THE

LEADERS OF THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION

 

THE NATURE AND NEED OF THE REFORMATION

.PATRICK HAMILTON

THE OPPRESSED AND THE OPPRESSORS

GEORGE WISHART   

KNOX AS LEADER OF OUR REFORMATION

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN KNOX

ALESIUS

 

THE NATURE AND NEED OF THE REFORMATION.

 

With the single exception of the period which covers the introduction and first marvellous triumphs of Christianity, the Reformation of the sixteenth century must be owned as perhaps the greatest and most glorious revolution in the history of the human race. And the years of earnest contendings and heroic sufferings which prepared the way for its triumph in many lands and issued in its cruel suppression in others, and the story of the men who by God’s grace were enabled to bear the brunt of the battle and to lead their countrymen on to victory or to martyrdom, will ever have a fascination for all in whose hearts faith in the great truths, then more clearly brought to light, has not yet altogether evapor­ated. The movement then initiated was no mere effort to get quit of acknowledged scandals, which had long been grieved over but never firmly dealt with; no mere desire to lop off a few later accretions, which had gathered round and obscured the faith once delivered to the saints; no mere “return to the Augustinian, or the Nicene, or the Ante-Nicene age,” but a vast progress beyond any previous age since the death of St John—a deeper plunge into the meaning of revelation than had been made by Augustine, or Anselm, or St Bernard, or á Kempis, or Wycliffe, or Tauler. Its object was to get back to the divine sources of Christianity,—to know, and understand, and appropriate it as it came fresh and pure from the lips of the Son of God and His inspired apostles, not excluding that chosen vessel to whom the grace had been given “to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.” It was, in fact, a return to the old Gospel so attractively set forth by him in his Epistles, and verified to the reformers by their own inmost spiritual experience under deep convictions of sin and shortcoming. The cry of their awakened consciences had been, “How shall we sinners have relief from our load and be justified before God?” And this, as has been said, was just the old question put to the apostle himself by the jailer at Philippi, “What must I do to be saved?” And the answer their own experience warranted them with one accord to proclaim was still, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, believe in the riches of His pardoning mercy, in the merit of His atoning death, in the freeness and power of His efficacious grace”. By believing, however, they meant, and were careful to explain that they meant, not a mere intellectual assent to the truth of the facts, but such an assent as drew with it the trust of the heart and the personal surrender of the soul to Christ; or—to use language of somewhat later origin—the individual appropriation of the freely offered Saviour, with all His fulness of blessing, pardon, and righteousness by His one offering once offered, and renewal into His own image by the continuous indwelling of His Holy Spirit.

Such was the animating principle which gave power to the teaching of the reformers in all lands, and which constitutes still the central article of a standing or a falling church to all their true-hearted successors—Christ crucified for our sins, raised again for our justification, and now exalted to the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens as Prince and Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sin and all needed grace to those who thus believe in Him, and are brought into union with Him. And the Reformed Church will never perish or decay while it continues to set forth this Gospel, and is honoured by its divine Head to bring it home to the hearts and consciences of men, with the same power as its first teachers were honoured with in the brave days of old. For it must never be forgotten, I repeat, that the Reformation movement was not only the introduction of a more scriptural and scientific method of exhibiting Christian doctrine, and simple unfolding of its teaching as to man’s fallen state and the remedy their heavenly Father had in His love provided for them; not only the reassertion of the supremacy of the written Word of God over human traditions, as well as of the right of all Christian men and women to have direct access to that blessed Word; not only the translation into the vernacular—German, English, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish—and the circulation throughout Western Europe of that which for ages had been to the Christian laity as a book that is sealed; but it was also, above all this, the infusion of a new and higher life into the churches. We fall short of a full comprehension of the movement if we fail to recognise that the God of all grace and blessing was then pleased to “send a plentiful rain to confirm His inheritance when it was weary,” to grant a second Pentecost to the church, to make the people willing in the day of His power, and to pour out His Spirit in rich abundance upon men.

With all the conscious and unconscious preparation which had paved the way for them, the men who were God’s chosen instruments at that crisis were made deeply to feel and humbly to own that it was God Himself who had led them on—at times by ways they had not thought of; that it was He who had upheld them in their extremity when all human power seemed to be arrayed against them; that it was He who, when their resources were exhausted, was pleased, in the day when they cried unto Him, to hear their prayer and revive their hopes by the plentiful outpouring of His Spirit. How feelingly this was acknowledged by Luther at various crises in his life is known to all who are in any measure acquainted with his thrilling story. No one could have more constantly in his heart or more frequently on his lips the Hebrew psalmist’s song of holy confidence, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea... There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God.”

There was also that other which, under reverses and discouragements, was the solace of our own reformer, “If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us: then they had swallowed us up quick... Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth.” As they mused the fire burned and found expression in such songs of holy confid­ence as—

“A sure stronghold our God is He,

A trusty shield and weapon ;

Our help He’ll be, and set us free

 Whatever ill may happen.

Through our own force we nothing can,

Straight were we lost for ever,

But for us fights the proper Man,

By God sent to deliver.

Ask ye who this may be ?

Christ Jesus named is He,

Of Sabaoth the Lord Sole God to be adored,

’Tis He must win the battle.”

“ If God were not upon our side

When foes around us rage,

Were not Himself our help and guide

When bitter war they wage,

Were He not Israel’s mighty shield,

To whom their utmost crafts must yield,

We surely must have perished.”

By the time at which reforming influences began manifestly to show themselves in Scotland, that grand medieval organisation, which had supplanted the simpler arrangements of the old Celtic church, had in its turn exhausted its life powers, and shown unmistakable signs of deep-seated corruption and hopeless decay. Whatever good it may have been honoured to do in times past,—in keeping alive the knowledge of God and of things divine in the midst of “a darkness which might be felt,” in promoting a higher civilisation than the Celtic, in alleviating the evils of the feudalism which Anglo-Norman settlers had brought in, in founding parishes and universities and some other institutions which, with a purified church and revived Christian life, were to be a source of blessing after it was swept away, —yet now at last it had grossly failed to keep alive among the common people true devotion, or to give access to the sources at which the flame might have been rekindled; it had failed to provide educated men for its ordinary cures, to raise the masses from the rudeness and ignorance in which they were still involved, and even to maintain that hearty sympathy with them and that kindly interest in their temporal welfare which its best men in its earlier days had shown. It con­tinued to have its services in a language which had for ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely circulated among them. It did not, when the invention of printing put it in its power, make any effort to circulate among them the Holy Book, that they might read therein, in their own tongue, the message of God’s love. No doubt it had its pictures and images, its mystery plays and ceremonies, which it deemed fit books for children and the unlearned. But it forgot that these children were growing in capacity, even if allowed to grow up untrained; that “to credulous simplicity was succeeding a spirit of eager curiosity, an impatience of mere authority, and a determination to search into the foundation of things”; and that, if it was to maintain its place, it must not only keep abreast but ahead of advancing intelligence and morality. But the old church began greatly to decline just as the laity began to rise. Bishop Kennedy, I suppose, was almost its last preaching bishop; and the character of the preaching, so far as preaching was still continued by the friars and some of the inferior clergy, was not generally fitted to supply the lack of Bibles and catechisms, and other vernacular books of instruction. It never grappled, as it ought, with the problem of lightening the burdens it had long exacted of the peasantry; but refused almost to the last moment to ease even the most galling of them. It never grappled, as it ought, with the problem of the education of the masses; and what was done for those of the community in more fortunate circumstances was done more by the efforts of a few noble-minded individuals than by any corporate action of Church or State. There is not among all its codes of canons anything approaching to the clear ringing utterances of our First Book of Discipline concerning the necessity and advantages of education.

Not only had the life powers of the medieval church been exhausted and decay set in, but corruption, positive and gross corruption, had reached an alarming height. There were the indolence and neglect of duty which wealth too often brings in its train; the covert secularising of that wealth, just as in the old Celtic church, by various devices, to get it into the hands of unqualified men and minors; luxury, avarice, oppression, simony, shameless pluralities, and crass ignorance; and above all that celibate sys­tem, which nothing would persuade them honestly to abandon, though it had proved to be a yoke they could not bear, and was producing only too generally results humiliating and disastrous to themselves and to all who came under their influence. The proof of this does not rest merely or even mainly on the statements of Knox, Alesius, and Spottiswood, nor on the representations of Lindsay and the Wedderburns. The fact, as both the late Dr David Laing and Dr Joseph Robertson have shown, and the late Bishop Forbes has sorrowfully acknowledged, is confessed and deplored in the canons of their councils, in the Acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in the writings of their own best men. The harsh measures to which men themselves so vulnerable had recourse to maintain their position, the relentless cruelties they perpetrated on men of unblemished character, amiable disposition, deep-seated conviction and thorough Christian earnestness, could not fail in the end to turn the tide against them, and arouse feelings of indignation which on any favourable opportunity would induce the nation to sweep them away.

The corruptions in the doctrine of the church were hardly less notable than those in the lives of its clergy. The sufficiency and supremacy of the written Word of God were denied, and co­ordinate authority was claimed for tradition. The Virgin Mary and the saints departed were asserted to share the office which Scripture reserves for the one Mediator between God and man. Pen­ances and other external acts of work-righteousness were alleged to co-operate in the pardon of sin with the “one obedience” by which “many are made righteous.” The sacraments were asserted to produce their effect ex opere operate,—not by the working of the Spirit in them that by faith receive them. Belief in the literal transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper was rigidly enforced and substituted for that spiritual presence and spiritual manducation which the earlier church had maintained. The doctrine of a purgatory after this life was invented, and the virtue of masses for the dead therein detained was persistently taught and required to be believed. The Roman church was affirmed to be the mother and mistress of the churches, and its head to be the successor of St Peter and the Vicar of Christ.

Yet it must never be forgotten that, even in these degenerate days, there were those among the ministers of the church who wept in secret over the abominations that were done, who longed for the dawn of a better day, and, in their parishes or cloisters or colleges, sought to prepare the way for it, and who succeeded in doing so with many of their younger comrades, and only made up their minds in the end to abandon the old church when all their efforts for its revival proved vain. Nay, the men who initiated and carried to a successful issue the struggle for a more thorough reformation than the others desired, the martyrs, confessors, and exiles, were almost all from the ranks of the priesthood of the old church—from the regular as well as from the secular priesthood; from the Dominican and Franciscan monasteries as well as from the Augustinian abbeys; and from none more largely than the Augustinian Priory of St Andrews, and the College of St Leonard founded in connection with it, notwithstanding that its prior for the time being was so far from what he ought to have been. At least twenty priests joined the reformed congregation of St Andrews in 1559-60, and among them more than one who had sat in judgment on the martyrs and assisted in their condemnation. A much larger number were ultimately admitted as readers in the Reformed Church.

How was the great revolution which was to bring the church back from these corruptions of life and doctrine prepared for? Ebrard supposes that witnesses for holy living and simple faith, but partially connected with the dominant church, were never from Celtic times entirely wanting in Britain; and it may have been that, through Richard Rolle and a few other hermits, the feeble spark in the smoking wick continued to smoulder on till it was blown into a flame by Wycliffe. At any rate it was blown into a flame by him and his poor priests; and from their time witness after witness arose to contend for the right of the laity to read the Word of God, and to maintain that men were saved by the merits of Christ and should pray to Him alone, that there was no purgatory in the popish sense, and that the pope was not the Vicar of Christ. Wycliffe’s poor priests, when persecuted in the south, naturally sought shelter among the moors and mosses of the north. The district of Kyle and Cunningham was “a receptakle of Goddis servandis of old,” where their doctrines were cherished till the dawn of the Reformation. In 1406 or 1407 James Resby, one of these priests, is found teaching as far north as Perth, and for his teaching he was accused and condemned to a martyr’s death. A similar fate is said to have befallen another in Glasgow about 1422, in all probability the Scottish Wycliffite whose letter to his bishop has recently been unearthed in a Hussite MS. at Vienna; and in 1433 Paul Craw or Crawar, a Bohemian, for disseminating similar opinions, was burned at the market cross in St Andrews. These were not in all probability the only grim triumphs of Laurence, Abbot of Lindores, one of the first rectors in the University of St Andrews, who during so many years “gave no rest to heretics,” but they are all of whom records have been preserved to our time. The fact that every Master of Arts in the University of St Andrews had to take an oath to defend the church against the Lollards, and the other fact that the Scottish Parliament in 1425 enjoined that every bishop should make inquiry anent heretics and Lollards, and that where any such were found, they should be punished as the law of holy church requires, speak more significantly of the alarm they had occasioned than these sporadic martyrdoms. Still more, perhaps, does the abuse Fordun, or rather his continuator, heaps on them, bear witness to the alarm they had caused. Yet at the very close of the century, and in the old haunt, we find no fewer than thirty processed, and through the kindness of the king more gently dealt with than the ecclesiastical authorities wished; three of the most resolute—namely, Campbell of Cessnock, his noble wife, and a priest who officiated as their chaplain and read the New Testament to them—being released when at the stake.

Reforming tendencies in the sixteenth century, it has been said, first showed themselves in Scot­and in the reassertion of “those principles, catholic but anti-papal,” which had been maintained in the preceding century in the Councils of Constance and Basle. The decisions of the for­mer were received in Scotland in 1418, and allegiance to Benedict XIII was finally renounced. A Scottish doctor had taken a rather prominent part in the proceedings of the latter, though the Scottish Church, like the others, ultimately fell away from that council and the pope elected by it, and under Bishop Kennedy was reconciled to the Roman See and to Pope Eugenius. Scotland had had no Grosteste, no Anselm or Bradwardine among its prelates in the middle ages, no Wycliffe among its priests. Duns Scotus, the one theologian before the sixteenth century who claimed Scottish birth and European fame, never seems to have taught in his native land. Chief among its doctors in the beginning of the sixteenth century stood John Major, a native of East Lothian, who taught with distinguished success, first in Paris, then in Glasgow, after that in St Andrews, then once more in Paris, and finally in St Andrews again. Melanchthon, while ridiculing his scholastic ways, places him at the head of the doctors of the Sorbonne. The remembrance of his early labours in Montaigu College had not died out when Calvin entered it, and probably he had returned to it before Calvin left. Patrick Hamilton and Buchanan may possibly have been brought into contact with him while there, as they, Alesius, and John Wedderburn afterwards were in St Andrews, and John Hamilton and Knox in Glasgow. He was a true disciple of D’Ailly and Gerson, but like them was warmly attached to the dominant church and opposed to the heretics of his time. He taught, as they had done, that the church, assembled in general council, may judge and even depose a pope and reform abuses in the church; that papal excommunications have no force unless conformed to justice, and do not necessarily prevent a man who dies under them from going to heaven. He sharply censured the vices of the Roman court, and of the bishops and clergy of his time, particularly those of his native land. He is especially severe in censuring their immorality and ignorance; and, like Wycliffe, condemns the monks and friars for inveigling into their order young novices who had no vocation for a celibate life, and ought rather to have been encouraged to enter into honest wedlock. But he was a stern opponent of heresy—Lutheran as well as Wycliffite—a subtle defender of Roman doctrine; and in dedicating to Archbishop Betoun his Commentary on St Matthew’s Gospel, he congratulated him on the success of his cruel measures against Hamilton and the heretics.

 

PATRICK HAMILTON.

 

It has not been very clearly ascertained how or when the opinions and writings of Luther were first introduced into Scotland. M. de la Tour, who in 1527 suffered in Paris for heresy, was accused of having vented various Lutheran opinions while in Edinburgh in attendance on the Duke of Albany. This, of course, must have been before 1523. On the 9th June 1523, the same day that John Major was received as Principal of the Paedagogium, or St Mary’s College, Patrick Hamilton was incorporated into the University of St Andrews; and on 3rd October 1524 he was admitted as a member of the Faculty of Arts. If he did not from the latter date act as a regent in the University, he probably took charge of some of the young noblemen or gentlemen attending the classes. At that date he was probably more Erasmian than Lutheran, though of that more earnest school who were ultimately to outgrow their teacher, and find their congenial home in a new church.

Patrick Hamilton was born in 1503 or 1504 at Stonehouse in Lanarkshire, or at Kincavel near Linlithgow. His father, a natural son of the first Lord Hamilton, had been knighted for his bravery, and rewarded by his sovereign with the above lands and barony. His mother was a daughter of Alexander, Duke of Albany, the second son of James II, so that he had in his veins the noblest blood in the land. His cousins, John and James Hamilton, were in due time raised to episcopal rank in the unreformed church of Scotland, and several others of his relations received high ecclesiastical promotion. Marked out for a similar destiny, Patrick was carefully educated, and, according to the corrupt custom of the time, was in his fourteenth year appointed to the Abbacy of Ferne in Rossshire, to maintain himself in comfort while continuing his studies abroad. Like many of his aristocratic countrymen he went first to the University of Paris, and probably to the College of Montaigu, where Major, the great Scottish scholastic doctor, was then teaching with much éclat, and gathering round him there, as afterwards at St Andrews, an ardent band of youthful admirers, several of whom in the end were to advance beyond their preceptor, and to lend the influence of their learning and piety to the side of Luther and the reformers. Before the close of 1520 he took the degree of M.A. at the University of Paris, and soon after left Paris for Louvain, to avail himself of the facilities for linguistic studies provided there, or to enjoy personal intercourse with Erasmus, the patron of the new learning. He is said while there to have made great progress in the languages and in philosophy, and to have been specially attracted towards the philosophy of Plato. With the Sophists of Louvain, as Luther terms them, he could have had no sympathy. But there were some there, as well as at Paris, whose hearts God had touched, to whom he could not fail to be drawn. He may even have met with those Augustinian monks of Antwerp whom these Sophists so soon after his departure sent to heaven in a chariot of fire, and whose martyrdom unsealed in Luther’s breast the fount of sacred song.

In the autumn of 1522, or the spring of 1523, he returned to Scotland, and, after a brief visit to his relatives in Linlithgowshire, appears to have come on to St Andrews. Probably, along with Alesius, Buchanan, and John Wedderburn, he there heard those lectures on the Gos­pels which Major afterwards published in Paris and dedicated to the Archbishop of St Andrews and other prominent churchmen in Scotland. But his sympathies were more with the young canons of the Augustinian priory than with the Old Scholastic; and probably it was that he might take a place among the teachers of their daughter college of St Leonard’s that he was received as a member of the Faculty of Arts. Skilled in the art of sacred music, which the alumni of that college were bound specially to cultivate, he composed what the musicians call a mass, arranged in parts for nine voices, and acted himself as leader of the choir when it was sung in the cathedral. He is said to have taken on him the priesthood about this time, that he might be formally admitted “to preach the word of God.” But he was not then of age for priests’ orders, and Dr David Laing is doubtful if he was in orders at all, and certainly no mention is made of his degradation from orders before his martyrdom, and the final summons of Betoun seems to imply that he had never been authorised to preach at all.

