INTRODUCTION By ANDREW LANG, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., D.LITT. WIT ITH Dr. Morgan's permission I write a brief Introduction to that part of his work which deals with the Reformation and its results in my own country, Scotland. Dr. Morgan is a Welsh divine of Wales, and after being myself honoured with the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology by the University of Breslau, I feel free from the reproach of a friend who dubbed me "an amateur divine." Both Dr. Morgan and I speak not only as D.D.'s, but as members of "small nationalities," each of them fertile since the Reformation in the production of schism and sects such as MacMillanites, Irvingites, "glancing Glassites," Auld Lichts, New Lichts, and Sandemanians. Both of us are well aware that, in Dr. Morgan's words, "there has grown up around the Reformation a mass of legend from which it is difficult to disentangle the truth." But I was hitherto unaware that among the legends "is that the high-water mark in architecture was the direct result of the Reformation"! (p. 56). Here, indeed, is a large sample of the mass of legend that hangs about the Reformation. The Reformers, in Scotland, "hated boetry and bainting," like George II. In my own beloved country, the complete pulverisation of medieval architecture, save in a few examples, was the direct result of the Reformation. Medieval works of art were destroyed as "monuments of idolatry," while everywhere the development of art, whether for good or evil, was no more the result of the Reformation than of the Council of Nice. In literature, on the other hand (at least in England), the amazing splendour of the Elizabethan literature was concomitant with, if not caused by, the Reformation; while in Scotland presbyterial government refused the drama leave to exist, and the contemporary Scottish literature, in belles lettres, was, and long remained, insignificant. Only persons under a strong delusion will differ from Dr. Morgan when he avers that "letters, art, architecture, painting, and music were not the distinct products of the Protestant Reformation." As to music, the church organs were made into firewood, or, like a wicked French clock which fell into the hands of a Presbyterian forbear of my own, the works were scooped out,-because, as in the case of Prince Charlie's clock, "the heathenish timepiece played tunes on the Sabbath." So much for music: in art we had not even a portrait painter, as late as 1680, and "letters" were busy with polemical divinity, except in the hands of a few minor poets. Dr. Morgan can recognise that intolerance, even unto slaying, was not confined to the ancient faith. Unlike a recent Nonconformist historian, he could not write the history of the Church of Geneva without making the most distant allusion to the burning of Servetus! But I am not acquainted with Dr. Morgan's evidence for the statement (p. 60) that John Knox "advised the burning of Gardiner and others of the Catholic party." As a biographer, and not a favourably prejudiced biographer of Mr. Knox, I never came across authority for this charge: if it is good, I bitterly lament having overlooked it. I feel sure that, if Knox advised any penalty against Gardiner, it was not the Romish punishment of burning. That he reserved for witches, and even they, I believe, were usually strangled first and burned afterwards. Knox had a much higher opinion of Geneva than the Geneva doctors had of Knox. He went far too far for them on some points, and it may not be universally known that Calvin's immediate successors were terribly bored by what they thought the querulous complaints of the English Puritans who consulted them, and that they even expressed a friendly opinion of the English bishops who were being inveighed against. The Church discipline of Calvin might perhaps be valuable in a small "city state," a "City of God," but it did not bear transplantation to even a small nation like Scotland. A study of the records of kirk-sessions, dealing with peccant maids and bachelors, and profane swearers, and Sunday golfers, leaves one with the impression that ordinary morality did not improve under this régime, that sinners did not become less numerous, because they were put under sackcloth. True, Sunday golf was finally eradicated (happily for the links and the greens, which need a day's rest), but "Love would still be lord of all," and as for witches, the more they were burned, the more there were to burn. In any case, as Dr. Morgan says, the sons of Calvinism have, in many ways, been splendid characters, tough and true as steel. But I doubt if the Puritans who put down the tyrannies of Charles I. and Laud, were "almost to a man, Calvinists." The Sectarians, the Independents, won the battle, and surely among them were many heroes of "fancy religions"; there were scores of these queer sects. "Not as their friend or child I speak," but they had their good points, and if Calvinism is necessarily Presbyterian, Milton and England rejected Presbyterianism, after getting all the help they could out of the Scots by a feigned acceptance of the Solemn League and Covenant. Dr. Morgan, very properly (pp. 65-67), gives prominence, with Dr. Hay Fleming, to the extreme corruption of the Catholic Churchmen in the two, if not the three, centuries preceding the Reformation. We need not force an open door; "who's a deniging of it," of the corruption ? Certainly not Mary of Guise, who tried hard to induce the Pope to reform the scandalous nuns; certainly not Archibald Hay, Principal of St. Mary's College, St. Andrews (1546); certainly not good Ninian Winzet, or Quentin Kennedy, or even the papal nuncio who secretly visited Queen Mary, taking his life in his hand; and certainly not Father Pollen, S.J., in our own time. Except the Observantine Friars, and a few priests like Winzet and Hay, we can scarcely find ten righteous men among the clergy who are known to us in the Scotland of the middle of the sixteenth century. Almost all were ignorant, dissolute, and avaricious. But the counter-Reformation came, and, despite Presbyterian persecution, many Scots of the highest intelligence, risking punishment, went back to the ancient faith as the more reasonable and logical in their conscience and judgment. Dr. Morgan liberally allows that the intolerance of Knox was part of the force which established presbyterial government. To be sure the nobles and gentry would not allow the death penalties to be executed on Catholics, who had only to submit to fines, imprisonment, outlawry, exile, civil disabilities, and the pillory. The intolerance of Knox (not by nature an unkind man) sprang, I think, from the doctrine on which he often harps, that Catholicism is idolatry, is high treason to God, and that "idolaters must die the death" lest |