The people of England, as his Eminence Cardinal Manning is fond of saying, never abandoned the Catholic faith; it was torn from them by violence. The people of Ireland were made of sterner stuff; they clung to the faith, successfully resisting the pitiless persecutions to which they were subjected. But the people of Scotland joyfully received the new gospel and took it into their hearts with zealous ardor. In England the sovereign imposed the new religion upon the people, and they submitted to it; in Ireland the whole authority of the civil power, exercised in the most cruel forms, was exhausted in vain attempts to compel the apostasy of the people. In Scotland the people apostatized by their own motion and the Reformation there was essentially a popular movement. The late Archbishop Spalding, in his _History of the Protestant Reformation_, says that the Reformation in Scotland spread from low to high; that it “worked its way up from the people, through the aid of the nobles, through political combinations and civil commotions, to the foot of the throne itself, and, after having gained the supreme civil power and deposed first the queen-regent and then the queen, it dictated its own terms to the new regent and the new sovereign; and thus, by the strong arm, it firmly established itself on the ruins of the old religion of the country.” The true explanation of the fact that the Reformation in Scotland was a popular movement is to be found in the words of a Protestant writer[14] quoted by Archbishop Spalding: “Scotland, from her local situation, had been less exposed to disturbance from the encroaching ambition, vexatious exactions, and fulminating anathemas of the Vatican court” than other countries; that is to say, the authority of the Holy See for a long time prior to the Reformation had been scarcely felt in Scotland; the wise and wholesome provisions of the canon law had fallen into disuse; the civil power had thrust its own creatures into benefices and bishoprics; and the people had become disgusted by “the scandalous lives, ostentatious pomp, and occasional exactions of the unworthy men who had been thus unlawfully foisted into the bishoprics and abbeys.” Footnote 14: Thomas McCrie, minister of the Gospel, Edinburgh.