in all coming time,' we know not, for no such provision is to be found in the Book of Discipline itself. On the contrary, its words are 'Because we have appointed a larger stipend to them 'that shall be superintendents than to the rest of the ministers, 'we have thought it good to signifie to your honours such reasons 'as moved us to make difference betwixt teachers at this time

We consider that if ministers whom God hath endowed with his 'singular graces amongst us should be appointed to several places, there to make their continual residence, that then the greatest 'part of the realm shall be destitute of all doctrine. Therefore 'we have thought it a thing most expedient at this time, that from 'the whole number of godly and learned men, now presently in this realm, be selected ten or twelve (for in so many provinces 'we have divided the whole) to whom charge and commandment 'should be given to plant and erect kirks, to set, order, and 'appoint ministers, as the former order prescribes, to the coun'ties that shall be appointed to their care, where none now ' are.'*

Thus they were created expressly to fill up vacancies, and not to continue when those vacancies were supplied. They were equally amenable to rebuke, suspension, and deposition with the rest of the ministers of the kirk. They were bound to preach twice every week at the least. Visitors or commissioners of journeys were invested with the same powers and functions; these were not exclusively theirs. Guthrie, Bishop of Dunkeld, tells us that in 1571, i. e., eleven years after the institution of these superintendents, it was moved in a General Assembly at Stirling, that some of these officers being old, and divers of 'them serving at their own charges, (a very unlikely practice for bishops!) it was not to be expected that when they were gone, ' others would undergo the burden, therefore the Lord Regent and 'the Estates of Parliament should be dealt with for establishing 'A CONSTANT FORM OF GOVERNMENT.' That the General Assembly the next year at Perth resolved to choose two archbishops and two bishops, naming Mr. John Douglas as Archbishop of St. Andrew's, &c., but that this proceeding was so 'grievous to the ministry' that they never ceased to oppose this scheme till Mr. Andrew Melvill arriving from Geneva, gave them such a character of the Presbyterian discipline as determined them to have it and none other.t

Now so far was Knox from being favourable to Episcopacy, or from

Book of Discipline, 1621, p. 35. See also Knox's Historie, Guthrie's Memoirs, Lang's History of Scotland, M'Crie's Life of Knox, Caldwood's History, Dunlop's Confessions.

+ Guthrie's Memoirs, pp. 1-3.

intending his superintendents to be titular bishops, or bishops in any sense, that when he was requested to inaugurate this very Douglas as Archbishop of St. Andrew's, he not only refused, but pronounced an anathema against both the giver and receiver of the bishopric. He declared he did this because he had striven that the church of Scotland might not be subject to that order, ' especially after a very different one had been settled in the Book of Discipline, subscribed by the nobility and ratified by parlia'ment.' He said, that it was laying a burden on one old man that twenty men of the best gifts could not sustain ;' and at the General Assembly at St. Andrew's, in the following month, he entered a protest against the election of Douglas, and also ' op'poned himself directly to the making of bishops.**

Of so much value is Mr. Stephen's first assertion. In the same passage he has a fling at that foreign plant, Presbytery.' This is one of a vast number of such allusions and assertions which like stones flung up in the air in a foolish triumph, come down continually upon his own head. Is not Episcopacy, his darling Episcopacy, also a foreign plant? If it be indigenous to this country, it of course originated here, and not in Judea, and what then becomes of his apostolic succession? Of what value is it, if it be not a foreign plant?

