THE SCOTTISH CHURCH, 1560-1843--'THE WITNESS'
'The fate of a nation was riding that night.'
When Andrew Melville said to King James VI., 'Sir, as divers times before have I told you, so now again must I tell you, there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland; there is King James, the head of the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the King of the Church, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member,' he expressed what, from its foundation as an Establishment in 1560 till now, has been in every one of its constituent parts the belief and practice of the indomitable Kirk of Scotland.
These were words which the British Solomon was to remember. Over the border, where the obedient English clergy, who looked from the humblest curate to the highest dignitary to the throne alone for their support, professed to find in the pedantic pupil of the great Buchanan the wisdom of a present deity and regarded his slobbering utterances as 'the counsels of a god,' James found himself in more congenial society for the promulgation of his views on kingcraft which were to embroil the nation and drive his descendants from the throne. The preface to the Authorised Version of the Bible by the translators of 1611 shews the depth to which the Anglican clergy could sink. No wonder that James found such men ready tools to his hand. In their company he could complacently vapour about 'No bishop, no king,' or express his joy in finding himself for the first time in the company of 'holy and learned men.' When Melville, as professor of divinity at Sedan, was dying an exile in 1622 James was dismissing the two English houses of Parliament for what he was pleased to call an invasion of his prerogative; the rumours of the Spanish marriage were in the air, the first instalment of the royal legacy of kingcraft. 'No bishop, no king': The nation was to take him at his word, and to demonstrate pretty effectively that kingdoms can do without either--and both.
'Not a king--but a member;' 'in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil head supreme'--the whole history of Scotland was to run for three hundred years in these grooves. This is the doctrine which, from 1560 till now, has in Scotland been known as the Headship of Christ. Without a correct understanding of this question, not as a mere metaphysical or theological figment, but as a reality most vitally 'within practical politics' carrying effects direct and visible into every corner of the national life, the history of Scotland must of necessity be a sealed book--the play of _Hamlet_ without the royal Dane. To the English reader this has been largely obscured, from the fact that the chief sources of information open to him are not such as present a rational or connected story. George Borrow found that Scott's caricature of _Old Mortality_ was what Englishmen had in their minds, and that some thin romanticism about Prince Charles Edward was the end and substance of their knowledge. Yet such a presentation would be no less absurd than _Hudibras_ would be for the men of the Long Parliament. Scott was too much occupied with the external and material conditions of the country, too much engrossed by obvious necessity of materials in the romantic element of Scottish history, and too little in sympathy with the spiritual and moral forces at work to present anything like a complete narrative, while his feudal sentiments were nourished by the almost entire lack of the political instinct. The ecclesiastical chapters in John Hill Burton's _History_ are not equal to the main body of his work; and, if the _Lectures_ of Dean Stanley are the characteristically thin production of one confessing to but a superficial knowledge of the vast literature of the field,' the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Grub is only the work of a mere Episcopalian antiquary, and the lack of judgment and political insight appears on every page. 'It seems to me,' says Carlyle, 'hard measure that this Scottish man Knox, now after three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world, intrinsically for having been, in such way as was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen'--harder still, say we, that the subject of Milton's great eulogy should be judged by minds of the notes-and-queries order, or by those of the class of Hume and Robertson, who have such a gentlemanly horror at everything that savours of enthusiasm as to miss the central point, the _coincidence_ of civil and religious liberty.