This was a more important crisis of British history than is generally supposed. It was now that a commencement was made of that struggle for authority which we see going on through the remainder of this and the whole of the ensuing century. James had been reared as the creature of the zealous Presbyterian party. When he began to judge for himself, and to become conversant with minds beyond the range of his earlier associations, his affections led him to prefer those who had been his mother’s friends, and he soon came to believe that they and such as they were likely to be his own warmest supporters. What was most important of all, he found that the Presbyterian clergy, while professing respect for him as the chief-magistrate of the land, and disposed to obey him in civil matters, claimed to be, in things ecclesiastical, not merely independent of him, but his superiors. Restricting the idea of the church to those ‘exercising the spiritual function among the congregations of them that profess the truth,’ they asserted that it had ‘a certain power granted by God,’ having ‘ground in the word of God,’ and ‘to be put into execution by them unto whom the government of the kirk by lawful calling is committed.’ And, ‘as the ministers and others of the ecclesiastical state are subject to the magistrate civil, so aucht the person of the magistrate to be subject to the kirk spiritually and in ecclesiastical government.’ In their view, as far as his own religious and moral practice was concerned, King James was only a parishioner of the Canongate. On the other hand, when one of their order interfered with politics in his sermon, he was only liable to be challenged by his presbytery. The claim was presented by men of whose disinterestedness there can be no more doubt than of their religious zeal; that it might have worked satisfactorily if it had ever found a monarch who would cordially accept and submit to it, cannot be denied, for we have had no experience on the subject, the final settlement of the Scotch church at the Revolution having left it in a doubtful state. The compromise which was attained at the end of a century-long struggle, was unattainable in the days of King James. The pretension only set him upon looking up scriptural texts too, texts which could be interpreted as setting the royal authority equally above human challenge; and such were not difficult to be found. Hence arose the celebrated doctrine of the divine right of kings--a sort of antithesis to a doctrine which would have made kings in one important respect the subjects of a set of church-courts. And so commenced that unfortunate course of things in our national history, which has presented this king as in constant antagonism to the ecclesiastical forms and order of worship preferred by the great bulk of his people, as seeking by all arts to thrust hated systems upon them, and as founding a policy which, becoming a deadly and obstinate struggle