The years 1525 and 1526 were very unquiet years in Scotland, various factions contending with varying success for the possession of the person of the young king. It was on the 17th July of the former year that his Parliament passed its first Act against the new opinions, in which, after asserting that the realm had ever been clean “of all sic filth and vice”. In consequence of a letter from the pope, urging the young king to keep his realm free from stain of heresy, the scope of the Act was extended in 1527 by the chancellor and Lords of Council so that it might apply to natives of the kingdom as well as to strangers resorting to it for purposes of commerce.

In 1526 the primate, Archbishop James Betoun, uncle of the cardinal, having taken a keen part in the political contentions of the day with the faction which lost, had to escape for a time from St Andrews, and, disguised as a shepherd, to tend a flock of sheep for three months on the hills of Fife, on the high grounds of Kennoway, immediately to the east of where the railway now reaches its summit level. It was at this juncture that copies of the New Testament of Tyndale’s translation were brought over from the Low Countries by the Scottish traders to the seaports of Aberdeen, Montrose, St Andrews, and Leith. Most of them are said to have been taken to St Andrews and put in circulation there in the absence of the archbishop. One was present there at that time who had long treasured the precious saying of Erasmus, “Let us eagerly read the Gospel, but let us not only read, but live the Gospel”; and who seized the golden opportunity to impress the saying on others, and invite longing souls to quench their thirst at those wells of living water which had so marvellously been opened to them for a season.

During the months when the primate was in concealment, and in those which followed his return, Patrick Hamilton came out more earnestly than he had done before as an evangelist and an advocate of the great truths, for which ultimately he was to be called to lay down his life. His conduct could not long escape the notice of the returned archbishop. I do not suppose that he was naturally cruel, nor after his recent misfortunes likely, without consideration, to embroil himself with the Hamiltons, with whom in the tortuous politics of the times he had often acted. But he had those about him who were less timid and more cruel, especially his nephew, the future cardinal. He was himself ambitious and crafty, and about this very time was exerting all his influence to obtain special favours from the pope without the sanction of the king. He knew that the holy father had written the sovereign requiring him to keep his realm free from heresy, and no doubt he and his scheming nephew thought that by their zeal in this matter they would discredit the opposition of the king and his advisers to their ambitious schemes at the papal court. Still, he was anxious to perform the ungrateful task in the way least offensive to the Hamiltons. So while issuing his summons against the re­former to appear and answer the charges which had been brought against him, he did not at­ tempt at once to restrain his personal liberty; he would rather, if he could, rid the kingdom of his presence without imbruing his hands in his blood. And that was the result actually attained.

Some of Hamilton’s opponents even, touched by his youth, his illustrious descent, his engaging manners and noble character, joined with his friends in urging him to avoid by flight the danger which impended. He yielded to their counsels, and, along with two friends and a servant, made his escape to the Continent. The story of his residence there has been graphically told by Principal Lorimer and Dr Merle D’Aubigné; and the latter has the merit of explaining why Hamilton did not carry out his original intention of visiting Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg, as well as Frith, Tyndale, and Lambert at Marbourg.

At the very time he arrived on the Continent, the plague was raging in Wittenberg. “Two persons died of it in Melanchthon’s house.” Luther himself was suddenly taken ill. “All who could do so, and especially the students, quitted the town.” Thus the absence of documents bearing on his alleged sojourn at the Saxon university is naturally explained. He went to the younger University of Marbourg in Hesse, and prepared there, and publicly disputed, those theses that most fully and systematically set forth the doctrines which he mainly taught, and for which at last he suffered. He was warmly beloved by Lambert of Avignon, who was then the most distinguished theological professor in the infant university, as well as by others with whom he was brought into contact; and he would have been gladly retained by them, could he have been persuaded to remain in Germany: but his heart yearned to return to his native land, and once more proclaim there the truths which had now become to him more precious and engrossing than before.

His faith had been confirmed, and his spirit quickened, by living for a time among earnest and decided Christians; and in the autumn of 1527 he set out once more for Scotland, pre­pared for any fate that might await him, not counting even life dear unto him if he might finish his course with joy, and bear faithful witness to his Master’s truth, where before he had shrunk back from an ordeal so terrible. He appears first to have resorted to his native district, and made known to relatives, friends, and neighbours about Linlithgow that Gospel of the grace of God which gave strength and peace to his own spirit. In his discourses and conversations he dwelt chiefly on the great and fundamental truths which had been brought into prominence by the reformers, and avoided subjects of doubtful disputation. His own gentle bearing gained favour for his opinions and success in his labours, and it won for him the heart of a young lady of noble birth, to whom he united himself in marriage, following in this the example of Luther and others of the German reformers.

Archbishop Betoun being then on the other side of the Forth, in the neighbouring abbey of Dunfermline, could not fail to hear of his doings or to desire to silence him. But neither could he fail, in the state of the political parties in Scotland at the time, to recognise “that a heretic with the power of the Hamiltons at his back was more to be dreaded than Luther himself,” and must be dealt with very cautiously. It was long supposed that, if not at the king’s express desire, as Bishop Lesley seems to suggest, then certainly from his own wariness, the archbishop did not at first venture formally to renew his old summons, but invited the reformer to St Andrews to a friendly conference with himself and other chiefs of the church on such points as might seem to stand in need of reform, and that Hamilton accepted the invitation. At first, it has been said, he was well received: “All of them displayed a conciliatory spirit; all appeared to recognise the evils in the church; some of them seemed even to share on some points the sentiments of Hamilton.” He left the conference not without hope of some other than the sad issue he had at first anticipated. He was per­mitted for nearly a month to move about with freedom in the city, to dispute in the schools of the university, and privately to confer with all who chose to resort to him at the lodging which had been provided for him. It was evidently the intention of those who were deepest in the plot against him, that he should have ample time allowed him to express his sentiments fully and unmistakably, and even should be tempted by dissemblers, like Friar Campbell, to unbosom himself in private on matters as to which he refrained from saying much in public—the many alterations required in doctrine and in the administration of the sacraments and accustomed rites.

It is said that the archbishop still desired that he should again save himself by flight, and there is nothing in the summons flatly inconsistent with this; but he and his friends took the credit of the terrible deed as promptly as if they had planned and intended it from the first. They also assembled their armed retainers, that when the days of truce had expired they might be able to hold their prisoner against all attempts to rescue him. The reformer refused to flee, affirming that he had come to the city for the very purpose of confirming, if need be, by the sacrifice of his life, the doctrines he had taught. He even anticipated the time fixed for his appearance, and had one more conference with the archbishop and his doctors, who even then had come to a formal decision that the articles charged against him were heretical. The same evening he was seized and imprisoned in the castle, and next day was brought out for public trial and con­demnation in the Abbey Church or cathedral of St Andrews.

Among the articles with which he was charged, and the truth of which he admitted and main­tained, the most important were: “That a man is not justified by works, but by faith alone”; “That faith, hope, and charity are so linked together, that he who hath one of them hath all, and he that lacketh one lacketh all”; and “That good works make not a good man, but that a good man doth good works.” On being challenged by his accuser with having avowed other heretical opinions, he affirmed it was not lawful to worship images or to pray to the saints; and maintained that “it is reason and leisome to all men that have a soul to read the Word of God, and that they may understand the same, and in special the latter-will and testament of Christ Jesus.” These truths, which have been the source of life and strength to many, were to him the cause of condemnation and death; and on the last day of February 1527-28, the same day the sentence was passed, it was remorselessly executed before the gates of St Salvator’s College. “Nobly,” as I have said elsewhere, “did the martyr confirm the minds of the many godly youths he had gathered round him, by his resolute bearing, his gentleness and patience, his steadfast adherence to the truths he had taught, and his heroic endurance of the fiery ordeal through which he had to pass to his rest and reward.” The harrowing details of his six long hours of torture have been preserved for us by his friend Alesius, himself a sorrowing witness of the fearful tragedy. “He was rather roasted than burned,” he tells us. It may be that his persecutors had not deliberately planned thus horribly to protract his sufferings— though such cruelty was not unknown in France, either then or in much later times. They were as yet but novices at such revolting work, and all things seemed to conspire against them. The execution had been hurried on before a sufficiency of dry wood had been provided for the fire. The fury of the storm, which had prevented the martyr’s brother from crossing the Forth with troops to rescue him, was not yet spent. With a fierce wind from the east sweeping up North Street, it would be a difficult matter in such a spot to kindle the pile and keep it burning, or to prevent the flames, when fierce, from being so blown aside as to be almost as dangerous to the surrounding crowd as to the tortured victim. They did so endanger his accuser, the traitor Campbell, and “set fire to his cowl, and put him in such a fray, that he never came to his right mind.” But, through all his excruciating sufferings, the martyr held fast his confidence in God and in his Saviour, and the faith of many in the truths he taught was only the more confirmed by witnessing their mighty power on him.

 

THE OPPRESSED AND THE OPPRESSORS.

 

Archbishop Betoun thought that by Patrick Hamilton’s death he had extinguished Luther­anism in Scotland. The University of Louvain applauded his deed; and so also, I regret to say, did John Major, the old Scottish Gallican, then resident at Paris, and preparing for the press his Commentary on the Gospels, the first part of which was to be dedicated to his old patron in Scotland, and was emphatically to express his approval of what that patron had done to root out the tares of Lutheranism. But, according to the well-known saying, “the reek of Patrick Hamilton infected all on whom it did blow.” His martyr death riveted for ever in the hearts of his friends the truths he had taught in his life. This was especially the case with the younger alumni in the colleges, and the less ignorant and dissolute in­mates of the priory and other monastic establishments in the city. As at a later period it was felt certain that a stern Covenanter had been detected when a suspected one refused to own that the killing of Archbishop Sharp was to be regarded as murder, so in these earlier days it was thought a sufficient mark of an incipient Lutheran if he could not be got to acknowledge that Hamilton had deserved his fate. On the charge that he had a copy of the English New Testament, and had been heard to say that Hamilton was no heretic, Henry Forrest was subjected to a rigorous imprisonment and a violent death. Forrest was a native of the county of Linlithgow, and had associated with Hamilton in St Andrews, and was the first to share his bloody baptism there. He was burned at the north kirk-style of the Abbey Church, that the heretics of Angus might see the fire and take warning from his fate. One for simply touching in his sermons with a firm hand on the corruptions of the clergy had to escape for his life. Another, whose history after being long forgotten has been again brought to light in our own day, for a similar offence was subjected to cruel imprisonment, and at last forced to flee from his native land.

The name of this confessor was Alexander Alane, and it is so entered in the Registers of St Andrews University; but it is by the name of Alexander Alesius, imposed on him by Melanchthon, that he has been chiefly known to posterity. It may admit of some doubt whether he was absolutely the first after the death of Hamilton to abandon his country and all he held dear, rather than renounce the faith the martyr had taught him, or crouch before the lecherous tyrant who had destined him to a filthy dungeon and a lingering death. But it admits of no doubt that he was the most notable of all the band of young Scottish exiles who had to leave their native country between the martyrdom of Hamilton and that of Wishart, and who were honoured to do faithful service in the cause of the Reformation in England and on the Continent. The story of Alesius, of the shameless cruelties which drove him from his native land, of the hardships he had to bear in the earlier years of his exile, of the high place he gained in the affections of Melanchthon and Beza, and the great work he was to do by his writ­ings and prelections for the Protestant churches of Germany, is one of the most interesting in the great movement of the age. But to be appreciated it must be told in detail, and as most of his work was done out of Scotland, I have decided to reserve it for a supplementary lecture. I must not, however, omit to mention here one special service which he was honoured to do for the cause in his native land soon after he left it, as it casts fresh light on the origin of the Reformation in Scotland. His first publication, printed in 1533, was entitled ‘Alexandri Alesii Epistola contra decretum quoddam episcoporum in Scotia, quod prohibet legere Novi Testamenti libros lingua vernacula.’ It brought into bold relief, and set high above all minor issues, what had been taught by Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, and maintained by the Lollards of Kyle in the fifteenth, and what had actually been urged as an additional charge against Patrick Hamilton. Save for this epistle of Alesius, and the controversy it occasioned, we might not have known that even in ignorant Scotland the bishops had been so far left to themselves as to issue such a decree. It is still more melancholy to think that even among the better informed controversialists of Germany one was found to champion their cause, and to maintain that there was nothing at variance with sound doctrine in the decree; that nothing but harm could come from the practice of allowing laymen to read the Scriptures in their own tongue; and that it could not fail to make them bad Christians and bad subjects, as Luther’s translation had done in Germany.

From the time that Alesius fled from Scotland down to the death of James V in the end of 1542, there was almost continual inquisition made for those who were suspected of having in their possession heretical books, including the New Testament in the vernacular, or who otherwise betrayed a leaning towards the new opinions. In 1532, we are told, “there was one great objuratioun of the favouraris of Mertene Lutar in the Abbay of Halyrudhous”; and of course their goods were forfeited to the crown. In 1534 a second great assize against heretics was held in the same place. The king, as the great Justiciar of the realm, was present in his scarlet robe, and took a prominent part in the proceedings. Betoun was also present and taking part. About sixteen are said to have been convicted and to have had their goods forfeited. James Hamilton, brother of the martyr, had been ordered by the king to flee the country, as he could not otherwise save him. His sister was persuaded to submit to the church. Two were reserved for a fiery death—Norman Gourlay and David Stratoun. Gourlay was a priest in secular orders, and “a man of reassonable erudition,” who had been abroad, and there imbibed the new opinions. These he abjured, and was, it seems, really burned for the greater crime of having married a wife. Stratoun was the brother of the Laird of Laureston in the Mearns, and had been reclaimed from his former godless life by his neighbour, Erskine of Dun, but by some free speeches had incurred the resentment of the notorious Prior Hepburn. They were burned at the Rood of Greenside, on the northern side of the Calton Hill. In the same year, Willock, M‘Alpine, and M‘Dowal had to escape into England.

In 1536, when the king and Betoun were abroad, there was comparative peace. In 1537 several were convicted at Ayr, and had their goods forfeited, among whom was Walter Steward, son of Lord Ochiltree. In 1538-39 many were accused and convicted in various burghs in which by that time reformed opinions were spreading, and many had to seek safety in flight. Among these last were Gavin Logie, principal regent in St Leonard’s College, who for a number of years had been exercising a marked influence on the students under him; John Fyfe, who under the designation of Joannes Faithus matriculated at Wittenberg in 1539, and under that of Joannes Fidelis was incorporated into the University of Frankfort on the Oder, and appointed Professor of Divinity there in 1547; George Buchanan, who at the king’s command had exposed the hypocrisy of the friars; and George Wishart, who had taught the Greek New Testament in Montrose; also Andrew Charters, John Lyne, and Thomas Cocklaw, John and Robert Richardson and Robert Logie, canons of the Augustinian Abbey of Cambuskenneth. Nearly all of these fugitives took refuge in England. Cocklaw, Calderwood tells us, for marrying a wife had been mewed up within stone walls, but his brother came with crowbars and released him. His goods, as well as those of his wife, were forfeited to the Crown. Large numbers of the wealthy burgesses, even after they had consented to abjure their opinions, were stripped of their possessions, among whom the burgesses of Dundee were conspicuous. “Nor was the good town of Stirling far behind Dundee in the same race of Christian glory. She had less wealth to resign,... but she brought to the altar a larger offering of saintly blood.”

On 1st March 1538-39, no fewer than four of her citizens were burned at one pile on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh. On the same day with them, and in the same place, perished one of the most sainted and interesting of Scotland’s martyrs—Thomas Forret, canon of the Augustinian Abbey of Inchcolm, and thereafter vicar of Dollar, who was universally admired for his attractive character. He taught his parishioners the ten commandments, penned a little catechism for their instruction, and caused a child to commit it to memory and to repeat it publicly, that it might be impressed on the hearts of his parishioners who could not read. He succeeded in leading several of the younger monks in the abbey to more evangelical views; but the old bottles, he said, would not take in the new wine. He preached every Sunday to his people on the epistle or gospel for the day, and showed them, in opposition to the teaching of the friars, that pardon for sin could only be obtained through the blood of Christ.

During all these anxious years the severe measures against the reformers had really been directed by the man who comes more prominently into public view toward their close. This was David Betoun, the nephew of the primate, and, like him, a younger scion of the house of Balfour in Fife, who by this time was not only Abbot of Arbroath and Bishop of Mirepoix in France, but also coadjutor to his aged uncle in the Arch­bishopric of St Andrews, and cardinal, with the title of St Stephen on the Coelian Mount. “Paul III,” says D'Aubigné, “alarmed at seeing the separation of England from Rome, and fearing lest Scotland—as she had a nephew of Henry VIII for her king—should follow her example, was anxious to have in that country one man who should be absolutely devoted to him. David Betoun offered himself. The pope created him cardinal in December 1538, and thenceforth the red—a colour thoroughly congenial with him—became his own, and, as it were, his symbol. Not that he was by any means a religious fanatic: he was versed neither in theology and in moral philosophy. He was a hierarchical fanatic. Two points, above all, were offensive to him in evangelical Christians: one, that they were not submissive to the pope; the other, that they censured immorality in the clergy, for his own licentiousness drew on himself similar rebukes. He aimed at being in Scotland a kind of Wolsey, only with more violence and bloodshed. The one thing of moment in his eyes was that everything in church and state should bend under a twofold despotism. Endowed with large intelligence, consummate ability, and indomitable energy, he had all the qualities needed to ensure success in the aim on which his mind was perpetually bent without ever being diverted from it. Passionately eager for his projects, he was insensible to the ills which must result from them. One matter alone preoccupied him, the destruction of all liberty. The papacy divined his character and created him cardinal!”

This is one of the few attempts made fairly to estimate the character of the man whom one party seemed to have thought they must make out to be a very monster of iniquity, and of whom the other party seemed to have felt that the less they said the better; and to a certain extent D’ Aubigné’s estimate is correct, but it requires to be supplemented. The cardinalate was rather eagerly sought by him and his friends on the ground of what he had already done, and was expected yet to do, for pope and king, than voluntarily offered by the pope. Two, if not three, letters, extremely urgent, were written regarding it by the king to the pope, to the King of France, and to Cardinal Farnese, in the favour of all of whom he stood high. The pope consented to bestow on him the cardinalate he so much coveted; but the office of legate a latere, without which the other was rather an office of dignity than of power, was not granted till 1544, by which time neither the papacy nor any others needed to divine his character. Betoun was a man not only of large intelligence, high ability, unremitting energy, and unbounded ambition, but also of considerable scholarly attainments. He did not belong, it is true, to the school of Pole and Contarini, who would have made concessions to the reformers in regard to doctrine, nor to that of the disciples of D’Ailly and Gerson, who were pressing for a reformation within the old church in regard to morals. His associations and sympathies were rather with the laxer Italian and French humanist school, both in their virtues and vices, and he seems to be lightly referred to in their gossip as ille latinus Juvenalis. He was a great stickler for the liberties of holy church, and for years refused to pay the tax imposed on him for the support of the College of Justice. It was no doubt by his counsel that heretical processes from the first were carried on under the canon law, and that that code and French consuetudinary ecclesiastical law were more completely naturalised in Scotland than they had been before. Most of his time from 1514 to 1524 was passed abroad —the later years in the diplomatic service of his country; and he had acquitted himself with much credit and success. He had been subsequently employed in the negotiations for the marriage of the king, first with the daughter of the King of France, and after her death with Mary of Guise, and in both missions had given high satisfaction to his sovereign. He had no sooner returned home in 1524-25, than the same measures of cruel restraint against the reformers began to be adopted here which had already been put in practice in France; and he was a member of the various Parliaments in which the rigour of these measures had been increased. Even some of the hardest sayings of the Scottish king against heretics were but the echo of those of his father-in-law, the King of France.

