The Cause of the Scottish Martyrs
James Dodson
[For the American Christian Expositor (March 1, 1832). Vol. 1, no. 11, p. 432-436.]
The nature of this cause will be best understood from a specification of some of those leading principles for which they contended and died. We say not that those we are to state were reduced to a written, systematic form, or expressed and arranged exactly as we have done them. But we do say, that they are principles which entered essentially into their testimony for truth, which were received as binding, considered as axiomatical, and constantly acted upon. These we can do little more than state, having left ourselves no time to descant on them, either in the way of explanation or defense.
1. Salvation by the free sovereign grace of God, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, was the first of these principles. This is what was held by Luther and his friends of the reformation, as “the article of a standing or falling church.” It may be regarded as having produced the original revolt from the church of Rome. It was afterward incorporated with all the sentiments and discourses of the reformers; and when it once comes to be forgotten, or denied, or perverted, or concealed, whatever external observances may remain, the spirit of the reformation has fled, and you may write upon it “Ichabod,” the glory is departed.
2. Another of these principles was the sole authority of the holy scriptures in matters of religion, and the right of all men to peruse them. Traditions and the priesthood were discarded as grounds of faith, and the Bible alone elevated to this rank. Wearing the seal of divine attestation, it was reckoned worthy of implicit and universal reverence. It was deemed a maxim of self-evident truth, that that which all are to believe, according to which all are to act, and by which all are to be judged, ought to be in the full and undisputed possession of all. Ignorant and worthless priests might have reasons of their own for shutting out the light of revelation, skulking like moles and bats into hiding places, and preferring the darkness or the twilight; but the reformers had no such instinctive abhorrence of light, resembling rather “the bird of heaven, which meets the full unclouded blaze, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires.”
3. The right of men to form their religious opinions from the word of God, flowed as a native result from the foregoing; such a right being clearly implied in the supreme authority of revelation, in the impossibility of controlling the human mind by anything but scriptural evidence or rational argumentation, and in the accountable nature of man.
4. In opposition to the tyrannical claims and blasphemous assumptions of popes and kings, they held the sole headship of Christ over the church, and its consequent independence of all political control. The prerogatives of Zion’s King, they viewed as peculiar and inalienable; no mortal, without the most daring impiety, could venture to invade them. Christ was given to be head over all things to the church, and it was not for man to rob him of his glory, or share with him his honors. The church they regarded as a free, independent society, having no head but one; and therefore all who presumed in this capacity, to regulate her order, interfere with her management, prescribe her forms of worship, or lay restrictions on her office-bearers, were looked upon as wicked intruders, ungodly and tyrannical usurpers. HEAD OF THE CHURCH, whether inscribed on the papal crown, or the regal diadem, they held to be one of “the names of blasphemy.”
5. In connection with this they maintained another principle: The Headship of Christ over the nations, and the consequent duty of conducting civil affairs on religious principles, and subordinating them to the interests of the church. The restrictions of the mediatorial power to the church, is comparatively a modern doctrine, the natural growth of a desire to harmonize religious sentiments with political interest. Our reformers knew nothing of it. They had not learned those ingenious criticisms by which some of their descendants have been able to explain such passages as the following in conformity with a restricted dominion:—“Thou hast put ALL THINGS in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, HE LEFT NOTHING THAT IS NOT PUT UNDER HIM.” Esteeming Christ as “Prince of the kings of the earth,” and “Governor among the nations;” they showed no wish to blot out, or even to tarnish the lustre of his glorious title, KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.” Nor had they any knowledge of the boasted discovery of modern times, that things civil and religious should be kept entirely separate—that they have nothing to do with each other; and that church and state ought to be completely and forever divorced. They considered that things might be connected without being confounded. They knew that civil and religious matters were united by many a powerful tie; they viewed them as inseparable in point of fact; and finding them recognized in the same scriptures, tending to promote the glory of the same Lord, obligatory on the same persons, and a certain connection between them predicted as characteristic of the millennial state of the world, when “kings shall be nursing fathers, and queens nursing mothers” to the church, when “the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ,” and when the most common affairs of life and articles of use shall be “holiness to the Lord;” finding these things to be so, they scrupled not to recognize the connection both in their deeds and public standards. It is only when the church is degraded to a mere instrument of state policy that the union in question is objectionable: not when the civil affairs of the world are so ordered as to advance the interests of Christ’s kingdom.
6. The reformers also held the right of resisting such civil rulers as usurp the prerogatives of Christ, oppress the church, tyrannize over the people, and lend the weight of their authority and example to the subversion of equity. A principle consonant alike to reason and scripture, which none but the most slavish and interested parasites of the “powers that be” will venture to deny, and which afterwards received the high sanction of the nation at large, when the persecuting house of Stuart was expelled, and the prince of Orange called to the throne.
7. Alongst with these they held, in fine, the importance and obligation of public Covenanting as a means of professing, advancing, and maintaining the cause of reformation; and of comforting, and fortifying the church in troublous times. This principle our reformers viewed as involved in the relation subsisting between God and his people, countenanced by the spirit of other religious institutions and duties, recognized in prophecies regarding New Testament times, and expressly required by holy writ. Hence those famous vows entered into from time to time by the nation and the church, more especially the national covenant of Scotland, and the solemn league and covenant of the three kingdoms, now fallen into such unmerited neglect.
These are some of the leading principles of the Scottish reformers, from which an idea may easily be formed of the nature of that cause for which they loved not their lives unto the death; and, without being called upon implicitly to approve of all that they said, or wrote, or did, an approval of the general maxims which they held, as based on sound scriptural views of the relations and duties of man, must be implied in a professed respect for their memory.
The above enumeration may serve to rescue them from the charge of having busied themselves about trifles, and squandered their lives on matters of small moment. Some of the points, indeed, for which they contended, may seem of little importance to many in the present day, and far from justifying the sacrifices they made to secure them. But they durst not dispense with any part of divine truth; their consciences would not allow them, for the sake of purchasing exemption from pain, or even of saving their lives, to acknowledge as true what they knew to be false; nor did they deem it safe to make compliances in one department which might have the effect of inducing their persecutors to demand them in another, in which they could not be so safely granted. If they believed the Presbyterian form of church government to be agreeable to the word of God, how could they abjure it, as they were required to do, and tamely submit to a lordly prelacy? If they esteemed kneeling at the sacrament to have its origin in the idolatrous reverence claimed for the host by the church of Rome, and calculated to give countenance to that impious claim, how could they but lift up their voice against it? If the form in which they were required to pray for the king—for they never refused to pray for the blessing of God on his person, or for salvation to his soul; was such as to imply an acknowledgment of his blasphemous and tyrannical encroachments on the prerogatives of Christ, and the liberties of the church, were they not fully justified in refusing to comply? Yet these are things which the men of an easy generation are apt to reckon of no moment. Our ancestors thought otherwise; and they well knew what they were about. The line of conduct they chose to pursue, had been duly weighed. While the attempts that were made to ensnare their consciences in such matters, show the unfeeling and wanton tyranny of the times, their resistance evinces a strength of principle and correctness of thinking worthy of the highest esteem.