But next only to the diffusion of the Scriptures among the people, the greatest factor in the production of the Reformation in Scotland was the degraded condition into which in that country the Church of Rome itself had sunk. "That which decayeth is ready to vanish away." There were no longer in it the elements of vitality. It was past purifying, and had to be swept clean out. Its corruptions were too open to be denied, and too gross to be defended. The grasping selfishness and shameless licentiousness of the upper clergy were equalled only by the ignorance and general incompetence of the lower, so that there had sprung up among the people generally a {7} hatred of the order to which both belonged. This was deepened and intensified by the spirit in which the first efforts of the Reformers had been met, for in Scotland as elsewhere the prison and the stake were the short and easy answers made by papal intolerance to all the arguments which the preachers brought against the errors of Romanism. But these were answers which only turned more general attention to the statements of the Reformers, and gave wider circulation to their words. The storm of contrary wind unfurls the banner, and makes thereby its inscription the more legible, and in the same way the persecution of those who proclaimed the truth only fell out to the furtherance of that which it was designed to arrest. But Cardinal Beaton's conscience was too hard to feel the crime, and his eye was too dim to see the blunder which he was committing in putting Wishart to death. He looked only at immediate results, and thought perhaps that by silencing the preacher he could arrest the influence of the words which had already gone from him. But in reality he was himself standing above a mine which before long exploded for his own destruction. His checkmating of Henry VIII. so exasperated that monarch that he entered into correspondence, through his agent Sir Robert Sadler, with certain Scotsmen whose disaffection to the cardinal was well known, and who, at his suggestion, or at least with his concurrence and approval, perhaps also with his reward, entered into a conspiracy to "take him out of the way." {8} Accordingly on the morning of the 29th of May, just three months after the martyrdom of Wishart, Cardinal Beaton was assassinated by a company of men headed by Norman Leslie. That the wily priest had himself been guilty of attempts to get rid of his adversaries by the same unscrupulous means is not to be denied. It is equally certain that, as things then were, it would have been impossible to bring him to trial for any of his enormities. But still the manner of his "taking off" is not only utterly indefensible, but also worthy of the deepest reprobation, and it is too true, as Dr. Lorimer has said, that "the exasperation of feeling called forth by a deed so daring and criminal gave rise to proceedings against the conspirators which, being extended to all their abettors real or