s thus destitute of
opportunity to know and recognise the Truth, are threatened with
confiscation, exile, and death, if they cling to the only creed which
they have been taught--after August 17, 1560. The death penalty was
threatened often, by Scots Acts, for trifles. In this case the graduated
scale of punishment shows that the threat is serious.

This Act sounds insane, but the Convention was wise in its generation.
Had it merely abolished the persecuting laws of the Church, Scotland
might never have been Protestant. The old faith is infinitely more
attractive to mankind than the new Presbyterian verity. A thing of slow
and long evolution, the Church had assimilated and hallowed the world-old
festivals of the year's changing seasons. She provided for the human
love of recreation. Her Sundays were holidays, not composed of gloomy
hours in stuffy or draughty kirks, under the current voice of the
preacher. Her confessional enabled the burdened soul to lay down its
weight in sacred privacy; her music, her ceremonies, the dim religious
light of her fanes, naturally awaken religious emotion. While these
things, with the native tendency to resist authority of any kind,
appealed to the multitude, the position of the Church, in later years,
recommended itself to many educated men in Scotland as more logical than
that of Knox; and convert after convert, in the noble class, slipped over
to Rome. The missionaries of the counter-Reformation, but for the
persecuting Act, would have arrived in a Scotland which did not
persecute, and the work of the Convention of 1560 might all have been
undone, had not the stringent Act been passed.

That Act apparently did not go so far as the preachers desired. Thus
Archbishop Hamilton, writing to Archbishop Beaton in Paris, the day after
the passing of the Act, says, "All these new preachers openly persuade
the nobility in the pulpit, to put violent hands, and slay all churchmen
that will not concur and adopt their opinion. They only reproach my Lord
Duke" (the Archbishop's brother), "that he will not begin first, and
either cause me to do as they do, or else to use rigour on me by
slaughter, sword, or, at least, perpetual prison." {177a} It is probable
that the Archbishop was well informed as to what the bigots were saying,
though he is not likely to have "sat under" them; moreover, he would hear
of their advice from his brother, the Duke, with whom he had just held a
long conferenc