John Knox And The Scottish Reformation
3
JOHN KNOX AND THE
SCOTTISH REFORMATION
G. N. M. Collins
It would be difficult to find, in the whole range of Scottish history, a more controversial figure than John Knox. The estimates formed of him are so widely divergent that, at one extreme, he is reckoned an inspired prophet, oracular in pronouncement, infallible in judgment; and, at the other, an unscrupulous self-seeker, a boorish demagogue, whose malign influence upon the Scottish Church is even yet, after four centuries, bedevilling the ecumenical movement. Even his old church of St. Giles speaks of him with divided voice. Dr. Charles Warr describes him as “violent, aggressive and domineering, coarse in apprehension and devoid of aesthetic appreciation.” Worse still, according to Warr, “there ran in his complex character a yellow streak of enervating cowardice.” But Dr. Harry Whitley regards him as “the haunting ghost of our past betrayals and present disloyalties and complacencies. . . . He is the uneasy conscience of modern Scotland.” And Elizabeth Whitley, whose graceful pen has recently given us such a sympathetic picture of the Reformer, regards him as “ ‘a burning and a shining light’; a preacher whose voice, serving the Word of God, became the trumpet call to which his own people rallied.”
There are qualities in Knox, however, that even his fiercest detractors feel bound to acknowledge; and, on the whole, he emerges from the fires of criticism with scarcely “the smell of fire” upon his coat. Andrew Lang, certainly no admirer of Knox, admits in the end that he was “a great man, a disinterested man, in his regard for the poor a truly Christian man; as a shepherd of Calvinistic souls a man fervent and considerate; of pure life; in friendship loyal; by jealousy untainted; in private life genial and amiable.” And, as for the alleged “yellow streak” in him, the Regent Morton, notwithstanding that he came, more than once, under the stinging lash of the Reformer’s reproof—or perhaps because of it—spoke over his open grave by the grey walls of St. Giles, the oft-quoted eulogium. “There lies he who never feared nor flattered flesh.”
Knox in Exile
The picture of Knox’s early life is not particularly clear. He was born at Giffordsgate, near Haddington, which was then one of the strongest centers of the Roman Catholic Church in the Lowlands of Scotland. His father, William Knox, was a farmer. Of his mother, a Sinclair by name, we know nothing. The year 1505 has been commonly accepted as the date of his birth, but several notable historians argue for a later date, 1514, or perhaps 1515. He was educated at St. Andrews and, possibly, at Glasgow, and the date of his ordination to the priesthood is given as 1531. But it is not until 1546 that he emerges in the clear light of history. At that time he was serving as tutor to the sons of two East Lothian gentlemen of Protestant sympathies; and he had become attached to George Wishart who had spent some time in the vicinity, preaching the Reformed faith which he had learned while on the Continent. In all probability, Wishart was Knox’s spiritual father, and the attachment between them was extremely strong. But East Lothian was a dangerous place for people of Protestant sympathies, for it was in close proximity to St. Andrews, the Roman Catholic citadel in Scotland, and the hierarchy had already shown, by putting Patrick Hamilton to a martyr’s death, their complete intolerance of reform. So John Knox comes clearly into the story of the Scottish Church as Wishart’s bodyguard, carrying a two-handed sword. But it was with the sword of the Spirit that Knox was to do his best work for the cause of Christ.
His call to leadership came in dramatic circumstances. After the assassination of the notoriously profligate Cardinal Beaton, the Castle of St. Andrews, where he had dwelt in voluptuous luxury and where he had callously watched George Wishart perish in the flames, passed into the hands of certain Scottish nobles who were sympathetic to the Reformation cause and who hoped, not only that Scottish Protestants would rally to them, but also that help from England against the French would be speedily forthcoming. Knox cast in his lot with them, bringing with him his schoolboy charges whose parents had to flee from home in order to avoid arrest for their Protestant leanings. While he continued his tutoring in the Castle, Knox also gave lectures on the Gospel of John—that Gospel in the fourteenth chapter of which, as he said, he “first cast his anchor.” His outstanding gifts as expositor and apologist attracted the attention of the reforming party and they urged him to become their minister. But, dreading “lest he should run where God had not called him,” Knox declined until, one day, John Rough in the course of an address on the election of ministers, pounced suddenly upon him, calling him, in the name of the congregation, to assume pastoral charge of them. The congregation signified their assent, but the astounded Knox burst into tears and fled to his room.
