tly to show
themselves in Scotland, that grand medieval organisation, which had
supplanted the simpler arrangements of the old Celtic church, had in its
turn exhausted its life powers, and shown unmistakable signs of
deep-seated corruption and hopeless decay. Whatever good it may have
been honoured to do in times past,--in keeping alive the knowledge of
God and of things divine in the midst of "a darkness which might be
felt," in promoting a higher civilisation than the Celtic, in
alleviating the evils of the feudalism which Anglo-Norman settlers had
brought in, in founding parishes and universities and some other
institutions which, with a purified church and revived Christian life,
were to be a source of blessing after it was swept away,--yet now at
last it had grossly failed to keep alive among the common people true
devotion, or to give access to the sources at which the flame might have
been rekindled; it had failed to provide educated men for its ordinary
cures, to raise the masses from the rudeness and ignorance in which they
were still involved, and even to maintain that hearty sympathy with them
and that kindly interest in their temporal welfare which its best men in
its earlier days had shown. It continued to have its services in a
language which had for ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the
laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary
priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the
capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely
circulated among them.[4] It did not, when the invention of printing put
it in its power, make any effort to circulate among them the Holy Book,
that they might read therein, in their own tongue, the message of God's
love. No doubt it had its pictures and images, its mystery plays and
ceremonies, which it deemed fit books for children and the unlearned.
But it forgot that these children were growing in capacity, even if
allowed to grow up untrained; that "to credulous simplicity was
succeeding a spirit of eager curiosity, an impatience of mere authority,
and a determination to search into the foundation of things"; and that,
if it was to maintain its place, it must not only keep abreast but ahead
of advancing intelligence and morality. But the old church began greatly
to decline just as the laity began to rise. Bishop Kennedy, I suppose,
was almost its last preaching bishop; and the character of the
preaching, so far as p