mmonlie callit the kirk
richts, and Pasch offrands quhilk is takin at Pasch fra men and women
for distribution of the sacrament of the blessit body and blood of Jesus
Christ," should no longer be extorted under pain of excommunication or
debarring from the sacraments, but left to the free will of the givers
(Concilia Scotiae, ii. 148, 149). The Council met this demand for
reformation by enacting that in future the poor should be freed from
mortuary dues, while those not quite so poor were only to pay them in a
modified form; and the small tithes and oblations were to be taken up
before Lent so as to avoid the appearance of selling the sacrament
(Ibid., ii. 167, 168, 174). When, on the 27th of May 1560, the reforming
vicar of Lintrathin raised a summons against his parishioners for
payment of his teinds, "the cors present and umest clayth of all yeris
and termes bigane restand unpayit" were specially excepted from his
claim (Spalding Miscellany, iv. 121).]

CHAPTER IX.

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN KNOX.

[Sidenote: Assassination of the Good Regent.]

The eighth decade of the sixteenth century was memorable in the history
of Protestantism in its Presbyterian or Calvinistic form, and the year
1572 has been termed its _annus mirabilis_. It marked a crisis in the
long and bloody struggle of the Protestants in the Netherlands with
their Spanish oppressors,--a struggle which issued in securing the
independence of the Dutch people, and settling on a Calvinistic basis
the Reformed Church of Holland. It formed the turning-point in the
tragic fortunes of the Reformed Church of France, at which, from being
able to claim as adherents a majority of the landed gentry and a large
minority of the more intelligent and wealthy _bourgeois_ in the
provincial towns, and being only weak among the citizens of the capital
and the peasantry of northern and central France, she was, by an act of
base treachery and fiendish cruelty, hurled from her promising
position, sadly crippled in numbers and influence, permanently weakened
and cast down, though not crushed or driven to despair.[220] This decade
was especially memorable in the history of the Reformed Church of
Scotland as having witnessed the removal of the ablest and best of the
lay defenders of the Reformation, the death of our great reformer
himself, and the return to Scotland of the intrepid and devoted man who
was to take up and complete the work, from which failing health and a
gr