Protestantism in Scotland - James Aitken Wylie

Making a virtue of necessity, the new dignitaries, it
must be confessed, wore their honors with
commendable humility; and this state of matters,
which conjoined in the same Church lawn robes
and Geneva cloaks, mitred apostles and plain
presbyters, continued until 1618, when yet another
stage of this affair was reached.
Seated on the throne of England, the courtly
divines and the famed statesmen of the southern
kingdom bowing before him, and offering
continual increase to his "wisdom," his
"scholarship," and his "theological erudition,"
though inwardly they must have felt no little
disgust at that curious mixture of pertness,
pedantry, and profanity that made up James VI --
with so much to please him, we say, one would
have thought that the monarch would have left in
peace the little kingdom from which he had come,
and permitted its sturdy plainspoken theologians to
go their own way. So far from this, he was more
intent than ever on consummating the
transformation of the northern Church. He
purposed a visit to his native land,[1] having, as he
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