'The Poor be of three sorts: the poor labourers of the ground; the poor desolate beggars, orphans, widows, and strangers; and the poor ministers of Christ Jesus His holy Evangel: which are _all_ so cruelly treated.... For now the poor labourers of the ground are so oppressed by the cruelty of those that pay their Third, that they for the most part _advance upon the poor_ whatsoever they pay to the Queen or to any other. As for the very indigent and poor, _to whom God commands a sustentation to be provided of the Teinds_, they are so despised that it is a wonder that the sun giveth light and heat to the earth where God's name is so frequently called upon, and no mercy, according to His commandment, shown to His creatures. And also for the ministers, their livings are so appointed, that the most part shall live but a beggar's life. And all cometh of that impiety--'[91] The position that the 'patrimony of the Church' is fundamentally rather the 'patrimony of the poor,' and that ecclesiastics are merely its distributors, was anything but new. It is a commonplace[92] among the learned of the Catholic Church--the difference was that at this crisis it was possible for Scotland to act upon it, and that the state was urged to remember the poor by a man who, with all his devotion to God and to the other world, burned with compassion for the hard wrought labourers of his people. For it will be observed that here, as elsewhere, Knox is concerned, not only for the 'very indigent,' and the technically 'poor,'[93] but for those especially whom he calls 'your poor brethren; the labourers and manurers (hand-workers) of the ground.' In the Book of Discipline, before entering upon its provisions for dividing the tithe between the ministers, the poor, and the schools, he urges that the labourers must be allowed 'to pay so reasonable teinds, that they may feel some benefit of Christ Jesus, now preached unto them.' For 'With the grief of our hearts we hear that some gentlemen are now as cruel over their tenants as ever were the Papists, requiring of them whatever before they paid to the Church, so that the Papistical tyranny shall only be changed into the tyranny of the lord or of the laird.'... But 'the gentlemen, barons, earls, lords, and others, must be content to live upon their just rents, and suffer the Church to be restored to her liberty, that in her restitution, the poor, who heretofore by the cruel Papists have been spoiled and oppressed, may now receive some comfort and relaxation.'