'Not a king--but a member;' 'in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil head supreme'--the whole history of Scotland was to run for three hundred years in these grooves. This is the doctrine which, from 1560 till now, has in Scotland been known as the Headship of Christ. Without a correct understanding of this question, not as a mere metaphysical or theological figment, but as a reality most vitally 'within practical politics' carrying effects direct and visible into every corner of the national life, the history of Scotland must of necessity be a sealed book--the play of _Hamlet_ without the royal Dane. To the English reader this has been largely obscured, from the fact that the chief sources of information open to him are not such as present a rational or connected story. George Borrow found that Scott's caricature of _Old Mortality_ was what Englishmen had in their minds, and that some thin romanticism about Prince Charles Edward was the end and substance of their knowledge. Yet such a presentation would be no less absurd than _Hudibras_ would be for the men of the Long Parliament. Scott was too much occupied with the external and material conditions of the country, too much engrossed by obvious necessity of materials in the romantic element of Scottish history, and too little in sympathy with the spiritual and moral forces at work to present anything like a complete narrative, while his feudal sentiments were nourished by the almost entire lack of the political instinct. The ecclesiastical chapters in John Hill Burton's _History_ are not equal to the main body of his work; and, if the _Lectures_ of Dean Stanley are the characteristically thin production of one confessing to but a superficial knowledge of the vast literature of the field,' the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Grub is only the work of a mere Episcopalian antiquary, and the lack of judgment and political insight appears on every page. 'It seems to me,' says Carlyle, 'hard measure that this Scottish man Knox, now after three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world, intrinsically for having been, in such way as was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen'--harder still, say we, that the subject of Milton's great eulogy should be judged by minds of the notes-and-queries order, or by those of the class of Hume and Robertson, who have such a gentlemanly horror at everything that savours of enthusiasm as to miss the central point, the _coincidence_ of civil and religious liberty.