sion of the Kirk.]

The trial of Scotchmen before a foreign court, the imprisonment of
Scotchmen in foreign prisons, were steps that showed the powerlessness
of James to grasp the first principles of law; but they were effective
for the purpose at which he aimed. They struck terror into the Scotch
ministers. Their one weapon lay in the enthusiasm of the people; but,
strongly as Scotch enthusiasm might tell on a king at Edinburgh, it was
powerless over a king at London. The time had come when James might pass
on from merely silencing the General Assembly to the use of it in the
enslavement of the Church. Successful as he had been in gagging the
pulpits and silencing the Assembly, he had been as yet less successful
in his efforts to revive the power of the Crown over the Church by a
restoration of Episcopacy. He had nominated a few bishops, and had won
back for them their old places in Parliament; but his bishops remained
purely secular nobles, unrecognized in their spiritual capacity by the
Church, and without any ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was in vain that
James had striven to bring Melville and his fellows to any recognition
of prelacy. But with their banishment and imprisonment the field was
clear for more vigorous action. Deprived of their leaders, threatened
with bonds and exile, deserted by the nobles, ill supported as yet by
the mass of the people, to whom the real nature of their struggle was
unknown, the Scotch ministers bent at last before the pressure of the
Crown. They still shrank indeed from any formal acceptance of
episcopacy; but they allowed the bishops to act as perpetual moderators
or presidents in the synods of their presbyteries.

[Sidenote: Restoration of Scotch Episcopacy.]

With such moderators the General Assembly might be suffered to meet.
Their influence in fact secured the return of royal nominees to
Assemblies which met in 1608 and in 1610; and in the second of these
assemblies episcopacy was at last formally recognized by the Scottish
Church. The bishops were owned as permanent heads of each provincial
synod; the power of ordination was committed to them; the ecclesiastical
sentences pronounced by synod or presbytery were henceforth to be
submitted for their approval. The new organization of the Church was at
once carried out. The vacant sees were filled. Two archbishops were
created at St. Andrews and Glasgow, and set at the head of Courts of
High Commission for their respective prov