ruptions: 'Sir, we will humbly
reverence your Majesty always--namely, in public. But since we have
this occasion to be with your Majesty in private, and the truth is that
you are brought in extreme danger both of your life and crown, and with
you the country and kirk of Christ is like to wreck, for not telling you
the truth and giving of you a faithful counsel, we must discharge our
duty therein or else be traitors both to Christ and you! And therefore,
sir, as divers times before, so now again I must tell you, there are two
kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and
his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose
kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. And they whom
Christ hath called to watch over his kirk and govern his spiritual
kingdom have sufficient power and authority so to do both together and
severally; the which no Christian king nor prince should control and
discharge, but fortify and assist, otherwise not faithful servants nor
members of Christ!'"

[Sidenote: The ministers and the people.]

It is idle to set aside words like these as the mere utterances of
fanaticism or of priestly arrogance. James and his Council would have
made swift work of mere fanatics or of arrogant priests. Why Melville
could withdraw unharmed was because a people stood behind him, a people
suddenly wakened to a consciousness of its will, and stern in the belief
that a divine duty lay on it to press that will on its king. Through all
the theocratic talk of the Calvinist ministers we see a popular power
that fronts the Crown. It is the Scotch people that rises into being
under the guise of the Scotch Kirk. The men who led it were men with no
official position or material power, for the nobles had stripped the
Church of the vast endowments which had lured their sons and the royal
bastards within the pale of its ministry. The ministers of the new
communion were drawn from the burghers and peasantry or at best from the
smaller gentry; and nothing in their social position aided them in
withstanding the nobles or the Crown. Their strength lay simply in the
popular sympathy behind them, in their capacity of rousing national
opinion through the pulpit, of expressing it through the Assembly. The
claims which such men advanced, ecclesiastical as their garb might be,
could not fail to be national in their issues. In struggling against
episcopacy they were in fact struggling ag