Probably none but a native Scot can understand the finer points of Scottish theology. Fortunately, however, such understanding is not needed for a general grasp of church affairs in the eighteenth century. Primitive Calvinism shares with Marxism the distinction of being the most completely deterministic philosophy ever widely accepted in the western world. All men were held to be equally sinful and equally deserving of eternal damnation. ‘Adam as the federal representative of the human race had determined its fate once and for all by violating that unfortunate covenant which he and the Deity had contracted with regard to the forbidden fruit. A vicarious sacrifice had indeed been offered; but the power to avail themselves of this expiation was to be communicated to only a few of the minority to whom it had been made known; and these were to be saved to show that God was merciful, as the rest were to be damned to show that He was just.’[1] This was the creed of which Oliver Wendell Holmes said that any decent person really holding it ought to go mad out of mere self-respect. And like every other rigid system it had the effect of stultifying its sincerest adherents. The most patriotic of historians are compelled to recognize the general intellectual torpor of Scottish theological and philosophical writing in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The thinking of the clergy had been finished for them by John Calvin and John Knox; all that remained for them to do was to expound. No first-rate mind can subdue itself to the mere unquestioning exposition of other men’s views without losing its edge, and few of the parish clergy in Scotland had started with first-rate minds. Their preaching was commonly a dreary reiteration of the doctrine of the Four-Fold State of Man--first, Innocence or Primitive Integrity, next Nature or Entire Depravation, then Grace or Begun Recovery, and finally Consummate Happiness or Misery--brightened only by sadistic imaginings of the details of eternal torment. As if these doctrinal limitations were not sufficiently deadening, custom required that one of the minister’s two discourses each Sunday should be preached from his ‘ordinary’ text--which meant that he was expected to take the same text week after week and torture it into new applications of doctrine. If his invention failed under the strain, and he changed his ‘ordinary’ too often, zealous parishioners were likely to complain to the Presbytery. Add to these handicaps the fact that few ministers had money enough to buy books, even had they wished for books, and one begins to realize why Scottish manses two hundred years ago contributed no such leaders of national thought as were even then emerging from English rectories. FOOTNOTES: [1] W. L. Mathieson: _Scotland and the Union_ (Glasgow, 1905), p. 225.