Like too many of the high dignitaries of the Scottish church of his time, Cardinal Betoun was of notoriously incontinent habits; but he was never, so far as I know, guilty of such shameless excesses as were the boast of his comrade, Prior Hepburn, nor did he ever allow himself to sink into the same indolence and unredeemed sensuality. He was above all a “hierarchical fanatic,” devoted to the cause of absolutism, who would shrink from no measures, however cruel, to pre­serve intact the privileges of his order, and to stamp out more earnest and generous thought, whether that thought was aiming at the reformation of the old church or the building up of another on her ruins. If we may not say that he had sold himself to France—which had pensioned him with a rich bishopric and helped him to his honours—we must say he had lived so long in it, and had got so enamoured of it, that he was at any rate three parts French, and all popish. He had mingled not only with her scholars but with her nobles, loved and determined to imitate their ways even down to their scandalous laxity of morals and merciless treatment of so-called heretics. He made no earnest effort to reform the old church, and so help her to weather the gathering storm; and it was not till towards the close of his life that he laid out on the building of St Mary’s College part of the money which his uncle had carefully hoarded for that purpose.

For the forcible suppression of the new opinions the cardinal needed the unflinching support of his sovereign, and he spared no efforts to gain him over completely to his side, and to detach him from his nobility,—turbulent and self-willed, but fondly clinging to what remnants of liberty were still left to them,—and to alienate him from his uncle, not unfrequently well-meaning but always over-impetuous, and often in his later years selfish and untrustworthy. There was much in the king’s character to encourage such efforts. With good natural abilities and a frank and amiable disposition, he had for their own selfish ends been encouraged by his early guardians in sensual pleasures, and never to the last freed himself from his evil habits. “Dissolute as a man, prodigal as a king, and superstitious as a Catholic, he could not but easily fall under the sway of superior minds,” who undertook to free him from the worries of business, to provide him with money, and to regard his failings with indulgence, and on easy terms to absolve him from those grosser excesses which could not fail at times to trouble his conscience. These things Betoun and his clerical party endeavoured to do; and, lest he should be tempted to follow the example of his uncle, and appropriate the property of the monasteries and other religious institutions, or set the church lands to feu, as he had threatened, they once and again presented lists to him of those who were suspected of heresy, urging that they should be prosecuted without delay, and their goods, on conviction, be escheated to the Crown. They made large contributions from their own revenues to aid him in the wars with England, which obedience to their counsels had brought on him. They procured dispensations from the papal court to enable his sons, though illegitimate and infants, to hold any ecclesiastical benefices inferior to bishoprics, and on reaching a certain age to hold even the highest offices in the church. In this way they largely added to his revenues during the minority of his sons, and buoyed him up with the hope that when these sons came to years, and were formally invested with their dignities, he would have wealthy allies on whom he could thoroughly depend in his contests with his nobles.

But though James showed little indulgence to the reformers, and little favour for their doctrines, he seems to the last to have had less real liking for the priests of the old faith. No bribery, no flattery, no solicitations could reconcile him permanently to those who for their own selfish ends dragged him into courses from which his own better impulses at times made him revolt. “He incited Buchanan to lash the mendicant friars in the vigorous verse of the Franciscanus. He encouraged by his presence the public performance of a play” which, by its exposure of the vices of the clergy, contributed greatly to weaken their influence. “He enforced the object of that remarkable drama by exhorting the bishops to reform their lives, under a threat if they neglected his warning that he would deal with them after the fashion of his uncle of England” or his cousin of Denmark. “He repeated the exhortation in his last Parliament, declaring that the negligence, the ignorance, the scandalous and disorderly lives of the clergy, were the causes why church and churchmen were scorned and despised.”

So, notwithstanding all measures of repression, the desire for a reformation quietly grew and spread throughout the nation, especially among the smaller landed proprietors in Angus and Mearns, in Perthshire and Fife, in Kyle and Cunningham, as also among the more intelligent burgesses in the various burghs, and, above all, among the Hite of the younger inmates of the monasteries and of the alumni of the University. When the poor monarch, as much sinned against as sinning, at last died of a broken heart, and the Earl of Arran, who claimed the regency, looked about for trusty supporters to defend his claims against the machinations of the cardinal and the queen dowager, he deemed it politic to show not a little countenance to the friends of the Reformation and of the English alliance. We are not warranted to assert that he meant to declare himself a Protestant; but he chose as his chaplains preachers who showed themselves favourably inclined to the new faith. He encouraged the chief men among the Protestants to frequent his court, and he ventured to lay hands on the unscrupulous cardinal, who had striven to exclude him from the regency. He consented to pass through Parliament an Act expressly permitting the people to have and to read the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments in the vulgar tongue, and despatched messengers to all the chief towns to make public proclamation of the Act. The little treatises of Alesius had thus done their work, and he himself thought of returning and completing what he had so well begun.

The friends of the Reformation imagined that the hour of their triumph was at hand. They did not know on what a treacherous prop they were leaning, or what sore trials were yet in store for them ere that triumph should be gained. They knew the regent to be weak and timid; they did not know him to be deceitful—so deceitful that, within six weeks after the last of the messengers were despatched with the above-named proclamation, immediately on the return from France of his brother, the Abbot of Paisley, others were secretly sent off to inform the holy father of his accession to the regency, to put himself and the kingdom under his protection, and to ask permission to have under his control the income of the benefices of the king’s sons till they should come of age. The love of money was with him the root of this evil; as the fear of man was of others which soon followed, and were fraught with dire calamities to the nation. And so he went from bad to worse, till in the dim light of the Franciscan chapel at Stirling, “that weak man, to whom people had been looking for the triumph of the Reformation in Scotland, fondly fancying that he was performing a secret action, knelt down before the altar, humbly confessed his errors, trampled under foot the oaths which he had taken to his own country and to England, renounced the evan­gelical profession of Jesus Christ, submitted to the pope, and received absolution of the cardinal.”

Even in June he had entered in the books of the Privy Council an Act against Sacramentaries holding opinions on the effect and essence of the Sacraments tending to the enervation of the faith catholic, in which they were threatened with “tinsale of lif, landis, and gudis.” He had not dared to proclaim this openly, though perhaps his ally, Henry VIII, would not have blamed him greatly for doing so. But no sooner was he in league with, and under the power of, the cardinal, than he showed in open Parliament “how thair is gret murmure that heretikis mair and mair risis and spredis within this realme, sawand dampnable opinionis incontrar the fayth and lawis of Haly Kirk, actis and constitutionis of this realm”; and exhorted all prelates and ordinaries “to inquir upon all sic maner of personis and proceid aganis thame according to the lawis of Haly Kirk”; promising to be ready himself to do therein at all times what belonged to his office. This promise he was soon obliged cruelly to fulfil.

On the 20th January 1543-44 he set out in company of the cardinal, the Lord Justice and his deputy, with a band of armed men and artillery, to Perth, where a great assize was held. Several were convicted of heresy, and their goods forfeited. Several were condemned to die. The governor himself was inclined to spare their lives, but the cardinal and the nobles who were with him threatened to leave him if he did this. So on St Paul’s day (25th January) 1543-44, Robert Lamb, James Hunter, William Anderson, and James Ranaldson were hanged; and the wife of this last, who had refused when in labour to pray to the Virgin Mary, was denied the consolation of being suspended from the same beam with her husband, and put to death by drowning, after she had consigned to the care of a neighbour the infant she carried in her arms. Dundee was next visited, but it was found that the suspected citizens—who in the previous autumn had sacked and destroyed the Grey Friars and the Dominican monasteries—had taken the alarm and fled from their homes.

The weak and inconstant man continued to be regent in name, but from that hour he was dominated by the imperious cardinal almost as completely as King James had been. He wrote to the pope that the cardinal’s devotion to the holy see and to the interests of his native country was so great that he deserved the praise, or at least no small part of the praise, of preserving its liberty and extinguishing heresy. That last work, however, was by no means so nearly accomplished as the regent in his letter to the pope had boasted. In fact, within two months after we find the cardinal himself confessing in a letter to the pope that he was still in the thick of the fight, and all but worn out—“vigiliis, laboribus, atque sumptibus” — not only in contending with foes without, but also with traitors within, the camp. The regent himself was obliged to confess, in a subsequent letter, that they were then in a miserable plight; and that, unless material assistance came to them from abroad,—and in particular from his holiness, when almost all their other friends were growing cold,—it would be hard for them to maintain the struggle against the English king. The balance of parties at this critical juncture was more nearly equal than is generally supposed. “An active minority of the nobles and gentry saw in the government of Beaton not only their own personal ruin, but the giving away of the country to a power more dangerous to its liberties than England itself... With those who favoured England were naturally associated those who desired a reformation of religion,—a body now so numerous in the opinion of a papal legate [Grimani] who visited the country in 1543, that, but for the interposition of God, Scotland would soon be in as bad a case as England itself.” These appeals for foreign help, and the hopes raised by them, intensified the struggle, and retarded for years the triumph of a really national party resolved to set the interests of Scotland above those of France and Rome as well as of England.

 

GEORGE WISHART.

 

It was about this time that a new evangelist arrived in the country, singularly fitted to im­press on the hearts of men the lessons of the Holy Book to which they had now access in their native tongue. This was George Wishart, a younger son or nephew of Sir James Wishart, laird of Pittarrow in the Mearns. He appears to have been born about 1512-13, and to have received his university training in King’s College, Aberdeen, then presided over by a distinguished humanist skilled both in Latin and Greek. He acquired a knowledge of Greek—at that time a very rare accomplishment in Scotland—either from the Principal of King’s College, or from a Frenchman teaching languages in Montrose. From his early years he seems to have been in­timate with John Erskine, laird of Dun, and at that time also provost of the neighbouring burgh of Montrose. The earliest notice we have of him is as attesting a charter granted in favour of Erskine. This lends confirmation to the tradition which Petrie, himself a native of the town, says he had heard from ancient men (who in their youth had seen and known the reformer) that then, or soon after, he was employed as assistant or successor of Marsillier, the Frenchman Erskine had brought from France to teach the languages, and that, like him, he read the Greek New Testament with some of his pupils. John Hepburn, then Bishop of Brechin, would not naturally have been quick-scented to detect heresy in one who stood so high with his good friend Erskine of Dun; but David Betoun, Abbot of Arbroath, often resided at the mansion-house of Ethie, half-way between Arbroath and Mon­trose, and he was both more lynx-eyed and more anxious to stamp out any approach to heresy, and he urged the bishop on.

Wishart in consequence was summoned by Hepburn, but instead of appearing in answer to the summons, he, like many others in that year of grievous persecution, sought safety in England, and it is said that he was forthwith excommunicated and outlawed. He found shelter under Bishop Latimer, whose diocese comprehended Gloucester and Bristol, as well as Worcester; but in the following year he fell into fresh trouble at Bristol—not, as was at one time supposed, by denying the merits of the Virgin Mary, but by denying the merits of Christ Himself. For this he was duly convented before Archbishop Cranmer, and, after conference with him, was per­suaded to recant and bear his faggot. Soon after the enactment of the bloody statute of the six articles, he, like most of the Scottish refugees, left England and sought shelter among the reformed churches on the Continent, especially those of Zurich, Basle, and Strassburg, and brought home with him, and ultimately translated into English, the First Helvetic Confession, composed and agreed on by the chief theologians of these churches.

He returned to England, about the close of 1542, and soon after entered into residence in Corpus Christi or Benet College, Cambridge, with the view of studying and teaching there. In one of the windows of the common-room in that college, above the arms of archbishops and nobles, distinguished alumni of the college, stands the name of George Wishart, with the martyr’s crown over it; and it is to Emery Tilney, his pupil during the year he was in residence there, that we are indebted for our fullest description of his appearance and habits. He was, he tells us, “a man of tall stature, polled-headed, and on the same a round French cap of the best; judged to be of melancholy complexion by his physiognomy; black haired, long bearded, comely of personage, well-spoken after his country of Scotland, courteous, lowly, lovely, glad to teach, desirous to learn, and was well travelled; having on him for his habit or clothing never but a mantle or frieze gown to the shoes, a black Millian [i.e. Milan] fustian doublet, and plain black hosen, coarse new canvas for his shirts, and white falling bands and cuffs at his hands,— all the which apparel he gave to the poor, some weekly, some monthly, some quarterly, as he liked, saving his French cap, which he kept the whole year of my being with him... His charity had never end, night, noon, nor day, infinitely studying how to do good unto all, and hurt to none.”

Such, according to his pupil, was the evangelist who—in 1543 according to some, in 1544 according to others—returned to his native land, and for two years testified of the gospel of the grace of God throughout Angus and Mearns, Ayrshire and the Lothians, but whose favourite fields of labour were to be central Angus and Mearns, the towns of Montrose and Dundee. A portrait of him, as well as one of his great opponent, has been preserved in the Roman Catholic College of Blairs, and the expression of the face harmonises well with the description his pupil gives of him. Another portrait, deemed by Dr Laing not unworthy of Holbein, is in possession of a descendant of the Wisharts.

It is supposed that for a short time after his return to Scotland he lived quietly at Pittarrow, in the parish of Fordoun, where the shrine of St Palladius was preserved; and being an accomplished artist, occupied himself with adorning the ancestral mansion with several beautiful fresco paintings, which, after being long covered over by the wainscot, were again brought to light in the present century, but unfortunately were destroyed before their value was perceived. Dr Leslie of Fordoun, who saw them, has thus described the most remarkable of them: “Above the largest fireplace in the great hall was a paint­ing of the city of Rome, and a grand procession going to St Peter’s... The Pope, adorned with the tiara, and mounted on horseback, was attended by a large company of cardinals on foot, richly dressed, but all uncovered. At a little distance, directly in front of the procession, stood a beautiful white palfrey, finely caparisoned, held by some persons who were well dressed, but un­covered. Beyond them was the Cathedral of St Peter, the doors of which appeared to be open. Below the picture were written the following lines:—

“In Papam.

“Laus tua, non tua fraus, virtus non gloria rerum

Scandere te fecit hoc decus eximium;

Pauperibus dat sua gratis nec munera curat

Curia Papalis, quod more percipimus.

Haec carmina potius legenda, cancros imitando.”

Wishart began his work as a preacher in Montrose, the scene of his early scholastic labours, expounding the rudiments of the Christian faith and practice as set forth in the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles’ Creed. At that time Montrose was frequented by many of the landed gentry in the surrounding districts who were favourable to the Reformation and the English alliance, and their hearts could not fail to be cheered and their courage raised by the exhortations of the evangelist. Dundee, however, was the chief and favourite scene of his ministrations; and it was from the great success attend­ing them that it gained the name of the Scottish Geneva. It was even more decidedly attached to the new opinions and the English alliance than Montrose; and a reformation, as it was called— including the sacking of the monasteries in the town and neighbourhood—had taken place in the autumn of 1543. The governor confessed, when put to penance, that this had been done with his permission. The martyr cannot with any certainty be connected with it, much less made to bear the blame of it; though another George Wishart, a citizen and bailie of Dundee, with whom the martyr has been recklessly confounded, was afterwards put on his trial for having taken a leading part in it. If the martyr could, his enemies would hardly have failed to have brought it against him at his trial.

He preached for a time in Dundee with great acceptance, expounding systematically that Epistle to the Romans, the full significance of which the recently published Commentary of Calvin had deeply impressed on the minds of his co-religionists in various lands where Wishart had been. At length he was charged by one of the magistrates in the queen’s name and the governor’s to desist from preaching, to depart from the town, and trouble it no more. This was intimated to him when he was in the pulpit, surrounded by a great congregation, and with a significant reminder that he had already been put to the horn, and that there was no intention to relax the law in his favour. Thereupon he called God to witness that he intended not their trouble but their comfort, and felt sure that to reject the Word of God, and drive away His messenger, was not the way to save themselves from trouble; adding, “God shall send unto yow messengeris who will not be effrayed of hornyng nor yitt for banishment.” He left the town forthwith, and with all “possible expeditioun passed to the west­land.” There he pursued his labours in the same kindly spirit, refusing to allow his followers to dispute possession of the churches by force of arms with the authorities, and choosing rather to preach in the open air wherever he found a convenient place and audience fit to listen to him.

Soon after he left Dundee, the plague, which that year was raging in several of the towns of Scotland, extended its ravages to that place. This naturally led the citizens to bethink themselves of the treatment they had allowed the evangelist, who had laboured so devotedly among them, to suffer at the hands of his enemies, as the news of what they were suffering led him to think compassionately of his friends who were now in trouble, and stood in need of comfort. He returned to the afflicted town, and its inhabitants received him with joy. He announced without delay that he would preach to them; but it was impossible he could do so in a church. Numbers were sick of the plague; others in attendance on them were regarded as infected, and must not be brought into contact with those who were free from infection. The sick were crowded in and about the lazar-houses near St Roque’s Chapel, outside the East or Cowgate Port of the town. Wishart chose as his pulpit the top of that port, which, in memory of the martyr-preacher, has been, it is said, carefully preserved, though—like Temple Bar, so long tolerated in London—it is now in the heart of the town, and an obstruction to its traffic. The sick and suspected were assembled outside the port, and the healthy inside. The preacher took for the text of his first sermon the words of Psalm cvii. 20: “ He sent His word and healed them”; and, starting on the key-note that it was neither herb nor plaster, but God’s Word which healeth all, “He maist comfortablie did intreat [i.e. treat of] the dignitie and utilitie of Goddis Woord; the punishment that cumis for. the contempt of the same; the promptitude of Goddis mercy to such as trewlye turne to Him; yea, the great happynes of thame whome God tackis from this miserie evin in His awin gen till visitatioun, which the malice of man cane neyther eak nor paire.” By this sermon, Knox tells us, he so raised up the hearts of all who heard him, that they regarded not death, but judged those more happy that should depart than those that should remain behind, considering that they knew not whether they should have such a comforter with them at all times.

No doubt John Wedderburn, as well as the others who had been suspected of heresy and had fled from the town in the persecution of 1539, had before this time returned, and were co-operating with Wishart in his work; and then, in all probability, was prepared that beautiful funeral hymn which passed from the Bohemians to the Germans, and from the Germans to the Scotch; and which, in addition to the original stanzas, contains in the Scottish version certain new verses having unmistakable reference to the circumstances in which they originated—in a plague-stricken town which had just before been occupied by the soldiers of the cardinal and the regent, and might well dread a similar visitation for its determined adherence to the new evangelist.

