One who would find out and appraise with exactness the influence of Scotland upon English thought, previous to the eighteenth century,--that is, during the period of the colonization of New England, before the Commonwealth, and later, when American institutions were taking definite form,--will not find much to the point in English books or documents. That Scottish writers and preachers were most influential with English Puritans--the same who settled America--cannot be gainsaid. Neither can it be denied that Puritanism took on some dark and unlovely forms. Yet we must remember that the work of Claverhouse and the massacres of Scottish Christians by Englishmen were taking place within a few score miles of these very people who first left England, to find a permanent home beyond the Atlantic. These English Puritans got their idea of the equality of man and that sense of human dignity, which lies at the foundation of civil liberty, in large measure from the Scots, who had already shown their hatred of oppression and their contempt for differences of rank founded only on the accident of birth. From such a soil of history and feeling sprang Burns’s inimitable poem, “A man’s a man for a’ that,”--the consummate white flower of the poetry of humanity. It is barely possible that such a poem might have been written in England in the eighteenth century, but, as a matter of fact, it rose out of the heart of a Scotsman. In England the lesson of the equality of man has not, even yet, been fully learned. In America, it is the very foundation on which our Government rests. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Speech is the answering and antiphonic call to the song of Burns. In fact, we cannot understand how any true history of the United States can be written which neglects the study of Scotland’s history. The Scottish people called those prelates appointed by the London Government, who collected the revenues of their sees and turned them over to their patrons, “tulchan” bishops. These prelates got their nickname in Scotland from calfskins, stuffed with straw to make them look like cow’s babies, with which the dairymen deceived refractory cattle,--mothers that refused to give down their milk. In 1578, the General Assembly resolved that bishops should be called by their own names and not by their titles or sees, and that no vacant see should be filled until the next December. In 1580, the whole system was abolished when the General Assembly, meeting at Dundee, resolved that the office of bishop was a mere human invention unwarranted by the Word of God.