The political side of the national religion is expressed no less clearly in facts. The Scottish Crown is held by a contract,[1] and the coronation oath is the deliberate expression of it. In his _De Jure Regni_ in 1579, dedicated to the king, Buchanan had made this apparent to Europe, and in his _Lex Rex_, in 1644, Buchanan was reinforced by Rutherfurd in the doctrine that the people is the source of power, and his officers are merely _ministri regni non regis_, 'servants of the kingdom, not of the king.' Startling doctrine this to the slobbering vicegerent of God, conceding to the people acts to be revoked at his pleasure. In the light of ordinary facts, therefore, what are the national covenants of 1580 and 1638, but very simple Magna Chartas or Reform Bills with a religious colouring? One half of the statements of Hume and Robertson about fanaticism, austerity, gloom, enthusiasm, democracy, and popular ferocity, and all the bugbears of the writers so terribly 'at ease in Zion,' would be discounted by a simple regard for facts. When Leighton and Burnet went into the west in 1670 to try and induce the people to recognise the establishment of Charles, what did they find? Wranglings or harangues after the manner of Scott's Habbakuk Mucklewrath? 'The poor of the country,' says Burnet, 'came generally to hear us. We were amazed to see a poor commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, and on _the bounds to be set to the power of the civil magistrate_ and princes in matters of religion: upon all these topics they had texts of Scripture at hand, and were ready with their answers to everything that was said to them. This measure of knowledge was spread even among the meanest of them, their cottagers and servants.' Leighton might well have remembered the case of his own father. History loves not the Coriolani, says Mommsen, and Miller has well seized this incident to bring out the popular side of the national religion. To the question, in an inn at Newcastle, what the Scottish religion had done for the people, he could reply, 'Independently altogether of religious considerations, it has done for our people what your Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and all your Penny and Saturday Magazines will never do for yours; it has awakened their intellects and taught them to think.'