for parity. "There ought to be an equality": presbyter and Bishop were once all one. But if the demand for parity was first heard south of the Tweed, it was soon echoed back by Scotland; and thenceforth the English Puritan was often looking northward. In Scotland much had been left unsettled. From August, 1561, to May, 1568, Mary Stewart is there; Rizzio and Darnley, Bothwell and Moray, Lethington and Knox, are on the stage; and we hold our breath while the tragedy is played. We forget the background of unsolved questions and uncertain law. Is the one lawful religion the Catholic or the Protestant? Are there two established Churches, or is one Church established and another endowed? There is an interim: or rather, an armed truce. The Queen had not confirmed the statutes of 1560, though mass-mongers were occasionally imprisoned. Nothing decisive had been done in the matter of tithes and kirk-lands and advowsons. The Protestant ministers and superintendents were receiving small stipends which were charged upon the ecclesiastical revenues; but the Bishops and Abbots, some of whom were Protestant ministers, had not been ousted from their temporalities or their seats in Parliament, and, as vacancies occurred, the bishoprics were conferred upon new occupants, some of whom were Catholics. The General Assembly might meet twice a year; but John Hamilton still went to Parliament as a reverend father in God and primate of Scotland. If Mary had succeeded in reestablishing Catholicism, we should probably have said that it had never been disestablished. And when she had been deposed and a Parliament held in her son's name had acknowledged the Knoxian Church to be "the immaculate spouse of Christ," much was still unsettled. What was to be done with the bishoprics and abbacies and with the revenues and seats in Parliament that were involved therewith? Grave questions of civil and ecclesiastical polity were open, and a large mass of wealth went a-begging or illustrated the beatitude of possession. Then in the seventies we on the one hand see an attempt to Anglicise the Church by giving it Bishops, who will sit in Parliament and be somewhat more prelatic than were Knox's superintendents, and on the other hand we hear a swelling cry for parity.
To many a Scot prelacy will always suggest another word of evil sound: to wit, Erastianism. The link is Anglican. The name of the professor of medicine at Heidelberg-it was Thomas Liiber, or in Greek Erastus-won a fame or infamy in Britain that has been denied to it elsewhere. And in some sort this is fair, for it was an English Puritan who called him into the field; and after his death his manuscript book was brought to England and there for the first time printed. His Prince, the Elector Palatine Frederick III, was introducing into his dominions, in the place of the Lutheranism which had prevailed there, the theology that flowed from Zurich and Geneva; images were being destroyed and altars were giving place to tables. This, as Elizabeth knew when the Thirty Nine Articles lay before her, was a very serious change; it