“ Thocht pest or sword wald vs preuene,

Befoir our hour, to slay vs clene,

Thay can nocht pluk ane lytill hair

Furth of our heid, nor do vs deir.

Quhen fra this warld to Christ we wend,

Our wratchit schort lyfe man haif end

Changeit fra paine, and miserie,

 

To lestand gloir Etemallie.

End sail our dayis schort, and vaine,

And sin, quhilk we culd nocht refraine,

Endit salbe our pilgremage,

And brocht hame to our heritage.”

 

Wishart concerned himself not only about the souls but also about the bodies of his hearers in that sad time, fearlessly, like Luther on a similar occasion, exposing himself to the risk of infection, that he might minister to the diseased and the dying, and taking care that the public funds for the relief of the destitute should be properly administered. He forgot himself only too much, and the terrible risks to which, as an excommunicated and outlawed man, he was exposed in so near proximity to the cardinal, who was so eager to get him out of the way.

One day as the people were departing from the sermon, utterly unconscious of the peril menacing their favourite preacher, Knox tells us that a priest, bribed by the cardinal, stood waiting—with his whinger drawn in his hand under his gown—at the foot of the steps by which the preacher was descending from the top of the port. Wishart, most sharp of eye and swift of judg­ment, at once noticed him, and, as he came near, said, “My friend, what would you do?” and at the same moment seized the hand in which he held the dagger, and took it from him. The priest fell down at his feet and confessed the whole truth. Immediately the rumour spread that a priest had attempted to assassinate their favourite preacher, the sick outside burst open the gate, crying,  Deliver the traitor to us, or else we will tack him by force.” But the preacher put his arms around his would-be assassin, exclaiming, “Whosoevir trubles him shall truble me, for he has hurte me in nothing, bot ... hes lattin us understand what we may feare in tymes to come”; and so, says Knox, he saved the life of him that sought his.

Like Drs Laing, Lorimer, and Weir, I cannot persuade myself that the man who spoke and acted thus is the same as “a Scottish man called Wysshert,” who is mentioned in a letter of the Earl of Hertford in April 1544, as privy to a conspiracy to apprehend or assassinate Cardinal Betoun, and as employed to carry letters between the conspirators and the English court. There were other Wisharts in Scotland. Yea, as Dr Laing has shown, another George Wishart in Dundee, who was a zealous friend of the English alliance—not only after the conspirators got possession of St Andrews castle, but from the earlier date when the monasteries in Dundee were destroyed and sacked. There was probably another about St Andrews who, while the martyr was yet a boy, was called in to attest a charter by the notorious friar Campbell in 1526. I will not venture to affirm that, with all his gentleness, Wishart might not have been tempted to maintain that violence and murderous intent—such as Betoun had twice shown to get rid of him privately—might be lawfully met and restrained by force, though even that is hardly in keeping with all we know of his gentle ways; but we may be sure that had such thoughts been cherished by him, he, like Knox, would have said this openly, and not have engaged in any secret reprisals. As an outlawed man he came down to Scotland under protection, and never seems to have travelled in it save under protection; and so he was one of the last men likely to be chosen for a secret mission to England. If anything more than the able essay of the late Professor Weir in the ‘ North British Review’ for 1868 were needed to prove that the “ pure lustre of the martyr’s fame is still unsullied,” it seems to me to be supplied by himself in his affecting address at the stake. “I beseech Thee, Father of heaven ! to forgive them that have of any ignorance, or else have of any evil mind, forged any lies upon me. I forgive them with all my heart.” The cardinal was not ig­norant of the volcano on which he was sitting or of the plots that had been hatched against him; and he may have suspected Wishart of being in the conspiracy. That may have been the reason why he sent two friars to him to get his last confession, and, when they failed to do so, allowed Wynram to go, as the reformer had re­quested. Wynram, after hearing it, returned to the cardinal and his abettors, and assured them that Wishart was innocent. This can only refer to such a suspicion of conspiracy, not to the charge of heresy which was confessed and acknowledged; and Mr Andrew Lang has failed as completely as the cardinal in his laboured attempt to produce a tittle of evidence against him.

From the time of Wighton’s attempt the reformer had a clearer view of the perils which beset him, and a mournful conviction of the issue which awaited him if he would not flinch or flee. By his success in Dundee the rage of his adversaries was lashed into a fury which appalled his friends in various districts; but none of these things moved him that he might finish his course with joy, and make full proof of his ministry. As soon as the plague abated in the city, heedless of the new proofs he then had of the cardinal’s relentless determination to capture or trepan him, and the earnest warnings of his northern friends that they could not be answerable for his safety, he took his last farewell of his kirks in Montrose and Dundee. At all hazards he was determined to fulfil his engagement to meet his western friends in Edinburgh, to prosecute his work there under their promised protection, and to seek a public disputation with some of the popish clergy who about that time were to meet in Synod in the capital. Disappointed of the presence and protection of the western men, he laboured for a brief season in Leith, Inveresk, and East Lothian without much success. At last, forsaken by many of those who should have stood by him, he was seized at Ormiston, under cover of night and promise of safe keeping, by the Earl of Bothwell, Sheriff Principal of the county. The Earl pledged his honour not to give him up to his enemies, but was soon persuaded to deliver him to the governor, as was the governor to hand him over to the cardinal, though he finally protested against his being tried or condemned by the churchmen in his own absence. A full account of his labours during these days of despondency has been given by Knox, who got from him, it is said, the first rudiments of Greek, and who— having rendered his first service to the cause of the Reformation by bearing the two-handed sword for his protection—was dismissed on the night of his betrayal with the significant words, “ One is sufficient for one sacrifice,” showing what fate he now anticipated for himself.

I cannot enlarge on these things, nor on the sad scenes which took place at St Andrews on the last day of February and 1st of March 1545-46, when the cardinal, regardless of the remonstrances of the regent and the murmurs of the people, but with the assent of the Council which he had adjourned from Edinburgh to St Andrews, condemned him to the stake. Throughout all these trying scenes he comported himself as nobly as Patrick Hamilton had done; and not less plentifully did his blood prove the seed of the church, verifying his words, that few would suffer after him before the glory of God evidently appeared. No doubt his cruel martyrdom hastened the removal of that tyrant who set himself above all restraint of civil law, and breathed forth threatenings against the saints of God,—though that removal had not been plotted by him, nor would have been approved by him. The words attributed to him at the stake by Buchanan and Lindsay of Pitscottie, foreshadowing his persecutor’s approaching fate, are not generally regarded as authentic. Knox says nothing of them, nor Foxe, nor Spottiswoode; nor does Sir David Lindsay, in his ‘ Tragedy of the Cardinal,’ make any reference to them. It seems better authenticated that he made the following general statement: “I beseech you, brethren and sisters, to exhort your prelates to the learning of the Word of God, that they at the last may be ashamed to do evil and learn to do good, and if they will not convert themselves from their wicked error, there shall hastily come upon them the wrath of God, which they shall not eschew.” It is easy to see—especially after the events which so speedily occurred—how a statement which referred to the prelates generally should come to be applied specifically to their imperious chief, just as the example of Eli had, in a well-known ballad, been similarly used for warning by the Reformation poet to the aged James Betoun for his weak indulgence to his nephew and the younger Prior Hepburn, notwithstanding their scandalous excesses.

Such was the end of the life and ministry of George Wishart, one of the most zealous and winning evangelists, and one of the most heroic and steadfast confessors, that our country has ever produced. The remembrance of him was fondly cherished, especially in that district where he chiefly laboured, and where he wrought a work not less memorable than that which M‘ Cheyne and Burns were honoured to do in our own day. His influence was but deepened by his cruel fate, and he “lived again,” as Dr Lorimer has eloquently said, “in John Knox. The zealous disciple, who had counted it an honour to be allowed to carry a sword before his master, stood forth immediately to wield the spiritual sword which had fallen from the master’s grasp, and to wield it with a vigour and trenchant execution superior even to his.”

It may not be inappropriate to state how far the organisation of the Reformed Church had by this time advanced in Scotland. Patrick Hamilton seems to me to have laboured to the last for the revival of Scriptural teaching and Christian living within the old church rather than apart from her. Alesius, and some others of his disciples, were for a time reluctant to separate from her, if her rulers could have been persuaded seriously to set about repairing acknowledged evils and defects. But Wishart, and those who came under his influence, seem to have abandoned this struggle, and to have striven for the formation of a new organisation apart from the old one. He formed kirks or congregations—at least in Montrose and Dundee; the former consisting probably mainly of the lesser gentry in the adjacent dis­tricts of Angus and Mearns, and the latter chiefly of the substantial burghers of the town of Dundee. I suppose that some forms of discipline began to be put in practice in the Dundee congregation, and that it was on that account, as well as from the remarkable revival which had taken place under his ministrations, that the town came to be spoken of as “the Scottish Geneva.” The New Testament of Tyndale’s translation had been introduced both there and in Montrose as early as 1526; and by this time the subsequent editions had been largely imported, and since 1543 might be openly read. John Wedderburn was then in his native city, and I suppose by that date had published, in its most rudimentary form, his ‘Psalms and Spiritual Songs,’ largely translated from the German. John Scott, the printer, was also there, and under suspicion of the authorities in Edinburgh. Of the psalms and hymns, one, as I have already mentioned, bears unmistakable reference to the pest then infesting the town of Dundee; another was sung by Wishart that even­ing on which he was apprehended in East Lothian; a third is certainly referred to in the Complaynt of Scotland, which, being published as early as 1549, is a guarantee for the earlier existence of the hymn. This rudimentary col­lection of ‘Psalms and Spiritual Songs ’ was the book of praise in family and social gatherings of the reformed until the ‘Genevan Psalter’ came into use. The earliest editions of it have perished. A nearly complete copy of the edition of 1567 has, however, been preserved, and now at last reprinted.

The translation of the First Helvetic Confession, which Wishart made, was no doubt meant as the Confession of the churches he formed, though it may only have been extant then in manuscript, and not published till 1548. That fragment of the Communion Office which was used by Knox in the administration of the Lord’s Supper at Berwick in 1550, and perhaps had been used by him at St Andrews in 1547—and which was recently brought to light again by Dr Lorimer from among the MSS. in Dr Williams’ library in London—was almost certainly derived from Wishart, for part of it is translated from the Office of the Church of Zurich, with which he could not fail to have become acquainted during his residence there, and part from other German Offices, which were more likely to have fallen in his way (who had been a traveller on the Continent) than in Knox’s. It may even have been used by Wishart in 1545, when he dispensed the communion in both kinds at Dun. The same may be said of that interesting burial-service which purports to have been used in the kirk at Montrose, and has been reprinted in the Miscellany of the Wodrow Society; though probably this, as we now have it, may not be the original form, but a recension of it, made later, under the auspices of Erskine of Dun, superintendent of Angus and Mearns. The foundations of the superstructure that was to be were thus laid by Wishart. It was reserved to his successor to raise it, as the martyr had predicted it would be raised, even to the copestone.

 

KNOX AS REFORMER LEADER

As stated towards the close of my last lecture, the sword-bearer of Wishart stood forth at once “to wield the spiritual sword which had fallen from the master’s grasp, and to wield it with a vigour and trenchant execution superior even to his.”

At this time Knox was full forty years of age, having been born at Giffordgate, in Haddington, in 1505. He probably received the rudiments of his education there, and matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1522. Some suppose that he may have followed Major to St Andrews in 1523, or may have come there later, to study theology or to act as a private tutor to some young men studying at that university. But there is no reference to him in the university books, nor mention of his presence by any one then resident. From 1522 up to 1545-46, when he appears as sword-bearer to Wishart, his life is to us almost a blank. But as Minerva was said to have come full armed from the brain of Jupiter, so did Knox then start up as leader of our Reformation, fully equipped and singularly matured. Whatever his early training may have been, he had by that time thoroughly mastered the subjects in controversy between the two churches, and possibly, as Bayle supposes, had made himself aquainted in his retirement with the writings of that great doctor of the western church to whom Luther, Calvin, and Alesius were largely indebted. I believe no man in recent times has in brief space sketched his character, both on its brighter and darker sides, with less partisan feeling than Dr Merle D’Aubigné, when he says: “The blood of warriors ran in the veins of the man who was to become one of the most intrepid champions of Christ’s army... He was active, bold, thoroughly upright and perfectly honest, diligent in his duties, and full of heartiness for his comrades. But he had' in him also a firmness which came near to obstinacy, an independence which was very much like pride, a melancholy which bordered on prostration, a sternness which some took for insensibility, and a passionate force sometimes mistakenly attributed to a vindictive temper.” According to Calderwood, he received his first “taste of the truthe” from the preaching of his fellow-countryman, Thomas Guilliame or Williams, a black friar, who in 1543 became one of the chaplains of the regent, and shortly after, being inhibited to preach, retired into England. The good seed sown by him was watered by Wishart, and grew up apace, “first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.”

On 29th May 1546, while the applause of priests and friars was still ringing in his ears, and he was proudly congratulating himself on the progress of his new fortifications, and the success of all his measures to secure the triumph of his party and his own complete personal ascendancy, the cardinal was suddenly surprised by conspirators in his stronghold, and cut off by “a fate as tragical and ignominious” as almost “any that has ever been recorded in the long catalogue of human crimes.” Only the deep feeling of relief thus given from merciless oppression could prompt or excuse the lines of Sir David Lindsay—

“ As for the Cardinal, I grant

He was a man we weill culd want,

And we’ll forget him sune ;

But yet I think the sooth to say, A

lthough the loon is weill away,

The deed was foully dune.”

When it became known that the conspirators who assassinated Betoun meant to hold the castle of St Andrews, they were joined by a con­siderable number of their friends from among the reforming gentry of Fife, and gradually by others from a greater distance who were friendly to the Reformation and the English alliance, and in consequence were then being subjected to many annoyances at the hands of the regent and his new following. Among these last, about Pasche 1547—in charge of his pupils, the sons of certain lairds in East Lothian—came John Knox, whose life, ever since he had cast in his lot with Wishart, had been made so miserable to him by the regent’s bastard brother—the aspirant to the vacant archbishopric—that, but for this refuge unexpectedly opened to him, he would have found it necessary to leave his native land and follow Alesius, Fyfe, and others to Germany or Switzerland. At the time when he arrived in St Andrews there was a truce between the regent and the occupants of the castle, and with the latter the inhabitants of the city had pretty free intercourse. The reforming citizens resorted at times to the services in the chapel of the castle; and John Rough, the chaplain of the garrison, under the powerful protection he enjoyed, occasionally forced his way into the parish church and preached there to the assembled citizens.

Knox was no sooner settled in St Andrews than he resumed the system he had followed with good effect in East Lothian, causing his pupils to give account of their catechism in public to all who chose to come, and opening up in a plain and colloquial manner the Gospel of St John. His great ability and success as a teacher, and his wonderful gift of persuasive speech, thus became generally known. After private but unsuccessful efforts had been made by Balnaves and others to induce him to become colleague to John Rough, a formal call to the ministry was, with the counsel of Sir David Lindsay, publicly addressed to him from the pulpit by Rough, in the name of the rest, and he was solemnly adjured not to despise the voice of God speaking to him. Thus honourably called to assume the office of a public preacher in that reformed congregation, he at last entered on the work with all his heart, and made full proof of his ministry before the assembled citizens in their parish church, as well as before the rude garrison in the castle chapel. He administered the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in the simple form he always used, and continued the public catechising of his pupils, which the people of the town heard repeated till they had the substance of his teaching by heart, and thus was spread a knowledge of Gospel truth even among those who could not read. A very graphic account is given in his History of the sermons, catechisings, and disputations he held with the popish champions, by means of which the new doctrines gained a hold on the minds of the citizens of St Andrews which they never wholly lost. But times of trial were to come ere the cause should finally triumph in that city, or in his native land; and the earnest preacher, whose mouth God had opened in that old parish church, was to be taught by sad experience how hard it is to leave all and simply follow Christ, ere he was to be privileged to see the full fruit of his labours.

Those who had presumed to take into their hands “the sword of God” as they called it, and to mete out to the tyrant cardinal the punishment which human justice was too weak to award, were made to feel that they who take the sword must expect to suffer from the sword. They had been able to withstand the power of the regent and the attacks of his unskilful captains; but help and skill at last came to the aid of these from their co-religionists abroad — chief among them being a militant ecclesiastic entitled Prior of Capua—and the succour promised to the garrison by England having been again and again delayed, they were obliged to surrender the castle to the representative of the French king. The occupants of the castle—those who had come to it for shelter, as well as those who were really guilty of the murder—were deprived of liberty, and dealt with as criminals of the worst class. For nineteen months our reformer had to work as a chained slave on board the French galleys, generally at Rouen or Dieppe, though sometimes a cruise was taken to more distant waters. Once, at least, he was brought within sight of the towers of the city where he had begun his ministry; and then he solemnly affirmed that he believed God would once more allow him to proclaim His word there. Even then he maintained unshaken faith in God, and at times indulged in sallies of pleasantry against his popish custodiers; but he would have been more than human if the iron had not entered into his soul, and if traces of the sternness thence arising had not long been visible in his character.

Early in 1549 he was, by English influence, released from his captivity in the French galleys, and from his exile. He proceeded first to London, and thereafter to Berwick, with the approval of the English Privy Council. There he was as near to his persecuted fellow-countrymen as it was safe for him to go, and there many of them might resort to him; and in fact so many did so, that the president of the English Northern Council became anxious for his transference farther south. There also, through the ap­pointment of the Privy Council, a wide field of usefulness was opened to him among the English. Into this he entered with his whole soul, preaching the Gospel with great boldness and success not only to the garrison and citizens of Berwick, but also in the surrounding districts; and proving himself a true successor of those early Scottish missionaries who had originally won over to the Christian faith the heathen Saxons of Northumbria. At Newcastle, in 1550, he discussed, before Tonstal, Bishop of Durham, his doctors, and the Northern Council, the idolatry of the mass; and in the spring of 1551 he removed his head­quarters to that more central and influential town, extending his labours at times, no doubt, into Yorkshire, as well as into Northumberland and Cumberland.

