Protestantism in Scotland - James Aitken Wylie

archbishop, bishops, and a competent number of
the ministry, should have the strength of a law."
James VI had made a beginning, Charles I with
the help of his primate purposed to make an end. It
is necessary, in order to a true insight into the
struggle that followed, to bear in mind what we
have already explained, that with their form of
Church government were bound up the civil rights
of the Scots, since, owing to the recent redemption
of the nation from feudalism, the conservator of its
liberties was not the Parliament as in England, but
the Kirk.
The Scottish bishops, in a letter to Laud,
expressed a wish for a nearer conformity with the
Church of England, adding for the primate's
satisfaction that their countrymen shared with them
in this wish. If they really believed what they now
affirmed, they were grievously mistaken. The
flower of their ministers banished, and their places
filled by men who possessed neither learning nor
piety, the. Scottish people cherished mournfully the
memory of former times, and only the more
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