To the carnal mind these rules appear to savour of harshness.  The carnal mind would not gather exactly what the new penal laws were, if it confined its study to the learned Dr. M’Crie’s Life of Knox.  This erudite man, a pillar of the early Free Kirk, mildly remarks, “The Parliament . . . prohibited, under certain penalties, the celebration of the Mass.”  He leaves his readers to discover, in the Acts of Parliament and in Knox, what the “certain penalties” were. {175} The Act seems, as Knox says about the decrees of massacre in Deuteronomy, “rather to be written in a rage” than in a spirit of wisdom.  The majority of the human beings then in Scotland probably never had the dispute between the old and new faiths placed before them lucidly and impartially.  Very many of them had never heard the ideas of Geneva stated at all.  “So late as 1596,” writes Dr. Hay Fleming, “there were above four hundred parishes, not reckoning Argyll and the Isles, which still lacked ministers.”  “The rarity of learned and godly men” of his own persuasion, is regretted by Knox in the Book of Discipline.  Yet Catholics 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.