But while the Church authorities were so zealous for the morals of the nation and the prevention of scandal, they appear to have sometimes thrown impediments in the way of lawful marriage. In the early years following the Reformation, it was a very frequent ordinance of Kirk Sessions that no persons should be allowed to marry until they were able to repeat to the minister or reader the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, and the Ten Commandments. Either a "pawn" was required for the fulfilment of this condition or a fine was exacted in case of failure. In some parishes the Kirk Sessions went beyond this requirement, and insisted on regular attendance at public worship. In 1700, the Kirk Session of Galston, "considering that there were some who lived within the parish who did not join with the congregation in public worship, nor submit themselves to discipline, and yet craved common privileges of members of this congregation, such as proclamation in order to marriage, concluded that none such should have privileges, until they should engage to live orderly for the time to come." And a further entry, of the same date, states that one of the persons referred to applied for proclamation of banns, and, on the resolution being communicated to him, he "engaged, through God's grace, to live orderly, and to wait upon gospel ordinances more particularly, and was then allowed to be proclaimed." There was some difference of opinion in the early days of the Reformed Church as to whether a pre-contract should be an impediment to marriage with another person. The minutes of the Westminster Assembly show that some of the divines maintained that a promise of marriage was a "covenant of God," and could not be broken, even by mutual consent. The Church of Scotland did not adopt this view. In 1570, the General Assembly directed that persons desiring to withdraw from a contract of marriage should, if nothing had followed, be allowed to do so. In the same year, an appeal was made to the Assembly from the decision of a Kirk Session that a man should not be allowed to marry any woman other than a former servant of the appellant, whom he had seduced. He had applied to the Kirk Session for proclamation of banns, putting in the document known as a "discharge of marriage," signed by the woman he had wronged, for three or four successive years, but it was persistently refused recognition. The Assembly sustained his appeal, gave him the liberty he sought, and added, "yea, and there is injury done to him already."