With such bugbears did Guthrie and his companions think, a century later,
to daunt "the clear spirit of Montrose."

While reading the passages just cited, we are enabled to understand the
true cause of the sorrows of Scotland for a hundred and thirty years. The
situation is that analysed by Thomas Luber, a Professor of Medicine at
Heidelberg, well or ill known in Scottish ecclesiastical disputes by his
Graecised name, Erastus. He argued, about 1568, that excommunication has
no certain warrant in Holy Writ, under a Christian prince. Erastus
writes:--

"Some men were seized on by a certain excommunicatory fever, which they
did adorn with the name of 'ecclesiastical discipline.' . . . They
affirmed the manner of it to be this: that certain presbyters should sit
in the name of the whole Church, and should judge who were worthy or
unworthy to come to the Lord's Supper. I wonder that then they consulted
about these matters, when we neither had men to be excommunicated, nor
fit excommunicators; for scarcely a thirtieth part of the people did
understand or approve of the reformed religion." {117}

"There was," adds Erastus, "another fruit of the same tree, that almost
every one thought men had the power of opening and shutting heaven to
whomsoever they would."

What men have this power in Scotland in 1559? Why, some five or six
persons who, being fluent preachers, have persuaded local sets of
Protestants to accept them as ministers. These preachers having a
"call"--it might be from a set of perfidious and profligate murderers--are
somehow gifted with the apostolic grace of binding on earth what shall be
bound in heaven. Their successors, down to Mr. Cargill, who, of his own