Page:Sketches of the History of the Church of Scotland.djvu/11

 on Christmas Day, in some cases with ornate ritualistic services. A few years more, and the edict against High Days and Holy Days will probably be formally repealed, and Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost be observed throughout Scotland, as those Festivals are among the Lutheran communities in Germany and Scandinavia, and even in Presbyterian Holland. Knox had been scarcely two years in his grave, When Andrew Melville, the real founder of Scottish Presbytry, arrived from Geneva, where, under the tutorship of Beza, the inventor of Presbyterianism, he had imbibed principles and views contrary to those of Knox, and for the first time introduced them into Scotland. Fierce and turbulent, and fiery in his undisciplined temper, this heresiarch set himself to make his principles popular; and to a large extent he succeeded. "Melville was a man," says Bishop Sage, "by nature fierce and fiery, confident and peremptory, peevish and ungovernable. Education in him had not sweetened nature, but nature had soured education; and both, conspiring together, had tricked him up into a true original; a piece compounded of pride and petulance, of jeer and jangle, of satire and sarcasm, of venom and vehemence. His democratical principles made him hate the crown, as much as the mitre; the sceptre as much as the crosier; and made him as bold with the purple as with the rochet." The Presbyterian or Genevan faction among the Scottish Reformers, as it gathered strength, repeatedly tried to upset this Reformed Prelatical constitution under the Superintendents; and at last, after a struggle of several years, this party, taking advantage of the King's minority, in 1592 succeeded in introducing the novel system which Melville had brought with him from the Swiss Reformers. But this system, although the lower and more ignorant portion of the people was vastly taken with it, did not long continue; for in 1610, the old succession of Bishops having died out soon after the change of religion, Spottiswoode, Hamilton, and Lamb, three of the Reformed ministers under the Superintendents or Knoxian Episcopate, were consecrated in London as true and valid Bishops, for the re-constituted Church of Scotland. In 1618 the famous Articles of Perth, which were framed distinctly atagonistic to the Presbyterian polity, were debated, confirmed, and ratified by the Three Estates of the Realm. So far was the foreign importation, Presbytry, from being, as is pretended, the system by which the Reformation was effected in Scotland, and "agreeable to the inclination of the people," that a true and genuine Episcopacy when it was restored by the English consecrations which I have mentioned, was generally and heartily welcomed as the guarantee of settled order in Church and State. It formed, in fact, a recognised element of the Constitution, and continued with acceptance until the breaking out of the Great Rebellion in 1638, itself the work of a clamorous, violent, and unscrupulous minority; when the Covenanting preachers in the Western Shires, after calumniating their Bishops, and branding them with every crime, conceivable and inconceivable, in order to blacken their characters and render them odious in the eyes of the people,