In England and Ireland the influence and authority of the popes had not been thus disregarded; the church there had been kept tolerably pure, and the affection of the people had not been alienated by the faults and crimes of prelates and priests. In Ireland to-day, after three hundred and thirty-six years of Protestant assaults upon the faith, Catholic truth remains as firmly as ever rooted in the hearts and exemplified in the lives of the people. In England the effects of the retention of Catholic tradition are still to be seen: some of the great fasts and festivals of the church are observed as legal holidays; marriages are not solemnized at a later hour than that which formerly was fixed for the celebration of the nuptial Mass; and respectable Protestants, belonging to the Nonconformist societies as well as to the Established Church, abstain from marrying or giving in marriage during Lent.[15] But in Scotland the “blessed Reformation” swept away all these “rags of Popery”; it had full course to run and be glorified; and it made such thorough work that, for example, only within the past few years has even the most modest recognition of Christmas day as a festival been permitted. The Scottish Reformers, having burned the religious houses, stripped and disfigured the churches, and driven the priests from the land, set up the Bible as their fetich, and ordained that it should be worshipped in conformity with the precepts embodied in certain creeds and confessions of faith which they framed to suit themselves. For three hundred years the Scottish Presbyterians have been the most ardent Protestants in the world, and have boasted most loudly of their devotion to, and their implicit faith in, the written Word of God. This, and this alone, contained in itself all that was necessary for salvation; and it were better that a man should never have been born rather than that he should take away from, or add one word to, what was written in this book. God had not on the day of Pentecost called into being, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a body commissioned “to teach all whatsoever he had commanded until the consummation of the world”; he had simply caused a book to be written. “In the books of the Old and New Testaments,” they declared in their “Standards,” “the revelation of God and the declaration of his will are committed wholly unto writing ... and they are all given by inspiration of God to be the only rule of faith and life.” This has been the nominal faith of the Scotch Presbyterians ever since the dawn of the Reformation, and it is their nominal faith to-day. It has long been difficult, however, for the admirers of Scotch Presbyterianism to reconcile the fact that they were at once “the most Bible-loving and whiskey-loving people on the face of the earth”; that their sexual immorality was threefold that of the English, and tenfold that of the Catholic Irish; and that marriage among them had become divested of every form of religious sanction.