The ministers are to have their manses, and glebes of six acres; to this many of the Lords assented, except, oddly enough, those redoubtable leaders of the Congregation, Glencairn and Morton, with Marischal.  All the part of the book which most commands our sympathy, the most Christian part of the book, regulating the disposition of the revenues of the fallen Church for the good of the poor, of education, and of the Kirk, remained a dead letter.  The Duke, Arran, Lord James, and a few barons, including the ruffian Andrew Ker of Faldonside, with Glencairn and Ochiltree, signed it, in token of approval, but little came of it all.  Lethington, probably, was the scoffer who styled these provisions “devout imaginations.”  The nobles and lairds, many of them, were converted, in matter of doctrine; in conduct they were the most avaricious, bloody, and treacherous of all the generations which had banded, revelled, robbed, and betrayed in Scotland.

There is a point in this matter of the Kirk’s claim to the patrimony of the old Church which perhaps is generally misunderstood.  That point is luminous as regards the absolute disinterestedness of Knox and his companions, both in respect to themselves and their fellow-preachers.  The Book of Discipline contains a sentence already quoted, conceived in what we may justly style a chivalrous contempt of wealth.  “Your Honours may easily understand that we speak not now for ourselves, but in favour of the Poor, and the labourers defrauded . . . " Not having observed a point which “their Honours” were not the men to “understand easily,” Father Pollen writes, “the new preachers were loudly claiming for themselves the property of the rivals whom they had displaced.” {186} For themselves they were claiming a few merks, and a few bolls of meal, a decent subsistence.  Mr. Taylor Innes points out that when, just before Darnley’s murder, Mary offered “a considerable sum for the maintenance of the ministers,” Knox and others said that, for their sustentation, they “craved of the auditors the things that were necessary, as of duty the pastors might justly crave of their flock.  The General Assembly accepted the Queen’s gift, but only of necessity; it was by their flock that they ought to be sustained.  To take from others contrary to their will, whom they serve not, they judge it not their duty, nor yet reasonable.”

Among other things the preachers, who were left with a hard struggle for bare existence, introduced a rule of honour scarcely known to the barons and nobles, except to the bold Buccleuch who rejected an English pension from Henry VIII., with a sympathetic explosion of strong language.  The preachers would not take gifts from England, even when offered by the supporters of their own line of policy.