§ 90. The Scotch Covenants and the Scotch Kirk.
Literature.
The Covenants are added to some Scotch editions of the Westminster Standards. The Solemn League and Covenant was often separately printed.
James Aikman: An Historical Account of Covenanting in Scotland, from the first Band in Mearns, 1556, to the Signature of the Grand National Covenant, 1638. Edinburgh, 1848 (82 pp.).
National Covenants or politico-religious agreements for the maintenance and defense of certain principles and privileges are a peculiar and prominent feature in the history of the Kirk of Scotland. They were copied from Jewish precedents. [1326] They originated in critical periods, when the sacred rights and convictions of the people were in imminent danger, and when the religious and national sentiments were inseparably blended. They are not properly confessions of faith, but closely connected with them, and must therefore be noticed here. They are solemn pledges to defend the doctrines and polity of the Reformed Kirk against all hostile attempts from within or from without, and to die rather than surrender. [1327]
The earlier Covenants were safeguards against popery, the later against episcopacy. In the ecclesiastical history of Scotland since the Reformation we may distinguish three main periods: the period of anti-popery (1560 to 1590), the period of anti-prelacy (until 1690), and the period of anti-patronage (until 1875).
The first Covenants were made for mutual protection against the Romanists by a number of Protestant nobles and gentlemen, at Mearns, 1556, at Edinburgh, Dec. 3, 1557, at Perth, Dec. 31, 1559, before the Reformed Kirk was properly organized.
THE NATIONAL COVENANT, 1581 AND 1638.
Far more important is the 'National Covenant,' or the 'Second Scotch Confession,' also called the 'King's Confession,' and the 'Negative Confession.' It was drawn up in English and Latin by the Rev. John Craig, a noble, well-educated, and devoted man, a colleague of Knox and author of two Catechisms, who, after an eventful and romantic career, died in 1600, in the eighty-eight year of his life. It is a solemn indorsement of the Confession of Faith of 1560, with the strongest possible protest against 'all kind of papistry in general and particular heads,' especially against the 'usurped tyranny of the Roman Antichrist upon the Scriptures of God, upon the Kirk, the civil magistrate, and consciences of men; all his tyrannous laws made upon indifferent things, against our Christian liberty; . . . his five bastard sacraments, with all his rites, ceremonies, and false doctrine added to the ministration of the true sacraments without the Word of God; his cruel judgment against infants departing without the sacrament; [1328] his absolute necessity of baptism; his blasphemous opinion of transubstantiation; his devilish mass; his blasphemous priesthood; his profane sacrifice for sins of the dead and the quick; . . . his worldly monarchy and wicked hierarchy; his three solemn vows; his erroneous and bloody decrees made at Trent, with all the subscribers and approvers of that cruel and bloody band conjured against the Kirk of God.' No other Protestant Confession is so fiercely anti-popish.
This Covenant was subscribed by King James VI., his household, and a number of nobles and ministers, at Edinburgh, Jan. 28, 1581 (or 1580, old style [1329] ); then by the Assembly and by persons of all ranks in March, 1581; again in 1590, together with a 'General Band for Maintenance of the True Religion and the King's Person or Estate;' it was solemnly renewed, with additions, in 1638 and 1639; ratified by an Act of Parliament in 1640, and signed by King Charles II., in exile, at Spey, June 23, 1650, and again when he was crowned at Scone, in Scotland, Jan. 1, 1651. [1330]
The renewal of the Covenant in 1638, which is more particularly called the National Covenant, marks the Second Reformation. It includes the old Covenant of 1581, the Acts of Parliament condemning popery, and a protest against the government of the Kirk by bishops, all those measures of King Charles I. which 'do sensibly tend to the re-establishment of the Popish religion and tyranny, and to the subversion and ruin of the true Reformed religion, and of our liberties, laws, and estates.' The additions were prepared by Alexander Henderson and Johnston of Warriston, to meet a great crisis. [1331]
The introduction of the semi-presbyterian mongrel episcopacy of James was comparatively harmless. But when his son Charles and his spiritual adviser, Archbishop Laud, in criminal ignorance or contempt of public feeling, attempted to force upon the Scots the royal supremacy, with a Romanizing hierarchy and liturgy, it produced a revolution and civil war which extended to England, and culminated in the temporary triumph of Puritanism. Macaulay traces the freedom of England to this 'act of insane bigotry.' In 1633 Laud displayed the most elaborate pomp of ceremonial worship in Holyrood Chapel to impress the descendants of John Knox! His new service-book differed from the English in a marked tendency to popery. When it was first introduced, July 23, 1637, in the cathedral church of St. Giles, in the presence of the privy council, the two archbishops of Scotland, several bishops, and the city magistrates, a poor old woman, named Jenny Geddes, confounding 'colic' and 'collect,' indignantly exclaimed, 'Villain, dost thou say mass at my lug,' and hurled her famous stool at the head of the unfortunate dean, who read 'the black, popish, and superstitious book.' Instantly all was uproar and confusion all over the city. The people shouted through the streets, 'A pope, a pope! Antichrist! The sword of the Lord and Gideon!' The unpremeditated riot extended into a popular revolution. The result was the overthrow of the artificial scheme which bigotry and tyranny had concocted. [1332]
The renewal of the Covenant took place in Greyfriars' Church, in Edinburgh, the 28th of February, 1638, and was a most solemn and extraordinary scene. No less than sixty thousand people flocked to the city from all parts of the kingdom. The dense crowd which filled the church and adjoining graveyard listened with breathless attention to the prayers, the addresses, and the reading of the Covenant. The aged Earl of Sutherland first signed his name with trembling hand upon the parchment roll. Name followed name in swift succession. 'Some wept aloud; some burst into a shout of exultation; some, after their names, added the words, till death; and some, opening a vein, subscribed with their own warm blood. As the space became filled, they wrote their names in a contracted form, limiting them at last to the initial letters, till not a spot remained on which another letter could be inscribed. . . . Never, except among God's peculiar people, the Jews, did any national transaction equal in moral and religious sublimity that which was displayed by Scotland on the great day of her sacred National Covenant.' [1333]
Similar scenes were repeated throughout the Northern Kingdom. Noblemen and gentlemen carried copies of the Covenant in their pockets and portmanteaus, soliciting subscriptions. Women sat in church day and night, from Friday till Sunday, to receive the communion with it. To refuse signature seemed to some denial of Christianity itself. [1334]