on the subject, I shall read you one or two sentences from it. The writer says―

"If the Free Church is prepared to sanction the erection of such paintings on the windows or walls of her places of worship, she is certainly resiling from the position which Scottish Presbyterianism took up at the era of the Reformation. Many of those who do not sympathise with the extreme position in regard to purity of worship adopted by the party headed by the Rev. Dr. Begg will be scandalized by this innovation, and regard it as opening the door sooner or later to the whole ritual of Romish worship. Can it be pleasing to God, or is it in itself seemly or lawful to adorn or disfigure the house of God with spurious portraits of his only Son? Is it any honour to Sir D. Brewster to insert his portrait among the Babylonian Sages engaged in adoring the infant Saviour, thus rendering the whole picture grotesque as well as fanciful?" The writer concludes by calling on the Free Church to nip in the bud an evil that is already threatening to work havoc throughout our Scottish Presbyterianism. (To be concluded in our next.)

THE DISCIPLINE OF THE REFORMATION.

BY D. HAY FLEMING, ST. Andrews.

I.

To Knox and his colleagues the prospect in Scotland before the Reformation must have looked dark and dreary, for darkness covered the land and gross darkness the people. The Roman Antichrist had reigned supreme for centuries, and though his deadly sway was once and again protested against by the faithful witnesses whom God had raised up, they had either perished at the stake, or been forced to flee from the realm. The oppressed country was groaning under the lordly dominion of the dignitaries of the Church, and the dissimulation and bigotry of the queen-regent. And even when the darkness of death began to vanish before the light of the evangel, when the flower of the nobility took the lead in reforming, when the people were grasping the truth, and even after the nation by its rulers and representatives had turned from Popery to Protestantism in 1560,1 there re

1 "It is true, that had the Reformers not received the support of the civil power, in all human probability the infant Reformation would have been strangled at its birth, as it actually was in Spain and Italy, and the whole of Europe might have been yet lying under the dominion of Antichrist." M'Crie's Sketches, 4th ed., vol. I., p. 19.

mained much to be done, the land had still to be possessed, and there were formidable difficulties in the way. The Church was neither organised nor endowed, and preachers were scarce.1 A handful of devoted men had to face the poverty of the country, the selfish greed of the nobles, the blandishments of the beautiful but frail and Popish Mary, the policy of Morton, the tyranny of Lennox and Arran, the intrigues of "Jesuites, Seminarie Priests, and traffiqueing Papists," the duplicity and king-craft of James, and the ignorance and superstition of the land. But there were giants in those days. Our Reformers were men of great wisdom, undaunted courage, irrepressible zeal and strong faith. They relied not on human expediency, vain traditions, or worldly wisdom, but on God's promised blessing on His own means. They went direct to the Bible for all their plans, and the result was that every rag of rotten Popery, and every relic of the Amorite was purged away, and cast forth as things accursed into the region of eternal detestation, and the pure evangel set up instead. In the language of the renowned George Gillespie :-"The Church of Scotland was blessed with a more glorious and perfect reformation than any of our neighbour Churches. The doctrine, discipline, regiment, and policy established here by ecclesiastical and civil laws, and sworn and subscribed unto by the king's majesty and [the] several presbyteries and parish churches of the land, as it had the applause of foreign divines; so was it in all points agreeable unto the word; neither could the most rigid Aristarchus of these times challenge any irregularity of the same." The great object of our zealous Covenanted Reformers was to win Scotland for Christ, and they could not rest satisfied until every person in the realm, at least professed Christianity. They longed to see the promise fulfilled in their own beloved land-"Thou shalt no more be termed forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed desolate but thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah, and thy land Beulah for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married." To effect this noble aim, the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of the Church were admirably adapted. The Calvinism of the first, the purity of the second, the strictness of the third, and the strength and vitality of the fourth were thoroughly scriptural, for they "took not their pattern from any kirk in the world; no, not from Geneva itself; but laying God's word before them, made reformation according thereunto,

1 For some time Knox was the only minister of Edinburgh, and even in 1596 there were "above four hundreth paroche kirks destitute of the ministrie of the word, by and attour the kirks of Argyle and the Isles." The Booke of the Universall Kirk of Scotland. Peterkin's ed., p. 437.

2 Preface to the Dispute against the English Popish Ceremonies.

both in doctrine first and then in discipline, when and as they might get it overtaken." The great agency, of course, in spreading the Reformation was the powerful preaching of the gospel," they studied not the smooth and pawky prudence that is now so much applauded," but fearlessly delivered the whole counsel of God; but the circulation of the Scriptures in the vulgar language must not be forgotten; neither must we overlook the simplicity of the worship which had nothing in it to divert attention from the realities of the gospel, nor anything to fill men's minds with vain and frothy imaginations. As Gillespie has well said—" The policy, then, which is most simple and single, and least lustred with the pomp and bravery of ceremonies, cannot but be most expedient for edification. The king's daughter is most like herself when she is all glorious within, not without, Ps. xlv. 13, and the kingdom of God appeareth best what it is, when it cometh not with observation, Luke xvii. 20, 21. But 'superstition (saith Camero), the mother of ceremonies, is lavish and prodigal; spiritual whoredom, as it is, it hath this common with the bodily; both of them must have their paintings, their trinkets, their inveiglements.'" Now-a-days, the term ecclesiastical discipline is generally used in the restricted sense, of correction of manners, admonitions, excommunications, and receiving to repentance; but in Reformation times it was often used in its widest sense, namely, for the whole policy of the kirk, hence the two books containing this policy were called the Books of Discipline; and it was sometimes used as comprehending also the acts, constitutions, and practices agreed upon, and recorded in the registers of the general and provincial assemblies, presbyteries, and kirk-sessions. Although at the Reformation, from the scarcity of preachers, the Presbyterial form of Church government could not be fully carried out, and necessitated the appointment of readers and superintendents, yet the results achieved showed the great advantage of having adopted the scriptural system.

