Protestantism in Scotland - James Aitken Wylie

the Parliament (1584) overturned the independence
of the Church. It enacted that no ecclesiastical
Assembly should meet without the king's leave;
that no one should decline the judgment of the king
and Privy Council on any matter whatever, under
peril of treason, and that all ministers should
acknowledge the bishops as their ecclesiastical
superiors. These decrees were termed the Black
Acts.
Their effect was to lay at the feet of the king
that whole machinery of ecclesiastical courts
which, as matters then stood, was the only organ of
public sentiment, and the only bulwark of the
nation's liberties. The General Assembly could not
meet unless the king willed, and thus he held in his
hands the whole power of the Church. This was in
violation of repeated Acts of Parliament, which had
vested the Church with the power of convoking
and dissolving her Assemblies, without which her
liberties were an illusion.
The Reformed Church of Scotland was lying in
what seemed ruin, when it was lifted up by an
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