Deeming the call to be from God, however, he entered upon his duties with a sense of vocation that never left him. From the beginning he used great plainness of speech. With him there could be no half-measures. Laodiceanism was foreign to his nature. “Others,” they said, “sned (lopped) the branches of the Papistry; he strikes at the root.” His friends feared for his safety. What had Hamilton and Wishart said of Rome and her doctrines in comparison with this bold Reformer? If the Church had slain those men, would she spare Knox?
Knox’s ministry to the St. Andrews garrison was terminated by the arrival of the French fleet in July 1547. The Castle walls were breached by the attackers, and the garrison were forced to surrender. For nineteen weary months thereafter Knox toiled as a galley-slave, and to the end of his life he suffered from the effects of that terrible experience.
But the shaping of God’s hand is discernible in the happenings of that period, for they led to Knox’s coming to England after his release, by English intervention, in 1549, and to his time of service with reforming brethren south of the Border. The reformed Church of England was already divided into two sections, one of which desired to hold on to the old ritual and ceremony of pre-Reformation times, while the other wished to extend the purification of the Church much further than anything that had, as yet, been achieved. In this Puritan section, Knox became an acknowledged leader, and it was due to his influence that a rubric was inserted in the English Communion Office expressly disallowing the worship of the consecrated elements in the Lord’s Supper. For he was the “runagate Scot” to whom Dean Weston refers as having taken away “the adoration or worshipping of Christ in the sacrament . . . so much prevailed that one man’s authority at that time.”
Ecclesiastical preferment might have been his, but he declined the offers made, partly from disagreement with the policy of Reform in England, and partly because he felt, as he put it, that “the time would not be long that England would give me bread.” In 1553, with many of the Reformed persuasion, he fled to the Continent from the persecution which had broken out under Mary Tudor on her succession to the throne. Some of his detractors charged him with cowardice on this account, and, for a time, he tended to reproach himself for having fled. But when he asks, “Why did I flee?” he answers, “Assuredly, I cannot tell; but one thing I am sure; the fear of death was not the chief cause of my fleeing.”
Today, we can see the hand of God very clearly in this period of exile, for it was thus that Knox made contact, not only with the reforming movement in Germany, but—what was much more important for the Scottish Reformation—with the Reformed Church of Geneva.
It was Knox’s reputation as a Puritan that led to his being called to take charge of the English refugees at Frankfurt. But the peace of the congregation was soon disturbed by the arrival of a new party of English refugees who adhered to the less reformed party. The ensuing trouble led to Knox’s leaving Frankfurt and removing to Geneva. There, the English congregation to which he ministered was of the Puritan persuasion, and they continued to be his principal pastoral interest for the remainder of his exile. But even after his return to Scotland, his link with English Puritanism continued strong and, although he never returned to minister in England, he still had many contacts with English Protestantism through which his influence operated.
Knox had interrupted his ministry in Geneva for a few months in 1555–56 in order to visit Scotland, where the Queen-Regent was following, for political reasons, a more conciliatory policy towards the Reformed party. The result was that a spirit of compromise began to manifest itself among the nobility, insomuch, indeed, that they resumed attending the Mass, believing that reform would come gradually without any major trouble. Knox thought otherwise, and denounced this temporizing policy, calling upon those who were following it to break with a practice that would inevitably retard the reforming movement. Wherever he went, and the opportunity presented itself, he ministered the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in its New Testament simplicity.
His crusade bore fruit. In 1557, many of the Scottish nobility signed what is known as the First Covenant, pledging themselves to “maintain, set forward, and advance the most blessed Word of God and His congregation” and to resist tyranny at the risk of their very lives.
When, two years later, Knox returned finally to Scotland and assumed the leadership of the Reformed party, “the time to favour Sion, yea, the set time,” was come. The quality of his leadership was immediately tested, and he came through the test triumphantly. “I assure you,” wrote Randolph to Cecil; “the voice of that one man is able in one hour to put more life in us than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.” He had his objective, and incessantly he stormed heaven with his importunate cries that he might attain it. Scotland was the burden of his prayer. And the Scotland he desired from the Lord, and for the Lord, was a land liberated spiritually from the corrupting thraldom of Rome and politically from her ensnaring alliance with Papist France.
Knox and the Church of Scotland
Without attempting to follow out, even in the briefest outline the story of the Scottish Reformation, let us consider the contribution made by Knox to the well-being of the Scottish Church and nation.
