he lord or of the laird.'... But 'the gentlemen,
barons, earls, lords, and others, must be content to live upon
their just rents, and suffer the Church to be restored to her
liberty, that in her restitution, the poor, who heretofore by
the cruel Papists have been spoiled and oppressed, may now
receive some comfort and relaxation.'

For Knox had now fully conceived that magnificent scheme of
statesmanship for Scotland, which is preserved for us in his book of
Discipline, presented, after the Confession, to the Estates of Scotland
in 1560.[94] How long this project may have been in incubation in his
mind, we do not know. But the germ of it may have been very early
indeed. It may have come into existence simultaneously with his earliest
hope for the 'liberty' and 'restitution' of the oppressed and captive
kirk. For I shall now for the last time quote a passage from that early
Swiss Confession which his master Wishart had brought over with him to
Scotland so long ago; a passage which in its bold comprehensiveness may
well have been the original even in his (Knox's) early East Lothian
days, of his later 'devout imagination.' The Church, said the Swiss
Reformers, as translated by the Scot (and translated, as there is high
authority for believing,[95] for the express purpose of founding a
Protestant Church in Scotland--or at least in those burghs of Scotland
which had received his teaching), is entitled to call upon the
magistrate for

'A right and diligent institution of the discipline of citizens,
and of the schools a just correction and nurture, with
liberality towards the ministers of the Church, with a
solicitate and thoughtful charge of the poor, to which end all
the riches of the Church [in German, _die Gueter der Kirche_] is
referred.'[96]

Knox's 'Book' and scheme are an expansion of this one sentence. It was
statesmanship in the fullest sense, including a poor-law and a system of
education, higher and elementary, for the whole country. But it was in
the first place a Book of the Church. And while its 'system of national
education was realised only in its most imperfect fashion, its _system
of religious instruction_ was carried into effect with results that
would alone stamp the First Book of Discipline as the most important
document in Scottish history' (Hume Brown). Even on the Church side it
is somewhat too despotic. The power of discipline and of exclusion which
is n