Produced by Susan Skinner, Jordan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber's Note: This text uses utf-8 (unicode) file encoding. If you don't see 10 characters in the next line: œ ē ū α β γ ε λ ο ς make sure your text reader's "character set" or "file encoding" is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the latin-1 version of the file instead.] THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION [Illustration: [Handwritten: yrs always cordially Alex F. Mitchell]] THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics (Being the Baird Lecture for 1899) BY THE LATE ALEXANDER F. MITCHELL, D.D., LL.D. EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY EDITED BY D. HAY FLEMING, LL.D. _WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR BY JAMES CHRISTIE, D.D._ WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCC PREFACE. Few men have shown more indomitable application to an arduous duty, amid physical weakness and bodily pain, than did the author of these Lectures in their preparation and revision. In the MS. there are a goodly number of additions and minute alterations in his own hand--some of them very tremulous, some of them in ink, some of them in pencil. He intended to revise them still more carefully ere they were published; but expressed the desire that, if he were not spared to do so, I would see them through the press. The Master, whom he served so long and so faithfully, having released him from the work he loved so well, and from the suffering he so patiently endured, the final revision has devolved upon me. On the suggestion of Professor Robertson the book has been arranged in chapters. The sixth lecture having temporarily gone amissing before its delivery, Dr Mitchell prepared a rescension of it. The original and the rescension are now combined in chapter x. He intended to devote an extra lecture to Alesius, and another to Andrew Melville, but unfortunately was unable. The chapter on Alesius is therefore taken from two of his class-lectures, some of the longer extracts being thrown into appendices, and a few passages being slightly compressed. This is at once the fullest and the best account of Alesius that has yet been published. The facts concerning Melville in chapter x. are supplemented to a small extent in the paper quoted in Appendix A.