of the first phase of the Reformation. Women rediscovered the Word of God, the truth. They came to know it and apply it, and they learned then how to apply it in their daily lives. And we re talking about the days of Hus and of Wycliffe and of all those others who devoted themselves to making sure that the people had the Word of God and that they were able to read it themselves and then respond to it themselves. And the appetite that God gives to people, I was just struck with this and thinking about this the other evening as John Purvis here last evening was telling us about that last trip into Siberia when he'd just come back and this lady, and he had a picture of her there and she was holding up a little card And she had said to John, 55. I said, what's she meaning? He got underneath the surface and said, I'm 55 years old. Well, John says, so what? I'm 54. I mean, he didn't say that to her, but he was thinking about this. I'm 54. She had come out of mainland China into Russia for, they can come over for 30 days without having to get a visa. And so she'd come over there and he had them for one week. And he was teaching them to study the word, and apply the word, and live the word. And she held this little card up, 55. Well, what do you mean? Well, I'm 55 years old. Well, I'm 54. Yes. But then he found out what she was meaning, that just a year or so ago, she had become a Christian in mainland China. And she didn't know anything about how to read. But the appetite and the desire to read the Word of God was so great that she taught herself to read by just reading the Bible. She taught herself to read. She said, we call it a miracle. I said, there are many miracles like that going on over there. 35,000 people a day coming to trust in Christ in mainland China. and the pressure of wanting to know so much. This new Lord, the Lord, God, and He's written a book. And so she taught herself to read. Then she got to this conference and discovered that John was asking them to write these memory verses, a little verse card about that big, to memorize. And she couldn't write. But she had taught herself to write. As she watched others and learned, she taught herself to write. And so she was writing out her memory verse, 55. Well, that's a little bit the appetite that God has given to people. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. And the people of Scotland were discovering, people of these other countries the same way. Did you ever wonder why there were so many people who were so excited about the translation of the book and the book coming to people and being written in their own language so that each one could understand it and then respond to it? This is a good description of the early part of the Reformation, the first Reformation years all over Europe. that men would read the Word, they would know the Word, and they would make a personal response to the Word, the same kind of response to the Word that God had made to them. They learned to know the truth. And then the second phase of the Reformation is a phrase, is a good description of that You should know the truth, the truth shall make you free. That second phrase is a good description of the second part of the Reformation. We'll see it in detail more in Scotland than any place else. But this is true, what we're going to be talking about this evening was also true of the other countries involved in the Reformation. Wherever there was or is a rediscovery of God's truth with that first phase of Reformation making good headway, then there will be a later wave of social and political activity. The truth shall make you free. People who have learned about the priesthood of all believers and what it means to be instant to have instant personal access to God, and the dignity and the respectability and the preciousness of every soul in God's eyes, will always find it necessary to resist the encroachments of the church that may be there, and of the state, and of the schools, and of the business, or anything else that will seek to come between them and that first-person singular relationship that they now have with God. Sometimes they may even find it necessary to throw out these other influences that would try to come between them and God. And if that happens to be civil government, then they will overthrow that civil government. Not because they are interested in freedom. That's the thing that is misunderstood by almost all historians. These men were not primarily interested in being free. They were just interested in being close to God. One of the contemporary political philosophers has understood this. He s looking on at it and I don t think it s true in his own life and so he s gone as far as he can, a man by the name of J.N. Figgis in a book called Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century. He s looking on at this and he said it this way, religious liberty arose not because the sects believed in it, but out of their persistent determination not to be extinguished, either by political or religious persecution. Religious liberty is rightly described as the parent of political liberty. These people weren't interested in being politically free. And you'll find a lot of historians, even church historians, who said, well, they just wanted to be politically free. So therefore, they threw off the government. No, no, no, no. All they wanted to do was to continue worshiping God and to be whatever God wanted them to be. And when the state was a threat to that, then eventually they said, hey, get out of here. If you're going to be a soul killer, and that's what some of them in Scotland called it, King, if you're going to be a soul killer. I was just looking at several histories of Richard Cameron today. And most of the modern histories and biographers who are trying to describe him say, well, a dumb thing he did the day he rode into Sancre and nailed up that Sancre Declaration. And so they nailed him for it. Very shortly after that, out there at Erzmos, they killed him. No, no, no, no. That wasn't a dumb thing to do. He was simply saying to the king and to the nation, you're coming between us and God and nothing may come between us and God. He should know the truth. The truth shall make you free. Um, it's a serious mistake and a historical and theological blunder to suppose that the reformation is primarily a protest. a Protestant movement against either the Roman Catholic Church, a protest against that Church, or against the kings, kings who claimed to rule by divine right or any other right. People of the Reformation were not primarily against any church or king. They were simply responding to the scriptures and to the teachings and influences and claims of the living Christ, whom they had come to know and love. through their study of the scriptures. They could and they did resist any and every influence from the Church or the state or the family or any other influence that threatened to come between themselves and their Lord and their worship of Him. But their resistance to any of these other things was the secondary thing. It was not their primary purpose and goal. And this continues to be true all through the Reformation and in the truly reformed churches today. That's why I become apprehensive when we begin reacting to any of the great sins of today. We react to the abuses of worship in worship. I think a lot of the music in worship today is not good, it's wrong. But if we ever come to the