Beaton. Had he disposed of himself and Scotland to Henry VIII. (who
would not have tolerated Presbyterian claims for an hour), Scotland would
not have received the Genevan discipline, and the Kirk would have groaned
under bishops.

The Reformation supplied Scotland with a class of preachers who were pure
in their lives, who were not accessible to bribes (a virtue in which they
stood almost alone), who were firm in their faith, and soon had learning
enough to defend it; who were constant in their parish work, and of whom
many were credited with prophetic and healing powers. They could
exorcise ghosts from houses, devils from men possessed.

The baldness of the services, the stern nature of the creed, were
congenial to the people. The drawbacks were the intolerance, the
spiritual pretensions of the preachers to interference in secular
affairs, and the superstition which credited men like Knox, and later,
Bruce, with the gifts of prophecy and other miraculous workings, and
insisted on the burning of witches and warlocks, whereof the writer knows
scarcely an instance in Scotland before the Reformation.

The pulpit may be said to have discharged the functions of the press (a
press which was all on one side). When, in 1562, Ninian Winzet, a
Catholic priest and ex-schoolmaster, was printing a controversial
tractate addressed to Knox, the magistrates seized the manuscript at the
printer's house, and the author was fortunate in making his escape. The
nature of the Confession of Faith, and of the claims of the ministers to
interfere in secular affairs, with divine authority, was certain to cause
war between the Crown and the Kirk. That war, whether open and armed, or
a conflict in words, endured till, in 1690, the weapon of excommunication
with civil penalties was quietly removed from the ecclesiastical armoury.