science. What they did do was
something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to
be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of
Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles
were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was
and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to
help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or
something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by the
Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They
decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed;
and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and
faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of
theirs, we all know tolerably well.

The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland,
the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came
about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by
princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up
with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and
Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted
early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised.
Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the
creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been
created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men,
belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the
earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in
Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in
the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part,
farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and
thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation
of men detached from the lords and from the Church--brave, noble,
resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised
by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting
allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of
Scotland--that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and
determined its after fortunes as a nation--had its first germ in these
half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the
Reformation in Scotland diffe