hurch. Whatever roused the Protestant
spirit of the country gave Presbytery a firmer hold as the Church system
most antagonistic to Popery, and also to arbitrary government which
seeks in Popery its natural ally. At every crisis such as that which now
arose, it made a fresh appeal to the deepest feelings of the nation.

At the time when the Armada was approaching our shores the country had
no confidence in the patriotism of the King. There were sinister
suspicions of his attitude to Romanism, caused by the favours shown at
Court to nobles of that faith; by his retention of many of its adherents
in his service, and his reluctance to take action against the Romish
priests, the Jesuits, and the rest of the army of Papal emissaries who
were sowing treason throughout the land. All through his life James was
characterised by a singular unseasonableness in his activity. 'There is
a time,' says the preacher, 'to every purpose under the heaven,' but
with James there was always an incongruity between the time and the
purpose. The year before, he had scandalised the Court by dancing and
giggling at a levee held immediately after his mother's death; and now,
when he should have been arming the country against the Spanish
invasion, he was engaged in writing an academic treatise against the
Pope. Perhaps his conduct was due to a deeper fault in his
character--his ingrained duplicity. As, after his accession to the
English throne, he sought to thwart the anti-Papal policy of his own
Government when Spain was threatening the Protestant power in Germany,
so now he may have been dissembling his real sympathies in writing
against the Papacy. At all events, he never showed by any act of his
reign that he dreaded the Papal power as much as he dreaded that of the
Scottish Presbyterians or the English Puritans.

The Armada brought Melville once more to the front. It was his voice
that roused the nation to a sense of its danger, and his energy that
organised the nation to meet it. He summoned the Assembly, being
Moderator at the time: the Assembly stirred up the nobles and the
burgesses, and the whole nation joined to offer resistance to the
invasion.

From this time the favourable tide for the fortunes of Presbytery which
had set in previous to the Armada flowed with a rush, which within a few
years carried it to undisputed ascendency in the land. The people's
attachment to it was too strong for James, and even within his own
Council it ha