His fame as an eloquent preacher, and able and ready defender of the doctrines of the Reformation, spread southwards; and at the close of 1551, or early in 1552, he was appointed one of the royal chaplains of Edward VI. In the autumn of 1552 he was summoned to the south, and preached with great power and faithfulness before the king and his court. He persistently advocated, along with the other royal chaplains, those thorough­going Protestant doctrines which, in the north, he had previously held and taught and carried out in practice. In conjunction with the other five royal chaplains, he was called to give his opinion of the Articles then proposed to be adopted as the creed of the English Church, and of the revised Communion Office then prepared to take the place of that of 1549. His objections to the act of kneeling in receiving the elements in the Lord’s Supper helped to procure the insertion of that rubric which high-churchmen term “the black rubric.” He refused both an English bishopric and a London rectory, and continued to labour on, faithfully and devotedly, as a preacher unattached. He had a presentiment that the time he would have to do so would be brief, and he improved it to the uttermost. The Reformation in England at that date had been forced on by its courtly patrons and their earnest preachers beyond what was warranted by the hold it had as yet gained on the mass of the people. When the good King Edward was succeeded by the bigoted Mary, nothing remained for the Protestant bishops and preachers but either to prove the sincerity of their convictions in prison and at the stake, or to leave the country and reserve themselves in exile for happier times. Knox, as a foreigner, was especially warranted to choose the latter course; and at the urgent request of his friends in the north he did so, when it was only not yet too late to escape.

The five years of the reformer’s life which followed were not less eventful for himself nor for those of whom he now became the chosen leader. After an unsuccessful attempt to set up a substantially Puritan church among the English exiles at Frankfort, Whittingham and he obtained at Geneva, through the favour of Calvin, an asylum for themselves and their like-minded fellow-exiles, where they might be allowed peacefully to carry out their own forms of worship and discipline. But he had not been long there till, at the earnest invitation of the reforming party, he paid a visit to his native land—a visit which was memorable for its immediate, and still more for its ultimate, results. For several years the cause of the Reformation had been making quiet progress. Those who could read the Scriptures had been drinking the waters of life from the fountain-head. Those who could not, drank from the streams opened by the Reformation poets, whose verses were carefully committed to memory. Then came the voice of the living preacher, accompanied, as it had never yet been in Scotland, with the demonstration of the Spirit and with power from on high. The reformer wrote that he would be content to sing his nunc dimittis after forty such days as he had had three of in Edinburgh. He prolonged for six months a visit which he had intended to complete in as many weeks; and, when he was at last recalled to Geneva by the urgent letters of the con­gregation there, he promised to his friends in Scotland that he would return whenever they saw meet to summon him and to assure him of protection from persecution.

The few quiet years which Knox and his fellow­exiles passed, at Geneva were to be richly blessed to themselves and to their fatherland. He, at least, had not gone there to have his views of Christian doctrine or church order formed or materially changed. He went to see the pure reformed faith (which he and Calvin in common believed, and independently had drawn from the Holy Scriptures and from the writings of the great doctor of the ancient church) exhibiting its benign influence in quickening to higher life, and moulding into a united community the volatile citizens of Geneva. He came to have his wearied spirit revived and refreshed by communion with devoted Christian brethren; and, by witnessing the success of their labours, to be nerved for further achievements in the service of their common Lord and for the good of his native land.

It was there that Puritanism was organised as a distinct school, if not also as a distinct party, in the church. If it had done nothing more than what it was honoured to do in the few peaceful years our fathers were permitted to spend in that much loved city by the bright blue waters of the Leman Lake, it would have done not a little for which the church and the world would have had cause to be grateful to it still. There were first clearly proclaimed in our native language those principles of constitutional government, and the limited authority of the “upper powers,” which are now universally accepted by the Anglo-Saxon race. There was first deliberately adopted and resolutely put in practice among British Christians a form of church constitution which eliminated sacerdotalism, and taught the members of the church their true dignity and responsibility as priests to God and witnesses for Christ in the world. There was first used that Book of Common Order which was long to be the directory for public worship in the fully reformed Church of Scotland, and whose simple rites Bishop Grindal was forced to own, in his controversy with the English Puritans, he could not reprove. There was nearly completed, after the model of the French version, the English Metrical Psalter. There was planned and executed a translation of the Scriptures into our mother tongue, which for nearly half a century continued to hold its place alongside of others executed at greater leisure and more favoured by authority. That was how our reformer and his tireless associates occupied them­selves when left freely to follow their own bent. That was how he was ultimately prepared for the great work he was to accomplish in his native country when finally invited to return to it.

Immediately after the accession of Elizabeth to the English throne in the autumn of 1558, the English exiles on the Continent began to break up their congregations and return to their native land. Those at Geneva were among the first who commenced to do so; but those of them who had been occupying themselves in that translation of the Bible into English which was to prove such a blessing to their countrymen decided to remain where they were until they had finished that work. Those who returned were at first favourably received by the queen and her advisers, and taken into service in the reconstituted church; but when it was found that they were generally averse to comply fully with the ceremonies which she fostered, a change took place.

Knox, who does not seem to have been one of the translators, appears to have left Geneva among the earliest. In February 1558-59 we find that he had gone to Dieppe, whence, while assisting in the French Protestant services, he sent a request to Cecil for leave to pass through England on his way to Scotland, and to converse with him on some matters which deeply concerned the welfare of the Protestants in both realms. But his ‘First Blast of the Trumpet’ was an insult which Elizabeth could not brook, and so, after waiting in vain for the desired per­mission for a reasonable time, he set sail from Dieppe for Scotland, and arrived in Edinburgh on the 2nd of May 1559, much to the consternation of the popish council then assembled in the city. It dissolved forthwith; but care was taken to get Knox’s name, as that of an already condemned heretic, added to the list of Protestant preachers then under summons to appear before the queen regent and her council to answer for their persistence in preaching. Knox at once resolved to throw in his lot with his brethren, and went north to Dundee where the zealous Protestants of Fife, Angus, and Mearns were already assembling, determined to make common cause with their preachers, and to go forward in peaceful form to Stirling in order that they might do so, and leave the queen and her council in no doubt as to the position which they were henceforth to occupy towards her and them. They accordingly marched forward from Dundee to Perth, and sent on Erskine of Dun to Stirling to apprise the queen and council of their attitude and intentions. It is said that she promised Erskine that the prosecution of the preachers would be abandoned, but they were condemned in absence and outlawed, and the breach between the two parties thus became irrevocable. Nothing remained for the queen, from her point of view, but to prosecute the matter to the bitter end, if thereby she might succeed in silencing and repressing the Protestants.

After the regent’s falsehood to Erskine and persistence in her fatal policy, the reformers proceeded at once to set about such reform as they desired, and commenced rather roughly at Perth, where they had the majority of the population in their favour. Knox, along with Moray, went to Fife as soon after as it became apparent that forcible measures must be taken to secure toleration for the Protestants. After a few brief visits to other towns he presented himself at the public preaching-place in St Andrews. Modern historians will not allow us to say that it was in that city that he had received his university training, or had first listened to the preaching of the reformed doctrines, or been brought to a personal knowledge of the truth; but they leave untouched, as previously stated, the more important facts that it was there, when in charge of his pupils at the university, that he had first ventured at the hazard of his life openly to make known to others that which had been blessed of God to the quickening of his own soul, and publicly to exert in the cause of the Reformation those rare gifts of telling argument and persuasive speech which were destined so signally 4o con­tribute to its ultimate and permanent triumph throughout the land. It was there, probably in the old parish church, that he had been first solemnly called to the ministry of the Word in the reformed church; and there, in the chapel of the old and now ruined castle, that he had first celebrated the Lord’s Supper with the same purity and simplicity with which it was afterwards observed in the fully reformed Church of Scotland. Even in exile and working as a slave in the galleys his heart had turned with special pleasure to the scene of his first labours, and he had cherished the confident expectation that God would again bring him to the place where he had first opened his mouth, and permit him again to preach from its pulpit the precious truths of His Holy Word.

This expectation he believed that God had then fulfilled, and neither the threats of adversaries could make him quail from his purpose, nor the counsels of timid friends move him to let slip the opportunity which he believed God had then given him of bearing full and faithful testimony to the truth of God in that important city. He therefore boldly proclaimed before the dignitaries of the church, the doctors of the university, and the magistrates of the burgh, as well as before more humble citizens, that doctrine of the grace of God which had long been his own solace and support, and was then being more generally recognised and embraced by his countrymen. Having thus seized the opportunity and improved it to the utmost, his efforts were so abundantly blessed by God that the cause of truth and right finally triumphed there. The reformed worship was by general consent peaceably set up, and the authority of the archbishop was virtually ended in the very stronghold of his power. That which, with the divine blessing, the reformer’s preaching then accomplished in St Andrews, was by the same or similar means effected in the chief cities of the kingdom, and throughout the greater part of the lowlands, almost within the compass of a single year. In fact, four months after his arrival, he could write to his friends: ‘Notwithstanding the fevers have vexed me, yitt have I travelled through the most part of this realme where (all praise be to His blessed Majestie) men of all sorts and conditiouns embrace the Truthe... We doe nothing but goe about Jericho, blowing with trumpets as God giveth strenth, hoping [for the] victorie by His power alone. The reformer’s expectation of victory, and of victory by the persuasive means which Bishop Hooper affirmed were alone legitimate and in accord with Christ’s will, was neither disappointed nor long deferred. The great body of the nation, with unexampled rapidity and unanimity, embraced the truth, and submitted to the discipline of their teacher, and under its salutary influence, as Stahelin in his ‘Johannes Calvin’ affirms, from being one of the rudest, most ignorant, indigent, and turbulent peoples, grew to be one of the most civilised, educated, prosperous, and upright which our family of nations can show.

Believing that we have no cause to be ashamed of the great revolution which was thus effected, or of aught which has legitimately followed from it, but that we need to have our pure minds stirred up by way of remembrance of the great things the Lord has done for us, I proceed to direct attention to the distinctive characteristics of the Scottish Reformation in respect of doctrine, worship, government, discipline, and church life, and the lessons which such a review should tend to rivet on the hearts of those who still hold fast its principles and long to see them more fully carried out.

 

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN KNOX.

 

The eighth decade of the sixteenth century was memorable in the history of Protestantism in its Presbyterian or Calvinistic form, and the year 1572 has been termed its annus mirabilis. It marked a crisis in the long and bloody struggle of the Protestants in the Netherlands with their Spanish oppressors,—a struggle which issued in securing the independence of the Dutch people, and settling on a Calvinistic basis the Reformed Church of Holland. It formed the turning-point in the tragic fortunes of the Reformed Church of France, at which, from being able to claim as adherents a majority of the landed gentry and a large minority of the more intelligent and wealthy bourgeois in the provincial towns, and being only weak among the citizens of the capital and the peasantry of northern and central France, she was, by an act of base treachery and fiendish cruelty, hurled from her promising position, sadly crippled in numbers and influence, permanently weakened and cast down, though not crushed or driven to despair. This decade was especially memorable in the history of the Reformed Church of Scotland as having witnessed the removal of the ablest and best of the lay defenders of the Reformation, the death of our great reformer himself, and the return to Scotland of the intrepid and devoted man who was to take up and complete the work, from which failing health and a grieved spirit had obliged Knox to withdraw. The assassination of the Good Regent (as the Earl of Moray was deservedly surnamed) was unquestionably the most disgraceful of all the murders perpetrated in Scotland in the interests of faction during those years of confusion and strife.It brought no permanent advantage to the party of reaction. It wrought much woe to the country, which under his firm yet kindly rule had begun to settle into order and to recover its prosperity.

This great national calamity preyed on the spirit and broke the already waning strength of Knox. In the month of October in that year he had a stroke of paralysis or of apoplexy, which for a time laid him aside altogether from work, and permanently enfeebled his constitution. As in the case of Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, his opponents exulted over his misfortune, and circulated maliciously exaggerated accounts of his condition, on which probably their more malicious and notoriously fictitious accounts of his last illness were founded. But this first seizure was not so severe as to put a final arrest on his activities. Before many weeks were over he had so far recovered as to be able, in part at least, to resume his labours. He was able in a measure to continue them through the anxious and unquiet months of the succeeding winter and spring—bearing faithful testimony to the principles, religious and political, which he had long professed; standing up resolutely in defence of the authority of the young prince, when many, who had formerly sworn allegiance to him, led by the intriguing laird of Lethington and the “fause” house of Hamilton, went over to the party of his popish mother. He exposed their sophistries, and fearlessly rebuked their defection, even after they had gained for the time the supremacy in Edinburgh. Others might truckle to them or quail before them, but that palsied old man, with all his former plainness and much of his former fire, persevered in denouncing their treachery and discrediting their proposals. Threatenings were uttered against his life if he persisted in his course; protection seems to have been refused him by the party against the violence of their lawless followers; and one evening (as had often happened to Calvin in his years of conflict) a musket-ball was fired in at the window of his house, and lodged in the roof of the apartment in which he was sitting. Again and again faithful citizens, an attached kirk-session, and John Craig, then his colleague in the ministry, entreated him to remove for a time to some place where his life would be safe from violence, and whence he could return to his loving and beloved flock as soon as the prevailing faction should be put down, or should vacate the city. But he heard them all unmoved, until at last they were constrained to tell him plainly that if he was attacked they had made up their minds to peril their lives in his defence, and if they were com­pelled to shed blood in the contest it must lie on his head. Thus “sore against his will,” as one of the earliest historians of his declining years tells us, and “almost thrust out by the authority of the church court,” as another of them has it, he, on the 5th May 1571, took farewell of Edinburgh for a time, and crossing the Firth of Forth at Leith moved on by short and easy stages through Fife to the city in which “ God had first opened his mouth” to proclaim His truth, and for which to the last he, as well as the Good Regent, cherished a special affection. As Mr John Davidson, then a teacher in one of the colleges, has expressed it in homely Scotch:—

“ Thou knawis he lude the by the lave,

For first in the he gave the rout

Till Antechrist that Romische slave,

Preicheing that Christ did only save.

Bot last of Edinburgh exprest,

Quhen he was not far fra his grave

 He came to the by all the rest.”

In St Andrews the reformer was sure to be free from personal danger, and on the whole to have the sympathy of the citizens; though it was not to be supposed that—in the city and university where the late Archbishop Hamilton had been long supreme, and had recently been claiming to exercise the authority of Chancellor of the University, and new founder of St Mary’s College, and where he had left behind several relations and dependents more compliant with the new order of things than himself—there were not to be found in this crisis several influential persons who had more sympathy with their late chief and with the selfish and crooked policy of the Hamiltons than with the straightforward course and steadfast fidelity of the dauntless reformer, and who would have little relish for his earnest warnings and stern reproofs. The notices preserved to us regarding this last and, so far as is yet known, longest visit of Knox to St Andrews are both detailed and interesting. From the simple and loving Memorials of his attendant, Richard Bannatyne, we learn that all the time he was there—i.e., from the beginning of July 1571 to the 17th of August 1572—he preached every Sunday, and expounded the prophecies of Daniel to the middle of the ninth chapter, applying the words of the prophet to the circumstances of Scotland at the time, and inveighing in the strongest terms against “the bloody house of Hamilton” and its abettors for their deceit, treachery, and turbulence, their base murder of the Good Regent, and cunning plot to restore a popish queen. These themes, to which in the applications of his sermons he ever and anon returned, woke up all the fire and fervour of the old man eloquent; and if it might not be said, as in earlier days, that every sermon was of more value to the cause he defended than five hundred armed men, yet the report of his untiring zeal and unswerving fidelity would still contribute greatly to animate and cheer the adherents of the young prince and of the new regent in all parts of the land.

As I have hinted, there were some in the city to whom such discourses could not fail to be distasteful—some who refused to attend on his ministry, and were perhaps so stung by what was reported of his sharp but not undeserved reproofs that they were compelled to throw off the mask they had hitherto worn, and soon after openly to apostatise from the faith which for several years they had professed and taught. But the effect on many of the young men in attendance on the university, or acting as regents in its colleges, was salutary and enduring; and perhaps it was not without special intention that, when the door was shut against him in Edinburgh and the ears of the men in power there were closed against his counsels, he betook himself to what was still the principal university in the realm, and made his last appeals to the rising hopes of the church and country there. Such discourses as he then delivered, coming from one they had already learned to venerate, could not fail to form or foster in their ingenuous minds that fidelity to the reformed faith, that jealousy of popery, and that hatred of its cruelty and tyranny, which distinguished them to the last.

James Melville, whose plastic nature and gentle spirit retained through life the impressions then made, supplements in his Diary the notices in Bannatyne’s Memorials, and, in a passage which has been often quoted, gives a very fresh and vivid sketch of the old reformer. “Bot of all the benefites I haid that yeir”—the first year he was a student in St Andrews, and had “ drunk of St Leonard’s well ”—“ the greatest,” he tells us, “was the coming of that maist notable profet and apostle of our nation, Mr Jhone Knox, to St Androis; wha be the faction of the Quein occupeing the castell and town of Edinbruche was compellit to remove thairfra with a number of the best, and chusit to com to St Androis. I hard him teatche ther the prophecie of Daniel that simmer and the wintar following. I haid my pen and my litle book, and tuk away sic things as I could comprehend. In the opening upe of his text he was moderat the space of an halff houre; bot when he enterit to application he maid me sa to grew and tremble that I could nocht haid a pen to wryt. I hard him oftymes utter these thretenings [against the faction then] in the hicht of their pryde, quhilk the eis [i.e., eyes] of monie saw cleirlie brought to pass within few yeirs upon the captean of that castle, the Hamiltones, and the Quein hirselff. He ludgit down in the Abbay besyde our Collage.” So far was it from being true, as is commonly as­serted, that he had caused the destruction of the abbey and of the abbey church or cathedral in 1559, that in 1571 he found a habitable building there, in which he, a frail old man, with his wife and children, could pass the winter in comfort. It, we know from a letter of his antagonist, Archibald Hamilton, was “the new ludgene of the abbey,”or novum hospitium, built for the reception of Mary of Guise, the queen of James V. It was in the immediate vicinity of St Leonard’s College, and our diarist further tells us: “Our regents, Mr Nicol Dalgleise, Mr Wilyeam Colace, and Mr Jhone Davidsone, went in ordinarilie to his grace [or devotional exercises] efter denner and soupper. Mr Knox wald sum tymes com in and repose him in our Collage yeard [that is the gardens im­mediately to the west of the novum hospitium, adjoining St Leonard’s College], and call us schollars unto him and bless us, and exhort us to knaw God and His wark in our contrey, and stand be the guid cause, to use our tyme weill, and lern the guid instructiones, and follow the guid exemple of our maisters.”No wonder, in these circumstances, that he is able to add, “Our haill collage, maisters and schollars, war sound and zelus for the guid cause,” or that we can now still further add that thence proceeded several of the men who were to uphold it most resolutely in the evil days which followed.

In the New College we are told, “whowbeit Mr Jhone Dowglass, then Rector [and Principal] was guid aneuche,” yet the “uther maisters and sum of the regentes war evill - myndit,” and “hated Mr Knox and the guid cause”;and two of them, Archibald and John Hamilton, soon after apostatised, betook themselves to the Con­tinent, and rose to high office in the Universities of Louvain and Paris, where the one in not inelegant Latin, and the other in courtly Scotch, sought to vindicate their conduct, and to traduce and refute their former co-religionists. Some of the masters of the Old College also, as Bannatyne has recorded, hated the plain-speaking reformer, though “be outward gesture and befoir his face thei wald seime and apeir to favore and love him above the rest.”  The Hamiltons especially seem to have given him considerable occasion to complain of their bitter and unguarded criticisms, and one of them, stung by his denunciations, challenged him to defend his doctrine in the schools of the university. This he at first refused, maintaining that the pulpit was not to be controlled by the university schools, nor the church put into subjection to the academy.

