Читать книгу The Scottish Reformation - Alexander F. Mitchell - Страница 5

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With the single exception of the period which covers the introduction and first marvellous triumphs of Christianity, the Reformation of the sixteenth century must be owned as perhaps the greatest and most glorious revolution in the history of the human race. And the years of earnest contendings and heroic sufferings which prepared the way for its triumph in many lands and issued in its cruel suppression in others, and the story of the men who by God's grace were enabled to bear the brunt of the battle and to lead their countrymen on to victory or to martyrdom, will ever have a fascination for all in whose hearts faith in the great truths, then more clearly brought to light, has not yet altogether evaporated. The movement then initiated was no mere effort to get quit of acknowledged scandals, which had long been grieved over but never firmly dealt with; no mere desire to lop off a few later accretions, which had gathered round and obscured the faith once delivered to the saints;[1] no mere "return to the Augustinian, or the Nicene, or the Ante-Nicene age," but a vast progress beyond any previous age since the death of St. John—a Its Animating Principle. deeper plunge into the meaning of revelation than had been made by Augustine, or Anselm, or St. Bernard, or À Kempis, or Wycliffe, or Tauler. Its object was to get back to the divine sources of Christianity—to know, and understand, and appropriate it as it came fresh and pure from the lips of the Son of God and His inspired apostles, not excluding that chosen vessel to whom the grace had been given "to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ." It was, in fact, a return to the old Gospel so attractively set forth by him in his Epistles, and verified to the reformers by their own inmost spiritual experience under deep convictions of sin and shortcoming. The cry of their awakened consciences had been, How shall we sinners have relief from our load and be justified before God? And this, as has been said, was just the old question put to the apostle himself by the jailer at Philippi, What must I do to be saved? And the answer their own experience warranted them with one accord to proclaim was still, Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, believe in the riches of His pardoning mercy, in the merit of His atoning death, in the freeness and power of His efficacious grace. By believing, however, they meant, and were careful to explain that they meant, not a mere intellectual assent to the truth of the facts, but such an assent as drew with it the trust of the heart and the personal surrender of the soul to Christ; or—to use language of somewhat later origin—the individual appropriation of the freely offered Saviour, with all His fulness of blessing, pardon, and righteousness by His one offering once offered, and renewal into His own image by the continuous indwelling of His Holy Spirit.

Such was the animating principle which gave power to the teaching of the reformers in all lands, and which constitutes still the central article of a standing or a falling church to all their true-hearted successors—Christ crucified for our sins, raised again for our justification, and now exalted to the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens as Prince and Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sin and all needed grace to those who thus believe in Him, and are brought into union with Him. And the Reformed Church will never perish or decay while it continues to set forth this Gospel, and is honoured by its divine Head to bring it home to the hearts and consciences of men, with the same power as its first teachers were honoured with in the brave days of old. For it must never be forgotten, I repeat, that the Reformation movement was not only the introduction of a more scriptural and scientific method of exhibiting Christian doctrine, and simple unfolding of its teaching Infusion of a New Life. as to man's fallen state and the remedy their heavenly Father had in His love provided for them; not only the reassertion of the supremacy of the written Word of God over human traditions, as well as of the right of all Christian men and women to have direct access to that blessed Word; not only the translation into the vernacular—German, English, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish—and the circulation throughout Western Europe of that which for ages had been to the Christian laity as a book that is sealed; but it was also, above all this, the infusion of a new and higher life into the churches. We fall short of a full comprehension of the movement if we fail to recognise that the God of all grace and blessing was then pleased to "send a plentiful rain to confirm His inheritance when it was weary," to grant a second Pentecost to the church, to make the people willing in the day of His power, and to pour out His Spirit in rich abundance upon men.