1. He recalled the Scottish Church to its original allegiance—to Christ the Church’s Head, not to the Bishop of Rome. The attempts by Augustine of Canterbury, a millennium earlier to bring the Celtic Church into communion with Rome had completely failed. The Celtic Church clung tenaciously to her independence, and despite the deterioration which set in at, and subsequent to, the Synod of Whitby in 664, it was not until Malcolm Canmore married his English Princess, Margaret, in 1068 or 1070, that the Scottish Church surrendered her independence entirely to Rome. Margaret, whose great ambition had been to become a nun, came to believe that she had been called by God to serve Him in the Court instead of in the cloister, and her supreme aim now was to bring her husband’s realm into the Roman fold. She built and endowed churches, introduced vestments and the use of the crucifix, and brought in a number of clergy from south of the Border to help with the Romanizing of the Kirk. The victory of the Church of Rome in Scotland was achieved by the enforcement of royal authority.
But Knox’s First Book of Discipline broke the tyranny thus established. In it, Christ alone was recognized as Head of the Church, and the principle was established, in accordance with the scriptural authority adduced, that “it appertaineth to the people, and to every several congregation, to elect their own minister.”
2. Knox recalled the church to the teaching of Holy Scripture, as the supreme authority and the final court of appeal. This estimate of the Holy Scriptures was, indeed, characteristic of all the Reformers and of their precursors in the evangelical succession. “When Luther turned his back on Rome,” writes Dr. J. A. Wylie, “he turned his face toward the Bible.” But this statement is more accurate in inverted form; for it was when Luther turned his face to the Bible that he turned his back on Rome. It was to the teaching of the Bible that he appealed in his famous Theses.
It has to be admitted, of course, that Luther’s doctrine of inspiration lacked the consistent clarity that we find in the pronouncements of Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox on the same subject. But the strength of his challenge to the papal chair lay in his conviction of the supreme authority of Holy Scripture. “The Scriptures,” he declares, “although they were written by men are not from men but from God.” And again, “We must make a great difference between God’s Word and the word of man. A man’s word is a little sound that flies into the air and soon vanishes; but the Word of God is greater than heaven and earth, yea, greater than death and hell, for it forms part of the power of God, and endures everlastingly; we should therefore diligently study God’s Word, and know, and assuredly believe that God Himself speaks unto us.”
It was this tremendous conviction that expressed itself in his memorable words at the Diet of Worms, when to the demand that he should recant, he replied: “Having been conquered by the Scriptures referred to, and my conscience taken captive by the Word of God, I cannot and will not revoke anything, for it is neither safe nor right to act against one’s conscience. Here I stand; I can do no other. So help me God.”
Calvinism, it is true, became the dominant strain in Scottish Protestantism, but the fact that there were other strains ought not to be forgotten. Lollardism had affected Scotland before John Knox was born. The form of Protestantism for which Patrick Hamilton died was mainly Lutheran. And the faith of George Wishart was probably Zwinglian. But whatever difference in emphases may be traced in these systems, they were at one in making the Word of God supreme in all matters of faith and doctrine.
It fell to John Calvin, who succeeded Zwingli in the leadership of the Reformed Church in Switzerland, to provide the first systematic statement of revealed theology from the Reformed viewpoint, viz. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. There, in the clearest possible terms, he claims the submission of all believers to the doctrine of Holy Scripture as the Divinely inspired, and therefore infallible, Word of God. “The Scriptures,” he declares, “are the only records in which God has been pleased to consign His truth to perpetual remembrance,” and therefore “the full authority which they ought to possess with the faithful is not recognized, unless they are believed to have come from heaven, as directly as if God had been heard giving utterance to them.”
Knox’s association with Calvin during the Scot’s years of exile in Geneva had its good effect upon Scotland in the years that followed. And yet Knox’s appeal was never to the authority of Calvin, but to the authority to which Calvin himself appealed, the Holy Scriptures. Referring to the reforming activities of Knox and his Scottish associates, John Row the historian declares, “They took not their pattern from any Kirk in the world; no, not from Geneva itself; but laying God’s Word before them, they made reformation according thereunto, both in doctrine first, and then in discipline.”
