Bygone Church Life in Scotland

The Reformation in Scotland was of a character more sweeping and destructive than is easy of realisation by an Englishman at the present day. In the southern kingdom much that as symbolism was valuable, and as art was admirable, was wantonly given over to the hammer or the flames at that time; but one learns to be thankful for the many works of glory and of beauty that were nevertheless left to us, when one turns one's eyes to the northern realm. Carried away by the violence of the most extreme men, the Reformation there became a veritable revolution, in which everything that spoke of earlier times was condemned, and was treated as if it were a sacrament of Satan; and the attempt was seriously made to render "the King's Daughter" yet more "glorious within" by stripping her of every shred of her "clothing of wrought gold." Religion, that it might be more truly spiritual, was to be sent forth into the world absolutely naked of every external sign or form. The furniture of the churches was torn out, and sold or burnt; the statues of the saints were of course broken up; but the organs were also pulled down, and even the carved stalls and screens of the cathedrals were declared to be "idolatrous." Nothing illustrates more strongly, and more curiously, the indiscriminate frenzy of destruction which for a time took possession of the people, than the fact that monuments and tombstones were even condemned as superstitious and sinful. Only a comparatively few of all the many memorials of Scottish worthies of earlier centuries escaped demolition, and this not wrought by the mere violence of a turbulent mob, but by formal resolutions of the General Assembly in the seventeenth century. In 1640 the Kirk Session of Aberdeen ordered the removal of a portrait of "Reid of Pitfoddels" from the vestry of the church, on the ground of its "smelling somewhat of Popery"; and in 1649 a similar authority at Kilmarnock condemned "a graven image" on the tomb of Lord Boyd. This action was taken, no doubt, in obedience to the summons issued by the General Assembly in 1640 to the presbyteries to complete the removal and destruction of all monuments.

Such being the state of feeling in Scotland, we are not surprised to find that the sign of our salvation was found even more obnoxious by the leaders of the movement there than it was among their brethren in England. With the latter, when the interiors of the churches were swept bare of crosses, the passion for destruction was stayed so far as that emblem was concerned; on spire and gable, on tomb and tablet, in churchyard and market-place, the stone crosses were for the most part left; and even when, under the Puritan regime of the following century, an attempt was made to pull down these by Parliamentary authority, the popular feeling was so far from being strongly in its favour, that the work was by no means done thoroughly and completely.

In spite of all that was intended, and even attempted, Scotland has, nevertheless, retained some examples of the ancient crosses, which are well worthy of our attention. In remote places the sacred sign has been spared in scattered instances for more appreciative days; in more populous centres the cross has been preserved in a secularised form, its symbol gone, and with it its meaning; but amid the wreck of so much, we must receive gratefully the fragments that remain.

The strictly church crosses, those that once stood on altar or on rood-screen, that led the stately procession, or cast their benign shadows athwart the graves of the faithful--these were all swept away. The Synod of Fife held, at the time of the Reformation, "visitations" from time to time, to search out and remove "crosier staffes" and "divers crosses," as well as other ancient furniture, from the parish churches; and in so doing, doubtless, it was but acting as the other Synods of the country did. The old crosses in the churchyards, many of them of great age, and probably most interesting pieces of sculpture, were almost all destroyed. The market crosses, however, have in several cases survived, although the national emblem, the unicorn, has usurped the place of the Christian symbol, the cross; and the attack upon mortuary memorials was not altogether successful; in fact, it was hardly to be expected that any people would consent to the entire obliteration of the grave-stones of their ancestors.