V. _Care of the Poor._

[Sidenote: Oppression of the Poor.]

I must still add that the same enlightened principles which guided them
to make careful provision for these important objects, led them also to
take a kindly interest in the humbler poor and aged, and to urge both on
the state and on the members of the church the duty they owed to this
long despised and neglected class of the population. First, for the poor
peasantry who were not paupers, but who, they allege, had been
grievously oppressed by the exactions of the clergy in the times
immediately preceding, they present the following earnest plea: "With
the griefe of our hearts we heare that some gentlemen are now as cruell
over their tenants as ever were the Papists, requiring of them (the
tiends and) whatsoever they afore payed to the kirk, so that the
Papistical tyrannie shall onely be changed into the tyrannie of the lord
and laird. We dare not flatter your honours, neither yet is it
profitable for you that we so doe: (for neither shall we,) if we permit
cruelty to be used; neither shall ye, who by your authoritie ought to
gaine-stand such oppression, nor yet they that use the same, escape
God's heavie and fearfull judgements. The gentlemen, barones, earles,
lords, and others must be content to live upon their just rents, and
suffer the kirk to be restored to her _(right and) liberty_; that by her
restitution, the poore, who heretofore, by the cruell Papists, have been
spoiled and oppressed, may now receive some comfort and relaxation, and
their tiends and other exactions _be cleane discharged_ and no more
taken in time comming. The uppermost claith, corps-present, clerk-maile,
the pasche-offering, tiend-ale, and all handlings[216] upaland can
neither be required nor recieved of good conscience."[217]

[Sidenote: Exactions of the Medieval Church.]

[Sidenote: The Oppressors relentless.]

The history of the world, the history of the Christian church, has few
passages more noble than this, where these poor ministers, not yet
assured of decent provision for their own maintenance, boldly undertake
the patronage of the peasantry, and say they would rather suffer
themselves than ask that teinds should be exacted from those who had
been so long ground down, not only by the exaction of these from their
crofts and even from their gardens, but also by a multitude of other
imposts, which, although their very names are now almost forgotten in
Scotland, had been lo