Who was the real John Knox? And why does it matter today?
To answer this question, The From Rome Blog republishes, with permission the Essay by Frank Dougan, on Edwin Muir’s Knox: an exposé of the person and life of the “Reformer” of the Catholic Church in Scotland in the 16th century.
Edwin Muir’s, John Knox.
by Frank Dougan
I found a copy of Edwin Muir’s book ( John Knox ) at The Andersonian Library within Strathclyde University where I was studying Scottish History.
I tried to obtain this book from City of Glasgow Libraries to no avail.
First published by Lowe and Brydone Ltd. London in 1929 “The Life and Letters Series No. 12.” ( John Knox: Portrait of a Calvinist. ) I find much of Muir’s work sympathetic to Knox, Robert Burns is quoted on the opening pages as writing; ‘Orthodox ! orthodox, wha believe in John Knox, Let me sound an alarm to your conscience’.
Edwin Muir wrote his preface;
‘For this biography I have gone chiefly to the writings of Knox himself, and to the usual contemporary records. The Reverend Dr. M’ Crie’s and Professor Hume Brown’s Lives have also been of help, but my particular gratitude is due to Andrew Lang’s ( John Knox and the Reformation ) the one biography I have found which attempts to be critical.
My reading of Knox’s life disagrees with that of most of his other biographers since M’Crie. It is on the whole supported, however, by the eighteenth century estimate represented by David Hume and Burns.
If I show bias it is not, at any rate, theological bias.
The object of this book is somewhat different from that of the biographies which I have mentioned: it is to give a critical account of a representative Calvinist and Puritan.
The temper in which I have attempted this may perhaps best be described as realistic; I have attempted to tell in contemporary terms how a typical Calvinist and Puritan lived, felt and thought.
With the historical figure I am not particularly concerned’.
As one may note the date of publication was similar to D. H. Lawrence’ banned book and at the height of Catholic persecution in Scotland at the hands of John White the Church of Scotland’s sectarian and racist moderator.
I will relate to a few examples from Muir he writes about Knox;
‘Between 1540 and 1543 we find him engaged as an ecclesiastical notary, and up to March of 1543 he was certainly in the Catholic Church.
Of the life he led during this time his fellow reformers tell us not a word, but the Catholics maintain that he was notorious for his immorality, and even assert that he was guilty of committing adultery with his step-mother ( his father’s second wife ). Such is the early Knox as history and scandal disclose him.
Archibald Hamilton claimed that Knox was distinguished as a young man by his licentiousness; that he had always three whores at his heels; and that moreover, he committed adultery with his step-mother.
There is finally the question whether or not Knox had any hand in the Rizzio murder. The evidence that he had is once more contained in one letter from Randolph to Cecil. In this letter Randolph gives a list of the accomplices of the murderers, and another marked ‘ all at the death of Davy and privy thereunto’.
At the bottom of this is written ‘ John Knox, John Craig, preachers’. It has been adduced as a confirmation of Knox’s guilt that he fled from Edinburgh on the same day as the murderers’.
Muir describes what was a new development in the life of Knox;
‘ At Berwick, too, one of those friendships with women began, which were to play such a great part in Knox’s life. In his congregation was a certain “ Mrs. Bowes”, the wife of Richard Bowes of Norham Castle, a fort about six miles up the Tweed.
She was the mother of five sons and ten daughters.
Her husband was not in favour of the new doctrines; her family, too, were in the main cold.
Her fifth daughter, Marjory, (13) came with her to hear the sermon, and presently the preacher ( Knox ) and the young girl became engaged.
She ( Mrs. Bowes ) was probably about fifty when Knox became intimate with her, till then Knox had thought that no creature had ever been as tempted as he; the beloved mother ( of fifteen children ) pursued him wherever he went with vivid descriptions of her fleshly weaknesses’.
I know I have related to these subjects on earlier passages by other writers though I feel that I must introduce Muir’s work and perhaps draw some conclusions as to why the Church of Scotland’s appointed fault finder Harry Reid takes pain to advise readers of (Outside Verdict) not to read Edwin Muir’s ( John Knox ) biography.
Harry Reid was a director with the Sunday Herald’s ‘Book Review’.
Strangely one has to search for this book as there doesn’t seem to be many copies around Glasgow libraries perhaps the publishers should re-print and let the world see why the former editor of the Glasgow based broadsheet the Herald advises censorship.
