"craved of the auditors the things that were necessary, as of duty the
pastors might justly crave of their flock. The General Assembly accepted
the Queen's gift, but only of necessity; it was by their flock that they
ought to be sustained. To take from others contrary to their will, whom
they serve not, they judge it not their duty, nor yet reasonable."

Among other things the preachers, who were left with a hard struggle for
bare existence, introduced a rule of honour scarcely known to the barons
and nobles, except to the bold Buccleuch who rejected an English pension
from Henry VIII., with a sympathetic explosion of strong language. The
preachers would not take gifts from England, even when offered by the
supporters of their own line of policy.

Knox's failure in his admirable attempt to secure the wealth of the old
Church for national purposes was, as it happened, the secular salvation
of the Kirk. Neither Catholicism nor Anglicanism could be fully
introduced while the barons and nobles held the tithes and lands of the
ancient Church. Possessing the wealth necessary to a Catholic or
Anglican establishment, they were resolutely determined to cling to it,
and oppose any Church except that which they starved. The bishops of
James I., Charles I., and Charles II. were detested by the nobles. Rarely
from them came any lordly gifts to learning and the Universities, while
from the honourably poor ministers such gifts could not come. The
Universities were founded by prelates of the old Church, doing their duty
with their wealth.

The arrangements for discipline were of the drastic nature which lingered
into the days of Burns and later. The results may be studied in the
records of Kirk Sessions; we have no reason to suppose that sexual
morality was at all improved, on the whole, by "discipline," though it