St Andrews at that time was the rendezvous of others of the adherents of the young prince, who did not feel themselves safe under the faction then in possession of the castle and city of Edinburgh. One of these, Mr John Durie of Leith, was “for stoutness and zeall in the guid cause mikle renouned and talked of.” He was an enthusiastic leader of the volunteers of his day. “The gown was na sooner af and the Byble out of hand fra the kirk, when on ged the corslet, and fangit was the hagbot, and to the fields.”Another was Robert Leckprevick, the famous printer, who brought his types and printing-press with him, and so did notable service to the cause. “ He haid then in hand,” Melville tells us, “Mr Patrik Constant’s [or Adamson’s] Catechisme of Calvin, converted in Latin heroic vers, quhilk with the author was mikle estimed of”; and deservedly so, for Adamson was an accomplished scholar, was using his scholarship for the church’s good, was eulogised by Lawson, Knox’s colleague and successor, and had not yet developed that spirit of subserviency to the powers that be which afterwards proved his ruin.

The printer had also the honour of publishing in St Andrews the last work which engaged the thoughts of the reformer. This was his ‘ Answer to a letter of a Jesuit named Tyrie.’ It had been drawn up some years before, but was now carefully revised and enlarged, and exhibited his matured views respecting several of the most notable subjects of controversy between the reformed and unreformed churches. Possibly it may have been because he had detected through all their disguises the secret leaning of the two Hamiltons to Romanist or semi-Romanist views regarding the apostolical succession, the nature of the sacraments, and the unfailing visibility and perpetuity of the church, that he now so fully entered into a controversy which previously he had been inclined to shun. Perhaps this is what is hinted at in the preface, in which he says: “Wonder not, gentill reidar, that sic ane argument suld proceid fra me in thir dolorous days after that I have taken gude-night at the warld and at all the fasherie of the same. There ar sevin yeares past sen a scrole send from a Jesuite to his brother was presented unto me be a faithfull brother requyring sum answer to be maid to the same. Amongs my other caires I scriblit that which followis, and that in few dayis; which being finished I repented of my laubour, and purposed fullie to have suppressed it. Which, na dout I had done, if that the devil had not steirit up the Jesuites of purpois to trouble godlie harts, with the same argumentis which Tyrie usis, amplified and set furth with all the dog eloquence that Sathan can devyse for suppressing of the free progres of the Evangell of Jesus Christ.” Then, after a touching reference to the hard lot of his dispersed flock “ suffering lytill les calamitie than did the faithfull efter the persecutioun of Steaphen,” and an earnest petition that God would grant them one day to meet in glory, he entreats the brethren to pray for Aim, that God “ in His mercy will pleis to put end to my long and panefull battell,” as he was unable to fight as erewhile he had done, and longed for release, though still resigned to bear patiently whatsoever God saw meet to lay upon this, his “wicked carkase.”

In March 1572 the General Assembly was held at St Andrews in the schools of St Leonard’s College. This place was no doubt chosen in part at least for the convenience of the aged reformer, whose counsel in that time of trouble was specially needed. It was the last Assembly at which he was able to be present, and probably the first witnessed by Davidson and Melville. “Thair,” the latter narrates, “was motioned the making of bischopes, to the quhilk Mr Knox opponit himselff directlie and zealuslie”; and thus probably were implanted in the youthful student’s mind the germs of those presbyterian principles which were nurtured by intercourse with his uncle Andrew Melville, and were retained by him to the last with heroic tenacity.

Two months before this a convention at Leith had given its sanction to a sort of mongrel episcopacy, nominally to secure the tithes more completely to the church, but really to secure the bulk of them by a more regular title to certain covetous noblemen who sought in this way to reimburse themselves for their services in the cause of the Reformation. Chief among these noblemen was the Earl of Morton, then one of the chief supporters of the young prince, and soon after regent of the kingdom. Having secured a presentation to the Archbishopric of St Andrews for Mr John Douglas before mentioned, he came over to the city, had him elected by the chapter in terms of the convention, and on the 10th of February inaugurated into his office. This function was performed by Wynram, Superintendent of Fife, according to the Order followed in the admission of Superintendents, save that the Bishop of Caithness, the Super­intendent of Lothian, and Mr David Lindsay, who sat beside Douglas, laid their hands on his head. Knox had preached that day as usual; but, as Bannatyne is careful to tell us, had “refuised to inaugurat the said bischope”; and as others add had “denounced anathema to the giver, anathema to the receaver,” who as rector and principal had already far more to do than such an aged man could hope to overtake. It was in reference to the same appointment that Adamson, as yet uncorrupted by Court influences, had a few days before in a sermon from the same pulpit given utterance to his famous distinction of three kinds of bishops, my lord bishop, my lord’s bishop, and the Lord’s bishop, the first of whom had been in time of popery, the second was now brought in merely to enable my lord to draw the kirk rents, and the third was the evangelical pastor as he should be in times of thorough reformation.

One more brief sketch from the Diary of the quaint but graphic chronicler on whom I have repeatedly drawn may conclude our notice of these last labours of the reformer, and bring us to his last illness and death. “The town of Edinbruche recovered againe [out of the hands of the queen’s faction] and the guid and honest men therof retourned to thair housses, Mr Knox with his familie past hame to Edinbruche.” During the time of his residence in St Andrews he was very weak. “ I saw him everie day of his doctrine,” says Melville, “go hulie and fear with a furring of martriks about his neck, a staff in the an hand, and guid godlie Richart Bal- landen, his servand, halding upe the uther oxtar, from the abbey to the paroche kirk; and be the said Richart and another servant lifted upe to the pulpit, whar he behovit to lean at his first entrie; bot or he haid done with his sermont he was sa active and vigorus that he was lyk to ding that pulpit in blads, and fly out of it.”

Soon after his return to Edinburgh he found himself quite unable to preach in the large church which he had formerly occupied, and a smaller one was fitted up for him in the western part of the nave of St Giles. But not even so were his services to be long available. On one occasion only after his return may it be said that the old fire burst out with all its former fierceness and brilliancy. This was in September, when tidings reached him of the bloody massacre of St Bartholomew’s day in France. “ Being conveyed to the pulpit,” Dr M‘Crie tells us, “and summoning up his remaining strength, he thundered the vengeance of God against ‘that cruel murderer and false traitor, the King of France,’ and [borrowing the language of the Old Testament prophets] desired Le Croc, the French ambassador, to tell his master that sentence was pronounced against him in Scotland, that the divine vengeance would never depart from him nor from his house, if repentance did not ensue; but his name would remain an execration to posterity, and none proceeding from his loins should enjoy his kingdom in peace.” The only further notice of his work is by Melville, who simply informs us that after “instituting in his roum, be the ordinar calling of the kirk and congregation, Mr James Lawsone, a man of singular learning, zeal, and eloquence, ... he tuk him to his chamber and most happelie and comfort- ablie departed this lyff.”

With this kindly notice by his youthful admirer this lecture would have ended, had I not promised to the late Dean Stanley several years ago that, when a suitable opportunity occurred, I would not fail publicly to advert to a shameless misrepresentation of the closing scene to which he had directed my attention. This originated with Archibald Hamilton, already referred to as one of the two masters of the New College, who apostatised from the Protestant faith, and after his flight to the Continent published the most barefaced lies of his old antagonist and the noble men who were associated with him in his hard battle and well-earned triumph. These lies were exposed and refuted at the time by Principal Smeton of Glasgow, himself a convert from that Society of Jesus which Hamilton ultimately joined. But as they have been revived in our own day, and distributed in the form of a tract by Popish emissaries at the doors of Protestant churches in London, and as one of a series bearing the sensa­tional title of “ Death-bed Scenes,” I shall, in fulfilment of my promise, subjoin a brief account of the reformer’s last illness and death, taken almost exclusively from the contemporary narratives of Bannatyne and Smeton, the former of whom was an eye-witness, and the latter of whom had full information from Lawson, who also was an eye-witness of all. This, I feel assured, is all that is required to set matters in their true light.

The vague charges of immorality brought against the reformer by those calumniators, ancient and modern, may be dismissed at once as nothing more than the stock-in-trade of hard-pressed controversialists in the sixteenth century. Had there been the slightest foundation for them, some of Knox’s many opponents in Scotland—Ninian Winzet, or the Abbot of Crossraguel, or Tyrie the Jesuit, or Hamilton himself before he left the country—would not have scrupled openly to upbraid him with them. Neither would the culprits among the Protestant clergy and laity, whom at various times he subjected to so rigorous a discipline, have borne this patiently at his hands had he himself been a known offender. It was his character which gave him his influence both at home and abroad, both with friends and with foes, and could it have been successfully assailed, it would not have been left to two Jesuits in a foreign land to lead the assault after he was silenced in death.

Such, however, I hardly need to assure you was not the end of the restorer of a really holy church in Scotland, if aught of credit is to be given to the unanimous testimony of those who attended him during his last illness and witnessed its closing scene, though it may have been the end which Popish controversialists in the sixteenth century deemed meet for him—as well as for Luther and Calvin and many more of whom the world was not worthy—as it is in one of the foulest legends with which their successors in the nineteenth century think it fair to supplement the legends of their predecessors in the sixteenth. According to them Luther was the child of a demon, not figuratively but literally; Calvin was eaten up of worms, like Herod who slew the children of Bethlehem and was smitten by the judgment of God, because (though apparently in this they con­found him with a later Herod) he affected divine honours. To mention such slanders, as the sceptical Bayle has said with special reference to the case of Knox, is all that is needed to refute them. They are the product of malignity so evident that it defeats itself. I know but one parallel to them in our literature, and it has the excuse that it has come down to us from the dark ages. Some would persuade us that the time has come when we might afford to forget old controversies and to shake hands with our former antagonists, but such occurrences as these tend to show that such forgetfulness and affecta­tion of cordiality is likely to be all on one side.

And now let me simply set over against these fables, in as abridged form as. I can, the unvarnished statements of Bannatyne and Smeton, the latter of which was published in reply to Hamilton who first gave shape to these charges, and which hitherto has been deemed a conclusive refutation of them.

On the 10th of November, the day after he inducted Lawson as his colleague, he was seized with a violent cough and began to breathe with difficulty. Many, who desired ardently, if it were possible, to detain him a little longer here, advised him to call in the assistance of skilful physicians. He readily complied with their advice, though he felt that the end of his warfare was now nigh at hand. Next day he caused the wages of all his servants to be paid, and earnestly exhorted them all to be careful to lead holy and Christian lives. On the 13th, being obliged by the increase of his malady to leave off his ordinary course of reading in the Scriptures (for every day he had been wont to read some chapters of the Old and New Testaments, especially some of the Psalms and Gospels), he directed his wife and servant to read to him each day the 17th chapter of St John’s Gospel, one or other of the chapters of St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, and the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. On the 14th he rose early, apparently supposing it had been the Lord’s day, and being asked why he did so when he was so ill, he replied that he had been meditating all night on the resurrection of the Lord (the subject which would have fallen to be treated next in order by him in his ministry), and that he was now pre­pared to ascend the pulpit to communicate to his brethren the consolation he had enjoyed in his own soul. Next day, though very sick, he prevailed on Durie, already mentioned, and another friend, Steward by name, to remain to dinner with him, ordered a hogshead of wine in his cellar to be pierced for them, and desired Steward to send for some of it as long as it lasted, for he should not tarry till it was done. Little is recorded of him for several days after this, but it was probably in this interval that he was visited by many of the chief of the nobility, including the Earl of Morton, so soon to be created regent, and by many members of his congregation. All of these he “solidly exhorted” and comforted. On the 20th or 21st he gave orders that his coffin should be prepared. On the 22nd he sent for the ministers, elders, and deacons of the church, that he might give them his last counsels and take final farewell of them. In the brief but solemn address which he delivered to them he called God to witness, whom he served in the Gospel of His Son, that he had taught nothing but the pure and solid doctrine of* the Gospel of the Son of God, and had never indulged his own private passions, or spoken from any hatred of the persons of those against whom he had denounced the heavy judgments of God. He exhorted them to persevere in the truth of the Gospel and in their allegiance to their young sovereign, and dismissed them with his solemn blessing. To Lawson and Lindsay, whom he asked to remain behind, he gave a last earnest message for his old friend Kirkaldy of Grange, the commandant of the castle, who had gone over to the party of the queen, and whose soul, notwithstanding, he said, was dear to him—as being one of his congregation in the castle of St Andrews, and a sharer in his hard lot in France —so that he would not have it perish if by any means he could save it. ' “Go and tell him,” he said, “that neither the craggy rock in which he miserably trusts, nor the carnal prudence of that man whom he regards as a demigod, nor the assistance of foreigners, as he falsely flatters himself, shall deliver them, but he shall be disgracefully dragged from his nest to punishment and hung on a gallows in the face of the sun, unless he speedily amend his life and betake him­self to the mercy of God.”

On the 23rd the difficulty of his breathing had greatly increased, and he seems to have thought that his end was near at hand. To one of his most intimate friends who asked him if he felt great pain, he replied that that was not reckoned as pain by him which would be the end of many miseries and the beginning of perpetual joy. And soon after, apparently supposing his end was come, he repeated the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed, adding certain paraphrases of his own on each petition of the prayer and article of the creed to the great comfort of those who stood by; and then lifting up his hands to heaven he once more said, “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” During the succeeding night he caused the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians to be read and re-read to him, and re­peatedly said to himself. O! how sweet and salutary consolation does the Lord provide for me in this chapter.” The following day, about noon, he once more sat up in bed, but owing to his extreme weakness was not able to remain long in that posture. About three in the afternoon one of his eyes failed, and his tongue performed its office less readily than before. About six in the evening he again said to his wife, “Go, read where I cast my first anchor,” referring to the instructions he had given on the 13th.

When this had been done, he continued for some hours in troubled slumber. It is in this occurrence alone that there can be got the slightest foundation for the slanders which his traducers have circulated. And it is only necessary to quote the account given of it by those who witnessed it to show that it was as honourable to the dying confessor as the gross misrepresentation of it was dishonourable to his opponents. During these hours he uttered frequent sighs and groans, so that those who stood by could not doubt that he was contending with some grievous temptation. When he awoke they asked him what was the cause of his distress. He answered that in the course of his life he had had many contests with his spiritual adversary. Often he had been tempted to despair of God’s mercy because of the greatness of his sins, often also tempted by the allurements of the world to forget his calling to endure hardness as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. But now the cunning adversary had assailed him in another form, and endeavoured to persuade him that he had merited heaven itself and a blessed immortality by the faithful discharge of the duties of his high office. “But blessed be God,” exclaimed the dying reformer, “who hath brought seasonably to my mind those passages of Scripture by which I was enabled to quench the fiery dart, ‘What hast thou, that thou hast not received?’ ‘By the grace of God I am what I am,’ and ‘Not I, but the grace of God in me’ ... wherefore I give thanks to my God by Jesus Christ who has been pleased to grant me the victory. And I am firmly persuaded that ... in a short time, without any great bodily pain, and without any distress of mind, I shall exchange this mortal and miserable life for an immortal and blessed life through Jesus Christ.”

This persuasion of his speedy and happy departure was soon to be justified by the event. After evening prayers Dr Preston, his physician, asked him whether he had heard them, when he replied, “ I would to God that ye and all men heard them as I have heard them, and I praise God for that heavenly sound.” Shortly after the signs of immediate dissolution appeared, his friends gathered round his bed, and his faithful servant addressed him: “Now, sir, the time that you have long called to God for, to wit an end of your battle, is come. And seeing all natural power now fails, remember those comfortable promises, which often times ye have shown to us, of our Saviour Jesus Christ. And that we may understand and know that ye hear us, make us some sign.” And so he lifted up one of his hands, and incontinent thereafter rendered up his spirit apparently without pain or movement, so that he seemed rather to fall asleep than to die.

Such was the account of his last illness and death transmitted by those who attended on him and witnessed it, a death worthy of his noble life, and fully justifying the brief comment of Smeton, “Surely, whatever opprobrious things profane men may utter, God hath in him given us an example of the right way as well of dying as of living.” It is true, as his heartless traducer takes care to remind us, no dirge was chanted over his remains, no mass of requiem was celebrated for his soul. He and his countrymen had long ceased to believe in the worth of such priestly ceremonies, or to imagine that their eternal state could be affected by them, or by aught save Christ’s finished work and their own faith and repentance while God’s day of grace was prolonged to them here. The brief eulogy pro­nounced over his grave by the stern and reserved regent was a truer and more impressive testimony to his worth than the most gorgeous celebration of Romish rites which he could but have shared with a Borgia or a Betoun. The stern simplicity of his grave, which, like his master Calvin’s, was till lately preserved in the memory of men without stone or bronze to mark it out, tells a tale very different from that his traducer hints at; and if his bitter taunts shall lead the reformer’s countrymen now to erect a material monument to him in some measure corresponding to the benefits he has been honoured to confer on them, this attack on his fair fame will have been over­ruled for good.

But his real monument will never be one graven by art or man’s device. It is one more noble, more lasting far. It is to be found in the life God enabled him to live, and the work God honoured him to do. It is to be seen in the plans he devised, in the institutions he founded, in the people he moulded anew, when the old church had confessedly failed in its mission. And while the Scottish nation continues to retain these institutions, and to bear this impress, it will continue the grandest, as it is the most telling, monument to the memory of its noble-hearted and single-minded reformer.

 

ALESIUS.

 

We owe it to the Rev. Christopher Anderson, the author of the ‘Annals of the English Bible,’ that attention has been once more turned to the deeply interesting story of Alexander Alane, or Alesius. Principal Lorimer, in his Scottish Reformation, has thrown further light on him. And Dr Merle D’Aubigné, who appears to have minutely examined most of his tracts and commentaries, has wrought into his graphic but imaginative narrative much of the information which they have been the chief means of handing down to us. It was after his expatriation that he received from Melanchthon the name of Alesius, or the wanderer.

This highly distinguished but long forgotten alumnus of St Andrews University was born in Edinburgh on the 23rd of April 1500, of honest parents, and received the first rudiments of his education in his native city. It was probably while he was still there that he had vouchsafed on his behalf those wonderful interpositions of Providence, which remained through life engraven on his heart, and which he thus relates in his preface to his Commentary on the Second Epistle of Paul to Timothy, published at Leipzig in 1551. With even more than his usual licence, Dr D’Aubigné thus recounts this adventure : He “was fond of going with other boys of his own age to the heights which environ Edinburgh. The great rock on the summit of which the castle stands, the beautiful Calton Hill, and the picturesque hill called Arthur’s Seat, in turn attracted them. One day, it was in 1512, Alexander and his friends, having betaken themselves to the last-named hill, amused themselves by rolling over and over down a slope which terminated in a precipice. Suddenly the lad found himself on the brink; terror deprived him of his senses; some hand grasped him and placed him in safety, but he never knew by whom or by what means he had been rescued. The priests gave the credit of this escape to the paper with which they had provided him, but Alexander him­self attributed it to God and his father’s prayers.”