Edwin Muir writes about letters from Knox to Mrs. Bowes and vice-versa:
‘ When he was deprived of the comfort of her ‘ corporal presence’ Mrs Bowes fulfilled the conditions to perfection. She was older than he, she was already his prospective mother-in-law. His pride would have recoiled from an intimacy in which he received reassurance and gave none. He could luxuriate in the voluptuous relief which her weakness provided’.
The Protestant Church, that Knox founded, chained people by the neck and castigated them in the most horrendous manner for sexual discrepancies…. yet Scotland’s greatest hero as Harry Reid calls him….
Muir continues his examination of Knox’s correspondence:
‘ My wicked heart loveth the self, and cannot refrain from vain imaginations’.
Writing to Mrs. Bowes that his heart was ‘ infected with foul lusts’ she was beset by the recondite sins of Sodom and Gomorra, was a strange repository for Knox’s imperative confessions.
Fear was to become an instrument in his hands, an instrument which he rarely laid aside, and which sometimes got beyond his control.
He threatened when he could make good his threats; he threatened still more wildly when he could not. He threatened his friends when they disagreed with him; he threatened his enemies when they could afford to laugh at him. He threatened Mary ( Tudor ) of England when he was flying from her; he threatened Elizabeth when he hoped to get a favour out of her. Where insensibility was shown in his threatenings, he took refuge in hatred.
Three women, Mary of England, Mary of Guise, and Mary Stuart, were unimpressed by his lightenings; he revenged himself by slander and prophecies of plagues where he could not by civil wars’.
The more I research the life of John Knox I continuously have to reassure myself that Protestants and Presbyterians really believe that this man was a Christian?
Muir goes on:
‘ Ever since he had met Wishart nine years before Knox had been in the habit of prophesying. He prophesied on grave and on trifling occasions; he prophesied reasonably and unreasonably; he prophesied above all wherever he could not get his own way; he prophesied against Sir Robert Bowes because Sir Robert would not accept him as a suitor for 13 year old Marjory’s hand.
The prophecies arose to wild heights of fantasy; in ideal conditions he contemplated an orderly and exhaustive slaughter of the Catholics. Then the prophet had become the man; now all the passions, all the envies, the hatreds, the cruelties of the man were triumphantly subsumed in the prophet. These passions, envies hatreds, cruelties, by the same transmutation became the passions, envies, hatred, cruelties of God.
His search for God and for comfort, his perplexity over why he had fled ( from England ) his rage of resentment tipped him sheer into abysses of self-deception touched with Sadism which no other reformer had plumbed.
At their most grandiose his prophecies about the future of England were almost like the ravings of a madman.
Edwin Muir was an academic, novelist, poet, Norton Professor of English at Harvard University, he had also been Director of the British Council at Prague in 1946 and Rome in 1949, he has a long list of distinguished works to his credit with major book publishers which can be viewed on the web.
His book on John Knox should be read by anyone wishing to investigate Reformation history particularly the mis-doings of Knox’s philosophies.
Professor Muir wrote:
‘ The instrument ( Knox ) had cursed Mary Tudor ( the Queen of England ) and had publicly advised her assassination, Calvin and Bullinger, however, had refused to back him’.
He narrates about Knox at Frankfurt then moves to 1556 Knox had been in Scotland to marry Marjory for the purpose of concealing his affair with her mother Sir Robert Bowes was hunting for them.
Muir goes on:
‘ He arrived in Geneva with Mrs. Knox, Mrs. Bowes a servant, and a pupil called Patrick. He was now married to Marjory, and accordingly we hear nothing more of her, except that she bore him two children, ‘ and then she died’. The same silence henceforth covers the irrepressible Mrs. Bowes ?’
It seemed that Knox had found a safe haven in Geneva with his wife and her mother for a while:
‘ Yet, in spite of all this, in spite of his power in the congregation and the solace of Mrs. Bowes and Mrs Knox’s company, he still longed for the comfort which only other men’s wives, it seemed, could give him in full measure.
‘Ye wrote that your desire is earnest to see me’ he said in a letter to Mrs. Locke in London, a few months after he had settled in Geneva with his family.
‘ Dear sister, ( he addressed Marjory the same in his letter to her ) if I could express the thirst and languor which I have for your presence, I shall appear to pass measure. Yea, I weep and rejoice in remembrance of you; but that would evanish by the comfort of your presence, which I assure you is so dear to evanish by the comfort of your presence’.
