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 fac