done for those of the community in more fortunate circumstances was done more by the efforts of a few noble-minded individuals than by any corporate action of Church or State. There is not among all its codes of canons anything approaching to the clear ringing utterances of our First Book of Discipline concerning the necessity and advantages of education.[5] [Sidenote: Lethargy of the Medieval Church.] Not only had the life powers of the medieval church been exhausted and decay set in, but corruption, positive and gross corruption, had reached an alarming height. There were the indolence and neglect of duty which wealth too often brings in its train; the covert secularising of that wealth, just as in the old Celtic church, by various devices, to get it into the hands of unqualified men and minors; luxury, avarice, oppression, simony, shameless pluralities, and crass ignorance; and above all that celibate system, which nothing would persuade them honestly to abandon, though it had proved to be a yoke they could not bear, and was producing only too generally results humiliating and disastrous to themselves and to all who came under their influence. The proof of this does not rest merely or even mainly on the statements of Knox, Alesius, and Spottiswood, nor on the representations of Lindsay and the Wedderburns. The fact, as both the late Dr David Laing and Dr Joseph Robertson have shown, and the late Bishop Forbes has sorrowfully acknowledged, is confessed and deplored in the canons of their councils, in the Acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in the writings of their own best men.[6] The harsh measures to which men themselves so vulnerable had recourse to maintain their position, the relentless cruelties they perpetrated on men of unblemished character, amiable disposition, deep-seated conviction and thorough Christian earnestness, could not fail in the end to turn the tide against them, and arouse feelings of indignation which on any favourable opportunity would induce the nation to sweep them away. [Sidenote: Corruption of the Medieval Church.]