THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION.'
DR. HAY FLEMING is a very learned and laborious student of Scottish history, and he has done some excellent work in this department. But we do not think that this volume of lectures delivered at Princetown Theological Seminary will add greatly to his reputation. His aim is to show the deplorable condition of the Pre-Reformation clergy in Scotland,—their depravity, ignorance, and credulity, and the wholesale corruption in the bestowing of benefices. He then expounds the positive causes of the Reformation, and the consequences which followed. In this latter part of his task we think he is fairly successful. He writes with proper enthusiasm of the great men like Patrick Hamilton, Wishart, and Knox; and he makes out something of a case, not in disproof, but in extenuation of the charge that the Reformers destroyed the old ecclesiastical fabrics. No doubt the English invaders and the lawless Border clans had some- thing to do with it, and the poverty of the people had more. Wind and weather in Scotland will soon unroof a building if there are no funds for repairs. But in the first half of the book we find very little of the reasonable temper of the historian. Dr. Hay Fleming draws the Roman Church in lines of unrelieved blackness, and fills his chapters with a hotch-potch of instances of clerical depravity from all countries. It would not be difficult to show that there was another side, and the whole tone of the argument is not such as to inspire the reader with much confidence in the author's fair-mindedness. The style is that of the old- fashioned Protestant histories of our youth, a style which we are surprised to find an historian of Dr. Hay Fleming's eminence reviving. He laughs at the credulity of those who believed the innocent legends in the Aberdeen Breviary; but what of the persecution of witches by the Reformed • The Beforsnation in Scotland Causes, Characteristic", Consequences. By David Hay Fleming, LL.D. London : Hodder and Stoughton. Dos. 6d. net.]
Church in seventeenth-century Scotland P The great and abiding work of the Scottish Reformers is not really exalted by painting them as infallible angels of light, and their eppcnenta as abandoned children of darkness.
Previous page