The more immediate object of this and the succeeding articles is to show the nature of the discipline,-using the word in its restricted sense, then in use, the manner of carrying it out, the power it had for good, and to give a few illustrations from the old session-records of West Anstruther. The earliest volume

1 Row's History, Wod. Soc. ed., p. 12.

* Hind let loose, ed. 1770, p. 18.

* English Popish Ceremonies, part 2, chap. 4, sec. I.

Calderwood remarks:-"So howbeit they allow readers, they allow not reading ministers."

The next volume contains the following entry :-"Decimo quinto Apr., 1649. Laurence Hay and Isobell Fermore his spous haid ane bairne baptised neamitt

extant, of the records of this parish, extends from 1577 to 1601, and as a note on the title-page informs us contains the "Transac tions of the several kirk-sessions of Kilrennie, W. Anstruther, Pittenweem, and Abercrombie, with marriages and baptisms, &c., interspersed from 1586 to 1601." Fully thirty years ago there was a dispute among these kirk-sessions as to the possession of this volume, and on the 31st January, 1844, the Presbytery of St. Andrews decided that the custody of it should be given to the session of West Anstruther, and that it should be open to all the sessions connected with it; but it is now in the Edinburgh Register House. This volume, which is mostly written in a cramped hand, abounding with contractions, is, with the exception of a few pages, in such a good state of preservation, that it is perfectly legible to those who are acquainted with the old hand, and who can bring time and patience to bear upon it. It contains interesting references to James Melville, to the renewing of the Covenant in 1596, &c., but into this tempting field we cannot at present enter.

It would be very difficult to describe the end of ecclesiastical discipline better than it is done in the following words :-"That the kingdom of Christ may be set forward; that the paths of the Lord be made straight; that His holy mysteries may be kept pure; that stumbling-blocks may be removed out of the Church, lest a little leaven leaven the whole lump, or lest one sick or scabbed sheep infect the whole flock; that the faithful may so walk as it becometh the gospel of Christ, and that the wandering sheep of Christ may be converted and brought back to the sheep-fold." There is a twofold power of the keys which must be distinguished: the one is executed in doctrine, the other in discipline; the one concionalis, the other judicialis. The former is "proper for pastors alone, whose office and vocation it is, by the preaching and publishing of God's word, to shut the kingdom of heaven against impenitent and disobedient men, and to open it unto penitent sinners; to bind God's heavy wrath

Laurence. Witnesses Jon. King, Andrew Lousone, and David Fermore." To say the least, it is more than likely that this is the same Laurence Hay who, with Andrew Pittilloch, suffered martyrdom in the Grassmarket on the 13th July, 1681, whose testimonies are in the "Cloud of Witnesses," and whose heads were fixed to the Tolbooth of Cupar, where they remained until the Revolution, when they were buried with one of the hands of the valiant Rathillet.

1 The One Hundred and Eleven Propositions, prop. 70.

2 The real meaning of the power of the keys affords a satisfactory explanation of that clause in the 30th chapter of the Westminster Confession, which, as Principal Cunningham said, is rather startling at first sight :-"To these officers the keys of the kingdom of heaven are committed, by virtue whereof they have power respectively to retain and remit sins."

upon the former, and (by application of the promises of mercy) to loose the latter from the sentence and fear of condemnation."1 The latter the power of binding and loosing by the keys of external discipline-belongs to the whole Church, that is to every particular church or congregation collectively taken, but as He who is the God of order and not of confusion hath committed the exercise of no ecclesiastical jurisdiction to a promiscuous multitude, the reformers held that the execution and judicial exercising of this power pertained to that company and assembly of elders in every church which the Apostle calls (in 1 Tim. iv. 14) a presbytery, but which we in Scotland call a session. And again, while they boldly maintained that there is no part of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the power of one man, but of many met together in the name of Christ, yet they held that the execution of some decrees enacted, by the power of jurisdiction, belonged to ministers alone, as imposition of hands, the pronouncing of the sentence of excommunication, the receiving of a penitent, &c. But lest the ministers might seem to claim the sole power of jurisdiction, which the prelates of old had arrogated to themselves, and as there was a difficulty, especially in landward parishes, of getting a competent number of understanding and qualified men to make up an eldership, they ordained that "three, four, more, or fewer particular kirks may have one eldership common to them all, to judge their ecclesiastical causes," ," though each was to have its own elders. Another remedy for this was provided by the planting of presbyteries throughout the country, but this accounts for the early register of West Anstruther containing the records of four different parishes.

As the Reformers saw that the true religion could not endure long without good discipline, they exercised it with a strictness and impartiality, which, to the easy-chair-Christians of this declining age, would seem rigorous and severe, perhaps even harsh and repulsive. Their strictness and impartiality were both manifested in 1567, when the Lady Argyle,—who "once being at the table of the Lord Jesus, and professing his Evangell, had revolted therefrae, in giving her assistance and presence to the baptizing of the King in ane Papistical manner," was ordained to "make publick repentance in the ChapellRoyal of Stirling, upon ane Sonday3 in tyme of preaching." But, 1 English Popish Ceremonies, part III., chap. 8, digres. 4.

* Second Book of Discipline, chap. 7.

"Some of the fathers, such as Justin and Tertullian, in their apologies to the heathen emperors, called this day Sunday'; the reason whereof is plain; they were speaking to heathens, who always called this day by that name, and so would not have known certainly what day they meant, if they had not called it Sunday."— Willison. Our first Reformers had a similar reason.

Booke of the Universall Kirk, p. 73.