Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

During his retirement he translated the Bible. The confusion at last became so desperate that he could no longer be spared; and, believing that he was certain to be destroyed, he left Wartburg and returned to Wittenberg. Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He used to say that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if he died in his bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His friends said if he went there Duke George would kill him.

'Duke George!' he said; 'I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges for nine days!'

No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther outlived him--lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil, re-shaping the German Church, and giving form to its new doctrine.

Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. The corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one root--the notion that the Christian priesthood possesses mystical power, conferred through episcopal ordination.

Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in certain things done to and for a man by a so-called priest. It was the devotion of each individual soul to the service of God. Masses were nothing, and absolution was nothing; and a clergyman differed only from a layman in being set apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching.

I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this matter. It is a matter of fact only, that in getting rid of episcopal ordination, he dried up the fountain from which the mechanical and idolatrous conceptions of religion had sprung; and, in consequence, the religious life of Germany has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while priesthoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which they live, and move, and have their being.

Enough of this.

The peculiar doctrine which has passed into Europe under Luther's name is known as Justification by Faith. Bandied about as a watchword of party, it has by this time hardened into a formula, and has become barren as the soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It expressed what was, and is, and must be, in one language or another, to the end of time, the conviction of every generous-minded man.

The service of God, as Luther learnt it from the monks, was a thing of desert and reward. So many good works done, so much to the right page in the great book; where the stock proved insufficient, there was the reserve fund of the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for money to those who needed.

'Merit!' Luther thought. 'What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff as man? The better a man is--the more clearly he sees how little he is good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of having deserved reward.'

'Miserable creatures that we are!' he said; 'we earn our bread in sin. Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God a tenth of our time: and yet we think that with our good works we can merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours! Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!'

A perpetual struggle. For ever to be falling, yet to rise again and stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven--this was the best which would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the infinite grace of God, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the intention for the deed--who, when there is a sincere desire to serve Him, overlooks the shortcomings of infirmity.

Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty? All doctrines, when petrified into formulas, lead to that. But, as Luther said, 'where real faith is, a good life follows, as light follows the sun; faint and clouded, yet ever struggling to break through the mist which envelopes it, and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear and raise it.

'The barley,' he says, in a homely but effective image--'the barley which we brew, the flax of which we weave our garments, must be bruised and torn ere they come to the use for which they are grown. So must Christians suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. The old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If man is to rise to nobleness, he must first be slain.'

In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same truth. 'The natural man,' he says, 'is like the ore out of the iron mine. It is smelted in the furnace; it is forged into bars upon the anvil. A new nature is at last forced upon it, and it is made steel.'

It was this doctrine--it was this truth rather (the word doctrine reminds one of quack medicines)--which, quickening in Luther's mind, gave Europe its new life. It was the flame which, beginning with a small spark, kindled the hearth-fires in every German household.

Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He remained poor. He might have had money if he had wished; but he chose rather, amidst his enormous labour, to work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood.

He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amusements, and delighted to encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal; and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his larder among the poor.

All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. Flights of nuns from the dissolved convents came to him to provide for them--naked, shivering creatures, with scarce a rag to cover them. Eight florins were wanted once to provide clothes for some of them. 'Eight florins!' he said; 'and where am I to get eight florins?' Great people had made him presents of plate: it all went to market to be turned into clothes and food for the wretched.

Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually very gentle and tolerant. He recognised, and was almost alone in recognising, the necessity of granting liberty of conscience. No one hated Popery more than he did, yet he said:--

'The Papists must bear with us, and we with them. If they will not follow us, we have no right to force them. Wherever they can, they will hang, burn, behead, and strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I live, and most likely killed. But it must come to this at last--every man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, and answer for his belief to his Maker.'

Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he wrote like an apostle--sometimes like a raving ribald.

Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When he was angry, invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks down a mountain torrent in flood. We need not admire all that; in quiet times it is hard to understand it.

Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the Eighth, who began life as a highly orthodox sovereign, broke a lance with Luther for the Papacy.

Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which was probably his own after all. He thought the king was put forward by some of the English bishops--'Thomists' he calls them, as men who looked for the beginning and end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

'Courage,' he exclaimed to them, 'swine that you are! burn me then, if you can and dare. Here I am; do your worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to all the winds--spread them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you still. Living, I am the foe of the Papacy; and dead, I will be its foe twice over. Hogs of Thomists! Luther shall be the bear in your way--the lion in your path. Go where you will, Luther shall cross you. Luther shall leave you neither peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows of brass and dashed out your iron brains.'