Their own anxiety to be thoroughly biblical in all their theological interpretations comes out in their preface to the Scots Confession, where they request, “If any man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugnant to God’s Holy Word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity’s sake, to admonish us of the same in writing; and we, upon our honour and fidelity, do promise him satisfaction from the Holy Scriptures, or due reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss.”
Their broad principle of interpretation was finely expressed by Knox in one of his memorable interviews with Queen Mary of Scotland. The discussion had got on to theological lines. “Ye interpret the Scriptures in one manner, and other interpret in another. Who am I to believe? and who shall judge?” said the Queen.
“Madam,” replied Knox, “ye shall believe God, that plainly speaketh in His Word, and further than the Word teacheth you ye shall believe neither the one nor the other. The Word of God is plain in itself; and if there appears any obscurity in one place, the Holy Ghost, which is never contrarious to himself, explains the same more clearly in other places.”
Modern ecumenical leaders who, like the elusive Erasmus, have no stomach for “assertions,” and yet who would like to serve themselves heirs of the Reformers, have been saying of late that the view of inspiration favored by Calvin and his school was not the high doctrine of plenary, verbal inspiration which later Reformers taught. And this they support by the miserable subterfuge of isolating certain comments from their context and attaching to certain words a meaning that was utterly foreign to the theological vocabulary of four centuries ago. Professor John Murray, in his Calvin on Scripture and Divine Sovereignty, says well in this connection (and his words are as closely applicable to Knox as they are to Calvin himself), “In Calvin we have a mass of perspicuous statement and of lengthened argument to the effect that Scripture is impregnable and inviolable, and it would be the resort of desperation to take a few random comments, wrench them from the total effect of Calvin’s teaching, and build upon them a thesis which would run counter to his own repeated assertions respecting the inviolable character of Scripture as the oracles of God and as having nothing human mixed with it.”
It was foreign to the usage of these men to “present the dictates of the Holy Ghost as a series of debatable propositions”—to quote Professor B. B. Warfield—and even Brunner, who claims for the theology of his own school that it “returns to the inner spirit of the reformation,” admits that Calvin “in the dogmatic formulation of the authority of the Bible, was already entirely under the sway of the orthodox view of literal divine inspiration”—an admission which alone suffices to put the exponents of the Crisis theology out of the true Reformed succession.
That then was the ground which Knox and his associates took in reforming the Scottish Church. Nothing could be admitted to the doctrine and worship of the Church for which clear sanction could not be adduced from Holy Scriptures. Everything had to be “according to the pattern” which God Himself had given in His Word.
Another part of the contribution that Knox made to the Scottish Reformation was that he called the Church to the Great Commission of “preaching the Gospel to every creature.” The recall was urgently needed, for the preaching of the Word had long been neglected. Where, indeed, it was continued the practice was frowned upon by the hierarchy. The case of Thomas Forret, the Vicar of Dollar, is indicative of the spirit of the times. Hearing that Forret was preaching to his people every Lord’s Day, Bishop Crichton of Dunkeld remonstrated with him over his excessive zeal on the ground that if he continued his practice the people might begin to think that the Bishops ought to preach also! But, in a conciliatory way, the Bishop advised him to preach only occasionally, when he found “any good Epistle or any good Gospel”! But when Forret sought the Bishop’s guidance as to which were the good, and which the bad, Epistles and Gospels, Crichton raised his hands, saying, “I thank God that I never knew what the Old and New Testament was . . . I will know nothing but my portuise and my pontifical.”
The prevalency of Protestant preaching, and the interest awakened among the people thereby, did indeed prompt some of the clergy to preach also, but often with ludicrous results. Many of them were so ignorant that they could scarcely read, and even Gavin Dunbar, Bishop of Glasgow, when he attempted to preach at Ayr, to counteract the influence of George Wishart, found that the effort was beyond him. After stammering a few sentences, he apologized to the people that he was not able to do better, adding. “But have us still for your bishop, and we shall provide better for the next time.”
But better provision was already being made for Scotland, and God honored the faithful preaching of His Word by adding unto the Church daily those who were being saved.
Knox’s leadership was largely influential also in recalling the Church, and particularly its office-bearers, to the purity of life that is requisite in those who bear the vessels of the Lord. Probably in no country affected by the Reformation had the corruption of the Church touched such depths as it did in Scotland. One has only to read Dr. Hay Fleming’s carefully documented booklet The Church from which the Reformation Delivered Us to learn how thoroughly bad things were. The celibate clergy had their concubines everywhere, and their numerous offspring were a sore drain on the Church’s treasury. And reformation of this scandalous evil could not be expected with David Beaton—the “carnal Cardinal”—as Knox with full justification calls him, at the head of the hierarchy. “Priests and doos mak’ foul houses,” said the common people in one of the by-words which arose from the evils of the time. And immorality was accompanied by overmastering avarice. Everything was available for money, and nothing without.
