that they could not
be fully enforced and were not, and that perhaps they were not quite
intended to be enforced. In point of fact Scotland in the Reformation
time had little blood-shedding for mere religion on either side to shew,
compared to the deluge which stained the scaffolds of continental
Europe. That is no answer to the criticism that the only law now needed
was one to 'abolish and extinguish' the persecuting laws which had been
enacted of old. But even to such a critic, and on the ground of theory,
there is something to be said. It is not true that the new theory was
worse than the old. On the contrary, the old theory allowed no private
judgment to the individual at all; he was bound by the authority of the
Church, and it was no comfort to him to know that the state was bound by
it too. On the Protestant theory neither the individual nor the state
were in the first instance so bound; both were free to find and utter
the truth, free for the first time for a thousand years! It was this
feeling--that the state was free truthwards and Godwards--which
accounted for half of the enthusiasm in the Scots Parliament a week
before. And it was not at once perceived, there or elsewhere, that for
the state to make use of this freedom by embracing a creed itself--even
though it now embraced it as the true creed and no longer as the
Church's creed--was perilous for the more fundamental freedom of the
individual. He would be sure to feel aggrieved by his state adopting the
creed which was not his. And the state might readily be led into holding
that it had adopted it not for its officials only but for its subjects,
and might shape its legislation accordingly.

Knox was more responsible for the result than any other man, and for him
also there is something to be said. The view that the state must adopt a
religion for all its subjects and compel them all to be members of its
Church, was common ground in that age; both parties proclaimed it
(except when they were in too hopeless a minority), and the few
Anabaptists and others who anticipated the doctrine of modern times had
not been able to get it into practical politics. Knox too, in his first
contact with the Reformed faith (and the contact, as we know, was a
plunge), had found the tenet of the magistrate's duty in an exaggerated
form. And in that form he now reproduced it. The statement of his
Confession of 1560 that 'To Kings, Princes, Rulers, and Magistrates we
affirm that c