Protestantism in Scotland - James Aitken Wylie

Parliament against the royal forces. While the
controversy is finding its way to an issue through
the bloody fields of the civil war, we must turn for
a little space to a more peaceful scene.
These civil convulsions, which owed their
origin in so large a degree to the innovations and
ceremonies of Laud, led many in England to ask
whether the National Church had been placed
under the best form of government, and whether
something more simple than the lordly and
complicated regime enacted by Elizabeth might not
be more conservative of the purity of the Church
and the liberties of the nation? Might it not, they
said, be better to complete our Reformation more
on the model of the other Protestant Churches of
Christendom? The Scots, too, in their negotiations
with them in 1640 and 1641, had represented to
them how much a "nearer conformity" in worship
and discipline would tend to cement the union
between the two kingdoms. If the Reformation had
brought the two nations together, a yet greater
accord in ecclesiastical matters would make their
union still stronger, and more lasting. There was
322