We hesitate not, with Carlyle, to name the Reformation under Knox as the great era in Scottish history, as the one glorious event which gave life to the nation. Thence resulted freedom, activity, purity of morals, science, national and individual greatness. Previous to this event Scotland possessed only a rough, tumultuous physical life; her politics--dissensions and executions; her religion--a puerile superstition;--her literature--ballads and monkish legends; her joy--hunting, fighting, and drinking! But the Reformation breathed into her the breath of a spiritual existence. Her national prosperity dates from that era. Thence proceeded faith and order, education, industry, and wealth. "It was not a smooth business; but it was welcome surely, and cheap at that price, had it been far rougher. On the whole, cheap at any price, as life is. The people began to _live_; they needed first of all to _do that_, at what cost and costs soever. Scottish literature and thought, Scotch industry, James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns. I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart's core of every one of these persons and phenomena; I find that, without the Reformation, they would not have been. Or what of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland became that of England, of New England. A tumult in the High Church of Edinburgh spread into a universal battle and struggle over all these realms; and there came out of it, after fifty years' struggling, what we all call 'the Glorious Revolution,' a Habeas Corpus Act, Free Parliaments, and much else."