Alesius, or Alane as he was still called, being of good abilities, was early sent to the university, and seems to have been one of the first set of students who entered St Leonard’s College (the college founded by Prior John Hepburn, with the consent of Archbishop Alexander Stuart) after its opening in 1512. His studies appear to have been prosecuted there in the usual way, and in 1515 he became a determinant, or took the degree of B.A.; and, probably after acting for a few years as a regent in the college, he was drafted as a novice into the priory, and ultimately became one of its canons. When John Major came to St Andrews in 1523 as principal of the Paedagogium, he, like Hamilton and some others who ultimately shared the same opinions, studied theology under him, and made great progress, especially in the study of the schoolmen and the fathers of the Christian church. He was, like most of the young scholastics of his time, fond of disputation; and if he listened to those lectures on the gospels which Major gave to the press some years after, he probably imbibed from his teacher that combative attitude towards the new opinions which at this period of his life he showed. D’Aubigné says: “His keenest desire was to break a lance with Luther. As he could not measure himself personally with the man whom he named arch-heretic, Alesius had refuted his doctrine in a public discussion held at the uni­versity. The theologians of St Andrews had covered him with applause. Alesius, alive to these praises and a sincere catholic, thought that it would be an easy task for him to convince young Hamilton of his errors.... Armed cap-à-pie, crammed with scholastic learning, and with all the formulae quo modo sit, quo modo nonsit,” he had various discussions with him. “ Hamilton had before him nothing but the Gospel, and he replied to all the reasonings of his antagonist with the clear, living, and profound word of the Scriptures. Alesius, struck and embarrassed, was silenced, and felt as if the morning star were rising in his heart. It was not merely his understanding that was convinced, the breath of a new life penetrated his soul.” He continued from time to time to visit the reformer while he lived, and to cherish his memory after he had been so cruelly put to death.

When the opinions and martyrdom of Hamilton were the subject of conversation among the canons, several of the younger of whom were attached to him, Alesius refused to condemn him. He was not yet by any means, as Dr Lorimer would have it, a Lutheran; he was not yet prepared to separate himself from the old church; but he saw and mourned over her corruptions, and longed, and in a quiet way laboured, for the removal of them, and also yearned for the revival of a more earnest Christian spirit, and more correct moral conduct among those over whom his influence extended. From that day no one could induce him to express approval of the proceedings which had been taken against Hamilton, or to pronounce an unfavourable judg­ment on the articles for which he had been condemned to death.

This silence brought him under the suspicion of his more bigoted associates, and gave special offence to his superior, Prior Patrick Hepburn (the nephew of Prior John, who had founded St Leonard’s College), a violent, coarse, immoral young noble, emulous of the debaucheries and vices, as well as of the cultured hauteur, of the young French ecclesiastics of rank among whom his youth had been passed. Knox has given a graphic if rather coarse account of the revelries of this young man and his gay associates, more in keeping with what we should have expected from the sons of Tarquin in heathen Rome than from the elite of the young ecclesiastics of a primatial Christian city, and under the eye of an aged archbishop.The representation of Alesius is only the more credible because it is the more restrained, and the one representation corroborates the other, and proves to what a low ebb morality had sunk among the ministers of the old church in Scotland before it was swept away. Not only did this bold bad man set at nought the laws of God and the canons of his church, and make a boast of doing so among his boon companions, but even when the archbishop sought to separate him from his unlawful con­nection, the prior collected his armed retainers, and would have fought with him had not the Earl of Rothes and the Abbot of Arbroath, the primate’s hopeful nephew, come between the two bands and patched up a sort of truce between their leaders.

The Christian lives and healthful influence of the younger canons could not but be felt to be a standing rebuke by their superior, and doubtless were one main cause why he bore them so deep a grudge and gave way to such savage outbursts of temper in his intercourse with them. He is said to have denounced them, and especially Alesius, to the aged primate, and probably with the view of entrapping him into some unguarded expression of approval of the new opinions, he got him appointed to preach the sermon at the opening of a synod of bishops and priests which was held at St Andrews probably in the Lent of the year 1529. Alesius, while carefully avoiding everything which might give needless offence to his hearers, thought, to use his own words, that in such presence, and speaking in the Latin language, he would not discharge his duty unless he earnestly exhorted those set in authority over the churches to the practice of piety, the observance of good morals, the study of Christian doctrine, and the pious teaching and governing of their churches. He confesses that he earnestly inveighed against immoral priests, but he adds that as he had said nothing in a disloyal spirit, or more harshly than the facts warranted, and had attacked no one by name, the sermon gave no offence to good men. But his irate and domineering prior imagined that the sermon was specially aimed at him, and was intended to hold him up to the ridicule of the assembled prelates and clergy. Having already defied the archbishop, Hepburn could not brook such a liberty on the part of one of his own subordinates. An opportunity soon occurred to him of paying back with interest the insult which he imagined had been done to him.

It so happened that the whole college of canons resolved, for many and grave reasons, to lodge a complaint with the king respecting the harshness and cruelty of their superior. When this came to Hepburn’s ears, he rushed with a band of armed attendants into the sacred chapter­house where the canons were assembled, and when admonished by Alesius, who probably presided in the meeting, not in the heat of passion to be guilty of any foolish prank, he ordered the speaker to be seized by his armed attendants, and drawing his sword would have run it through him had not two of the canons forcibly dragged him back and turned aside his weapon. The affrighted and timid canon cast himself at his superior’s feet and entreated him to spare his life, but in return only received a kick in the breast which nearly proved fatal to him. When he had partially recovered from this, and was being hurried off to prison, another dastardly attack was made on him, but that was parried by the prior’s own retainers, who saw that he was beside himself with rage and fury. After this all the other canons were seized and imprisoned, but on the remonstrance of certain noble friends they were ordered to be released by the king, who was then in St Andrews and was informed of what had taken place.

The king’s order was speedily carried out in regard to all save Alesius; but he, notwithstanding all remonstrances of friends, was not only detained in custody, but was even thrust into a more filthy dungeon, called by the sufferer, in one of his treatises, teterrimo specu subtus terram inter bufones et serpentes, and in another a latrind or sink, to which I know nothing at all corresponding in St Andrews save the underground chamber near the college hall, and the roughly-hewn cavern still subsisting in the rock to the north of the house at the end of Castle Street, going down by the southern entrance by thirty or more somewhat irregular steps through the rock, and terminating in a small chamber of rounded or oval form, having an opening in its roof originally little more than a foot in diameter, but now considerably enlarged, and to which on the other side a covered passage from the castle leads down. They might well abandon hope who entered there, and possibly one at least of its uses was for literally immuring those who were never again to have further intercourse with their fellow-men. In this or some other equally horrible place the poor canon was confined for eighteen or twenty days; and when, after repeated remonstrances on the part of the king and the magistrates of the city, the prior was obliged to produce his victim, he enjoined him strictly on no account to utter one word about the shameful maltreatment to which he had been subjected. Alesius, however, had suffered too horribly in this place to let slip the opportunity so unexpectedly presented to him of telling the worst to the friendly magistrates, and entreating them to save him from all further risk of a repetition of this barbarous cruelty. But the magistrates, though friendly, were easily persuaded that all was now to go right. As soon, however, as they were got out of the way under this persuasion, the prior upbraided the poor canon for having divulged the whole disgusting truth which he had enjoined him to conceal, and ordered him to be again placed in confinement, in which he was left to languish for nearly a year. But this confinement was in a less objectionable place, and apparently within the precincts of the priory; and when the prior was absent the canons occasionally had the prisoner brought out from his ward, and even permitted him, as in former times, to take a leading part in the services at the altar. On one occasion the prior, coming back unexpectedly, and seeing what occurred in his absence, ordered Alesius at once into confinement, threatening on the morrow to have him off to the old filthy place where his life had been so nearly sacrificed before, and where he was to be entrusted to the care of a more remorseless jailer.

As soon as their superior left them for the night the canons, satisfied that all hope of preserving the life of their comrade in St Andrews was at an end, and that if he did not seek safety by instant flight horrible torments and certain death awaited him, gathered round him and urged him to escape. On his expressing a wish to consult with other friends before taking a step so serious, they pressed him only the more urgently to flee and leave the country at once, as he would certainly be pursued, and, if overtaken, brought back for condign punishment. The sequel I give in his own unvarnished statement, which is to me more touching from its very simplicity than the highly embellished rechauffees of D’Aubigné: “Etsi maximo dolore afficiebar cum cogitarem mihi e patria, qua nihil dulcius est bene institutis naturis, discedendum esse, tamen, et necessitati, et tot bonorum virorum consiliis parendum duxi.” And then follows a parting scene only less affecting than that of St Paul from the disciples on the seashore at Tyre, and proving that even yet all good was not extinguished from the hearts of those under the rule of this vicious prior, and encouraging the hope, which was after­wards fully realised, that the best of them would ultimately find a more congenial home in a new and purified church. Only the apostle, though in a heathen land, could kneel down in open day on the seashore to pray with his friends, and they without challenge could accompany him to the ship which waited to receive him; while these men, though living in a professedly Christian land, had secretly to bring out their friend from the place of confinement and comfort him, and then send him away alone into the thick darkness to pursue his weary journey under cover of night to that broad firth which bounds Fifeshire on the north, if haply he might find on its shores some boat to ferry him across, or on its bosom some friendly craft to convey him without loss of time beyond the reach of his implacable persecutor. “Clam igitur educunt me domo, instruunt et viatico. Ita cum lachrymantes inter nos vale dixissemus, et illi suavissima commemoratione illustrium virorum et sanctorum qui similiter d patria tyrannidi cesserunt, maesticiam meam non nihil levassent, media jam nocte in densissimis tenebris solus iter ingredior.” Sadly he plodded on his way through the darkness, oppressed with forebodings, for he knew of no hospitable retreat in other lands; he had neither friend nor acquaintance among foreigners; he could speak no language but his native tongue and Latin; and he had some reason to fear that he might be classed with those vagabonds who had been driven out from various Continental states because of their fanatical opinions, and were justly suspected even by Protestants in Germany. But in the multitude of distracting thoughts within him he encouraged himself in the Lord his God and in Christ his Saviour. Ere morning had well dawned his journey was completed, and he got safely on shipboard, where, according to his own account, quidam homo germanus—that is, according to some, a certain man a German; according to others, a certain man a kinsman—received him very affec­tionately, and afterwards nursed him with great kindness during the sea-sickness from which he suffered throughout the stormy vogage.

On the day following his escape, when the vessel which sheltered him had already sailed, there came horsemen to the shore, sent by the prior from St Andrews, to make search for the fugitive. When they returned without success to their master, he is reported to have summoned before him a certain citizen of Dundee, whom he suspected to have aided in providing a ship for the canon. This merchant citizen took with him another true-hearted favourer of the Reformation, James Scrymgeour, provost of the town; and on the former denying that he had given the assistance which he was accused of doing to Alesius, and which probably he could deny with a good conscience, his sons in St Andrews and Dundee having been too prudent to involve him in their little plot, the provost spoke out boldly to the haughty prior, and said: Why make a work about this? I, myself, if I had known that Alexander was preparing to go away, would with the greatest pleasure have furnished him both with a ship and with provisions for his voyage, that he might be put in safety beyond the reach of your cruelty. Assuredly, had he been my brother I would long ago have rescued him from those perils and miseries in which you have involved him.

Thus Alexander Alesius was driven from his much-loved native land, destined never to return to it more, or again to see the friends and relations to whom he was so warmly attached. “Could anyone then have whispered in the ear of the disconsolate exile that he was on the road to far more extensive usefulness” and freedom; that he would gain many friends in foreign lands, and would not only be spared to labour there for more than thirty years, but would also be honoured to be the first to plead by his writings for the free circulation of the Scriptures in his native Scot­land, and one of the first to help on Cranmer in England, and Hermann von Wied, the reforming Archbishop of Cologne, in Germany; that he would be privileged to attend, as one of the Pro­testant representatives, many of the most import­ant colloquies of the leaders of the old and the new church on the Continent, to be the intimate friend of Luther and Melanchthon, to labour as a professor of theology in two German universities, and to live and die in the greatest honour and re­spect among those with whom he laboured,—“how incredible would it all have seemed to him! ” Yet it was thus God meant it, and thus He brought it to pass; and if there was one among the Scottish exiles of those times who was less embittered towards his persecutors than another, or more ready to yield to them in things indifferent or of minor importance, if only he could gain their hearts for Christ and His cause in matters of highest moment, it was he.

The ship in which Alesius sailed was bound for France, probably for Dieppe or Rouen, with which towns the trade of Scotland was carried on, and where many Scottish merchants resided or had factors; but she had not gone far on her way from port when a violent westerly gale carried her across the German Ocean, drove her into the Sound, and made it necessary to get her into the harbour at Malmo in Scania, in order to refit her. There, as well as at the French ports named, there was a community of Scottish merchants, probably by this time enjoying the ministrations of John Gaw or Gall, another St Andrews alumnus, early won over to the cause of the Reformation. The community of Malmo, a year or two before, had given its adhesion to the same cause, and its leading ministers, as well as the Scottish chaplain, were, therefore, prepared to welcome and treat with all kindness their exiled co-religionist, as he himself, twenty-five years after, feelingly narrates. After being refitted at Malmo, the vessel proceeded on her voyage to France, where Alesius left, and plodding his way along the northern coast, visited Belgium, where he would meet with friendly Scots at Bruges, and probably also at Antwerp.

He then passed up the Rhine to Cologne, where, as already suggested, he was favourably received by the Archbishop, Hermann von Wied, who afterwards became a friend of the Reformation, though at this time, like Alesius him­self, not yet decided altogether to break with the old church. It is no doubt to this visit he refers in the following passage of the treatise from which I have repeatedly quoted: “When lately at Cologne I conversed familiarly with a certain man of the highest learning and authority, and perceived how deeply he was grieved by the disturbed state of the church in Germany. I began to exhort him to interpose his judgment in certain matters of dispute, because I hoped that milder views might gain the ascendancy if princes and people only had such monitors excelling in learning and authority. When I had argued long in support of my opinion, heaving a sigh, but making no formal reply to my arguments, he bade me listen to an apologue: When the lion, worn out with old age, could no longer obtain his prey by hunting, he fell on the device of inviting the beasts to visit him in his den. There came to him a bear, a wolf, and a fox. The bear entered first, and being affably received by the lion, and conducted round the den, he was asked how he was pleased with the amenity of the place. Being no courtier, the bear answered bluntly that he could never stay in such a filthy hole, among heaps of decaying carcasses. The lion, enraged, chid the bear for finding fault with the amenity of the royal den, and tearing him up, cast away his carcass among the others. The wolf, who had been standing by, seeing in what danger he was, thought by artifice to soothe the haughty mind of the lion. He accordingly approached, was led round the den, and was asked whether the smell of the heap of carcasses was unpleasant to him.

The wolf replied, in a carefully considered speech, that he had never seen anything more pleasant. This artifice, however, was of no avail to the wolf. The lion meted out the same treatment to him as to the bear, tearing him up for his impudent flattery. The fox, who had witnessed all this, and how both the simplicity of the bear and the flattery of the wolf had given equal offence to the lion, was in great perplexity what to answer when it came to his turn. He went forward, however, and being interrogated as the others had been whether the smell of the den was disagreeable, he replied modestly that he could not express any opinion on the point, as he was labouring under a cold in the head.” Alesius waited to hear from his host the moral or application of the apologue, but this was not given by him. He preferred to leave it to his own good sense, merely counselling him to be cautious of engaging in such discus­sions for the present. Ultimately, however, both came to see that there is a time to speak as well as a time to keep silence; and it is interesting to note that to the last both observed similar moderation in their statements of doctrine, both evinced the same desire, by conciliation to gain opponents, rather than to provoke them, notwithstanding all the hard usage they both met with from their secular and ecclesiastical superiors.

Soon after this Alesius appears to have passed on from Cologne to Wittenberg, and there for a time to have resumed the study of theology, as well as of Greek and Hebrew, under Melanchthon and the other gifted teachers in that university. Luther he does not seem to have met for a time, or to have been acquainted with his writings when he published his first treatises. Melanchthon cherished a special affection for Alesius and the Scottish exiles who soon after followed him to Wittenberg, believing that they were the descend­ants of those Scoti who had sent the early Christian missionaries to Germany, and that it became him to repay to them the great kindness the heathen Germans had received from their fore­fathers in the distant past.

It was while he was thus occupied that Alesius heard of the cruel edict of the Scottish bishops, and it hardly admits of doubt that he submitted to Melanchthon, and got corrected by him, his little treatise against their decree, forbidding the New Testament Scriptures to be used by the laity in the vernacular. It is a very pithy and forcible bit of pleading for the right of the Christian laity to possess and study the Scriptures in their own tongue. This remarkable treatise struck the true key-note in the contest it ushered in, and helped it on to victory—a victory which was substantially to be gained ere Knox had taken his place among the combatants on the side of the Reformation at all.

To this epistle Cochlaeus replied without loss of time, and ere the year was out Alesius rejoined in that Responsio ad Cochlei calumnias, in which he has given so touching an account of his own maltreatment, so interesting a statement of his own opinions in matters of faith and church polity, and so trenchant a reply to the sophistries and slanders of his opponent.

This able and, for the age, singularly temperate reply made a deep impression in England as well as in Scotland, and doubtless prepared the way for that offer of employment there which two years subsequently was made him by Cranmer, whom, in his moderation and earnest desire to avoid a total rupture between the old church and the new life, he then so much resembled. But whatever its merits, the disputatious Cochlaeus—“der gewaffnete mann,” as Luther sneeringly terms him—was determined that his opponent should not have the last word in the dispute, and accordingly in August 1534 he published at Leipsic his Apologia pro Scotiae Regno adversus personatum Alexandrum Alesium Scotum. In this treatise he repeats the assertion in his previous one that Melanchthon, not Alesius, was the author of these epistles. He charges Alesius with put­ting lies into the mouth of a foreigner to the discredit of his native country, and tells him that if he had the power he would gladly send him away to Scotland with his hands tied behind his back to be ignominiously punished as a traitor and a public slanderer. His opponent’s minute and temperate narrative of facts appears to have made no impression on him. He is content magisterially to pronounce it absurd and incredible, and inconsistent with itself as well as with probability. He appears in his ire to forget that the king of Scots and his subjects were better able to judge of its truthfulness than he, a foreigner, could be; and that after saying all he could for the bishops and superior clergy in his former reply, he had been obliged to conclude with the damaging admission that possibly there were “bishops and prelates who, neither in sanctity of life nor in acquaintance with sacred learning, responded to or satisfied their dignity and office.”