Knox’s message to Scotland was also a call to the duties implied in the priesthood of all believers upon which he and the other Reformers laid such stress. A man had a responsibility for his own soul that no priest or presbyter could take over from him. Heads of households had responsibilities for the religious instruction and upbringing of their charges. Writing to the Commons, Knox declares, “Ye are in your own houses Bishops and Kings . . . let there be worship of God morning and evening . . . and let no day slip over without some comfort received of the Word of God.” As Elizabeth Whitley so neatly shows in her Plain Mr. Knox, although Robert Burns was no admirer of Knox, it is Knox’s work that he is really extolling in The Cottar’s Saturday Night where he depicts “the priest-like father,” though a peasant, leading his family in the worship of God.
Knox and Scotland
It was Knox, too, who, under God, delivered Scotland from the despotism of the ruling house. This rugged Scot was a democrat to the very core of his being. He has been severely criticized for his attitude to the Sovereign powers of his time, and he had to stand a trial for treason in his native land; this, at the instigation of Queen Mary. But Knox’s pronouncements with regard to the Throne will bear investigation—even his Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. To understand the Blast, one has to begin by translating the title into present-day speech, in the process of which it loses its offensiveness. For “monstrous” simply means “unnatural,” and “regiment” means “rule”; so that what Knox is protesting against is “the unnatural rule of women.”
Knox took a more extreme attitude in this connection than did any of the Reformers. But it has to be remembered that he, more than any, had suffered from the “monstrous regiment of women.” Mary of Guise, the Scottish Queen-Regent, had been his chief opponent in his work of reforming the Church. Mary Tudor had stained her hands with martyr blood, and had sent multitudes of her best subjects into exile; Knox among them. And Mary of Scotland had come to her Scottish throne with the avowed intention of destroying the Reformed Church in Scotland, no matter what that might cost. And yet, however “monstrous” he may regard the “regiment” of women to be, he is no rebel against it where it exists, so long as it is restricted to the recognized sphere of civil power and government, as witness his letter to Elizabeth of England in July 1559: “It appertaineth to you therefore to ground the justice of your authority, not upon that law which from year to year doth change, but upon the eternal providence of Him Who, contrary to nature, and without your deserving, hath thus exalted your head. If thus, in God’s presence, ye humble yourself, as in my heart I glorify God for that rest granted to His afflicted flock within England, under you, a weak instrument, so will I with tongue and pen justify the same in Deborah, that blessed Mother in Israel.” Knox expressed himself similarly in one of his interviews with Mary of Scotland, praying that she might be “as blessed within the commonwealth of Scotland as ever Deborah was in the commonwealth of Israel.”
In those interviews Mary Stuart and John Knox were representatives of principles that were diametrically opposed. Mary believed in the Divine Right of kings, even to the extent of holding, as some one has put it, that “kings had a Divine right to govern wrong.” Her son, James VI and I, in his treatise The True Law of Free Monarchies, expresses the view, which doubtless his mother had held before him, that the king is free to do as he pleases with his subjects, who, he says, “are not permitted to make any resistance but by flight, as we may see by the example of brute beasts, and unreasonable creatures, among the vipers.” In his Basilicon Doron he further maintains “that the office of a king is partly civil and partly ecclesiastical,” and that “a principal part of his function consists in ruling the Church.”
Now, as against this, Knox held that “all power is founded on a compact expressed, or understood, between the rulers and the ruled, and no one has a right to govern save in accordance with the will of the people and the law of God.”
That Knox should propagate such views was, in Mary’s judgment, the very quintessence of disloyalty. “Think you,” she demanded, “that subjects, having the power, may resist their princes?”
“If princes exceed their power, Madam,” came the reply, “no doubt they may be resisted even by power. For no greater honour is to be given to kings than God has commanded to be given to father and mother. But the father may be struck with a frenzy, in which he would slay his children. Now, Madam, if the children arise, join together, apprehend the father, take the sword from him, bind his hands, and keep him in prison till the frenzy is over, think you, Madam, that the children do any wrong? Even so, Madam, it is with princes that would murder the children of God that are subject to them.”
