d through God's grace ever will hold it,' or she regarded it
as a mere pious opinion, which did not prevent her from coalescing
with a Kirk of contradictory ideas. The tiny minority--the Wee Frees,
the Free Kirk of to-day--would not accept this compromise, 'hence
these tears,' to leave differences in purely metaphysical theology out
of view.

Now the root of all the trouble, all the schisms and sufferings of
more than three centuries, lies, as we have said, in some of the ideas
of John Knox, and one asks, of what Kirk would John Knox be, if he
were alive in the present state of affairs? I venture to think that
the venerable Reformer would be found in the ranks of the Established
Kirk, 'the Auld Kirk.' He would not have gone out into the wilderness
in 1843, and he would most certainly have opposed the ideas of the
United Presbyterians. This theory may surprise at a first glance, but
it has been reached after many hours of earnest consideration.

Knox's ideas, as far as he ever reasoned them out, reposed on this
impregnable rock, namely that Calvinism, as held by himself, was an
absolutely certain thing in every detail. If the State or 'the civil
magistrate,' as he put the case, entirely agreed with Knox, then Knox
was delighted that the State should regulate religion. The magistrate
was to put down Catholicism, and other aberrations from the truth as
it was in John Knox, with every available engine of the law, corporal
punishment, prison, exile, and death. If the State was ready and
willing to do all this, then the State was to be implicitly obeyed in
matters of religion, and the power in its hands was God-given--in
fact, the State was the secular aspect of the Church. Looking at the
State in this ideal aspect, Knox writes about the obedience due to the
magistrate in matters religious, after the manner of what, in this
country, would be called the fiercest 'Erastianism.' The State 'rules
the roast' in all matters of religion and may do what Laud and Charles
I. perished in attempting, may alter forms of worship--always provided
that the State absolutely agrees with the Kirk.

Thus, under Edward VI., Knox would have desired the secular power in
England, the civil magistrate, to forbid people to kneel at the
celebration of the Sacrament. _That_ was entirely within the
competence of the State, simply and solely because Knox desired that
people should _not_ kneel. But when, long after Knox's death, the
civil magistrate ins