Strong expressions; but the times were not gentle. The prelates whom he supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield with the reek of burning human flesh.

Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of Nature herself--terrible when roused, and in repose, majestic and beautiful. Of vanity he had not a trace. 'Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' he said; 'call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been crucified for the world?'

I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were the expression of the very inmost heart of the German people. 'Music' he called 'the grandest and sweetest gift of God to man.' 'Satan hates music,' he said; 'he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.'

He was extremely interested in all natural things. Before the science of botany was dreamt of, Luther had divined the principle of vegetable life. 'The principle of marriage runs through all creation,' he said; 'and flowers as well as animals are male and female.'

A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him; beautiful sometimes as a finished piece of poetry.

One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he exclaimed:--

'Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the resurrection of the dead! Winter is death--summer is the resurrection. Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and change. The proverb says--

Trust not a day
Ere birth of May.

Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'

'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand--the infinite goodness--in the humblest flower. We praise Him--we thank Him--we glorify Him--we recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there. The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it when the time comes. An egg--what a thing is that! If an egg had never been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how would all the world have wondered!'

And again:--

'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over the world, and no one regards them.'

There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a single matter--for which more than any other he has been blamed--I mean his marriage.

He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy also.

The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. Luther had come to middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed; and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required it of him.

Let us see what those circumstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the natural companionship which nature had provided for them--who were thus exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to resist.

The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and advice was of little service without example.

The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a kind of incest.

Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament--impious, loathsome, and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at once purest, best, and happiest.

For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion to the malice of his enemies.

But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide them--guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him and them--that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him--that it was no use to tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his full thought upon the matter.

That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.

'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'

He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the moderate respectable people--the people who thought like Erasmus--those who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the world's opinion--such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the whole world in my way.'

Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent. She was an ordinary, unimaginative body--plain in person and plain in mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance--but a decent, sensible, commonplace Haus Frau.

The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect, and ended with steady affection.

The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God thanks.

He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their adventures together.

'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals, where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask me.

'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the brother of the Margrave?"'

She was an odd woman.

'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and seldom?'

Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the corner.'

His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them, and their fancies and imaginations delighted him.

Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said, 'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.'

One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, the children were watching it with longing eyes. 'That is the way,' he said, 'in which we grown Christians ought to look for the Judgment Day.'

His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. He speaks of his loss with the unaffected simplicity of natural grief, yet with the faith of a man who had not the slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was passing. Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor the other disguised or suppressed.

You will have gathered something, I hope, from these faint sketches, of what Luther was; you will be able to see how far he deserves to be called by our modern new lights, a Philistine or a heretic. We will now return to the subject with which we began, and resume, in a general conclusion, the argument of these Lectures.

In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words.

One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, or knowing him, should not have treated him with more forbearance.

Erasmus spoke of him for the most part with kindness. He interceded for him, defended him, and only with the utmost reluctance was driven into controversy with him.

Luther, on the other hand, saw in Erasmus a man who was false to his convictions; who played with truth; who, in his cold, sarcastic scepticism, believed in nothing--scarcely even in God. He was unaware of his own obligations to him, for Erasmus was not a person who would trumpet out his own good deeds.

Thus Luther says:--

'All you who honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes; and I say with Joshua, Choose whom ye will serve. He thinks we should trim to the times, and hang our cloaks to the wind. He is himself his own first object; and as he lived, he died.

'I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has had for a thousand years. Intellect does not understand religion, and when it comes to the things of God, it laughs at them. He scoffs like Lucian, and by-and-by he will say, Behold, how are these among the saints whose life we counted for folly.

'I bid you, therefore, take heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for the ignorant to believe.'

Of Erasmus personally, much of this was unjust and untrue. Erasmus knew many things which it would have been well for Luther to have known; and, as a man, he was better than his principles.

But if for the name of Erasmus we substitute the theory of human things which Erasmus represented, between that creed and Luther there is, and must be, an eternal antagonism.

If to be true in heart and just in act are the first qualities necessary for the elevation of humanity--if without these all else is worthless, intellectual culture cannot give what intellectual culture does not require or imply. You cultivate the plant which has already life; you will waste your labour in cultivating a stone. The moral life is the counterpart of the natural, alike mysterious in its origin, and alike visible only in its effects.