place of reacting to that instead of responding to Christ, then we're going to be faked out of position and going to lose the testimony that God intends us to have. This continues to be true. through the Reformation and in truly Reformation churches today. Christ did not bring his church into existence to react or to resist or to protest against certain wrongs in other churches or in the state or society or business. Christ brought his church into existence in order to respond to himself and to his truth and to his lordship and to do it in such a way There will be a praise of His name, and others will be resisted as a result of that. But whenever we begin focusing on resisting or objecting or protesting against, then we lose it. It is through the continuing rediscovery of the scriptures, as each new generation learns to read and apply the scriptures in making daily decisions of life, that the Reformation Church will keep on growing today. The principles or the policies laid down, and incidentally, Tom, that's one of the things we have to look for at noon Monday, in terms of ACE, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Are they reacting to other evangelical groups around them? Is that what they're wanting of us? Or are they responding to the claims of Christ, the teachings of His word? And if we ever get faked out into a position of reacting, then we're losing the real power that Christ wants us to have. The principles or policies that are laid down in the scriptures are particularly clear as they are seen in the history of the Reformation Church in Scotland. We think of Scotland as being the land of beautiful Tartans, and they are beautiful, and I've already said some of these things because Tom, you pulled it out of me before we got here. The clans were fighting and feuding, and there was no country that had more vicious hatreds and battles, family feuds, and political disunity. Nothing but the power of the gospel and the genius of the covenants, as people found those in Scripture, could have brought them to work and love and live and die together. We've already reviewed the early evangelization of Scotland in the medieval times, and for many years there was a strong influence from Rome there. We're liable to think that the Reformation began with Martin Luther and his 95 thesis in 1517 in Germany, but we've seen how Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland and others elsewhere had preceded Luther. So we find it in Scotland in 1406, 110 years before Martin Luther ever wrote his thesis, there was a man by the name of John Resby, an English priest, who was burned at the stake in Perth for denying that an unholy Pope could be the vicar of Christ. In 1433, a physician, and I'm hoping you're tying this together with other history we've already covered, a doctor named Paul Crawl was burned to death at St. Andrews University, 1433. And another heretic, and incidentally Paul Crawl, came from Bohemia. He was a Hussite, and he'd been sent to Scotland for the purpose of evangelizing the nation. And then in 1494, 30 people in Kyle, that's a geographical district in Scotland, were condemned as heretics. They were followers of Huss and of Wycliffe, and in July 1525, the Parliament passed a special act forbidding the importing of any of Luther's books. So a long time before Luther, there were people dying in Scotland for the true faith. The causes of the Reformation in Scotland are similar to those in other countries. And I want to get a little bit closer to them as we come into Scotland now than we've been able to get to them in other countries, perhaps more easily seen. I'm talking now about Hay-Fleming's book on the Reformation in Scotland, its causes and its consequences. And you have the summary of that in what I've given to you there. But these were the spots and blemishes that I want to go into with you for a little bit now, the spots and blemishes that Christ was in the act of cleaning out. Clerical depravity was one of these, clerical depravity. It had just been a case of multiple popes The one in Avignon and the one who continued on in Rome, and then a third one for a time there, if it had just been a case of multiple popes who were damning each other over on the continent, that would have been too far away to have involved the people in Scotland. If it had just been a case of bad doctrine, or wrong worship, then the people of Scotland might not have been aroused to do something about it. But immorality was something that every man and every woman could understand. And it was rampant, and it was admitted, and it was ugly, and it was hated by all. When David Beaton was appointed cardinal, archbishop of St. Andrews, and primate of all Scotland, his cousin was a priest named Archibald Hay. And he wrote to his cousin, who is now the cardinal, congratulating him and at the same time recommending measures that were necessary for the reform of the church in Scotland. It's a book that was published in Paris in 1540. It was a letter, but it was far more than a letter, because it was a little treatise. The Panegyricus, P-A-N-E-G-Y-R-I-C-U-S, that was the name of it, is published in Paris in 1540, in which he describes in ugly detail how the priests were coming to the Lord's table, priests who have not yet slept off last night's debauch. But Cardinal Beaton never acted. And when we look into the registry of births, we begin to know why he himself didn't act to try to stop the immorality of the others. On March 5, 1330, Cardinal Beaton's son, George, and two daughters who were legitimated, and these are in the official civil records as we find them in Scotland yet today. Later, three other sons, described as bastard sons of David Beaton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, are registered. These are not news reports. These are official records that there was no way of expunging from the civil records of the nation of Scotland, and at least fifteen other sons and daughters by various concubines are registered to the cardinal, the primate, the highest Church authority in Scotland. And Beaton was not alone. Of the seven principal bishops on his council—this was the national council in Scotland—five had the same kind of a track record. In 1558, the council acted to forbid, quote, any of the prelates or lower clergy to bring up or keep in their house or society their offspring born of concubines so that they should stay in their household for more than three days in every three months. And even then, they must not do so openly. these men who were fathers. Now the church, of course, appointed them to be ecclesiastical fathers, but now they're physical fathers. And so they were wanting their children to be with them. And the council said, you can't have these children with you in your own quarters more than so much per month. Nor were the nuns immaculate. in a letter addressed to Pope Paul IV in 1556, Cardinal Sermonata complains, now here's one of the cardinals in Scotland complaining to the Pope in Rome, how all nunneries of every kind of religious women, that he was talking about throughout Scotland, have come to such a pass of boldness, they wander outside the monastic enclosures in shameless fashion, admit all sorts of wicked men within their convents, and hold with them unchaste intercourse, defile the sacred precincts with their progeny. One Franciscan friar tells about how, quote, I have found some priests lending out their money