In the next passage he informs us that James, in 1610, con'voked a General Assembly at Glasgow, which unanimously re'cognised Episcopacy as the national church, in all time coming.' This is a phrase over which our author chuckles with a most ludicrous glee. It is one to which he again and again recurs. Because it was enacted for all time coming,' he very sagely concludes, that it was put out of the power of all future times to alter or revoke it. He looks upon the laws made at any time in favour of the Episcopal church, as laws of the Medes and Persians, which no power under heaven can repeal or neutralize. He rubs his hands with delight, claps them in your face, and cries out, There, what do you think of that? It says for all time coming. Nothing can alter it. The Church of England is as much the church of Scotland to-day as it was 200 years ago! At page 136 he again assures us that the Assembly of 16 LO settled the establishment of Episcopacy in Scotland for ever, and put it out of the power of any Assembly of mere Presbyters to set it aside, and erect another. Nay he goes on to tell us that at the Restoration lawyers proved to the court (what cannot lawyers prove to the satisfaction of arbitrary courts?) that the English bishops had not been ousted by law of any point of their juris

M'Crie's Life of Knox, ii. 204, 205. Also Bannatyne, 331. Melvill's Diary, p. 26.

diction, save of the high-commission court. There was not even 'an act of parliament to restore them, so illegal was their seques'tration deemed. Upon what principle then could the Presby❝terians in Scotland imagine themselves to be legally established? 'They had usurped the places and livings of the Episcopal clergy 'contrary to the unrepealed laws of the land, and compelled the 'bishops to flee to England for the preservation of their lives. 'Indeed, for that matter, the acts of Assembly 1610, and of Parliament 1612, stand unrepealed to this day.'-p. 141.

Hear that ye members of the Scottish church. In the opinion of this member of the Church of England, yours is no church at all yet. What enactments have been made by government at any time in favour of the Church of Scotland are worth nothing, they pass for nothing in the eye of this son of the Episcopal establishment; for, by some inscrutable but divine right, whatever has been enacted in favour of the English church stands for ever; nay, the very act of Assembly of 1610, establishing Episcopacy in Scotland, and of the Parliament in 1612, stand unrepealed to this day. What! will not the members of the Church of Scotland who have been slumbering so many years in the comfortable assurance that their church stood based on the law of the land, be alarmed at this grand discovery? It is true that Charles I. took the solemn league and covenant abolishing Episcopacy and recognizing Presbyterianism in 1640; it is true that Charles II. also swore in the treaty of Breda to abolish Episcopacy and maintain the Presbytery; it is equally true that Episcopacy was abolished and Presbyterianism recognized by William and Mary at the Revolution, and made an article of the contract by which they received the crown: it is also equally true that at the Union of England and Scotland in 1706, it was made a fundamental article of the treaty, unalterable in all succeeding times,' that the Presbyterian discipline should be the only government of the Church of Scotland; yet in Mr. Stephen's mind all this goes for nothing, Episcopacy, as the Church of Scotland, stands unrepealed to this day. Yet drolly enough at page 157, when speaking of Charles II. repealing some acts of the Scottish Parliament, he asks-why not? 'Are our acts of parliament to be like the laws ' of the Medes and Persians, unrepealable?' Of course not, except, in Mr. Stephen's opinion, when they are in favour of the Church of England. Such is a specimen of this writer's ecclesiastical logic.

Another favorite doctrine here advanced is, that the Episcopal church was overthrown in Scotland by a mere handful of people, and that while nine-tenths of the population were most enthusiastically attached to it. In the extract given we are told that after James I. had recognized Episcopacy in Scotland, a few 'factious firebrands dissented from the now happily settled order