Intellectual gifts are like gifts of strength, or wealth, or rank, or worldly power--splendid instruments if nobly used--but requiring qualities to use them nobler and better than themselves.

The rich man may spend his wealth on vulgar luxury. The clever man may live for intellectual enjoyment--refined enjoyment it may be--but enjoyment still, and still centering in self.

If the spirit of Erasmus had prevailed, it would have been with modern Europe as with the Roman Empire in its decay. The educated would have been mere sceptics; the multitude would have been sunk in superstition. In both alike all would have perished which deserves the name of manliness.

And this leads me to the last observation that I have to make to you. In the sciences, the philosopher leads; the rest of us take on trust what he tells us. The spiritual progress of mankind has followed the opposite course. Each forward step has been made first among the people, and the last converts have been among the learned.

The explanation is not far to look for. In the sciences there is no temptation of self-interest to mislead. In matters which affect life and conduct, the interests and prejudices of the cultivated classes are enlisted on the side of the existing order of things, and their better trained faculties and larger acquirements serve only to find them arguments for believing what they wish to believe.

Simpler men have less to lose; they come more in contact with the realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the experience of suffering.

Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned away from Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake listened, and a new life began for mankind. A miner's son converted Germany to the Reformation. The London artisans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire went to the stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a second revelation.

So it has been; so it will be to the end. When a great teacher comes again upon the earth, he will find his first disciples where Christ found them and Luther found them. Had Luther written for the learned, the words which changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in impotence on the bookshelves.

In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I think, with me, that he did well and not ill; you will not sacrifice his great name to the disdain of a shallow philosophy, or to the grimacing of a dead superstition, whose ghost is struggling out of its grave.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER:

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1865.

I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part, he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever, especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get inside the English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with every considerable nation. They work out their own political and spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of those times can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to wound without intending it.

My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on both sides. I believe that nowhere and at no time any such struggle can take place on a large scale unless each party is contending for something which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all on one side; and only rogues and fools are on the other. Where the wise and good are divided, the truth is generally found to be divided also. But this is precisely what cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men begin to fight about things when reason and argument fail to convince them. They make up in passion what is wanting in logic. Each side believes that all the right is theirs--that their enemies have all the bad qualities which their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review, newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the Laodicean, neither cold nor hot, whom decent people consider bad company. He pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all.

Here, then, are good reasons why I should have either not come here at all, or else should have chosen some other matter to talk about. In excuse for persisting, I can but say that the subject is one about which I have been led by circumstances to read and think considerably; and though, undoubtedly, each of us knows more about himself and his own affairs than anyone else can possibly know, yet a stranger's eye will sometimes see things which escape those more immediately interested; and I allow myself to hope that I may have something to say not altogether undeserving your attention. I shall touch as little as possible on questions of opinion; and if I tread by accident on any sensitive point, I must trust to your kindness to excuse my awkwardness.

Well, then, if we look back on Scotland as it stood in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, we see a country in which the old feudal organisation continued, so far as it generally affected the people, more vigorous than in any other part of civilised Europe. Elsewhere, the growth of trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with an organisation of their own, independent of the lords. In Scotland, the towns were still scanty and poor; such as they were, they were for the most part under the control of the great nobleman who happened to live nearest to them; and a people, as in any sense independent of lords, knights, abbots, or prelates, under whose rule they were born, had as yet no existence. The tillers of the soil (and the soil was very miserably tilled) lived under the shadow of the castle or the monastery. They followed their lord's fortunes, fought his battles, believed in his politics, and supported him loyally in his sins or his good deeds, as the case might be. There was much moral beauty in the life of those times. The loyal attachment of man to man--of liege servant to liege lord--of all forms under which human beings can live and work together, has most of grace and humanity about it. It cannot go on without mutual confidence and affection--mutual benefits given and received. The length of time which the system lasted proves that in the main there must have been a fine fidelity in the people--truth, justice, generosity in their leaders. History brings down many bad stories to us out of those times; just as in these islands nowadays you may find bad instances of the abuses of rights of property. You may find stories--too many also--of husbands ill-using their wives, and so on. Yet we do not therefore lay the blame on marriage, or suppose that the institution of property on the whole does more harm than good. I do not doubt that down in that feudal system somewhere lie the roots of some of the finest qualities in the European peoples.

