John Knox | Page 6

paid. These parochial tithes all possessors of
land in the parish were bound by law to pay, whether they desired it or
not. And, strictly, they should have been paid to the pastor of the parish
and for its benefit. 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