d been trifled with by their
own natural leaders. Used and abused by Elizabeth, despised by the
worldly intelligence and power of the times--they triumphed after all,
and, as a natural consequence, they set their own mark and stamp upon
the fruits of the victory.

The question now is, what has the Kirk so established done for Scotland?
Has it justified its own existence? Briefly, we might say, it has
continued its first function as the guardian of Scottish freedom. But
that is a vague phrase, and there are special accusations against the
Kirk and its doctrines which imply that it has cared for other things
than freedom. Narrow, fanatical, dictatorial, intrusive, superstitious,
a spiritual despotism, the old priesthood over again with a new
face--these and other such epithets and expressions we have heard often
enough applied to it at more than one stage of its history. Well, I
suppose that neither the Kirk nor anything else of man's making is
altogether perfect. But let us look at the work which lay before it when
it had got over its first perils. Scotch patriotism succeeded at last in
the object it had so passionately set its heart upon. It sent a king at
last of the Scotch blood to England, and a new dynasty; and it never
knew peace or quiet after. The Kirk had stood between James Stuart and
his kingcraft. He hated it as heartily as did his mother; and, when he
got to England, he found people there who told him it would be easy to
destroy it, and he found the strength of a fresh empire to back him in
trying to do it. To have forced prelacy upon Scotland would have been to
destroy the life out of Scotland. Thrust upon them by force, it would
have been no more endurable than Popery. They would as soon, perhaps
sooner, have had what the Irish call the 'rale thing' back again. The
political freedom of the country was now wrapped up in the Kirk; and the
Stuarts were perfectly well aware of that, and for that very reason
began their crusade against it.

And now, suppose the Kirk had been the broad, liberal, philosophical,
intellectual thing which some people think it ought to have been, how
would it have fared in that crusade; how altogether would it have
encountered those surplices of Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of
Claverhouse? It is hard to lose one's life for a 'perhaps,' and
philosophical belief at the bottom means a 'perhaps' and nothing more.
For more than half the seventeenth century, the battle had to be foug