CHAPTER VIII

THE KING'S GREEK GIFT TO THE CHURCH

'The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was
in his heart.'

_The Psalms._

In 1596, at one of the many conferences which he held with the
Commissioners of the Church on the business with which our last chapter
was concerned, the King disclosed a new policy. For the double purpose
of diverting public attention from the Popish lords, and of starting a
new process for the overthrow of Presbytery, he cast off all disguise
and threw down the gauntlet to the ministers. He told the Commissioners
that the question of the redding of the marches between the two
jurisdictions must be reopened, and that there could be no peace between
him and the Church until it satisfied him on these four points:--that
ministers should make no reference in the pulpit to affairs of
government; that the Courts of the Church should take no cognisance of
offences against the law of the land; that the General Assembly should
only meet by the King's special command; and that the Acts of the
Assembly should, no more than the statutes of the realm, be held valid
till they received his sanction and ratification.

Had these demands been granted, the liberties of the Church would have
been placed under the King's feet, the ministers would have worn a Court
muzzle, and the Assembly would have sat only to register the King's
decrees. With the pulpits silenced in regard to affairs of government
and offences against the law, the country would have been deprived of
the only organ of public opinion that checked the arbitrary power of the
Crown and the prevailing laxity in the administration of justice. Had it
not been for words of 'venturesome edge' spoken from the pulpits on
necessary occasions, we cannot estimate how the liberties of Scotland
would have suffered. We are told by some dispassionate and carefully
balanced readers of Scottish History that the Presbyterian Reformers of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cared no more for liberty than
did their opponents, and that the controversy was between Presbyterian
tyranny on the one hand and Episcopal tyranny on the other; and, of
course, it is to be allowed that _individual_ liberty was neither
claimed nor admitted by any party in that age, as it is by all parties
in ours. But the Presbyterian Church was _the nation_ in a sense which
held true of no other organisation civil or ecclesiastical--c