The best way to
discover the practical fruits of a system of religion is to examine a people
or a country in which for generations that system has held undisputed sway. In
making such a test of Roman Catholicism we turn to some country like Spain,
Italy, Colombia, or Mexico. There, in the religious and political life of the
people, we see the effects of the system. Applying the same test to Calvinism
we are able to point to one country in which Calvinism has long been
practically the only religion, and that country is Scotland. McFetridge tells
us that before Calvinism reached Scotland, "gross darkness covered the land
and brooded like an eternal nightmare upon all the faculties of the people."1
"When Calvinism reached the Scotch people," says Smith, "they were vassals of
the Romish church, priest-ridden, ignorant, wretched, degraded in body, mind,
and morals. Buckle describes them as 'filthy in their persons and in their
homes,' 'poor and miserable,' 'excessively ignorant and exceedingly
superstitious,' — 'with superstition ingrained into their characters.'
Marvelous was the transformation when the great doctrines learned by Knox from
the Bible in Scotland and more thoroughly at Geneva while sitting at the feet
of Calvin, flashed in upon their minds. It was like the sun arising at
midnight . . . Knox made Calvinism the religion of Scotland, and Calvinism
made Scotland the moral standard for the world. It is certainly a significant
fact that in that country where there is the most of Calvinism there should be
the least of crime; that of all the people of the world today that nation
which is confessedly the most moral is also the most thoroughly Calvinistic;
that in that land where Calvinism has had supremest sway individual and
national morality has reached its loftiest level."2 Says Carlyle,
"This that Knox did for his nation we may really call a resurrection as from
death." "John Knox," says Froude, "was the one man without whom Scotland as
the modern world has known it, would have had no existence."
In a very real sense
the Presbyterian Church of Scotland is the daughter of the Reformed Church of
Geneva. The Reformation in Scotland, though coming some time later, was far
more consistent and radical than in England, and it resulted in the
establishment of a Calvinistic Presbyterianism in which Christ alone was
recognized as the head of the Church.
It is, of course, an
easy matter to pick out the one man who in the hands of Providence was the
principal instrument in the reformation of Scotland. That man was John Knox.
It was he who planted the germs of religious and civil liberty and who
revolutionized society. To him the Scotch owe their national existence. "Knox
was the greatest of Scotsmen, as Luther the greatest of Germans," says Philip
Schaff.
"The hero of the
Scotch Reformation," says Schaff, "though four years older than Calvin, sat
humbly at his feet and became more Calvinistic than Calvin. John Knox spent
the five years of his exile (1554-1559), during the reign of Bloody Mary,
mostly at Geneva, and found there 'the most perfect school of Christ that ever
was since the days of the Apostles.' After that model he led the Scotch
people, with dauntless courage and energy, from mediaeval semi-barbarism into
the light of modern civilization, and acquired a name which, next to those of
Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, is the greatest in the history of the Protestant
Reformation."3
"No grander figure,"
says Froude, "can be found in the entire history of the Reformation in this
island than that of Knox .... The time has come when English history may do
justice to one but for whom the Reformation would have been
overthrown among ourselves; for the spirit which Knox created saved
Scotland; and if Scotland had been Catholic again, neither the wisdom of
Elizabeth's ministers, nor the teaching of her bishops, nor her own
chicaneries, would have preserved England from revolution. He was the voice
which taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in
the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his
forefathers. He was the antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor
Maitland deceive; he it was that raised the poor commons of his country into a
stern and rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious and
fanatical, but who nevertheless, were men whom neither king, noble nor priest
could force again to submit to tyranny. And his reward has been the
ingratitude of those who should most have done honor to his memory."4
The early Scotch
reformed theology was based on the predestinarian principle. Knox had gotten
his theology directly from Calvin in Geneva, and his chief theological work
was his treatise on Predestination, which was a keen, forcible and unflinching
polemic against loose views which were becoming widespread in England and
elsewhere. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries topics such as
predestination, election, reprobation, the extent and value of the atonement,
the perseverance of the saints, were the absorbing interest of the Scotch
peasantry. From that land those doctrines spread southward into parts of
England and Ireland and across the Atlantic to the west. In a very real sense
Scotland can be called the "Mother Country of modern Presbyterianism."
Footnotes:
1Calvinism
in History, p. 124.
2The Creed of Presbyterians, pp. 98, 99.
3The Swiss Reformation, H., p. 818.
4Hist. Eng. X. 487.