' of the church.' That Charles I. in 1638, summoned a General Assembly at Glasgow, which was packed by Presbyterians, re'bels, and men inimical to church and state,' and by them the bishops were chased away into England. That at the Restoration the Church was again planted and cheerfully recognized by 'at least nine-tenths of the clergy and people. Yet the same singular fate befell it. That at the Revolution 'it was in a very 'flourishing and united state,' yet again it was somehow most easily set aside. At pages 185, 207, 229, 397 and others incidentally the same assertions are repeated. At page 414 occurs this passage: After the Revolution, when the first Presbyterian Assembly was held in 1690, there were no more than fifty 'Presbyterian ministers could be found in all Scotland! It is 'impossible that three hundred and fifty could have been removed 'by death in the short period which elapsed; but where were 'they-they were no where to be found at the Revolution? In 'truth, there were not much more than one hundred deserted 'their livings or were deposed; although such a false amount has 'been stated, and all subsequent authors have assumed Wodrow's 'exaggerated statements without inquiry or consideration. Yet 'these few Presbyterian ministers kept the west of Scotland in a 'continual ferment and agitation; while the rest of the kingdom, which was episcopalian, enjoyed profound tranquillity. These Presbyterian ministers were the greatest enemies to their country which it ever saw. They occasioned more bloodshed, and arbitrary, and severe measures, more trenching upon the liberties and freedom of the people, by their restless, lawless 'discontent, than the country had ever known. And, finally, 'the overthrow and nearly the annihilation of a flourishing church, the choice of the great majority of the nation.'

Now without going into the number of false statements compressed into this one passage-falsehoods which the testimony of the majority of historians well known to all who have read the history of those times, renders it unnecessary to rebut here, there is a question which continually presents itself to the mind of the reader on perusing these reiterations of this favorite assertion of the writer's, which never, however, seems to have occurred to his own. If such be the fact-if indeed the Episcopal church, the choice of the nation, was actually overthrown by a mere handful of people, and by only fifty ministers, how is it to be accounted for? It is certainly, if correct, one of the most remarkable phenomena in history. How happened it that all the power of England, that neither of the Charleses, nor of the Jameses, who certainly exerted all their powers of enactment and military persecution; how happened it that all the determination of the Scottish government and commissioners, with their Claverhouse, their Sir James Turner, their General Dalzeil, pursuing and slaughter

ing the Covenanters wherever they could find them, in the fields, in the mountains, in their own houses; how happened it that Sharp, and Lauderdale, and Middleton, with their gibbets, iron boots, thumbikins, and other instruments of death and torture, could not put down and exterminate this mere handful of 'men '—those fifty preachers and followers, while all the rest of 'the kingdom, which was Episcopalian, enjoyed profound tran'quillity? Why, the whole of the covenanting body, according to this author's assertions, were but a mere handful for any one of these civil or military devourers. They must have been exterminated in any one of their bloody campaigns. They did not constitute numbers sufficient to furnish victims even for the wasted forces of the Covenanters at the battle of Pentland, much less at Bothwell Brig. But it is the fate of this very zealous advocate for civil and religious despotism continually to prove too much. As the Americans say, he is always catching himself in a cleft stick. If it be a fact, that the whole of the Presbyterians who resisted and overthrew the Episcopal church in Scotland, backed by all the force of this great empire; who maintained this unequal warfare for thirty-two years, and yet so far from becoming annihilated, grew and established their cause, were actually so very few, nothing can be more certain than that it is the most marvellous circumstance in all uninspired history, and it cannot admit of a doubt that, in this case, their victory must have been effected by a most signal display of divine power-the arm of God, indeed, laid bare most gloriously in behalf of the sufferers. The author, therefore, is quite at liberty to admit this, or to call in question the correctness of his own statement-in one of which cases he is bound to condemn his own assertions, in the other to condemn his own Church, as glaringly murdering the innocent and fighting against heaven. What is singular enough is, that his own text is continually presenting a different aspect of things. As we advance through the latter half of his volume, while the civil and military forces of the kingdom were in full operation, straining every nerve to put down the Covenanters, we find on almost every page lamentations that all was in vain. Such declarations as these perpetually recur- Field conventicles increased amazingly.'- Conventicles now became more frequent than ever. Separation and schism had now become 'epidemical;' So epidemical that all the forces in Scotland could not put down this mere handful of men; the proclamations of the privy council were rendered ineffectual, and the disorders increasing with impunity, the council laid the state of affairs before his majesty, requesting him to order his troops in Ireland to move towards the maritime frontier of Scotland. —p. 513. The Highlanders, with all their habitual hatred of the

VOL. VI.

U