So much for the temporal side of the matter; and the spiritual was not very unlike it. As no one lived independently, in our modern sense of the word, so no one thought independently. The minds of men were looked after by a Church which, for a long time also, did, I suppose, very largely fulfil the purpose for which it was intended. It kept alive and active the belief that the world was created and governed by a just Being, who hated sins and crimes, and steadily punished such things. It taught men that they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of life was an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. It taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal which we now consider to have been a mistake--a great many theories of earthly things which have since passed away, and special opinions clothed in outward forms and ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do not think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented, was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork without which further progress in that science would have been probably impossible. The theories and ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited well with an age in which little was known and much was imagined: when superstition was active and science was not yet born. When I am told here or anywhere that the Middle Ages were times of mere spiritual darkness and priestly oppression, with the other usual formulas, I say, as I said before, if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that it reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better than the thing which we see in the generation which immediately preceded the Reformation, it could not have existed at all. You might as well argue that the old fading tree could never have been green and young. Institutions do not live on lies. They either live by the truth and usefulness which there is in them, or they do not live at all.

So things went on for several hundred years. There were scandals enough, and crimes enough, and feuds, and murders, and civil wars. Systems, however good, cannot prevent evil. They can but compress it within moderate and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that, measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the people, the mediæval institutions were very well suited for the inhabitants of these countries as they then were. Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could hardly have mended them if they had tried.

But times change, and good things as well as bad grow old and have to die. The heart of the matter which the Catholic Church had taught was the fear of God; but the language of it and the formulas of it were made up of human ideas and notions about things which the mere increase of human knowledge gradually made incredible. To trace the reason of this would lead us a long way. It is intelligible enough, but it would take us into subjects better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while the essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it is expressed changes and has changed--changes as living languages change and become dead, as institutions change, as forms of government change, as opinions on all things in heaven and earth change, as half the theories held at this time among ourselves will probably change--that is, the outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic formulas, instead of living symbols, become dead and powerless cabalistic signs. The religion lost its hold on the conscience and the intellect, and the effect, singularly enough, appeared in the shepherds before it made itself felt among the flocks. From the see of St. Peter to the far monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were shocked and scandalised at the outrageous doings of high cardinals, prelates, priests, and monks. It was clear enough that these great personages themselves did not believe what they taught; so why should the people believe it? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a living reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. The first steps everywhere were taken with extreme reluctance; and had the popes and cardinals been wise, they would have taken the lead in the enquiry, cleared their teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by the Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed; and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of theirs, we all know tolerably well.

The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland, the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised. Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men, belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part, farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation of men detached from the lords and from the Church--brave, noble, resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of Scotland--that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and determined its after fortunes as a nation--had its first germ in these half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any other part of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing--created already by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons, as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of the work of the Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.

How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole nation--as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the explanation.

The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how that union was to be brought about--how they were to make sure that, when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals, and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an opposite danger; the queen would become a Frenchwoman; her French mother governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries the Church was rich--much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came about that the great families--even those who, like the Hamiltons, were most closely connected with France--were tempted over by the bait to the other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers, because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in favour of the revolution.

And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last, at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two? Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a new dynasty.

I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus, and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, confiscated its possessions, destroyed its religious houses, and changed its creed. The French were driven away from Leith by Elizabeth's troops; the Reformers took possession of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met with a clear stage to determine for themselves the future fate of the country. Now, I think it certain that, if the Scotch nobility, having once accepted the Reformation, had continued loyal to it--especially if Elizabeth had met their wishes in the important point of the marriage--the form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something extremely different from what it in fact became. The people were perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders if the matters on which their hearts were set had received tolerable consideration from them, and the democratic form of the ecclesiastical constitution would have been inevitably modified. One of the conditions of the proposed compact with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy and the English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, and with fair dealing, would not have been found impossible. But it soon became clear that the religious interests of Scotland were the very last thing which would receive consideration from any of the high political personages concerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like that which he had seen working under Calvin at Geneva--a constitution in which the clergy as ministers of God should rule all things--rule politically at the council board, and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made plain to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. 'Eh, mon,' said the younger Maitland to him, 'then we may all bear the barrow now to build the House of the Lord.' Not exactly. The churches were left to the ministers; the worldly good things and worldly power remained with the laity; and as to religion, circumstances would decide what they would do about that. Again, I am not speaking of all the great men of those times. Glencairn, Ruthven, young Argyll--above all, the Earl of Moray--really did in some degree interest themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he called religion 'a bogle of the nursery.' That was the expression which a Scotch statesman of those days actually ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable, no doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on the side of the Reformation. But here, too, there was a serious hitch. Elizabeth would not marry Arran. Elizabeth would be no party to any of their intrigues. She detested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in all shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the nobles on one side, she affronted the people on another; and all idea of uniting the two crowns after the fashion proposed by the Scotch Parliament she utterly and entirely repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far as this was concerned; but she left the ruling families extremely perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They had allowed the country to be revolutionised in the teeth of their own sovereign, and what to do next they did not very well know.

