The ministers are to have their manses, and glebes of six acres; to this
many of the Lords assented, except, oddly enough, those redoubtable
leaders of the Congregation, Glencairn and Morton, with Marischal. All
the part of the book which most commands our sympathy, the most Christian
part of the book, regulating the disposition of the revenues of the
fallen Church for the good of the poor, of education, and of the Kirk,
remained a dead letter. The Duke, Arran, Lord James, and a few barons,
including the ruffian Andrew Ker of Faldonside, with Glencairn and
Ochiltree, signed it, in token of approval, but little came of it all.
Lethington, probably, was the scoffer who styled these provisions "devout
imaginations." The nobles and lairds, many of them, were converted, in
matter of doctrine; in conduct they were the most avaricious, bloody, and
treacherous of all the generations which had banded, revelled, robbed,
and betrayed in Scotland.

There is a point in this matter of the Kirk's claim to the patrimony of
the old Church which perhaps is generally misunderstood. That point is
luminous as regards the absolute disinterestedness of Knox and his
companions, both in respect to themselves and their fellow-preachers. The
Book of Discipline contains a sentence already quoted, conceived in what
we may justly style a chivalrous contempt of wealth. "Your Honours may
easily understand _that we speak not now for ourselves_, but in favour of
the Poor, and the labourers defrauded . . . " Not having observed a
point which "their Honours" were not the men to "understand easily,"
Father Pollen writes, "the new preachers were loudly _claiming for
themselves_ the property of the rivals whom they had displaced." {186}
For themselves they were claiming a few merks, and a few bolls of meal, a
decent subsistence. Mr. Taylor Innes points out that when, just before
Darnley's murder, Mary offered "a considerable sum for the maintenance of
the ministers," Knox and others said that, for their sustentation, they