has been expressed so
loudly, that the claim of the individual, whether superior or sovereign,
to alienate for unworthy uses huge tracts of territory which carry along
with them the lives and labours of masses of men--and of men who have
never consented to it--is a claim doubtful in its origin and pernicious
in its results. All over Protestant Europe the conclusion even of the
wise and just was, that, subject to proper qualifications, the ancient
endowments of the Church were now the treasury of the people.

But there was another part of the patrimony of the old Church on which
Knox had a still stronger opinion--viz., the yearly tithes or Teinds. To
these, in his view, that Church and its ministers had neither the divine
right which they had claimed, nor any right at all. The 'commandment' of
the State indeed had compelled men, often cruelly and unjustly, to pay
them to the Church. But the State was now free to dispose of them
better, and it was bound to dispose of them justly. And in so far as
they should still be exacted at all, they must now be devoted to the
most useful and the most charitable purposes--purposes which should
certainly include the support of the ministry, but should include many
other things too. One of the positions taken up by Knox in his very
first sermon in St Andrews (following the views which he reports as held
by the Lollards of Kyle), was, 'The teinds by God's law do not appertain
of necessity to the Kirkmen.'[88] And now the Book of Discipline, under
its head of 'The Rents and Patrimony of the Kirk,' demanded that

'Two sorts of men, that is to say, the ministers and the poor,
together with the schools, when order shall be taken thereanent,
must be sustained upon the charges of the church.'[89]

And again--

'_Of the teinds_ must not only the ministers be sustained, but
also the poor and schools.'

The kirk was now powerful, and the poor and the schools were weak; and
Knox now as ever put forward the strong to champion those who could not
help themselves. But he had long before come to the conclusion,[90] that
of the classes here co-ordinated as having a right to the teinds, it was
the right of the poor that was fundamental, and the claim of the
ministers was secondary or ancillary, and perhaps only to be sustained
in so far as they preached and distributed to the poor, or possibly
only in so far as they were of, and represented, the poor. Accordingly
the Assembly o