to usury and enriching themselves merely for the sake of their bastards. They had to provide for these children they brought into the world. their whole house full of bastard children, and spending their nights in sin and the celebration of the Mass the next day. One day, when a Franciscan friar had to celebrate Mass in a certain priest's church on a priest's day, he had no stole but the girdle of the priest's concubine. with a bunch of keys attached. And when the friar, whom I knew well, turned round to say, Dominus vobiscum, this is a blessing on the people, the people hear the jangling of the keys." These are the very opposite of the scenes that Bobby Burns described in his poem on the Great Hall Bible, scenes from which old Scotia's grandeur springs. in which generations later, Bobby Burns is describing what the basic strength of Scotland is. And he's saying that the real strength of the nation lies at that point where a father gathers his family together around the word of God and they apply the word of God together. And the rampant immorality of the clergy of all ranks angered the citizens of Scotland. and caused them to want a Reformation. We're talking about causes of the Reformation. They feared for their families. Mothers warned their daughters to run for their lives whenever they left the confessional booth. And fathers warned their sons to beware of those priests and of the profession of the priesthood. Those who thought a little bit farther into the problem knew that where celibacy would build a loyalty to Rome, if these priests didn't have any loyalty to any other wife or to children or anyone else, then they could be primarily loyal to the Pope in Rome. And when you look back, and we did a little bit of this in the medieval history course, when we look back to the reason for celibacy, we found that at least two of the popes had discovered that, that if these men didn't have other loyalties that were greater than their loyalty to him, then their loyalty to him would be greatest of all. So that's why he demanded celibacy at a terrible price at one point. Up to that point, many of the priests were married. But that is a primary reason for the whole doctrine and practice of celibacy, not only then, but yet today. And whenever you ecclesiastically identify and appoint a man to be a father, and he's not a father politically, then you lay the very foundation for the kind of child molestation that you do see going on today. and that the Catholic Church, especially down there in the Dallas area right now, is having to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to answer for. And whether the immorality of the local level was influencing the Pope and the Vatican, or whether it was the immorality of the Pope and his Vatican that was now trickling down to the local level, the fact was that the whole system was immoral. It was evil. It was wicked. And you find over and over again where the popes in Italy were legitimating their own bastard children and the others in the other convents throughout Europe. You could not make a man into a father by conferring on him that ecclesiastical title. And when priests and bishops and cardinals and popes insisting on using immoral means to become a father, and then designated the children that were thus being born as being children of God. And that's what was happening. It caused people to want a reformation. And yet those were the very men who were condemning, burning, beheading, and hanging the men and women of the very highest and best character. As you described so well, Christina, last Friday, the burning of that honorable man, I couldn't help thinking of the personal record and of the bastard children who had been legitimated by him. And here's the man he's burning, and there's the life that he was living. There undoubtedly were some priests and some popes who lived pure lives, at least until the loss of life and the overwhelming majority of immorality around them caused them to give it up. The council lamented the corruption of morals and the profane lewdness of life in the churchmen. But the sin had so saturated the entire system that no one was able to do anything about And it continues to cast a cloud of suspicion on all celibate clergy in the Roman Catholic Church down to today. I want to commend to you again the big book of which this little book that I've given you a copy this evening is, this little book is just an abridgment. I want to commend that large book. because the great bulk of all Hay-Fleming's evidences in there, the great bulk of that is quotations from the Roman Catholic Church records and from the civil records, which didn't have anything to do with Protestant versus Catholic. This is what the Catholic Church is saying about itself, and this is what the civil record tells about it. He lists four secondary causes of the Reformation in Scotland clerical depravity, and I've already been talking a little bit about that. Second, clerical ignorance and irreverence. Third, the conferring of benefices. And fourth, clerical credulity, imposture, and rapacity. And then he lists two primary causes. Those are secondary causes. The two primary causes that he lists are books, ballads, plays, preaching, and persecution. And then the second and most important of all, as Hay Fleming points out, is the word of God. One of the things that makes his book so valuable is the fact that his quotations, as I've said there just a moment ago, come from the sources in the church itself. I want to quote to you some more of these concerning clerical depravity. After Cardinal Beaton, Archbishop Hamilton took Beaton's place, and he presided over the Provincial Council in 1549, and the records show, the records of legitimation that he had a number of bastard children by Grizzle Semple, the wife of one of his kinsmen. James Hamilton of Stain House was his own kinsman, and he took that man's wife and had a number of children by her. He had at least 10 sons and daughters from several women, Bishop Gordon had three sons and three daughters legitimated. Another bishop in that ruling council had twelve children by various women legitimated. Everyone called the women who were involved concubines because, you see, the Church law laid down by Rome refused to allow any priest to marry. One statute of the council in 1558, 1559 forbade, quote, any of the prelates or lower clergy to bring up or keep in their household or society their offspring born of concubines. They were trying to keep these children out of sight. And the whole problem was so terrible because the marriage was forbidden. In 1534, Norman Gurley, a priest, was found to have married a wife in Edinburgh, and he was burned to death by the Church. Thomas Cocklaw of Tillybody was found to have married secretly a widow woman. They were living separately and wanting to keep the marriage secret. The Bishop of Dunblane accused and then prosecuted and sentenced him to be perpetually imprisoned. So he was mewed up between two walls. But according to the record, his brother and his brother's son, his nephew, broke down the two walls in order to allow him to escape, and he escaped to England where he became a minister. That bishop was one who later legitimated, I think it was, six sons and daughters. John Dome, according to Church records, was a priest convicted of marrying a woman, and he was condemned to be shut up between two walls till he died. I'm quoting there. But the