ear, and at which the king and his nobles appear often to have
been present, and whether, therefore, in the maintenance of this
quasi-Gallican liberty, as well as in some minor matters enumerated by
Lord Hailes, there may not have been a closer and more real connection
between the pre- and post-Reformation church in Scotland than has been
commonly admitted, it would now, perhaps, be very difficult to
determine. But it will be allowed on all hands that this venerable
court--which was so early established and has subsisted almost
uninterruptedly since the Reformation, and has exercised such extensive
legislative and judicial powers--is the most distinctive characteristic
of the Scottish Church, and has had great influence in the development
of Scottish opinion and religious life.

II. _The Discipline of the Church._

The opinions of our reformer and his associates regarding the discipline
and practical organisation of the church have hardly ever been made a
subject of serious controversy, even by those who have so long called in
question the generally received ideas regarding his opinions on the
government of the church. That which marked out the early Reformed
Church of Scotland most distinctively among the churches of the
Reformation was the fact that she advocated, and resolutely carried into
practical operation, that "godly discipline" which they all admitted had
been used in the primitive church in her best and purest days, and the
restoration of which, they perhaps ventured to hint, was much to be
desired, but which yet they had not the courage to demand from the civil
power as of essential concern to the wellbeing of their churches. Even
Luther, who began so well, hesitated and quailed before the claims of
the civil powers, and left it to Calvin to carry out his own earlier
conceptions, and those of the Hessian Synod of 1528.[203] Our reformers,
however, boldly laid down the absolute necessity of it in their Book of
Common Order, and named in their Confession as one of the three
distinctive marks of a true church of Christ, "ecclesiastical discipline
uprightlie ministred as Goddis Worde prescribes, whereby vice is
repressed and vertew nurished."[204] Not content to exercise such a
discipline merely under this clause of their State-ratified Confession,
they sought and obtained an explicit acknowledgment of the church's
privileges in special Acts of Parliament, which continue in force at the
present day, and have