The preachers were to be chosen by popular election, after examination in knowledge and as to morals.  There was to be no ordination “by laying on of hands.”  “Seeing the miracle is ceased, the using of the ceremony we deem not necessary”; but, if the preachers were inspired, the miracle had not ceased, and the ceremony was soon reinstated.  Contrary to Genevan practice, such festivals as Christmas and Easter were abolished.  The Scottish Sabbath was established in great majesty.  One “rag of Rome” was retained, clerical excommunication—­the Sword of Church Discipline.  It was the cutting off from Christ of the excommunicated, who were handed over to the devil, and it was attended by civil penalties equivalent to universal boycotting, practical outlawry, and followed by hell fire:  “which sentence, lawfully pronounced on earth, is ratified in heaven.”  The strength of the preachers lay in this terrible weapon, borrowed from the armoury of Rome.

Private morals were watched by the elders, and offenders were judged in kirk-sessions.  Witchcraft, Sabbath desecration, and sexual laxities were the most prominent and popular sins.  The mainstay of the system is the idea that the Bible is literally inspired; that the preachers are the perhaps inspired interpreters of the Bible, and that the country must imitate the old Hebrew persecution of “idolaters,” that is, mainly Catholics.  All this meant a theocracy of preachers elected by the populace, and governing the nation by their General Assembly in which nobles and other laymen sat as elders.  These peculiar institutions came hot from Geneva, and the country could never have been blessed with them, as we have observed, but for that instrument of Providence, Cardinal Beaton.  Had he disposed of himself and Scotland to Henry VIII. (who would not have tolerated Presbyterian claims for an hour), Scotland would not have received the Genevan discipline, and the Kirk would have groaned under bishops.

The Reformation supplied Scotland with a class of preachers who were pure in their lives, who were not accessible to bribes (a virtue in which they stood almost alone), who were firm in their faith, and soon had learning enough to defend it; who were constant in their parish work, and of whom many were credited with prophetic and healing powers.  They could exorcise ghosts from houses, devils from men possessed.

The baldness of the services, the stern nature of the creed, were congenial to the people.  The drawbacks were the intolerance, the spiritual pretensions of the preachers to interference in secular affairs, and the superstition which credited men like Knox, and later, Bruce, with the gifts of prophecy and other miraculous workings, and insisted on the burning of witches and warlocks, whereof the writer knows scarcely an instance in Scotland before the Reformation.