Page:Sketches of the History of the Church of Scotland.djvu/12

 proceeded to depose them, and to convoke both General Assemblies and Parliaments without the royal sanction, and in defiance of the King's prohibitions. They even raised an army, and levied war against the King, in' the King's name. In the midst of the tumults of the time, they so far prevailed on the King,—Charles the First, who was betrayed on all hands, even by the counsellors nearest his person, and whom he most trusted,—as to extort his reluctant consent to abolish Episcopacy in Scotland. Of this concession to the Scottish rebels, the King, when it was too late, and seeing how the English rebels "bettered the instruction," bitterly repented. He has left on record his solemn protestation, that "if God should restore him to the peaceable possession of his throne, he would do public penance for his error, by walking barefooted to S. Paul's, in the habit of a penitent, and make satisfaction before the Altar for the wrong he had done to Holy Church, through an unworthy fear of the people."

That the king's desire to uphold the Church and order in his northern kingdom was not a mere piece of state policy, but a conscientious conviction, appears, among other abundant proofs, from his published controversy with Alexander Henderson, one of the "Apostles of the Covenant," and by far the most learned and respectable man among them: in which, with the learning of a theologian, and the acuteness of a debater, his Majesty defends the Episcopal regimen on the principles of Divine Right. And Scotland was not so overrun with the new opinions as to lack other defenders of Apostolical order. The Diocese of Aberdeen, and its two famous universities, produced such divines as Bellenden its bishop, and Forbes, Barron, Ross, Scroggie, and Lesly, who are known in history as the "Aberdeen Doctors," the stout maintainers of orthodoxy and loyalty; divines who were only beaten and silenced, not in debate, but by the conclusive and persuasive arguments of chains and imprisonment, or by the self-banishment to which some of them were forced to save their lives. The king's care for the Church of Scotland had also been shown before the breaking out of the troubles, by his singling out, and promoting to a Bishopric specially founded for him, one of those Aberdeen Doctors whom I have just named,—the most learned, where all were learned—William Forbes, the first Bishop of Edinburgh, the author of a Plea for the Corporate Reunion of Christendom, the "Considerationes Modestae et Pacificae," which deserves the study of all who have the healing of the Church's divisions at heart. Bishop Forbes, in an age and country when the fear of Popery amounted almost to an insanity, calmly and modestly vindicated the doctrines and discipline of Primitive Christianity, which the popular Protestantism of the time had calumniated, and among them that of the Holy Eucharist which the same popular