With all the conscious and unconscious preparation which had paved the way for them, the men who were God's chosen instruments at that crisis were made deeply to feel and humbly to own that it was God Himself who had led them on—at times by ways they had not thought of; that it was He who had upheld them in their extremity when all human power seemed to be arrayed against them; that it was He who, when their resources were exhausted, was pleased, in the day when they cried unto Him, to hear their prayer and revive their hopes by the plentiful outpouring of His Spirit. How feelingly this was acknowledged by Luther at various crises in his life is known to all who are in any measure acquainted with his thrilling story. No one could have more constantly in his heart or more frequently on his lips the Hebrew psalmist's song of holy confidence, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. … There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God." There was also that other which, under reverses and discouragements, was the solace of our own reformer, "If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us: then they had swallowed us up quick. … Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth." As they mused the fire burned and found expression in such songs of holy confidence as—

"A sure stronghold our God is He,

A trusty shield and weapon;

Our help He'll be, and set us free

Whatever ill may happen.

… … . …

Through our own force we nothing can,

Straight were we lost for ever,

But for us fights the proper Man,

By God sent to deliver.

Ask ye who this may be?

Christ Jesus named is He,

Of Sabaoth the Lord

Sole God to be adored,

'Tis He must win the battle."[2]

"If God were not upon our side

When foes around us rage,

Were not Himself our help and guide

When bitter war they wage,

Were He not Israel's mighty shield,

To whom their utmost crafts must yield,

We surely must have perished."[3]

Decay of the Medieval Church.

By the time at which reforming influences began manifestly to show themselves in Scotland, that grand medieval organisation, which had supplanted the simpler arrangements of the old Celtic church, had in its turn exhausted its life powers, and shown unmistakable signs of deep-seated corruption and hopeless decay. Whatever good it may have been honoured to do in times past—in keeping alive the knowledge of God and of things divine in the midst of "a darkness which might be felt," in promoting a higher civilisation than the Celtic, in alleviating the evils of the feudalism which Anglo-Norman settlers had brought in, in founding parishes and universities and some other institutions which, with a purified church and revived Christian life, were to be a source of blessing after it was swept away—yet now at last it had grossly failed to keep alive among the common people true devotion, or to give access to the sources at which the flame might have been rekindled; it had failed to provide educated men for its ordinary cures, to raise the masses from the rudeness and ignorance in which they were still involved, and even to maintain that hearty sympathy with them and that kindly interest in their temporal welfare which its best men in its earlier days had shown. It continued to have its services in a language which had for ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely circulated among them.[4] It did not, when the invention of printing put it in its power, make any effort to circulate among them the Holy Book, that they might read therein, in their own tongue, the message of God's love. No doubt it had its pictures and images, its mystery plays and ceremonies, which it deemed fit books for children and the unlearned. But it forgot that these children were growing in capacity, even if allowed to grow up untrained; that "to credulous simplicity was succeeding a spirit of eager curiosity, an impatience of mere authority, and a determination to search into the foundation of things"; and that, if it was to maintain its place, it must not only keep abreast but ahead of advancing intelligence and morality. But the old church began greatly to decline just as the laity began to rise. Bishop Kennedy, I suppose, was almost its last preaching bishop; and the character of the preaching, so far as preaching was still continued by the friars and some of the inferior clergy, was not generally fitted to supply the lack of Bibles and catechisms, and other vernacular books of instruction. It never grappled, as it ought, with the problem of lightening the burdens it had long exacted of the peasantry; but refused almost to the last moment to ease even the most galling of them. It never grappled, as it ought, with the problem of the education of the masses; and what was done for those of the community in more fortunate circumstances was done more by the efforts of a few noble-minded individuals than by any corporate action of Church or State. There is not among all its codes of canons anything approaching to the clear ringing utterances of our First Book of Discipline concerning the necessity and advantages of education.[5]

Lethargy of the Medieval Church.