Regeneron rescued him. About 180 years ago, A human skeleton was found standing upright in the ruins of the ancient church in Inchcombe. I don't know whether we'll see Inchcombe or not, but they were doing some repair work from parts of the church that had fallen down, and they discovered one of these skeletons that had been sentenced for being married and standing upright. The message from the church is very clear. Concubinage was safer than marriage, and the people of Scotland both feared and hated this thought, this threat to their family life. It was one good cause for welcoming a Reformation. The second cause was clerical ignorance and irreverence. Archbishop Hamilton I've just told you about him. He was the man who took Beaton's place after Beaton was done away with. Archbishop Hamilton wrote a catechism in which he was trying to bring a little bit of cleanness into the church. He said this, the rectors, victors, or curates must not go up into the pulpit without due preparation. but they must prepare themselves with all zeal and assiduity for the task of reading in public by constant, frequent, and daily rehearsal of the lesson to be read, lest they expose themselves to ridicule their hearers. When through want of preparation they stammer and stumble in midcourse of reading." In other words, these men couldn't read. And so he had given them the message to be read on any given day, the message for every day that they were in the pulpit. And then he had to give them these instructions. In one of the articles, it is requested that in future no one should be made a curate or a vicar of a parish church unless he was sufficiently qualified to minister the sacraments of the Holy Kirk and could, quote, distinctly and plainly read the catechism and other directions of the ordinaries to the people. And so, more than a century after the invention of printing, there were still among the clergy of Scotland men who could not read their own language, and they were the men who had been appointed to be pastors. The preaching in the pre-Reformation Church was not fitted to counteract the demoralizing effect of the scandalous lives of the clergy. Even the prelates had such an insufficient knowledge of the scriptures that they were unable rightly to instruct the people in the Catholic faith and other things necessary to salvation. I am reading you now from what the cardinal wrote of his own people and of the need. This was one of the ribaldities that was going around. the curate his creed he could not read." That was what the people were saying, and they were mocking the church when they did that. The Bishop of Dunkeld, and this is a very interesting little story that you'll hear bits and pieces of, but this is the original of it. The Bishop of Dunkeld, in chiding Thomas for Ray, who was a vicar of Dalar, for preaching every Sabbath, the Bishop is coming down on this local vicar because he was preaching every Sabbath. He told him that it was enough when he found any good epistle or any good gospel which set forth the liberty of the Holy Church to preach it and let all the rest alone. To which the good vicar replied, I have read the New Testament and the Old and all the epistles and the gospels, and among them all I could never find an evil epistle or an evil gospel. But if your lordship will show me the good epistle and the good gospel and the evil epistle and the evil gospel, then I shall preach the good and omit the evil." The bishop was offended and he answered, I thank God that I never knew what the Old and New Testament was. Therefore, Dean Thomas, I will know nothing but my portuise and my pontifical." That was not only the order of service, but the message that was involved in the order of service that had been sent out from Rome itself. He says, I will know nothing but my portuise and my pontifical. And so the common phrase grew throughout the common people of Scotland, you're like the Bishop of Dunkeld that knew neither the new law nor the old law. Many of the priests offended at the term new, contended that it was a book lately written by Martin Luther, and demanded the Old Testament. He who boasts that he has never come in contact with the New Testament, who plainly teaches by his own example that men should keep away from the Holy Scriptures, who passes his life in the foulest darkness of ignorance, who never even in his dreams thinks of the duty of a good pastor, is considered highly deserving of the biggest income and the sacred title of a churchman. Now that's Archibald Hay, who is writing to his cousin, who had just recently been appointed cardinal, and he's saying this is one of the things that you're going to have to clean up now that you're the highest Church authority in all of Scotland. These men who can hardly read and who've never read the scriptures before are considered to be the highest officials in the Church. There was clerical illiteracy over and over again in the official writings where titles and deeds had to be signed for. It was necessary to sign the charter. But in one of the convents of the whole eighteen from the prioress downwards, not one of them could write her own name. And so after each name, the suggestive words were added with our hand at the pens. 22 nuns, not one could sign her name. And the same thing was true in many of the monasteries. The men who had the highest position, most responsible position, couldn't even sign their own names. Then we come to the subject of the irreverences, the irreverences. We talk about Godspeel, Godspell, whatever you want to call it, and such things as that today. They had a practice of electing the Scottish abbot of unreason, the abbot of unreason, having created a bishop an archbishop or a pope of fools. who went about masked with monstrous aspects or disguised in the appearance of women, of lions, of players. They danced, and in their dancing sang indecent songs. They ate fat viands near the altar, hard by the priest who was at that instant celebrating the Mass. They played at dice in the same place, and as incense they burned leather of old shoes. That would be a little bit disrupting as far as the church service was concerned. I'm talking about what was going on in the churches during the Mass. And this shows you something of the way the people were mocking the church, and they depicted They acted out a rude representation of the Last Supper. Isn't there some film going around that I see advertised every once in a while of the, there's a priest who is, and the Roman Catholic Church has reacted to it, and I thought that Disney or somebody had, had come up with a new film that was a ribald ridicule of the Roman Catholic Church, and not only the Roman Catholic Church, but of others. In these revels, there was a prior of Bon Accord, as well as an abbot, and in 1508, their titles were changed to Robin Hood and Little John, I want you to think back to what you remember about Robin Hood and Little John. And you'll find that there's a mockery that's going on there. And the very kinds of people being represented. And there was a purpose there. He's stealing from the wealthy and giving to the poor. But you look at who it is that's doing it. And you'll find that there's a mockery going on in that whole story. And that's not the ribald mockery that A. Fleming is telling us about here, but that is just a little bit of an indication of the attitude of the people towards the church. And it is a cause of the Reformation. So obnoxious did these revels become that in 1555, a year after Mary of Guise became the Regent of Scotland, Parliament sternly prohibited in all times coming the choosing of any person to be Robin Hood, Little John, Abbot of Unreason, or Queen of May, either in Bourg or in Landward. Sir Walter Scott described the doings of an Abbot of Unreason, and he deemed it strange that a church which studied how to render its rights so imposing and magnificent by poem, by music, by architecture, by external display, should have connived at such frolics. And the church very often, instead of coming down hard on these things and stopping them when they began, the church would sort of wink at these and think it was smart and not exactly approve of them, but let them go." Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish writer, is complaining about that. Irreverence easily developed into profanity, and grievous and abominable oaths, curses, and blasphemies became so common among all classes of the community that Parliament, in February 1551-52, endeavored to suppress the evil. by imposing a graduated scale of penalties. The highest class of offenders is headed by a prelate of Kirk. The second class includes a beneficent man, constituted in dignity ecclesiastic, and the third class with landed men and burgesses. These were the small benefits. In other words, the parliament is serving notice on the clergy who are involved in these kinds of irreverences that they're going to have to stop it. They'll be arrested and penalized if they don't. When the time of final conflict arrived, the Reformation, it was found that there was little vital energy in the priests ignorant, irreverent, and profane. See, the church should have been able to have mounted a lot more strength in the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church, than she did. She was almost a pushover, and this is the reason for it. The priests were mocking their own religion. And you watch out for that happening in terms of the kinds of worship that are developing in the United States today. The conferring of benefices, this was another cause. The conferring of benefices on men who not only had no heart for the work, but they were otherwise unfit. They were wicked, they were ignorant, they were underage, they were not even in the orders. They were mere boys in some cases. In some cases they were infants, and yet, I want to read you, just in passing for a few minutes here, a letter from King James that was written to the Pope. And King James is saying, I'm compelled to confess my own special fault before your holiness. This is the King of Scotland. I acknowledge my error of human frailties, speaking to the Pope. But that natural and fatherly affection, common to all creatures, which is implanted by nature, impels every man to consult the interests of his children and to provide for them, not otherwise than for himself. For to be a father and not be moved by care of one's offspring savors at once of ingratitude and inhumanity. On that account, we beg with these same sons of ours, that, notwithstanding the foresaid defect of their birth, yet when their lawful ages enable them, that they may be duly eligible for promotion to all higher ecclesiastical orders." You see, these priests had many, many sons and daughters, and now he's saying, Pope, We have to legitimate these, and they have to become eligible to receive these offices in the church. And you don't want to cut them off, do you? We'll hear more about it in a minute, Tom. Are these King James's bastards or everybody's bastards in general? He's pleading for the bastards of the priests and cardinals and the popes and the others. And from now, that notwithstanding their minority and the defect of their birth, they may, after they shall have been duly invested with the clerical character, be capable of holding, till they are of mature years, any and any number and kind of priesthoods, secular or regular, of any order, titular or commandatory, to the extent of even two, three, four, or more incompatible posts. In other words, they'd be appointed to receive the revenue from two, three, four, or more of these lands that belong to the church. Also, the higher dignities over pontifical offices in cathedral and metropolitan churches and the first places in collegiate ministries, likewise to be heads of monasteries, abbeys and convents, co-adjutors, however, being appointed as their deputies. And may your holiness, this is the King writing to the Pope, favor us with an indulgence that hereafter it be not necessary for any of them in obtaining apostolic places to set forth the defect of their birth. In other words, it'd be embarrassing to them to have to say they were bastard sons or daughters. And so please don't make us say anything about that. And that superstitious letters may not appear to have been obtained on their account. And lastly, may your holiness grant that when they shall have reached the 20th year of their age, they may be capable of being lawfully promoted to dignities, arch Episcopal and Episcopal. For this, however, great a stretch of your clemency it may be, and it is certainly great, we nevertheless expect will be granted by Clement, he's the Pope, to whose holiness we wish the years of Nestor. From our castle at Sterling, the 26th day of the month of February in the year of our Lord's incarnation, 1532, your said holiness devoted son, the King James R. James may have been encouraged to write this way to Clement, Pope Clement, simply because he knew that Clement himself was an illegitimate son. Although he is said to be a much better man than any of the popes that preceded him in the immediate papacy just prior to that. In Hay's opinion, the root evils of the Church were ambition and avarice. In Kennedy's opinion, it was tyranny and avarice. And in Winsett's opinion, it was pride and avarice. These other two men, incidentally, were Roman Catholic authors. Kennedy asserted that the ministers had not entered by the door, but, like thieves and brigands, had crept in by windows and the back doors. He held that if the Kirk had the old ancient liberty by which a bishop was freely chosen by his chapter, the Abbot and prior by the convent and from the convent and from the convent, then there would be qualified men in all the estates of the Kirk. Then all heresies would be banished and the people well taught. I want to I'll cover rapidly a couple of the others. I mentioned another secondary cause here, clerical credulity, imposture, and rapacity. They were teaching in one of the texts for those who were being instructed that One of these bishops, as a little boy, accidentally killed a robin red-breast, but having joined its head to its body, it became alive again. He kindled a fire by just placing frozen leaves on the hearth and then blowing on them. These were called miracles. A poor man killed his only pig to provide a repast for St. Serph and his clergy, but through the merits of St. Serph, the man found it alive again in the stye. A robber stole his saint's domesticated sheep. He killed it and ate it. But when he was swearing his innocence on the crozier, that's on the staff of the bishop, the sheep bleeded in the man's throat. The principle of all this was that they were being taught it's safer to believe too much. than to believe too little. And there was the worship of images. The cultus of images had degenerated into downright