he
proposal made in the Book of Discipline, ratified and confirmed by the
subscription of the lords, was that the tithes and other revenues of the
old Church, apart from all the tyrannical additions which had ground the
poor (the Uppermost Cloth, Corpse present, Pasch offerings, etc.),
should be given over to the Congregation for the combined uses above
described. This in principle had been conceded, though in practice it
was extremely hard to extract those revenues from the strong secular
hands into which in many cases they had fallen, and which had not even
ceased to exact the Corpse present, etc. The Reformers had strongly
urged the necessity of having the Book of Discipline ratified by the
Queen on her arrival; but this suggestion had been set aside even by the
severest of the lords as out of place for the moment. To such
enlightened critics as Lethington the whole book was a devout
imagination, a dream of theorists never to be realised. The Church,
however, with Knox at her head, was bent upon securing this
indispensable provision, though it may well be supposed that now, with
not only the commendators and pensioners but the bishops themselves and
other ecclesiastical functionaries, inspirited and encouraged by the
Queen's favour, and hoping that the good old times might yet come back,
it was more difficult than ever to get a hearing for their claim. And
great as was the importance of a matter involving the very existence of
the new ecclesiastical economy, it was, even in the opinion of the
wisest, scarcely so exciting as the mass in the Queen's chapel, against
which the ministers preached, and every careful burgher shook his head;
although the lords who came within the circle of the Court were greatly
troubled, knowing not how to take her religious observances from the
Queen, they who had just at the cost of years of conflict gained freedom
for their own. On one occasion when a party of those who had so toiled
and struggled together during all the troubled past were met in the
house of one of the clerk registers, the question was discussed between
them whether subjects might interfere to put down the idolatry of their
prince--when all the nobles took one side, and John Knox, his
colleagues, and a humble official or two were all that stood on the
other. As a manner of reconciling the conflicting opinions Knox was
commissioned to put the question to the Church of Geneva, and to ask
what in the circumstances described