Not only had the life powers of the medieval church been exhausted and decay set in, but corruption, positive and gross corruption, had reached an alarming height. There were the indolence and neglect of duty which wealth too often brings in its train; the covert secularising of that wealth, just as in the old Celtic church, by various devices, to get it into the hands of unqualified men and minors; luxury, avarice, oppression, simony, shameless pluralities, and crass ignorance; and above all that celibate system, which nothing would persuade them honestly to abandon, though it had proved to be a yoke they could not bear, and was producing only too generally results humiliating and disastrous to themselves and to all who came under their influence. The proof of this does not rest merely or even mainly on the statements of Knox, Alesius, and Spottiswood, nor on the representations of Lindsay and the Wedderburns. The fact, as both the late Dr. David Laing and Dr. Joseph Robertson have shown, and the late Bishop Forbes has sorrowfully acknowledged, is confessed and deplored in the canons of their councils, in the Acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in the writings of their own best men.[6] The harsh measures to which men themselves so vulnerable had recourse to maintain their position, the relentless cruelties they perpetrated on men of unblemished character, amiable disposition, deep-seated conviction and thorough Christian earnestness, could not fail in the end to turn the tide against them, and arouse feelings of indignation which on any favourable opportunity would induce the nation to sweep them away.

Corruption of the Medieval Church.

The corruptions in the doctrine of the church were hardly less notable than those in the lives of its clergy. The sufficiency and supremacy of the written Word of God were denied, and co-ordinate authority was claimed for tradition. The Virgin Mary and the saints departed were asserted to share the office which Scripture reserves for the one Mediator between God and man. Penances and other external acts of work-righteousness were alleged to co-operate in the pardon of sin with the "one obedience" by which "many are made righteous." The sacraments were asserted to produce their effect ex opere operato—not by the working of the Spirit in them that by faith receive them. Belief in the literal transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper was rigidly enforced and substituted for that spiritual presence and spiritual manducation which the earlier church had maintained. The doctrine of a purgatory after this life was invented, and the virtue of masses for the dead therein detained was persistently taught and required to be believed. The Roman church was affirmed to be the mother and mistress of the churches, and its head to be the successor of St. Peter and the Vicar of Christ.

The Reforming Priests.

Yet it must never be forgotten that, even in these degenerate days, there were those among the ministers of the church who wept in secret over the abominations that were done, who longed for the dawn of a better day, and, in their parishes or cloisters or colleges, sought to prepare the way for it, and who succeeded in doing so with many of their younger comrades, and only made up their minds in the end to abandon the old church when all their efforts for its revival proved vain. Nay, the men who initiated and carried to a successful issue the struggle for a more thorough reformation than the others desired, the martyrs, confessors, and exiles, were almost all from the ranks of the priesthood of the old church—from the regular as well as from the secular priesthood; from the Dominican and Franciscan monasteries as well as from the Augustinian abbeys; and from none more largely than the Augustinian Priory of St. Andrews, and the College of St. Leonard founded in connection with it, notwithstanding that its prior for the time being was so far from what he ought to have been. At least twenty priests joined the reformed congregation of St. Andrews in 1559–60, and among them more than one who had sat in judgment on the martyrs and assisted in their condemnation.[7] A much larger number were ultimately admitted as readers in the Reformed Church.

Precursors of the Reformation.

