John Knox | Page 6

But by a scandalous corruption, often protested against by both Parliament and the Church, the Lords of lands were allowed to divert the tithes, which they were already bound to pay, to congested ecclesiastical centres, sometimes to cathedrals, more often to religious houses of 'regulars.' After this was done the monastery or religious House enjoyed the whole sheaves or tithes of the land in question; the local vicar, if the House appointed one, being entitled only to the 'lesser tithes' of domestic animals, eggs, grass, etc. This robbery of the parishes of Scotland--parishes which were already far too large and too scattered, as John Major points out--was carried on to an extraordinary extent. Each of the religious houses of Holyrood and Kelso had the tithes of twenty-seven parishes diverted or 'appropriated' to it. In some districts two-thirds of the whole parish churches were in the hands of the monks, and no fewer than thirty-four were bestowed on Arbroath Abbey in the course of a single reign. When we remember that the Lords of these great houses were generally members--often unworthy members--of the families which were thus enriching them to the detriment of the country, we can imagine the complicated corruption which went on from reign to reign. Unfortunately the nepotism and simony which resulted had direct example and sanction in the relation to Scotland of the Head of the Church at Rome.[9] The most ardent Catholics admit this as true in relation to Europe generally in the time with which we deal;[10] and the Holy See had been allowed some centuries before to claim Scotland as a country which belonged to it in a peculiar sense, and the Church of Scotland as subject to it specially and immediately. The jealousy of an Italian potentate which was always powerful in England, and which had now, under Henry the Eighth, made it possible to reject the Romish supremacy while retaining the whole of Roman Catholic doctrine, had little influence farther north. Scotland followed the Pope, even when he went to Avignon, and when England had accepted his rival or Anti-Pope. And while in this it sympathised with France, it had little of that traditional dislike to high Ultramontane claims which we saw to have been so strong in Paris. The Pope remained the centre of our church system, and there were in Scotland no projects of serious reform except those which went so deep as (in the case of the Lollards and other precursors of the Reformation) to break with the existing ecclesiastical machine as a whole, and so to challenge the deadliest penalties of the law.
For it is a mistake to suppose that heresy, in the modern misuse of the word (as equivalent to false doctrine), was greatly dreaded in the Roman Catholic Church, or savagely punished by our ancient code. In Scotland, as elsewhere, the fundamental law was that of Theodosius and the empire, that every man must be a member of the Catholic Church, and submit to it. That law was indeed the original establishment of the Church, and for many centuries there had been in Scotland no penalty for breaking it except death. But the Church, when its authority was thus once for all sufficiently secured, was, in the early Middle Age, rather tolerant of theological opinion. And not until error had been published and persisted in, in face of the injunctions of authority--not until the heresy thus threatened to be internal schism, or repudiation of that authority--was the secular power usually invoked. Unfortunately Western Europe as a whole, ever since its intellectual awakening three or more centuries ago, was moving on to precisely this crisis; and the very existence of the Church, in the sense of a body of which all citizens were compulsorily members, was now felt to be at stake. The Scottish sovereign had long since been taken bound, by his coronation oath, to interpose his authority; and the present King, delivered in 1528 from the tutory of the Douglases by the Beatons, had thrown himself into the side of those powerful ecclesiastics. A statute, the first against heresy for nearly a century, was passed two years after Knox went to college. When he was twenty-three years old, England was preparing to reject the Pope's supremacy; but Scotland was so far from it that this year Patrick Hamilton was burned at St Andrews. When he was thirty-four years old, the English revolution had been accomplished by the despotic Henry; but his Scottish nephew had refused to follow the lead, and in that year five other heretics were burned on the Castle-hill of Edinburgh, the popular 'Commons King' looking on. On James V.'s death there was a slight reaction under the Regent, and Parliament even sanctioned the publication of the Scriptures. But Arran made his peace