In Scotland, as elsewhere, the causes of the religious revolution were many. The wealth and luxury of the higher clergy, and of the dwellers in the abbeys, had long been the butt of satire and of the fiercer indignation of the people. Benefices, great and small, were jobbed on every side between the popes, the kings, and the great nobles. Ignorant and profligate cadets of the great houses were appointed to high ecclesiastical offices, while the minor clergy were inconceivably ignorant just at the moment when the new critical learning, with knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, was revolutionising the study of the sacred books. The celibacy of the clergy had become a mere farce; and they got dispensations enabling them to obtain ecclesiastical livings for their bastards. The kings set the worst example: both James IV. and James V. secured the richest abbeys, and, in the case of James IV., the Primacy, for their bastard sons. All these abuses were of old standing. "Early in the thirteenth century certain of the abbots of Jedburgh, supported by their chapters, had granted certain of their appropriate churches to priests with a right of succession to their sons" (see 'The Mediaeval Church in Scotland,' by the late Bishop Dowden, chap. xix. Mac- Lehose, 1910.) Oppressive customs by which "the upmost claith," or a pecuniary equivalent, was extorted as a kind of death-duty by the clergy, were sanctioned by excommunication: no grievance was more bitterly felt by the poor. The once-dreaded curses on evil-doers became a popular jest: purgatory was a mere excuse for getting money for masses. In short, the whole mediaeval system was morally rotten; the statements drawn up by councils which made vain attempts to check the stereotyped abuses are as candid and copious concerning all these things as the satires of Sir David Lyndsay. Then came disbelief in mediaeval dogmas: the Lutheran and other heretical books were secretly purchased and their contents assimilated. Intercession of saints, images, pilgrimages, the doctrine of the Eucharist, all fell into contempt.