‘Lo here,’ then, ‘a nation born in one day; yea, moulded into one congregation, and sealed as a fountain with a solemn oath and covenant!’ So exclaims a clerical writer a hundred years later; and we, who live two hundred years still further onward, may well echo the words. But a little while ago, there were priests, with vestments of ancient and gorgeous form, saying mass in churches, which were the only elegant structures in the country. The name of the pope was a word to bow at. Confession was one of the duties of life. Barefooted friars wandered about in the enjoyment of universal reverence. Any gentleman going out with his sovereign on a military expedition, would have been thought liable to every evil under the sun, and altogether a scandalous person, if he did not beforehand obtain pardon for his sins from the Grayfriars, and leave in their hands his most valuable possessions, including the very titles of his estate, which he might hope to get back if he survived; but otherwise, he well knew all would go to the enriching of these same friars, who were under vows to live in perpetual poverty.[2] The king himself sought for his highest religious comfort in pilgrimising to St Duthac’s shrine in Ross-shire, or to the chapel of our Lady of Loretto, at Musselburgh. The bishop of Aberdeen felt a solacement in the hour of death, in the trust that his bowels would be buried, as he requested, in the Blackfriars Monastery in Edinburgh.[3] So lately as 1547, the Scotch, fighting with the English at Pinkie, called out reproachful names to them, on the score of their having deserted the ancient faith. But here is now Scotland also converted, and that as it were in a day, from all those old reverences and observances, and taken possession of by a totally new set of ideas. _The Bible in the vulgar tongue has been suddenly laid open to them._ Their minds, earnest and reflecting, though unenlightened, have been impressed beyond description by the tale of miraculous history which it unfolds, and the deeply touching scheme for effecting the salvation of man which the theologian constructs from it. They feel as if they had got hold of something of priceless value, and in comparison with which all the forms and rites of medieval Christianity are as dust and rubbish. The _Evangel_, the _True Religion_, as they earnestly called it, is henceforth all in all with this poor and homely, but resolute people. Nothing inconsistent therewith can be listened to for a moment. Scarcely can a dissentient be permitted to live in the country. The state, too, must maintain this system, and this system alone, or it is no state for them. Above all, the errors of Popery must be unsparingly put down. The mass is idolatry: God, in his Book, says that idolatry is a sin to be visited with the severest judgments; therefore, if you wish to avoid judgments, you must extinguish the mass. Even modified forms and rituals which have been preserved by English Protestantism,