idolatry. The Lord's prayer were addressed to the saints and their images. We pray commonly, and this is one of the bishops who was saying this, we pray commonly the paternoster, that is our father. to the image of this or that saint made of tree or of stone. And the blessed sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, after that manner, offered daily to this or to that saint and called his mass. I could go on to read you many of these. When so many of the Scottish clergy were shockingly immoral, woefully ignorant, grossly profane, culpably credulous, and had, as Quintus Kennedy pointed out, and this is one of their own men pointing out, entered the Church like thieves and burghans, it was only natural that they should wring as much as possible out of their deluded flocks. And so belief in lying legends, in the power of saints, in the virtue of relics, was worked for pecuniary ends, and worked most successfully. Purgatory especially was a means of earning much money and Hay goes on to point out how in one case this man had a horse and three cows and his His son died, and so the priest came in and took the horse. He wouldn't allow them to bury the man until he had his dues. This was what it cost to bury a man in such a way that he wouldn't go into hell. And that so upset the man that he died. priest then came in and took the best of the three cows. I've forgotten what the third tragedy in the family was, but every one of the cows was taken by a different priest as the payment for the probating the will, I suppose you'd call it today. And incidentally, you need to look out for lawyers in that same way today. But the lady was finally reduced to the poverty of begging, and there was absolutely no means by which she could earn her living. Now, I've quoted to you from Hay Fleming and his kind of research and writing of history. I want to read you from another historian, a man by the name of Geddes McGregor, in a biography of John Knox. Only it's just leading to the time of John Knox, as you'll hear as I read to you. How many of you have not read anything either in Schaff or in La Tourette? How many of you have not read anything in either of those two? Well, then you probably won't understand when I say that, but you must do that. You must do that. Schaff is so detailed and explicit in his description of the history that was going on. But Tourette in the History of the Expansion of Christianity is dealing with the trends. Schaff is dealing with the details. Now, in what I've just been reading to you here from Hay Fleming, not in the little book, but in the big book that I've given to you, he's dealing, as Schaff does, in terms of details of the causes leading up to the Reformation. Now I want to read you just one chapter here by this man Geddes MacGregor. Geddes MacGregor is a good historian. So don't write him off just because it becomes interesting. It is history that's very interesting. And MacGregor found, and he's almost a contemporary, his book was published, I knew him, but his book was published in about the time we were over in Scotland before. Every night in the cold month of March, 1528, In a hundred taverns in Scotland, the tavern keepers observed a strange, fearsome look in the eyes of their customers. A stranger might not have noticed it, but it swept over the men's faces, especially over those of the younger men, as they kept turning the conversation back to the question of the hour. Wherefore was Master Patrick Hamilton burned? The rest of the time the men joked and laughed and quarreled and roared and cursed God and blasphemed the Blessed Virgin and all the saints and mocked the Mass, just as their fathers had done before them. And they sang the same lewd songs in which they pilloried bishop and abbot and friar. under the flame of a spurting candle, away from the center of the den, a group of oldish seafaring men were talking to an uncouth blue-eyed lad who might have been John Knox. By this time he was about fifteen and was likely as not to have ignored the watchman's call that sent the more respectable citizens to their home for the night. The tremendous drama in which he was destined to become the leading actor was beginning to take shape around him while he was still too young to be more than an onlooker. Nearly 18 years were to pass before he would make his first appearance on the stage that was now being set for him, but he was already old enough to read the meaning of the look in the eyes of those around him when the burning of Hamilton was mentioned. It was a look that could never be forgotten. But the look soon faded from the old sailors' eyes. Now they were only telling the lad the tale how they had just missed sailing with Columbus on the Santa Maria just 35 years ago. The lad was only half listening, neither believing nor disbelieving their yarn. It was just good tavern talk. That was enough. The powers that be had said there was no land west of Portugal and Ireland, aye, but Columbus had proved them wrong. Anything that raised a laugh against the powers that be was good tavern talk. Better to tell tall tales about unfamiliar things and speak of sad subjects that they knew too well the reason for that burning. Flodden, for instance. Flodden, the Battle of Flodden, was a sore subject for the Scots. When there was hardly a young man in that tavern who had not lost his father, nor an old one who had not lost his son, 15 years ago, the bloodiest battlefield in Scotland's proud and sad history. Scotland had suffered a terrible defeat at Flodden. After centuries of bitter victorious struggles against the mighty English, Scotland had lost the Battle of Flodden. Greater even than hatred of the foe had been the sense of national independence roused in the hearts of Scotland's people by the spirit of the brave men that Wallace had led to victory at Stirling Bridge and that Robert the Bruce had led to victory at Bannockburn two hundred years ago. But Flodden had left Scotland still independent politically, and though Scotland's pride had been injured by military defeat, its sense of nationhood had been invigorated by this even more than it had been by its victories against England in the War of Independence. Yet the memories of Flodden tore even the toughest heartstrings. There was scarcely a man among them old enough to hold his liquor who did not sometimes see in his mind's eye the faces of the women who had haunted the streets of the town at that time, inquiring in their agony of every chance passerby for news of their men. Who did not hear at times in his mind's ear the heartbroken sob and the desolate shriek of one woman after another as she learned that her Sandy or her Tam was among the 10,000 men who had poured out their blood for Scotland and yet lay dead on that cruel, flawed and field. Flood was a bitter shame and a heartache, but it hurts had sunk too deep to be noticed anymore. A young man banged on the table with his tankard. The tavern keeper saw again the look in the eyes of the men as they waited in an expectant lull for the young man to ask once more the question of the hour. Wherefore was Master Patrick Hamilton burned? He asked it in a hoarse, low voice, addressing no one in particular, yet commanding immediate interest and respect from everyone. In a moment, All but those who were too drunk to do more than soliloquize were embroiled in the general discussion. The answer, Patrick Hamilton was a young Scott of