tant one. They were in fact but feudal gatherings of
prelates and nobles, whose action was fettered by the precautions of the
Crown. Of real parliamentary life, such as was seen across the border,
not a trace could be found in the assemblies which gathered round the
Scottish kings; but a parliamentary life of the keenest and intensest
order at once appeared among the lay and spiritual delegates who
gathered to the General Assembly of the Kirk. Not only did
Presbyterianism bind Scotland together as it had never been bound before
by its administrative organization, but by the power it gave the lay
elders in each congregation, and by the summons of laymen in an
overpowering majority to the earlier Assemblies, it called the people at
large to a voice, and as it turned out a decisive voice, in the
administration of affairs. If its government by ministers gave it the
outer look of an ecclesiastical despotism, no Church constitution has
proved in practice so democratic as that of Scotland. Its influence in
raising the nation at large to a consciousness of its power was shown by
the change which passed from the moment of its establishment over the
face of Scottish history.

[Sidenote: The Kirk and the king.]

The sphere of action to which it called the people was in fact not a
mere ecclesiastical but a national sphere. Formally the Assembly meddled
only with matters of religion; but in the creed of the Calvinist, as in
the creed of the Catholic, the secular and the religious world were one.
It was the office of the Church to enforce good and to rebuke evil; and
social and political life fell alike within her "discipline." Feudalism
received its death-blow when the noble who had wronged his wife or
murdered his tenant sate humbled before the peasant elders on the stool
of repentance. The new despotism which was growing up under the form of
the monarchy found a sudden arrest in the challenge of the Kirk. When
James summoned the preachers before his Council and arraigned their
meetings as without warrant and seditious, "Mr. Andrew Melville could
not abide it, but broke off upon the king in so zealous, powerful, and
unresistible a manner that howbeit the king used his authority in most
crabbed and choleric manner, yet Mr. Andrew bore him down, and uttered
the commission as from the mighty God, calling the king but 'God's silly
vassal'; and taking him by the sleeve, says this in effect, though with
much hot reasoning and many inter