{317} Note P, Footnote 100. _Strictness and impartiality of Discipline._――The form of satisfaction enjoined in the case of Methven, was appointed for all who should be excommunicated for murder, adultery, incest, or other aggravated crimes. The murderer was to bear in his hand “the same or lyke weapoun whairwith the murther was committed.” Buik of the Univ. Kirk, p. 38. Other rules observed in cases of discipline may be seen in Knox’s Liturgy, p. 55‒67, edit. 1611, and in Dunlop’s Confessions, ii. 704‒756. Impartiality, as well as severity, distinguished the discipline of those times. “_Gryt_ men offending in sick crymes as deserves seckclaith, they suld receave the same als weill as the _pure_.――Na superintendant nor commissioner, with advyce of any particular kirk of yair jurisdiction, may dispense with the extreamitie of sackcloth, prescrivit be the actes of the generall discipline, for any pecuniall sum or paine _ad pios usus_.” Buik of the Univ. Kirk, August, 1573. Dunlop, ii. 753. This was not a mere theoretic proposition. For, in 1563, we find the lord treasurer making public satisfaction, (Keith, 245, 529;) in 1567, the countess of Argyle, (Buik of the Univ. Kirk, p. 37,) and in 1568, the bishop of Orkney, (Anderson’s Collections, ii. 284.) Let not our modern fashionables and great ones be alarmed at hearing of such things. Those days are gone, and will not, it is likely, soon return. The parliament, or the magistracy of particular burghs, enacted punishments of a corporal kind against certain crimes which were ordinarily tried in the church courts. Some of these existed before the Reformation, and some of them were posterior to it; but the infliction as well as the enacting of them, pertained to the civil magistrate. Knox, p. 269. In the minutes of several kirk‑sessions, however, the sentences inflicting them are found recorded along with censures properly ecclesiastical. The following extract accounts for this in part. “What you bring” (says Mr Baillie, in his answer to bishop Maxwell) “of pecuniary mulcts, imprisonments, banishments, jogges, cutting of haire, and such like, it becomes neither you to charge, nor us to be charged with, any such matters: {318} No church assembly in Scotland assumes the least degree of power, to inflict the smallest civill punishment upon any person; the Generall Assembly it selfe hath no power to fine any creature so much as in one groat: It is true, the lawes of the land appoint pecuniary mulcts, imprisonment, joggs, pillories, and banishment for some odious crimes, and the power of putting these lawes in execution is placed by the parliament in the hands of the inferior magistrates in burroughs or shires, or of others to whom the counsel table gives a speciall commission for that end; ordinarily some of these civill persons are ruling elders, and sit with the eldership: So when the eldership have cognosced upon the