gentle birth, peaceable dispositions, scholarly attainments, who having been carefully spied on at the instigation of the archbishop had been burned at the stake in St. Andrews on February 29, 1528 in the presence of a great concourse of people. The horrible execution had been aggravated by circumstances of such monstrous cruelty that the thought of the whole affair bit deep into the minds of men and sickened their hearts. Until that sad, cold day, few persons had been burned for heresy in Scotland, perhaps only two, and they both foreigners. One was an English priest named John Resby, and the other, Paul Craw, a Bohemian physician. Both these men had been charged with preaching Lollard views. In the fourteenth century, before the foundation of the Scottish universities, the Scots had gone in considerable numbers to Oxford for some time a hotbed of Lollardy. But while there had been trouble there about students openly debating such heretical opinions, the incidents were usually hushed up. Lawler teachings were probably sometimes mixed up with subversive social doctrines, communism, and free love. They were not always chiefly directed, as were Wycliffe's, against ecclesiastical authority. Such wild ranters were feared by more than bishops and priors. They were also ridiculed by the mobs. It is not surprising that they incurred punishment. But though the Church did fear lollardry, the University of St. Andrews owed its foundation in 1412. partly to the Church's hope of diminishing the cause of such fears. It had been able to do surprisingly little to prevent the expression of Lollard views, which had been openly voiced, especially in certain parts of the country, with considerable influence and with remarkable impunity. Both the King and the nobles had showed themselves indifferent to the Church's protests, in spite of the fact that in a nation of perhaps half a million inhabitants, it commanded 3,000 clerics and others deriving their revenues directly from the Church, which owned half the wealth of the entire country. During the War of Independence in the early part of the fourteenth century, the Scots had ignored the papacy, which had supported English attempts to conquer their land. With Scotland's political independence seemingly assured, the papal policy changed. The popes now entered into competition with other forces in the scramble to exploit Scotland's nationalism as an instrument of their own aims. In the early part of the 15th century, there was little hostility to the papacy as such. Of course, there never was any such hostility so long as the papacy did not attempt to exercise its authority in any very definite way, and since at that time there were rival claimants to the papal throne, one at Avignon and another Pope at Rome, it was natural that neither claimant should do anything to offend the Scots. From 1514, however, under Pope Martin V, Roman interference became considerable. And some years later, various anti-papal laws were passed. Scottish scholars were, moreover, commonly sympathetic to those who, at the Council of Constance, sought constitutional restrictions throughout the whole church against the pretensions of the Pope in Rome. Patrick Hamilton was the younger son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Stain House. a knight reputed to have been the most redoubtable of his day at the chivalrous court of James IV. Through him, young Patrick was connected with the royal house of Stuart, and having gone to the University of Paris, then the leading theological school in Christendom, he came under the influence of Erasmus. In 1519, copies of the famous disputation between Luther and Eck were circulating in Paris, and the young Scottish scholar took his master's degree from the Sorbonne the following year, having imbibed some of Luther's views, and then departed for Lavagne before the doctors at the Sorbonne had examined Luther's doctrines and judged them heretical. By 1523, Patrick was back in Scotland, and was received into the University of St. Andrews on June 9, the same day as was John Major, the celebrated historian of Scotland who was later the teacher of John Knox. A few days earlier, James Beaton had been translated to the Archbishopric of St. Andrews, Scotland's primary see. Hamilton's gentle birth and his highly promising intellect brought him at once into the public eye in the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland that was also the seat of its first university. Yet for several years, Hamilton's opinions got him into no trouble. He was anything but a rabble-rouser. We hear of him during this time composing music for a mass in the cathedral and himself acting as the presenter. In 1525, however, the Scottish Parliament passed an act against Lutheranism, and Beaton, eager to display zeal for the papal cause, instituted throughout his archdiocese a faithful inquisition. When Hamilton was summoned in 1527 to appear before Beaton on a charge of propagating heretical doctrines, he left for Germany, where his sincerity evidently made a deep impression on older scholars of the day at Marburg. Later that year he returned to Scotland and he married. He was now treated very respectively by the ecclesiastical authorities and was permitted to give both public and private conferences in the university. But that courtesy was a cloak for a well-laid scheme against him. There is little doubt that Alexander Camel, prior of the neighboring Dominican house, was appointed to spy on him. in such conferences and to inform against him. Apparently to discourage royal interference in the forthcoming proceedings against Hamilton, the young king of Scotland was encouraged to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Duthic in a remote northern part of the country. Rejecting the advice of his friends to flee again, Hamilton appeared before the archbishop and his council, and he was charged with having taught various theological doctrines that were deemed to be heretical. Asked for his views on these doctrines, he said half of them were questionable, but admitted his firm adherence to the others. Meanwhile, since it was learned that Hamilton's powerful brother was mustering a force at Kincaval to go to his aid and that other friends were making similar arrangements on his behalf, The archbishop's men seized him during the night at his lodging, forcibly took him to the castle of St. Andrews, so that there might be no risk of his slipping out of their hands. St. Andrews is still notorious for its cold, high winds, and on that twenty-ninth day of February, the east wind from the North Sea was howling around the cathedral. A crowd of people were assembled when the archbishop took his place, surrounded by an impressive array of bishops, abbots, and the alike. Under strong guard, Hamilton was taken fence to be formally tried for heresy. After Prior Camel, the Dominican informer, had presented his case and Hamilton had made his defense, sentence was delivered. Hamilton was to have his property confiscated and be handed over to the secular powers for further punishment. In view of the danger of powerful help coming to the accused, a stake was immediately erected at the gates of St. Salvador's College, and Hamilton was led to it. Asked to recant, he replied that he would not do so for awe of your fire, for he preferred, he said, to burn in their fire for obeying his conscience than to burn in the fire of hell for disobeying his