ribing the old
religion and Church, and setting up, if not a new church, at least a new
religion. But, on another side, and one with which Parliament alone
could deal, there was also something necessary. What was to be done with
the huge endowments of the Church now abolished and proscribed? And what
provision was to be made by the State for that 'maintenance of the true
religion' to which it had bound itself, and for its spread among a
people, half of whom were not even acquainted with it, though all of
them were already bound to it by law?

The question of the endowments was a more difficult one, theoretically
and practically, than that of the yearly tithes. For the former had been
actual gifts, made to the Church or its officials by kings, barons, and
other individuals, when there was no law compelling them to give them.
What right had the State now to touch these? Two things are to be
recalled before answer. All these individual donors had been by law
compelled not only to be members of that Church, but to accept it
(whether they wished to do so or not) as the exclusive receiver of
whatever charities they might desire to institute or to bequeath. For
many centuries past in Scotland the proposal to do otherwise would have
been not only futile, but a deadly risk to him who tried it. Then,
secondly, the same law which had bound the individual to the Church as
the exclusive administrator of charities, had kept him in compulsory
ignorance of other objects of munificence than those which the Church
sanctioned; or if by chance that pious ignorance was broken, it sternly
forbade him to support them. For reasons such as these the modern
European state has never been able to treat ancient endowments made
under the pressure of its own intolerance with the same respect as if
the donors had been really free--free to know, and free to act. The
presumption that the donor or testator, if he were living now, would
have acted far otherwise than he did, and that in altering his
destination the State may be carrying out what he really would have
wished, is in such cases by no means without foundation. Knox and others
reveal to us that this feeling was overwhelmingly strong at the time
with which we are dealing, especially in the minds of the descendants
and representatives of the donors themselves. And in the minds of the
common people, and of Knox as one sprung from them, there was lying,
unexpressed, the feeling which in modern times