The gentle Congregation saith that, if the clergy “proceed in their cruelty,” they shall be “apprehended as murderers.”  “We shall begin that same war which God commanded Israel to execute against the Canaanites . . . " This they promise in the names of God, Christ, and the Gospel.  Any one can recognise the style of Knox in this composition.  David Hume remarks:  “With these outrageous symptoms commenced in Scotland that hypocrisy and fanaticism which long infested that kingdom, and which, though now mollified by the lenity of the civil power, is still ready to break out on all occasions.”  Hume was wrong, there was no touch of hypocrisy in Knox; he believed as firmly in the “message” which he delivered as in the reality of the sensible universe.

A passage in the message to the nobility displays the intense ardour of the convictions that were to be potent in the later history of the Kirk.  That priests, by the prescription of fifteen centuries, should have persuaded themselves of their own power to damn men’s souls to hell, cut them off from the Christian community, and hand them over to the devil, is a painful circumstance.  But Knox, from Perth, asserts that the same awful privilege is vested in the six or seven preachers of the nascent Kirk with the fire-new doctrine!  Addressing the signers of the godly Band and other sympathisers who have not yet come in, he (if he wrote these fiery appeals) observes, that if they do not come in, “ye shall be excommunicated from our Society, and from all participation with us in the administration of the Sacraments . . .  Doubt we nothing but that our church, and the true ministers of the same, have the power which our Master, Jesus Christ, granted to His apostles in these words, ’Whose sins ye shall forgive, shall be forgiven, and whose sins ye shall retain, shall be retained’ . . . " Men were to be finally judged by Omnipotence on the faith of what Willock, Knox, Harlaw, poor Paul Methuen, and the apostate Friar Christison, “trew ministeris,” thought good to decide!  With such bugbears did Guthrie and his companions think, a century later, to daunt “the clear spirit of Montrose.”

While reading the passages just cited, we are enabled to understand the true cause of the sorrows of Scotland for a hundred and thirty years.  The situation is that analysed by Thomas Luber, a Professor of Medicine at Heidelberg, well or ill known in Scottish ecclesiastical disputes by his Graecised name, Erastus.  He argued, about 1568, that excommunication has no certain warrant in Holy Writ, under a Christian prince.  Erastus writes:—­

“Some men were seized on by a certain excommunicatory fever, which they did adorn with the name of ‘ecclesiastical discipline.’ . . .  They affirmed the manner of it to be this:  that certain presbyters should sit in the name of the whole Church, and should judge who were worthy or unworthy to come to the Lord’s Supper.  I wonder that then they consulted about these matters, when we neither had men to be excommunicated, nor fit excommunicators; for scarcely a thirtieth part of the people did understand or approve of the reformed religion.” {117}