conscience. When brought to the stake, he took off his coat and gave it to his servants, saying, this stuff will not help in the fire, yet will do thee some good. I have no more to leave thee but the example of my death, which I pray thee to keep in mind. Thereupon he was tied to the stake. But while the men in the tavern only muttered garbled accounts of the story of the heresy hunt, they raised their voices and clenched their fists as they recalled Hamilton's hideous end. The stake was a horrible death at the best, even when merciful smoke suffocated the victim before the fire had burned his body into his first convulsions of pain. But in the howling gale of that wintry day, it was difficult to get that fire lighted. When the powder was brought, and at length ignited, the fire only scorched Hamel's left hand and the side of his face. It was relighted several times while he went on speaking of his faith, reproaching no one except Camel. When this friar stung no doubt in his own conscience, taunted him, and enjoined him to say, Sawa Regina, when he could no longer speak, and was being asked if he held to his opinions, he lifted up three blackened figures. His agony endured six hours, it was said, before the fire, becoming a last vehement, ended a spectacle, excruciating torture, the like of which had never before been seen within the realm of Scotland. The University of Levain, in a letter to the archbishop, expressed its appreciation of his zeal for the true faith, its admiration for the manner in which his sentence had been carried out, and his congratulations to the University of St. Andrews for the honor that had come to it through all these proceedings. He must have done something to hurt Neaton's pride, suggested the knobbly-faced old man with an air of inscrutable wisdom. But the other men in the tavern were saying it was Neaton's ambition that had made him so carefully engineer this plot against a peaceable young Scotsman. He was doing it all for his own advancement, all to please Rome. Some spoke darkly of having seen the archbishop's eyes glisten in selfish glee at the thought of the rewards he would win at the cost of a young gentleman's agony and death. It was an insult to the people of Scotland, shouted one man. Others said they had never thought much before about doctrines of faith, but what they had heard convinced them that the doctrine of Patrick Hamilton had taught whatever it was must be the right doctrine. I, said one of them, better informed than the others, They say that a friend of that bloody beaten has told him, if he burn any more men, he should burn them in cellars, for the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon. The priest will curse you for that talk, muttered a feeble old man in the corner. The priest's curse, of course, was excommunication. The priests don't care about talk. It's tithes they care about, rejoined another with a harsh laugh. It's when they don't get their ties that they do their cursing. There was general amusement at this. The weapon of excommunication had already long lost much of its old terror to the people of Scotland. Nobody cares anymore for the priest's curses, said a young man. Don't you see that's why they had to burn Master Patrick Hamilton? They're thinking that's better than the cursing. Grim quiet for a moment. Then somebody started to sing. an extempore ditty destined for a place of fame among the popular songs of that century that were later to be collected and compiled by the Wedderburns of Dundee. The bishop would not wed a wife, the abbot not pursue one, thinking it was a lusty life each day to have a new one. The crowd laughed and applauded the rivalry. It was a welcome relief from a painful subject. The songsters' tankard was filled, After the murmur of conversation, in the course of which someone mocked the Dominican friars, he was again inspired. The blind bishop he could not preach for playing with the lasses. The silly friar had to flatter for alms that he was asking. It would be a good thing if every priest were to marry like other men, suggested the tavern keeper. winking at the man who was providing his customers with free entertainment. Again, the songs just tankard was replaced. And once more he gave tongue for then should be so many harlots be up and down for then should not so many harlots be up and down this land, nor yet so many beggars poor in Kirk and market stand. The songs became more and more ribald. The men continued to roar with laughter. Yet somehow there was a new uneasiness in the air. The church had for long been the butt of tavern jokes. The subject, however, had been only half serious at the most. In a rude age and among a people accustomed to coarse village behavior, the morals of the Scottish clergy that sound so scandalous today did not offend as much as they would now. Farmers did not expect much of priests, though even so they were now sometimes scandalized. But Hamilton's death had put a more awesome complexion on the traditional theme of the tavern. It had also stirred in human hearts a vengeance less than half uttered because more than half unutterable. And when the roars of glee had subsided, when the songster had relapsed into drunken silence, when the clamor had resumed its normal pitch, when the arguments had been carried far into the night till all but a few of the men had gone, still, even in the sleepy slits of eyes, the tavern-keeper could see the ghost of the fearsome look as the last retreating voice cried hoarsely, wherefore, wherefore was he burned? And young John Knox, who could not but have heard of all this, must also have asked himself, with all a boy's wonderment, wherefore was that young professor burned? That's a different kind of history. But Geddes McGregor is a good historian. And his last book is not. is not nearly as good as that. If you're going to read it, please let me know ahead of time. I'd like to point out some things to look out for. Father in Heaven, we thank you for the men such as Hay Fleming, who have written facts and done careful research into the details of why it was that people were ready for the Reformation. What it was that you did to get people ready, the excesses the horrible, horrible excesses into which the church had gone, from which you would find it necessary to clean out those spots and smooth out those wrinkles. God, we thank you for the careful research of men like Hay Fleming. We thank you, too, for men like Geddes McGregor, who've appreciated that research and then gone on to write the description of the common people and of the life as it was in those days throughout Scotland, the life, for example, in the taverns. God, I'd pray that you would bless each person here as they would read and understand this history, and yet as they would read and understand it in terms of the circumstances in which the people lived then. And then God bless us now as we go on to see the men and the women and the children and the families and the churches who died because of conviction, the conviction that you had built into their hearts and lives. God, I pray that the study of the history of the Reformation would would become personal blessing to each person in this class, and especially those who go on then to study this in Scotland. In Jesus' name we pray it. Amen. I will not be reading to you again as I read to you here this evening, but I want you to hear those two different kinds of history. You dismiss.