The king had been compelled, by the force of public opinion in England, to abandon the Union. But with the object to which he devoted the rest of his life even those Englishmen who doubted the wisdom of his policy were inclined to sympathise. The Scottish Reformation, unlike that of England, had been the work of the aristocracy, in opposition to the Crown. It had, at the same time, been a deeply religious movement; and these two forces, working together, had developed, as the distinguishing features of the Reformed Church of Scotland, a denial of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and the assertion of the spiritual independence of the Church. Sir James Mackintosh has said that the peculiar theories of Berkeley were a touch-stone of metaphysical sagacity, meaning, apparently, by this phrase, that those who were without it could not understand the meaning or the tendency of those theories. In like manner, spiritual independence is the touch-stone of a capacity for understanding the history of the Scottish Church. The words “spiritual independence” expressed for Scotsmen what was, on the one hand, a part of their constitutional law, set forth in the statutes of the realm, and on the other hand, an article of faith, received by the people as an essential part of their religion, involving the principle of loyalty to the great founder of the Christian faith, as the only head of the Church. They believed--and for this belief thousands laid down their lives--that there were two authorities, the one civil and the other spiritual. Both were based upon a divine sanction; and each was to be obeyed within its own sphere. The civil magistrate was to bear rule and to be obeyed in civil affairs; but if he attempted to interfere with the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church, he was to be resisted to the death. This principle of spiritual independence, which, neither at the Union of the Crowns, nor at the Union of the Kingdoms, nor during that memorable crisis which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, rent asunder the Church of Scotland, Englishmen were able to understand, was taught in the first Confession of Faith drawn up by the Scottish Reformers, and laid before the Estates in 1560.[68] After some years, when the long controversy between the king and the Church had begun, the two jurisdictions, civil and ecclesiastical, were still more carefully defined.[69]