It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their help. Francis the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a childless widow. Her connexion with the Crown of France was at an end, and all danger on that side to the liberties of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to play for the English Crown--as good as he, or better, for she would have the English Catholics on her side. So, careless how it would affect religion, and making no condition at all about that, the same men who a year before were ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, now invited her back to Scotland; the same men who had been the loudest friends of Elizabeth now encouraged Mary Stuart to persist in the pretension to the Crown of England, which had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had assumed the title of Queen of England. She had promised to abandon it, but, finding her own people ready to support her in withdrawing her promise, she stood out, insisting that at all events the English Parliament should declare her next in the succession; and it was well known that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favour, some rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into Elizabeth. The object of the Scotch nobles was political, national, patriotic. For religion it was no great matter either way; and as they had before acted with the Protestants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly or tacitly act with the Catholics. Mary Stuart's friends in England and on the Continent were Catholics, and therefore it would not do to offend them. First, she was allowed to have mass at Holyrood; then there was a move for a broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the country--and he had perfectly good reason for saying so. He thoroughly understood that it was the first step towards a counter-revolution which in time would cover all Scotland and England, and carry them back to Popery. Yet he preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched with the notion of the English succession, that for a year and a half he ceased to speak to Knox; and as it was with Murray, so it was far more with all the rest--their zeal for religion was gone no one knew where. Of course Elizabeth would not give way. She might as well, she said, herself prepare her shroud; and then conspiracies came, and under-ground intrigues with the Romanist English noblemen. France and Spain were to invade England, Scotland was to open its ports to their fleets, and its soil to their armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland had remained unchanged from what it had been--had the direction of its fortunes remained with the prince and with the nobles, sooner or later it would have come to this. But suddenly it appeared that there was a new power in this country which no one suspected till it was felt.

The commons of Scotland had hitherto been the creatures of the nobles. They had neither will nor opinion of their own. They thought and acted in the spirit of their immediate allegiance. No one seems to have dreamt that there would be any difficulty in dealing with them if once the great families agreed upon a common course. Yet it appeared, when the pressure came, that religion, which was the play-thing of the nobles, was to the people a clear matter of life and death. They might love their country: they might be proud of anything which would add lustre to its crown; but if it was to bring back the Pope and Popery--if it threatened to bring them back--if it looked that way--they would have nothing to do with it; nor would they allow it to be done. Allegiance was well enough; but there was a higher allegiance suddenly discovered which superseded all earthly considerations. I know nothing finer in Scottish history than the way in which the commons of the Lowlands took their places by the side of Knox in the great convulsions which followed. If all others forsook him, they at least would never forsake him while tongue remained to speak and hand remained to strike. Broken they might have been, trampled out as the Huguenots at last were trampled out in France, had Mary Stuart been less than the most imprudent or the most unlucky of sovereigns. But Providence, or the folly of those with whom they had to deal, fought for them. I need not follow the wild story of the crimes and catastrophes in which Mary Stuart's short reign in Scotland closed. Neither is her own share, be it great or small, or none at all, in those crimes of any moment to us here. It is enough that, both before that strange business and after it, when at Holyrood or across the Border, in Sheffield or Tutbury, her ever favourite dream was still the English throne. Her road towards it was through a Catholic revolution and the murder of Elizabeth. It is enough that, both before and after, the aristocracy of Scotland, even those among them who had seemed most zealous for the Reformation, were eager to support her. John Knox alone, and the commons, whom Knox had raised into a political power, remained true.