The first thing the Reformation did for us was to emancipate our conscience. This was the point where our liberties began. The Church of Rome, putting away the Bible and presenting in its room a pretended infallible order of men, bound on the conscience whatever she was pleased to decree as truth. This was slavery. The Reformation reversed this process. Putting aside this order of pretended infallibilities, it restored the nation to the Word of God, telling every man that he was free to read it and free to interpret it. This was emancipation. Conscience awoke. Scotland was now free in soul.
We repeat it: Our liberties began with the emancipation of our conscience; and conscience next to God is the greatest moral power in the universe. Feudalism still reigned in Scotland. The nation as regarded its political and social rights was still held in thraldom; but here, in the innermost and deepest recesses of the nation, in it’s soul was a realized freedom. That freedom, like a corn of wheat fallen into the earth, could not remain alone. It was a little leaven that must necessarily leaven the whole mass.
Well, conscience was free; but a free conscience demanded an organization through which to act. As faith without works is dead, so conscience without the power of embodying itself in acts of spiritual freedom, is dead also. Shut up within itself, it is doomed to be smothered amid the ashes of its extinguished aspirations and claims. The organization which conscience, now free in Scotland, found was a Presbyterian Kirk. The men whose conscience the Word of God had liberated came together. We are an emancipated, a spiritual society, said they. We are Christ’s congregation, God’s church. Outside and all around slavery still weighed upon the people, but here, at the heart of the nation was a little kingdom of liberty, and from that centre liberty worked outwards over the entire domain of national life. The Kirk was the inner citadel of the nations liberties. It’s rise was the sure token and sign that the days of absolute monarchs and of infallible hierarchs were numbered and finished in Scotland. [J.A. Wylie]
And as the Covenanter martry said as he ascended the scaffold, “Ah the covenants, the covenants, they shall yet be Scotland’s reviving.” Tis ll we get those back in our churches, in our nations, in our lives, that remains true. As Scotland is no longer the sweet land of liberty of those days. The days were hard, they dangerous even, yet liberty flowed much freer amongst the kirk of Scotland than in our our safe and peacful by comparison days. Liberty in the soul is the only true liberty. Scotland no longer has that, nor anywhere else.
