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"means, that none taketh care of our misery, and that it is "better for to provide there our impotent members which "God hath given us; to oppose to you in plain controversy, "than to see you hereafter (as ye have done afore) steal from "us our houses, and ourselves in the meantime to perish "and die for want of the same: We have thought good, "therefore, ere we enter with you in the conflict, to warn "you, in the name of the great God, by this public writing, "affixed at your gates where ye now dwell, that ye remove "forth of our said hospitals, betwixt this and the feast of "Whitsunday next, so that we, the only lawful proprietors "thereof, may enter thereinto, and afterward enjoy the com"modities of the church, which ye have hereunto wrongfully "holden from us; certifying you, if ye fail, we will, at the "said term, in whole number (with the help of God, and as"sistance of His saints in earth, of whose ready support we "doubt not), enter and take possession of our said patrimony, "and eject you utterly forth of the same.

"Let him therefore that before hath stolen, steal no more; "but rather let him work with his hands that he may be "helpful to the poor.

"From all cities, towns and villages of Scotland.
"January 1st, 1558."

The friars were an old discord. Over all Christendom the priests had scorned, disowned them. There was no poetry in their order. And be it acknowledged or not, there is a conservatism in poetry which stands stead for strength and truth both.

Dean Milman's description of these Mendicants, as they

were found over France, Spain, Italy, as they were seen over all Europe, is a Europe, is a comment on this Scottish proclamation :

"There was absolutely nothing to limit the number of the monks, still less that of the friars in their Four Orders, especially the disciples of S. Dominic and S. Francis. No one was too poor or too low to become a privileged and sacred Mendicant. No qualification was necessary but piety, or its semblance, and that might too easily be imitated. While these Orders in the Universities boasted of the most erudite and subtle and all-accomplished of the school-men, they could not disdain or altogether reject those who, in the spirit of at least one of their founders, maintained the superiority of holy ignorance. Instead of being amazed that the friars swarmed in such hordes over Europe, it is rather wonderful that the whole abject and wretched peasantry, rather than be trampled to the earth, or maddened to Flaggelantism, Jacquerie, or Communism, did not all turn able-bodied religious Beggars; so the strong English sense of Wickliffe designates the great mass of the lower Franciscans in England. The Orders themselves, as was natural, when they became wealthy and powerful, must have repressed rather than encouraged the enrolment of such persons; instead of prompting to the utmost, they must have made it a distinction, a difficulty, a privilege, to be allowed to enter upon the enjoyments of their comparatively easy, roving, not by all accounts too severe life. To the serf, inured to the scanty fare, and not unfrequent famine, the rude toil and miserable lodging; and to the peasant, with his skin hard to callousness, and his weather

beaten frame,—the fast, the maceration, even the flaggelation of the friar, if really religious (and to the religious these self-inflicted miseries were not without their gratification), must have been no very rigorous exchange; while the freedom to the serf, the power of wandering from the soil to which he was bound down, the being his own property, not that of another, must have been a strong temptation."

They had proved themselves brave in times of great peril; but they were despised, the Mendicants, and most of all by the churchmen. And when, in the fifteenth century, a Franciscan friar became pope, and honoured and privileged his beloved order, all the church had resented his bull.

Delegates had gone from Paris to see with their own eyes the leaden Papal seal attached to the incredible document. Ostentatiously, scornfully, they had professed to disbelieve. And when disbelief became impossible, they had defied the pope. On all the convent gates in Paris, a proclamation, by the king's command, forbade priests and curates to permit the friars to preach or hear confession in their churches.

And that was a hundred years ago. Scotland had borne long, had been patient and reverential. But the end must come. After their long patience, the people rose with bitterness proportioned to their patience. "The beginning of the end" was now.

It was but a few months after this that Walter Mill suffered martyrdom. Yet the risk was already small to the lieges who offered these insults to the friars. At Edinburgh, four weeks earlier, the first Scottish Covenant was

subscribed by the powerful lords Argyle, Glencairn, Morton, and Lorn, pledging themselves open enemies to "superstition, abomination and idolatry." And already the baronial castles sheltered here and there throughout the land, as trusted and revered chaplains, preachers convicted of heresy, who expounded to chief and vassals their own Reformed faith.

The Abbey on the White Cart was no convent of friars. It had never affected poverty. Its wealth and far-reaching authority were its uncloaked glory and temptation. Still, in the ancient gateway, the eleemosynar stood, with the free, gracious bounty of Mother-Church, for all her poor children. The corn which the Clugniac monks cultivated on their fair fertile strath, was corn for "the widows and the orphans, and all the poor so visited by the hand of God, as could not work." They had never asked, but always given alms. We do not read that this bold proclamation touched the Clugniensian house.

When its day came, the angry people would find enough to plead against the jewelled mitre and ring, and the fine vestments, and the carved images. Proud wealth would be no less a charge to bear than proud poverty. The pathetic plea on the gates of the friars-" none taketh care of our misery"-bore perhaps a reassurance of its own to the abbot of Paisley and his monks, with their hundred and twelve bolls of meal, set against it as the yearly dole.

Yet the first sacriligious attack is made on the ecclesiastical retreats, and there are but two little years more for the abbot Claude to reign.

A LETTER TO MARY OF GUISE.

I OUGHT to bear the burthen of my rank.

George Elliot.

IN May-time, a year later, the Reformers write to Mary of Guise, the perplexed queen Regent, who rules in her daughter's name. Not as to the "flock of friars" threatening defiant, but with some tone of pleading, “God move your princely heart."

"Because we did not utterly despair of the queen's "favour," writes John Knox, "we caused to form a letter to "her Majesty, as followeth :—

"To the Queen's Majesty Regent,

"All humble obedience and duty promised.

"As heretofore with hazard of our lives, and yet with "willing hearts, we have served the authority of Scotland, "and your Majesty now Regent in this realm, in service to "our bodies dangerous and painful; so now, with most "dolorous minds, we are constrained by unjust tyranny pur

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