A clear assertion of his democratic rights comes out in Knox’s answer to the Queen when she remonstrated with him over a public reference he had made to her plans for re-marriage. “What are ye within this commonwealth?” she demanded with disdain. “A subject born within the same” was the prompt answer, “And albeit I neither be Earl, Lord, nor Baron within it, yet has God made me, (however abject that ever I be in your eyes) a profitable member within the same.”
“Modern democracy came into being in that answer,” is Principal T. M. Lindsay’s comment on the Reformer’s rejoinder. We indeed give John Knox less than his due if we fail to recognize him, not only as, in the main, the liberator of the Scottish people from the thraldom of the Papal hierarchy, but also as the champion of their democratic rights. “Before God, there is no respect of persons,” declares the First Book of Discipline, and “that equality before God,” says Professor Croft Dickenson, “branching out from a sturdy independence well-rooted in the past, gave to the Scot that ‘divine right of manhood’ which has sometimes been mistaken for pride.”
What Knox and his associates did for the causes of education and poor relief is by no means the measure of what they planned to do. If the schools and colleges for which they planned in the First Book of Discipline did not immediately arise, it was due, not to lack of zeal on their part, but solely to the greed of the nobles who made unlawful inroads upon the Church’s patrimony for their own enrichment. To the same cause must be attributed, in the main, the failure of the poor-relief plans. Professor A. F. Mitchell rightly declares that “the history of the world, the history of the Christian Church, has few passages more noble than this, where these poor ministers, not yet assured of decent provision for their own maintenance, boldly undertake the patronage of the peasantry, and say that they would rather suffer themselves than ask that teinds should be exacted from those who had been so long ground down.”
But if the plans of the Reformers in these departments did not reach immediate fulfillment, they at least provided the ideal to which they themselves unyieldingly struggled, and which was brought to realization in better days, when the leaven of Reformed teaching had more fully permeated the nation.
Conclusion
That Scotland has been slow in recognizing her indebtedness to her great Reformer was foreseen by Knox himself. “What I have been to my country,” he says, “albeit this unthankful age will not know, yet the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth.” Grudgingly, the intervening ages have borne their witness to his greatness. To be frank about his failing is only to make the picture more lifelike. But let us judge him in the light of the age to which he belonged, and of the situation in which he served. No sycophant he, this rugged son of the Lothians. Of the arts of diplomacy he was completely innocent; the shifts of compromise his soul hated. “Men delighting to swim betwixt two waters,” he writes, “have often complained upon my severity; fearing, as it seemed, that the same should trouble the quietness of brethren. But I do fear that that which men term lenity and dulceness doth bring upon themselves and others, more fearful destruction than yet hath ensued the vehemency of any preacher within this realm.” But when the critics have had their say, and the necessary adjustments have been made, the ultimate result comes out in some such assessment as Robert Barbour made some eighty years ago: “if . . . religion be allowed to have been hitherto the largest factor in our national life, and this little country, in virtue of it, be admitted to have given lessons to the great world; then we owe this, under God, first of all to one man, and that man was JOHN KNOX.”
In his latter days Knox had the heartbreak of seeing much of his work marred by men with whom self-interest came before principle. But his faith never faltered. “Whatsoever shall become of us, and of our mortal carcasses,” he declared, “I doubt not but that this cause, in despite of Satan, shall prevail in the realm of Scotland. For as it is the eternal truth of the eternal God, so shall it once, and for all, prevail, howsoever for a time it be impugned.”
In Scotland we have, of late, been celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the Scottish Reformation; but, in the final summary of events, nothing has appeared to give rise to high optimism regarding the future of the Reformed witness among us. To garnish the tombs of the prophets is not enough. Writing to John Fenwick amidst the struggles of the Second Reformation, Samuel Rutherford said, “It is true, in great part, what ye write of this Kirk, that the letter of religion only is Reformed, and scarce that. I do not believe our Lord will build His Zion in this land on this skin of Reformation.”
And that is our conviction today. God will build His Zion on nothing less than the eternal verities of His infallible Word. Let the words of Scotland’s Reformer ring in our ears to admonish and inspire us wherever we may be exercising our ministry: “As it is the eternal truth of the eternal God, so shall it once, and for all, prevail, howsoever for a time it be impugned.”