reaching was still continued by the friars and
some of the inferior clergy, was not generally fitted to supply the lack
of Bibles and catechisms, and other vernacular books of instruction. It
never grappled, as it ought, with the problem of lightening the burdens
it had long exacted of the peasantry; but refused almost to the last
moment to ease even the most galling of them. It never grappled, as it
ought, with the problem of the education of the masses; and what was
done for those of the community in more fortunate circumstances was done
more by the efforts of a few noble-minded individuals than by any
corporate action of Church or State. There is not among all its codes of
canons anything approaching to the clear ringing utterances of our
First Book of Discipline concerning the necessity and advantages of
education.[5]

[Sidenote: Lethargy of the Medieval Church.]

Not only had the life powers of the medieval church been exhausted and
decay set in, but corruption, positive and gross corruption, had reached
an alarming height. There were the indolence and neglect of duty which
wealth too often brings in its train; the covert secularising of that
wealth, just as in the old Celtic church, by various devices, to get it
into the hands of unqualified men and minors; luxury, avarice,
oppression, simony, shameless pluralities, and crass ignorance; and
above all that celibate system, which nothing would persuade them
honestly to abandon, though it had proved to be a yoke they could not
bear, and was producing only too generally results humiliating and
disastrous to themselves and to all who came under their influence. The
proof of this does not rest merely or even mainly on the statements of
Knox, Alesius, and Spottiswood, nor on the representations of Lindsay
and the Wedderburns. The fact, as both the late Dr David Laing and Dr
Joseph Robertson have shown, and the late Bishop Forbes has sorrowfully
acknowledged, is confessed and deplored in the canons of their councils,
in the Acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in the writings of their
own best men.[6] The harsh measures to which men themselves so
vulnerable had recourse to maintain their position, the relentless
cruelties they perpetrated on men of unblemished character, amiable
disposition, deep-seated conviction and thorough Christian earnestness,
could not fail in the end to turn the tide against them, and arouse
feelings of indignation which on any favourable opportu