INTRODUCTION.

THE Liturgy prepared under King Charles I. for the use of the Church of Scotland, and read once only, and in memorable-even epoch-making-circumstances, in the Cathedral Church of S. Giles at Edinburgh on the Seventh Sunday after Trinity (23rd July), 1637, is a book that has been spoken against. Its very name, by which it is commonly called, "Laud's Liturgy '—a misnomer, as we shall see (for its most distinctive features were due to two Scottish bishops), but a misnomer foisted on it with a hostile purpose has been sufficient in many quarters to secure its condemnation. Its opponents, when it was issued, were not sparing either in scathing criticism or abusive epithets. Row strung them all together, calling it a "Popish-English-Scottish-MassService Book."

In modern times we find it derided by certain Roman Catholics as "a fancy Liturgy, and denounced by certain Presbyterians-including some who have confessed that they had never read it-as "almost Popish." It has been over and over again described as "the prime cause" of the Great Rebellion, in the course of which both King Charles I. and Archbishop Laud were to perish on the

scaffold, which was to deluge in blood three kingdoms, and overthrow for a season alike their constitution and their liberties. The taunt is an old one, but it is unquestionably an exaggeration. When in 1640 the Scots Commissioners "challenged the Prelate of Canterbury as "the prime cause on earth" (they said nothing explicitly of an agent under the earth, at whose prompting they evidently believed the Primate acted) of "the novations in religion" which "are known," they said, "to be the true cause of our present troubles," Laud answered 1 that "these commotions had another and higher cause than the pretended innovations," and mentioned, in particular, the affair of Lord Balmerino, "grievances,' as they said, 'propounded in the Convention, an. 1628,' about coining and their black money, murmuring also as if the 'Articles and Parliament were not free'; great clamour against the Bishops' power in choosing the 'Lords of the Articles'; though that power belonged unto them by the fundamental laws of that kingdom. As much against the Act of Revocations, and the taxations (which yet were voluntarily offered, and miscalled on purpose to edge the people), as also 'applying,' as they said, 'these taxations to wrong uses'; with all which, and more, religion 2 had nothing to do. . . . Besides, they are no fools who have spoken it freely (since the Act of Oblivion for the Scottish business

1 Laud's Works, Lib. of Anglo-Catholic Theology, vol. iii. p. 299.

"The word "religion" is here used in its old English use, as meaning "form of worship.” In this meaning it is familiar to the student of the ecclesiastical history of England in the reigns of Mary I. and Elizabeth: there is an example of it in the Bible, in S. James i. 27, where the meaning is "pure worship and undefiled.”

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was passed), that this great league before mentioned between the discontented party of both kingdoms, was consulted on in the year 1632, and after the King's being in Scotland, an. 1633, it went on till they took occasion another way to hatch the cockatrice' egg, which was laid so long before." That there was truth in Laud's contention, and that the discontent produced by the Act of Revocation"the great Act," be it remembered, "which secured an adequate and permanent provision for the parish ministers," and whose beneficence, says Professor Hume Brown, "the national Church of Scotland has not failed to acknowledge "1—was one of "the two main causes for the revolt of 1638, which resulted in the National Covenant and the temporary overthrow of the royal authority" is "generally allowed by historians," and it is, of the two, the cause which receives the most "emphatic illustration in the proceedings of the Privy Council of Scotland."2 But if the discontent which this Act had caused was at the bottom of the "Troubles," "novations in religion," and the whole ecclesiastical policy of King Charles, and of his father before him, had their share also ; and it cannot but be admitted that the knowledge which the Government possessed of the state of feeling in Scotland should have bid them pause ere they superinduced a second cause which they must have known was only too likely to prove an occasion as well. It did prove the occasion. Whatever was the inspiration,3 whatever was the exact nature of the riot popularly associated with the name of

2

1 History of Scotland, Book vi. chapter 3.

Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, vol. iii. (1629

1630), Introd. (by Professor Hume Brown) ix.

3 See Grub, Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, ii. 386.

4 Hume Brown, History of Scotland, ii. p. 301.

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Jenny Geddes, that explosion took place at the introduction of this Liturgy, and it brought along with it calamities for the Church of Scotland far more lasting than those which it entailed upon the Monarchy. The Monarchy was consecrated by the tragedy at Whitehall. It was restored so soon as ever the people of either Kingdom were free to speak. It is to-day the most popular of all our institutions. But in matters ecclesiastical, at least in the Northern Kingdom (in England in 1660 the Church of Laud was restored as emphatically as the Crown of Charles), the blow struck in 1637 had enduring consequences. All that the wisdom, by no means inconsiderable, of King James VI., all that the piety, the munificence, the taste of his son had desired for the Church of Scotland, was henceforth discredited in the eyes of the vast bulk of the Scottish people, and its realisation postponed indefinitely. That union and communion between the two National Churches of the island, which the different circumstances of their respective Reformations had not availed to break, suffered now an interruption which has not yet been terminated. There is nothing, perhaps, which the nation so deeply needs as a United Church for the United Empire: there is nothing which the interests of both Churches more require: there is nothing to which CHRIST, we believe, so plainly calls us. But the difficulty created by those unhappy proceedings still stands in the way. The Scottish Covenanters tried for the union of the two Churches on a Presbyterian basis: that was the attraction to them of the Solemn League. The "Second Episcopacy" achieved it on an Episcopalian basis for a season (1662-1690), but in a fashion which served only to put the great mass of the Scottish people more out of conceit with it. After the Revolution it was but