was ill-timed, and excited suspicion in all ranks of people.

The nobles, the proudest in Europe, were indignant at the pretensions of the spiritual lords to precede them on public occasions; while as the poorest in Europe, they were also aware that to support episcopacy on a respectable footing, they would be necessarily, sooner or later, compelled to refund a part of the temporalities of the church, which they enjoyed either by simoniacal compacts with former prelates, or by grants from the crown.

The inferior clergy, instead of considering the rank of bishops as an object of ambition to which their order might aspire, which

might give them a direct vote and voice in the management of the state, and combine them with the other orders of government, held the office in a sort of sacred horror. They termed the restoration of episcopacy a rebuilding of the walls of Jericho; the bishops' pre-eminence in the church, the precedence of Dagon; and their seats in parliament, the means of introducing the arbitrary will of the monarch, on whom they were dependent, into the council of estates of the kingdom.

Notwithstanding these general prejudices the hierarchy was established without any express opposition, although its members held but a doubtful rank between the secular nobility and the presbyterian clergy, coutemned by the pride of the former, and hated by the jealous emulation of the latter. Success on this main point led James to attempt further alterations in the discipline of the church of Scotland, by introducing a certain part of the ceremonial of the church of England.

way

The common people, always liable to the most exaggerated impressions, had been preached into such a holy hatred of popery, that they saw its type and shadow in every thing which approached even to decency in the order of worship; so that, as a satirist expressed it, they thought it impossible they could ever lose their to heaven provided they left Rome behind them. The extreme unpopularity of every thing approaching to ritual or ornament was so manifest, that even in the first visit which James made to his native kingdom after assuming the crown of England, not all the delight of again seeing their sovereign could prevent the inhabitants of Edinburgh from manifesting the greatest disgust at the splendid ceremonial of his chapel. Notwithstanding the aversion thus openly testified, James forcibly introduced into the national church of Scotland five points of ceremony, well known by the name of the Articles of Perth. They were, 1. That the eucharist should be received in a kneeling posture. 2. That it might be received in private in cases of extreme sickness. 3. That baptism might, in certain cases, be privately administered. 4. That the youth should receive episcopal confirmation. 5. That the anniversaries of the Birth, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of our Saviour, with that of the Descent of the Holy Ghost, should be observed as holidays. Decent, reasonable, and moderate as these propositions must appear to every member of the church of England, they were totally uncongenial with the habits in which the Scottish clergy had been educated, and with the views, right or wrong, which they entertained of the reformation of religion. The leading ministers appealed to the settled state of their church, which had subsisted for nearly sixty years, confirmed by ecclesiastical constitutions, acts of parliament, the approbation of foreign churches, and the manifold experience of

God's

God's blessings. And they urged that ceremonials, supposing then in themselves things indifferent, cease to be so and become noxious when they give offence or scandal to tender consciences, or even to the weakness of our brethren. Even the Scottish bishops, aud especially Spottiswoode, archbishop of St. Andrews, gave a reluctant consent to these measures, and not without urging the maxim of Saint Augustin, that as even a change for the better disturbs by its novelty, so all innovation, not obviously useful, must be dangerous, by exciting disturbance without any countervailing advantage. On the 4th of August, 1621, however, the Articles of Perth were ratified by parliament, and perhaps an account of the omens attendant on that concurrence between the crown and nobles, which fixed these innovations on the church, will best express the feelings and sentiments of the presbyterians.

When all the acts were now concluded, and the ringleaders were insulting over the defenders of ancient orders, gaping for thanks and reward, and wishing every one to have wings to flee to court with the report; the grand commissioner, rising from the throne to ratifie the acts by touch of the sceptre, at that same very moment was sent from the heavens in at the windows of the house, which was dark before by reason of the darkness of the day, an extraordinary great lightening, after the first a second, and after the second a third more fearful. Immediately after the lightening followed an extraordinary darkness, which astonished all that were in the house. The lightenings were seconded with three loud claps of thunder. Many within the parliament-house thought them to be shots of cannons out of the castle. It appeared to all that dwelt within the compass of ten or twelve miles, that the clouds stood right above the town and overshadowing that part only. The beacon standing in the centre of Leith haven was beaten down with one of the blasts of thunder. After the lightening, darkness and thunder followed a shoure of hailstones, extraordinarie great, and last of all raine in such abundance, that it made gutters run like little brookes. The lords were imprisoned about the space of an hour and a half; servants rode home with footmantles, and their masters withdrew themselves, some to their coach and some to their foot. So the five articles were not honoured with the carrying of the honours, or riding of the estates in ranks. In the meantime, the Castle thundered with their fierie cannons, according to the custome used at other parliaments. This Saturday, the fourth of August, was called by the people black Saturday. It began with fire from the earth in the morning, and ended with fire from heaven at the evening. When the fear was past, then durst atheists scoff and say, that as the law was given with fire from Mount Sinai, so did these fires confirm their lawes.'-Calderwood's History of the Church of Scotland, p.783.

Inauspicious as this commencement was, not indeed from the accidental circumstances mentioned by Calderwood, but from the disposition which the people so plainly indicated by thus interpret

ing ordinary natural appearances as marks of the divine displeasure, it did not prevent Charles I. from following up the plan of his father; and while he vexed the English church by the introduction of new observances into their ritual, from labouring with more zeal than prudence to bring that of Scotland to the same model.

By wringing indirectly out of the nobility the tithes to which they had acquired a right at the Reformation, the king gave the greatest possible offence to that powerful body without immediately benefiting the great body of the landholders. But the introduction of the book of canons and liturgy, steps which James had meditated, but from which he receded in just apprehension, set the seal on the rashness of Charles. A casual tumult arose among the meanest and most worthless of the audience, which was commenced by a female, of whom the proverb is still current,

That when a woman scolding mad is,

We call her daft as Jenny Geddes.

Yet so wide and so general was the disaffection to the government, that this slight tumult soon spread into a general, almost an universal national insurrection, led by a discontented nobility, inflamed by preachers who boasted something of learning and more of rude eloquence, and supported by a hardy population, who conceived that in fighting the cause of presbytery they were defending that of heaven. The success of the Scottish in two successive wars, or rather abortive attempts at hostility, gave great and preponderating weight to the clergy of that kingdom, in whose cause and by whose exhortations the war had been undertaken. We wish to speak of these men with the respect which in many points of view they deserve. Their leaders possessed a competent share of learning and no small quantity of natural parts; their lives were, generally speaking, regular, even to ascetic severity; and they rejected and condemned even innocent pleasures and elegant pursuits, as unworthy of men dedicated to the explanation and maintenance of true religion. But in the imperfect state of humanity, even virtues carried to extremity run into error and indeed into vice. Conscious rectitude of intention hurried these eminent men (for many of them deserved that name) into the extremes of spiritual pride and intolerance; and what they esteemed the indubitable truth of their cause made them too anxious to enforce their tenets to hesitate, about the means of accomplishing an event so desirable. Their friends were the friends, their opponents were the enemies, of heaven; it was scarcely possible to do too much in behalf of the one or for the suppression of the other. The theocracy which the clergy asserted in behalf of the kirk was not in those days so distinctly understood or so prudently regulated, but that its administrators too often interfered with the civil rule of the kingdom. The Scottish ministers remembered the saying

of