How was the great revolution which was to bring the church back from these corruptions of life and doctrine prepared for? Ebrard supposes that witnesses for holy living and simple faith, but partially connected with the dominant church, were never from Celtic times entirely wanting in Britain; and it may have been that, through Richard Rolle and a few other hermits, the feeble spark in the smoking wick continued to smoulder on till it was blown into a flame by Wycliffe. At any rate it was blown into a flame by him and his poor priests; and from their time witness after witness arose to contend for the right of the laity to read the Word of God, and to maintain that men were saved by the merits of Christ and should pray to Him alone, that there was no purgatory in the popish sense, and that the pope was not the Vicar of Christ. Wycliffe's poor priests, when persecuted in the south, naturally sought shelter among the moors and mosses of the north. The district of Kyle and Cunningham was "a receptakle of Goddis servandis of old," where their doctrines were cherished till the dawn of the Reformation. In 1406 or 1407 James Resby, one of these priests, is found teaching as far north as Perth, and for his teaching he was accused and condemned to a martyr's death. A similar fate is said to have befallen another in Glasgow about 1422, in all probability the Scottish Wycliffite whose letter to his bishop has recently been unearthed in a Hussite MS. at Vienna; and in 1433 Paul Craw or Crawar, a Bohemian, for disseminating similar opinions, was burned at the market cross in St. Andrews. These were not in all probability the only grim triumphs of Laurence, Abbot of Lindores, one of the first rectors in the University of St. Andrews, who during so many years "gave no rest to heretics," but they are all of whom records have been preserved to our time. The fact that every Master of Arts in the University of St. Andrews had to take an oath to defend the church against the Lollards,[8] and the other fact that the Scottish Parliament in 1425 enjoined that every bishop should make inquiry anent heretics and Lollards, and that where any such were found, they should be punished as the law of holy church requires,[9] speak more significantly of the alarm they had occasioned than these sporadic martyrdoms. Still more, perhaps, does the abuse Fordun, or rather his continuator, heaps on them, bear witness to the alarm they had caused. Yet at the very close of the century, and in the old haunt, we find no fewer than thirty processed, and through the kindness of the king more gently dealt with than the ecclesiastical authorities wished; three of the most resolute—namely, Campbell of Cessnock, his noble wife, and a priest who officiated as their chaplain and read the New Testament to them—being released when at the stake.

Reforming tendencies in the sixteenth century, it has been said, first showed themselves in Scotland in the reassertion of "those principles, catholic but anti-papal," which had been maintained in the preceding century in the Councils of Constance and Basle. The decisions of the former were received in Scotland in 1418, and allegiance to Benedict XIII. was finally renounced.[10] A Scottish doctor[11] had taken a rather prominent part in the proceedings of the latter, though the Scottish Church, like the others, ultimately fell away from that council and the pope elected by it, and under Bishop Kennedy was reconciled to the Roman See and to Pope Eugenius.[12] Scotland had had no Grosteste, no Anselm or Bradwardine among its prelates in the middle ages, no Wycliffe among its priests. Duns Scotus, the one theologian before the sixteenth century who claimed Scottish birth and European fame, never seems to have taught in his native land. John Major.Chief among its doctors in the beginning of the sixteenth century stood John Major, a native of East Lothian, who taught with distinguished success, first in Paris, then in Glasgow, after that in St. Andrews, then once more in Paris, and finally in St. Andrews again. Melanchthon, while ridiculing his scholastic ways, places him at the head of the doctors of the Sorbonne. The remembrance of his early labours in Montaigu College had not died out when Calvin entered it, and probably he had returned to it before Calvin left. Patrick Hamilton and Buchanan may possibly have been brought into contact with him while there, as they, Alesius, and John Wedderburn afterwards were in St. Andrews, and John Hamilton and Knox in Glasgow. He was a true disciple of D'Ailly and Gerson, but like them was warmly attached to the dominant church and opposed to the heretics of his time. He taught, as they had done, that the church, assembled in general council, may judge and even depose a pope and reform abuses in the church; that papal excommunications have no force unless conformed to justice, and do not necessarily prevent a man who dies under them from going to heaven. He sharply censured the vices of the Roman court, and of the bishops and clergy of his time, particularly those of his native land. He is especially severe in censuring their immorality and ignorance; and, like Wycliffe, condemns the monks and friars for inveigling into their order young novices who had no vocation for a celibate life, and ought rather to have been encouraged to enter into honest wedlock. But he was a stern opponent of heresy—Lutheran as well as Wycliffite—a subtle defender of Roman doctrine; and in dedicating to Archbishop Betoun his Commentary on St. Matthew's Gospel, he congratulated him on the success of his cruel measures against Hamilton and the heretics.[13]