Again, when Knox laid hold of the nation his schemes in their very first draft embraced the people as a whole. It was not a merely piecemeal or monarchical business as in England. The Reformers were not content with merely formulating an Act like Henry; they proceeded to carry out in detail their plans for a national system of education. They had no idea of setting up a church of their own invention. There is something in the Scottish intellect, in this resembling the French, that seeks for the completest realisation in detail of its ideas. As Professor Masson has said, its dominant note is really not caution, with which it is so frequently credited, but _emphasis_. While the English Independents during the later years of the Civil War appear as either sectaries or as individualists, the contention of the Scots was ever for a national system. This feature in the character of the nation is really at the root of what Hallam calls the 'Presbyterian Hildebrandism' of the elder M'Crie. Johnson, too, could with some considerable truth say to Boswell, 'You are the only instance of a Scotchman that I have known who did not at every other sentence bring in some other Scotchman.' But this is the very feature that Buckle has overlooked, and it is this that explains how the new church spoke in the authoritative tones of the old; this, too, which explains how, outside of the waning Episcopalian sect, there are no dissenters in Scotland in the true sense. We have parties, not sects. While the Secession, the Relief, the Cameronians, the Burghers were all mere branches of the parent stock, retaining in detail its fundamental nature in discipline and worship, the established church in England finds itself face to face with organised and hostile dissent. So entirely has the national unity been preserved in Scotland that Professor Blackie has said, with no less truth than pith, that while Presbyterianism is the national and the rational dress of the land, Episcopacy is but the dress coat by which the nakedness is hid of the renegade from the nation, and the apostate from its church. Dean Stanley found that 'the questionable idols' of the Episcopalian sect were Mary Queen of Scots, Montrose, and Dundee. These have never been the idols of the Scottish people: the last, indeed, occupies in its memory the peculiar niche of infamy.