THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION.

CHAPTER I.

THE NATURE AND NEED OF THE REFORMATION.

[Sidenote: Its Animating Principle.]

With the single exception of the period which covers the introduction
and first marvellous triumphs of Christianity, the Reformation of the
sixteenth century must be owned as perhaps the greatest and most
glorious revolution in the history of the human race. And the years of
earnest contendings and heroic sufferings which prepared the way for its
triumph in many lands and issued in its cruel suppression in others, and
the story of the men who by God's grace were enabled to bear the brunt
of the battle and to lead their countrymen on to victory or to
martyrdom, will ever have a fascination for all in whose hearts faith
in the great truths, then more clearly brought to light, has not yet
altogether evaporated. The movement then initiated was no mere effort to
get quit of acknowledged scandals, which had long been grieved over but
never firmly dealt with; no mere desire to lop off a few later
accretions, which had gathered round and obscured the faith once
delivered to the saints;[1] no mere "return to the Augustinian, or the
Nicene, or the Ante-Nicene age," but a vast progress beyond any previous
age since the death of St John--a deeper plunge into the meaning of
revelation than had been made by Augustine, or Anselm, or St Bernard, or
A Kempis, or Wycliffe, or Tauler. Its object was to get back to the
divine sources of Christianity,--to know, and understand, and
appropriate it as it came fresh and pure from the lips of the Son of God
and His inspired apostles, not excluding that chosen vessel to whom the
grace had been given "to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable
riches of Christ." It was, in fact, a return to the old Gospel so
attractively set forth by him in his Epistles, and verified to the
reformers by their own inmost spiritual experience under deep
convictions of sin and shortcoming. The cry of their awakened
consciences had been, How shall we sinners have relief from our load and
be justified before God? And this, as has been said, was just the old
question put to the apostle himself by the jailer at Philippi, What must
I do to be saved? And the answer their own experience warranted them
with one accord to proclaim was still, Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,
believe in the riches of His pardoning mercy, in the merit of His
atoning death, in the freeness and power of His effica