The epistles of Cochlaeus, if abusive and less cogent in reasoning, as well as less relieved by any sparkle of wit or racy anecdote than those of Alesius, are certainly written in a more easy and flowing Latin style, and, in that respect at least, the Scottish prelates had no reason to be ashamed of the champion who had volunteered his services in their cause. Nor were they want­ing in those more substantial expressions of their satisfaction which Cochlaeus, like most of the controversialists of his time, evidently coveted. The Archbishops of St Andrews and Glasgow testified their gratitude for his services by sending him liberal presents. The king wrote him a letter, a contemporary transcript of which is still extant, and also, as is stated by Cochlaeus himself in a letter to a Polish archbishop, sent him some more material tokens of his regard. And even the messenger who had brought over the copies of his first epistle received, as it now appears, a present of fifty pounds Scots. Alesius, though in quite another way, did not lack his reward, and it came in the way which he valued most—the treatises he had written, to a certain extent at least, got into circulation both in Scot­land and in England. They cheered the hearts of the faithful under all the terrible trials to which they were subjected in the later years of James’s reign, when he seems to have abandoned his former kindliness, and surrendered himself in a great measure to the priests and to vicious indulgences. They carried conviction to the minds of many, and gradually ripened opinion to demand the right to do publicly what many had learned to do secretly—to study the Word of God, and especially the New Testament, in their native tongue. This right was authorised by an Act of the Scottish Parliament passed in 1543, when Cardinal Betoun was in disgrace, and the Archbishop of Glasgow was left alone to protest against it. This Act was the first real victory of the reformed party in Scotland, and it was mainly due to the able and temperate pleading of Alesius that this great boon, or indeed I may say this indefeasible right of .Christian lay­men, was granted. The same subject had been reverted to by him in his more elaborate treatise, De authoritate Verbi Dei, which was published in 1542 in Latin, and sometime after was translated into English.

One other episode in this controversy remains still to be adverted to. This is the intervention of the great humanist, Erasmus,—an incident in his history on which his biographers with one consent have observed a judicious silence. Nevertheless, the fact is as undoubted as melancholy that he—who had done so much to promote the freer circulation and profounder study of the Greek original of the New Testament, and had even ventured, under the patronage of Pope Leo X, to bring out a Latin version of the New Testament more true to the original than the Vulgate version, that those who knew only Latin might understand more fully the meaning of the original—in his old age, when irritated by the course of events, and by his controversies with Luther, consented to recommend this scurrilous pamphleteer to his friends in Scotland. His own letter is not now extant, or, if extant, is not at present accessible; but the answer sent to him by the Scottish king has been preserved, like his letter to Cochlaeus, among the MSS. in the British Museum. It is sufficient to prove the fact that Erasmus did intervene, and commend to his Scottish friends a writer who repre­sents Luther’s translation of the New Testament, which more than any other book has made Germany what it is, as the “pabulum mortis, fomes peccati, velamen malitiae, praetextus falsae libertatis, inobedientiae praesidium, disciplinae corruptio, morum depravatio, concordiae dissipatio ... vitiorum scaturigo ... rebellionis incendium ... charitatis peremptio ... veritatis perduellio.”

In 1535 Alesius, having received encouragement from the agents of the English king then negotiating an alliance with the Protestant princes of Germany, came over to England with a letter of recommendation from Melanchthon. He was favourably received by Archbishop Cranmer, by Cromwell the Vicar-General, and by the king himself, who appointed him king’s scholar, and instructed Cromwell, as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, to give him a place as a reader in divinity there. He accord­ingly went into residence in Queen’s College, the same college which shortly before had been the home of Erasmus while lecturing in the university on Greek, and towards the end of the year he began a course of lectures on the Hebrew Psalter. He is supposed to have been the first who delivered lectures in Cambridge on the Hebrew Scriptures, but he was not suffered to do it long in peace. It could not be concealed that he was a favourer of the new opinions and a friend of Melanchthon, and that he had, in fact, been recommended by him to the king and the chancellor of the university. By the time he had entered on the exposition of Psalm viii. he was challenged by one of the champions of the old learning to a public disputation, and courageously accepted the challenge; but when the day appointed for the discussion arrived, his opponent did not venture to meet him in open fight. He preferred to plot against him in secret, and to foment tumult among the scholars, till Alesius, finding that his life was in danger, and that he could not count on the protection of the uni­versity authorities, deemed it his duty to leave Cambridge and return to London.

For the next three years he remained there, supporting himself chiefly by the practice of medicine, which he studied under a London physician of note. He occasionally, however, gave assistance to his reforming friends in the varying fortunes of these unquiet times. He did so notably in a convocation or a meeting of the superior clergy in 1536 or 1537, being put forward by Cranmer and Cromwell as the chief spokesman on the reforming side, the opinions of which he defended with considerable force and ability, so far as the notes of the debates preserved by Foxe in his ‘Acts and Monuments’ enable us to judge. His appearance on this occasion brought him into sharp collision with Stokesley, Bishop of London. On the other hand, it secured for him the warm friendship of Cranmer and Latimer, towards both of whom he continued to the last to cherish a deep affection, and of whose martyrdom he spoke with so much grief when he published his Commentary on the First Book of Psalms. While in England, as Thomasius tells us, he married an English lady, by name Catherine de Mayn; and when Henry VIII once more veered round to his former moorings, and passed the bloody statute of the six articles, insisting inter alia on the doctrine of Transubstantiation and the celibacy of the clergy, Alesius, like several other married priests, had to consult his safety and that of his family by a hurried retreat to the Continent.

Among those who had to leave England about the same time were John M‘Alpine and John Fyffe—or, as they were henceforth to be surnamed by Melanchthon, Joannes Macchabaeus and Joannes Fidelis—both, like Alesius himself, Scotsmen, the former having been prior of the Dominican monastery at Perth, and the latter an alumnus and teacher in St Leonard’s College. They had, along with several other known favourers of the Reformation, been obliged to leave Scotland at an earlier period, and after finding a temporary shelter in England, apparently at Salisbury, under the protection of Bishop Shaxton, who was then a favourer of the reformed opinions, were, like Alesius himself, to find their ultimate home and special work on the Continent—the one in the University of Copenhagen, the other in the University of Frankfort on the Oder. They seem to have gone first to Wittenberg, and while the others for a time resumed their studies there, Alesius almost immediately on his return was selected by Melanchthon to accompany him to the colloquy at Worms, and then to that at Regensburg, which were attended not only by the Lutheran and the Catholic theologians, but also by Bucer, Calvin, and other reforming divines of Strassburg. So it came about that Alesius, who had suffered exile in the cause of the Reformation in Scotland, and still had striven to promote it, was probably the first of our countrymen to be brought into contact with Calvin, who was ultimately to exercise so marked an influence on the form and mode of that Reformation, and who too was then an exile both from his native land and from the scene of his earlier labours. To the last Alesius seems to have been the one of his pupils to whom the gentle and timid Melanchthon most closely clung, and it was by his recom­mendation that in the very year of his return to the Continent he was promoted to be Professor of Divinity in the University of Frankfort on the Oder. And it is something of which a Scotchman and a St Andrean may be proud, that the university of that little principality of Brandenburg, which has since expanded into the great kingdom of Prussia, was indebted for two of its first Protestant professors of divinity to Scotland and to St Andrews.

His stay at Frankfort, however, was but short, a controversy having arisen between him and one of his colleagues about the propriety of attaching civil punishments to adultery and other offences against the seventh commandment. In 1542, or early in 1543, he resigned his professorship, and transferred his family to Leipsic. Melanchthon, who, though concurring in his opinions, blamed his hasty resignation, yet exerted himself to procure an appointment for him in the great Saxon university; so also did Ludovicus Fachsius, at once the Burgomaster and the head of the Faculty of Law, of whose kindness he makes special mention in the dedication to his sons of his edition of Melanchthon’s Catechism, which he had used when superintending their religious instruction.

The remaining twenty-one years of his life were spent busily and usefully in this famous university, though he suffered somewhat severely during the Schmalkaldic war and the siege of Leipsic. It was there that most of his theological treatises were elaborated and published. He was twice at least chosen Rector of the university—in 1555 and in 1561. In 1542, as already stated, he published in Latin the arguments he had used in his disputation with Stokesley, Bishop of London, on the authority of the Word of God, and against the doctrine of the seven sacraments, both confirming his former arguments as to the rights of the Christian laity, and maintaining the supremacy of Scripture over tradition. He had previously published his inaugural dissertation in the University of Frankfort, ‘De restituendis scholis,’ in which he advocated at length the great need for university training for the ministers of the protestant churches, and gave a detailed account of his own opinions, which he affirmed were then in full accord with those of the Lutheran churches. In 1543, probably before he was fully settled at Leipsic, it is said that on  hearing the news of the favourable change which had taken place in Scotland on the death of James V and the accession of Arran to the regency, he, like many other Scottish exiles, had serious thoughts of returning home, and availing himself to the uttermost of this unexpected opportunity which seemed to be opening for carrying forward the work of the Reformation in the land which was still dear to him. But before he had fully made up his mind to follow this course, he fortunately heard that the fickle regent had already begun to change his policy, and that though the privilege of freely reading the Scriptures in the vernacular, for which he had so earnestly contended, was legally secured, the triumph of the Reformation was by no means so near at hand as at first he had been led to suppose. Shortly after this, roused by the tidings of fresh persecutions which had reached him from Scotland, and especially by the account of the cruel executions of the humble martyrs of Perth by the cardinal and his party on St Paul’s day, 1543-44, Alesius on 23rd April wrote to Melanchthon in the following terms:—

“Three days ago there were here several countrymen of mine, who declare that the cardinal rules all things at his pleasure in Scotland, and governs the governor himself. In the town of St Johnston he hung up four respectable citizens, for no other cause than because they had requested a monk, in the middle of his sermon, not to depart in his doctrine from the sacred text, and not to mix up notions of his own with the words of Christ. Along with these a most respectable matron, carrying a sucking child in her arms, was haled before the tribunal and condemned to death by drowning. They report that the constancy of the woman was such that, when her husband was led to the scaffold and mounted the ladder, she followed and mounted along with him, and entreated to be allowed to hang from the same beam. She encouraged him to be of good cheer, for in a few hours, said she, I shall be with Christ along with you. They declare also that the governor was inclined to liberate them, but that the cardinal suborned the nobles to threaten that they would leave him if the condemned were not put to death. When the cardinal arrived with his army at Dundee, from which the monks had been expelled, all the citizens took to flight; and when he saw the town quite deserted he laughed, and remarked that he had expected to find it full of Lutherans.”

Before the expiry of that year Alesius addressed to the chief nobles, prelates, barons, and to the whole people of Scotland, his Cohortatio ad concordiam pietatis ac doctrinae Christianae defensionem. This piece, Dr Lorimer tells us, “is instinct throughout with the spirit of true Christian patriotism, as well as with genuine evangelical earnestness and fervour. Lamenting the distractions of the kingdom by opposing political factions—the French faction and the English—he [like the author of the Complaynt of Scotland a few years later] implores his countrymen to lay aside these divisions, and demonstrates by many examples from classical history the dangers of national disunion, and the duty of patriotic concord in defence of the safety and honour of their common country. His expostulations against the oppression and cruelty of the bishops, and his allusions to the martyrs who had suffered in the cause of truth, are full of interest; and his digression, in particular, upon the character and martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton, is a noble burst of eloquence and pathos. When he exhorts to national union he means union in the truth—union in the one great work of purifying religion and reforming the corruptions of the church of God. What urgent need there was of such a work he demonstrates at much length, and with great freedom and faithfulness. Unless the church of Christ be reformed it must perish from the earth, and those are its worst enemies, not its real friends, who oppose such indispensable reform.” “Everywhere,” he says, “we see the church driven forward to such reform. Ask even those who are most solicitous for its welfare, and they will tell you that the church can no longer be safe or free from troubles unless it be strengthened by the removal of abuses. If this, then, is a measure of absolute necessity unless we would see the whole church go to ruin; if all men confess that this should be done, if facts themselves call with a loud voice that some care should be taken to relieve the labouring [bark of the] church, to purify her depraved doctrine, and to reform her whole administration,—why, I demand, are those maligned and vilified who discover and point out the church’s faults and failings? The proper remedies could not possibly have been applied till the disease was known; and yet the men who point it out, warn of its virulence and danger, and wish to alleviate or entirely remove it, are hated and persecuted as much as if they had been them­selves the cause of all.” With equal vigour he repels the cry of innovation raised against the reformers and their teaching. Their work was rather an honest attempt at restoration. What they sought, he said, “was just such a change as would take place in the manners of an age if the gravity, modesty, and frugality of ancient times were to take the place of levity, lewdness, luxury, and other vices. Such a change might be termed the introduction of what was novel, but in fact it was only the reintroduction of what was old and primitive. Let us,” he exclaims, “have innovation everywhere if only we can get the true for the false, seriousness for levity, and solid realities for empty dreams.” “It is no new doctrine we bring, but the most ancient, nay rather the eternal truth, for it proclaims that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came into the world to save sinners, and that we are saved by faith in Him. Of Him even Moses wrote, and to Him give all the prophets witness, that whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins. This is the old doctrine which runs through all the ages. Those which are really new are the doctrines which have obscured or contaminated it, brought in by those entrusted with the care of the vine­yard of the Lord, and who, like the keepers of the vineyard in the Gospel parable, have maltreated and slain many of the Lord’s messengers.”

This was the last service, so far as we know, which Alesius was able to render to the cause of the Reformation in his native land, and it did not fail in due time to produce abundant and lasting fruit. As Major before him, so Knox after him, strenuously contended for union of Scots­men among themselves; and after that, but only after that, for a league with England rather than with France. They laboured, and others entered into their labours, and, proceeding on the same lines on which they had worked, at last brought the conflict to a triumphant issue. Tid­ings of their success filled Alesius with joy in the land of his exile. Even these, however, failed in his old age to tempt him back to the home of his youth, or the scene of those early struggles which were so deeply engraven on his memory and heart. And, so far as we know, he received no call to return from those who were then at the head of affairs in Scotland, though unquestionably he was more deeply read in theology than any one of them, and though, as unquestionably, the faculty of divinity was for several years but poorly supplied in the universities of Scotland, and preachers of ability, culture, and learning were very rare in the land.

His life, especially after the close of the Schmalkaldic war, seems to have passed tranquilly and happily at the great Lutheran University of Leipsic. He was loved and honoured by his col­leagues and by his prince, and, as I have already hinted, he was the bosom friend and unremitting correspondent of Melanchthon. As his services had been called into requisition by the Preceptor Germaniae at the colloquies of Worms and Re­gensburg, so were they sought and got at the colloquy of Saxon theologians for the preparation of the Leipsic Interim in 1548, at that of Naumburg in 1554, at that of Nuremberg in 1555, and that of Dresden in 1561. “In all these”—the Leipsic professor, who on the occasion of the first centenary of his second rectorship pronounced an oration on him, affirms that—“he so conducted himself that no one could charge him with want of perseverance in building up the truth, or of judiciousness in examining the errors of others, or of faithfulness and dexterity in the counsels he gave.” M'Kenzie, who has inserted a sketch of his career in his ‘Lives of Eminent Scotsmen,’ assures us that in the conference of Naumburg he acquitted himself to the admiration of the whole assembly, for which he is highly commended by Camerarius in his ‘ Life of Melanchthon’; and further, that in the year 1555 the disciples of Andrew Osiander having raised great dissensions in the city of Nuremberg respecting the doctrine of justification, Melanchthon made choice of Alesius as the fittest person to appease them by his wisdom and learning, and that his management answered Melanchthon’s expecta­tions, though Alesius himself had previously taken a side in the controversy. In the Majoristic con­troversy, Alesius, like Melanchthon, so far sided with Major as to maintain against the extreme Lutherans the necessity of good works, not to justification, but to final salvation; and in 1560 he seems to have discussed this question in one of his so-called disputations.

With respect to his private life, we are told by Thomasius that he had by his English wife one son, whose name was Caspar, and who died while still a youth, and had a monument erected by his father to his memory, bearing the simple inscription, “Caspari. Filiolo. Alexander. Alesius. Doctor. Lugens. Posuit.” He had at least two daughters. One named Christina, Thomasius tells us, was married to a German bearing the classical name Marcus Scipio: she outlived her husband, and died in 1604, in the fifty-ninth year of her age. The name of the other daughter does not seem to have been known to Thomasius, but as he states that she was given in marriage in 1557, we can have no doubt that she is the same Anna whose wedding is referred to in a letter of Alesius to Melanchthon, recently un­earthed, and inviting him and other friends in Wittenberg to the wedding.

Alesius himself died on the 17th March 1565, and was buried at Leipsic; but no stone was raised, or, if raised, now remains, to tell where his ashes repose. In all probability it was in his son’s grave, in the church of St Paul, in the city of Leipsic, that his ashes were laid to rest. The only monuments to his memory reared at the time and still existing are those furnished by our own John Johnston — second master of St Mary’s College, and colleague of Andrew Melville—in his Latin poems on the Scottish martyrs and confessors, and entitled by Beza in his ‘Icones.’ Johnston, joining together Macchabaeus and Al­esius, says:—

“ Sors eadem exilii nobis, vitaeque laborumque,

Ex quo nos Christi conciliavit amor.

Una salus amborum, unum et commune periclum ;

Pertulimus pariter praestite cuncta Deo.

Dania te coluit Me Lipsia culta docentem.

Audiit, et sacros hausit ab ore sonus.”

Beza says, “He was a man dear to all the learned, who would have been a distinguished ornament of Scotland if that country had recovered the light of the Gospel at an earlier period; and who, when rejected by both Scotland and England, was most eagerly embraced by the evangelical church of Saxony, and continued to be warmly cherished and esteemed by her to the day of his death.” The man who was held in such high esteem by the reforming Archbishops of Cologne and Canterbury; who was the bosom friend of Melanchthon; who was highly thought of by Luther, and warmly eulogised by Beza and Johnston, was certainly not one whose memory his countrymen should willingly let die. He was unquestionably the most cultured, probably also the most liberal and conciliatory, of the Scottish theologians of the sixteenth century. He was the first to plead publicly before the authorities of the nation for the right of every household and every individual to have access to the Word of God in the vernacular tongue, and to impress on parents the sacred duty of sedulously inculcat­ing its teaching on their children, and therefore, as Christopher Anderson has said, “ the man who struck the first note in giving a tone to that character,” for which his native country has since been known, and often since commended, as Bible­ loving Scotland. Had his countrymen not so long lost sight of him, perhaps some stone of remembrance might have been found to his memory in Germany; but surely, though he was so long an exile, the chief memorial of his birth and death ought to be in Edinburgh or St Andrews. “There, in reference to the cause he advocated, no inappropriate emblem ” would be “ a father and his child reading the same sacred volume; and, for a motto, in remembrance of his position at the moment, perhaps his own memorable quotation of the Athenian, Strike, but hear me.’”