the soundness of any of the doctrines of that Confession, than they were of the reality of sorcery, and felt themselves not more truly called upon by the Bible to repress idolatry than to punish witches. They were good men, earnest, and meaning well to God and man; but they were men of the sixteenth century, ignorant, and rough in many of their ways. While, then, we shall see great occasion to admire the hardy valour with which this people achieved their deliverance from bondage, we must also be prepared for finding them full of vehement intolerance towards all challenge of their own dogmas and all adherence to alien forms of faith. We shall find them utterly incapable of imagining a conscientious dissent, much less of allowing for and respecting it. We must be prepared to see them--while repudiating one set of superstitious incrustations upon the original simple gospel--working it out on their own part in creeds, plats, covenants, and church institutions generally, full of mere human logic and device, but yet assumed to be as true as if a divine voice had spoken and framed them, breathing war and persecution towards all other systems, and practically operating as a tyranny only somewhat less formidable than that which had been put away. REIGN OF MARY: 1561-1565. The regent, Mary de Guise, having died in June 1560, while her daughter Mary, the nominally reigning queen, was still in France, the management of affairs fell into the hands of the body of nobles, styled Lords of the Congregation, who had struggled for the establishment of the Protestant faith. The chief of these was Lord James Stuart, an illegitimate son of James V., and brother of the queen--the man of by far the greatest sagacity and energy of his age and country, and a most earnest votary of the new religion. Becoming a widow in December 1560, by the death of her husband, Francis II., Mary no longer had any tie binding her to France, and consequently she resolved on returning to her own dominions. When she arrived in Edinburgh, in August 1561, she found the Protestant religion so firmly established, and so universally accepted by the people--there being only some secluded districts where Catholicism still prevailed--that, so far from having a chance of restoring her kingdom to Rome, as she, ‘an unpersuaded princess,’ might have wished to do, it was with the greatest difficulty that she could be allowed to have the mass performed in a private room in her palace. The people regarded her beautiful face with affection; and, as she allowed her brother, Lord James, and other Protestant nobles to act for her, her government was far from unpopular.