joined the reformed congregation of St Andrews in 1559-60, and among
them more than one who had sat in judgment on the martyrs and assisted
in their condemnation.[7] A much larger number were ultimately admitted
as readers in the Reformed Church.

[Sidenote: Precursors of the Reformation.]

How was the great revolution which was to bring the church back from
these corruptions of life and doctrine prepared for? Ebrard supposes
that witnesses for holy living and simple faith, but partially connected
with the dominant church, were never from Celtic times entirely wanting
in Britain; and it may have been that, through Richard Rolle and a few
other hermits, the feeble spark in the smoking wick continued to
smoulder on till it was blown into a flame by Wycliffe. At any rate it
was blown into a flame by him and his poor priests; and from their time
witness after witness arose to contend for the right of the laity to
read the Word of God, and to maintain that men were saved by the merits
of Christ and should pray to Him alone, that there was no purgatory in
the popish sense, and that the pope was not the Vicar of Christ.
Wycliffe's poor priests, when persecuted in the south, naturally sought
shelter among the moors and mosses of the north. The district of Kyle
and Cunningham was "a receptakle of Goddis servandis of old," where
their doctrines were cherished till the dawn of the Reformation. In 1406
or 1407 James Resby, one of these priests, is found teaching as far
north as Perth, and for his teaching he was accused and condemned to a
martyr's death. A similar fate is said to have befallen another in
Glasgow about 1422, in all probability the Scottish Wycliffite whose
letter to his bishop has recently been unearthed in a Hussite MS. at
Vienna; and in 1433 Paul Craw or Crawar, a Bohemian, for disseminating
similar opinions, was burned at the market cross in St Andrews. These
were not in all probability the only grim triumphs of Laurence, Abbot of
Lindores, one of the first rectors in the University of St Andrews, who
during so many years "gave no rest to heretics," but they are all of
whom records have been preserved to our time. The fact that every Master
of Arts in the University of St Andrews had to take an oath to defend
the church against the Lollards,[8] and the other fact that the Scottish
Parliament in 1425 enjoined that every bishop should make inquiry anent
heretics and Lollards, and that where any such were found, the