What was the comfort which he longed for so earnestly ? It was the same which he had found once in Mrs. Bowes’ friendship, a friendship which, it was clear, however, no longer quite satisfied his needs. His urgent necessity during these years, in fact, seems to have been to surround himself with mothers. He secured Mrs. Bowes already; to secure another a trifling relaxation of principle would surely be justifiable’.
Unfortunately for the millions who have been indoctrinated into Presbyterianism who have had to suffer severe consequences over hundreds of years for any relaxation of principles, as this was a luxury only for their great leader and his disciples.
Muir continues:
‘Mrs. Locke came to Geneva in the following May, in spite of the opposition of her ‘ head’ who was left behind in London. She appeared with her son Harry, her daughter Anne, and a maid called Katherine. The adventure began disastrously. Anne died a few days after arriving’.
Knox was about to write his book ( The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women ).
Professor Muir quotes him:
‘ How abominable before God is the empire and rule of a wicked woman, yea, of a traitoress and bastard’.
In this passage Knox is referring to Mary Tudor the Queen of England obviously he saw her as illegitimate. Actually Mary Tudor’s mother was Catherine of Aragon the first queen of Henry V111, she had previously been married to Henry’s elder brother, Prince Arthur, in 1501 ( the marriage allegedly being unconsummated ) and on his death in 1502 she was betrothed to Henry and married him on his accession to the throne in 1509.
Of the six children she bore only Mary survived, desirous of a male heir Henry divorced Catherine contrary to the law of the land regardless if it was also the law of the Church.
Perhaps Knox is referring to Henry and Catherine’s marriage as illegitimate because she had been married to his brother which was also illegal then and the only legitimate heir to the English throne was Mary Stuart whose grand-mother was Henry’s sister.
Professor Muir describes some of Knox’s views on women from his book:
‘ Knox began to look about him anxiously for all those proofs of woman’s infamy which the exordium promised. Man, he found, drawing on his knowledge, was strong and discreet. Woman, on the other hand , was mad and phrenetic. Was it reasonable that the passionate should rule the calm and the strong? Women, moreover, had been known to die of sudden joy, to commit suicide, to betray their country to strangers, and to be so avid of domination that they murdered their husbands and children. Knox reasoned ( about women ) ‘ where there was no head eminent above the rest, but that the eyes were in the hands, the tongue and mouth beneath the belly, and the ears in the feet’.
These are the writings of John Knox if a modern day psychiatrist were to examine these works and not know who the writer was, he could easily be seduced into thinking perhaps this was Adolph Hitler’s ‘struggle’.
Edwin Muir continues his narrative:
‘ Knox’s attitude to woman, it will be seen, sometimes changed with extraordinary rapidity. On Mary Tudor’s accession to the throne he had begged God to illuminate her heart with pregnant gifts of the Holy Ghost and to repress the pride of those who would rebel; after his flight his prayer was to send a Jehu to cut off her days.
When Mary of Guise was behaving with great toleration to the Protestants in Scotland she had been ‘ a princess honourable, endowed with wisdom and graces singularly,’ but now that he had heard about the pasquil she, like all other queens was a monster.
His mother had perhaps died when he was young; he had ‘ known’ his stepmother.
Two mothers were at present waiting for him in Geneva. Mrs. Bowes and Mrs. Locke ( and his child bride ) were obviously not real mothers. Mary of England and Mary of Guise ( and later Mary Stuart ), he was equally convinced, could not be real queens’.
It seems quite clear that Knox betrayed everyone around him including his own father by having an affair with his stepmother and anyone that he came into contact with including Wishart who he was with on the night of his capture, Knox was carrying his sword, Cardinal Beaton, Rizzio, Lord Darnley, Mary Stuart and the women who surrounded him in a Charles Manson maniacal devotion.
Calvin was also betrayed by him on the publication of the ‘First Blast’ as Knox had it secretly printed in Geneva with no writer or publisher’s names Calvin was outraged as condemnation poured upon reformers in Europe.
Professor Muir goes on to report the ideology of ‘Der Fuhrer’ of Scotland’s Presbyterian’s:
‘ Any Protestant had obviously, therefore, the right to kill any Catholic; it was the collective duty of the Protestants, however, to exterminate the Catholics ‘en masse’. His letters from Dieppe showed an ungovernable temper and an imagination delighting in cruelty. His Appellation from Geneva could only be the work of a mind corrupted by a monstrous doctrine. His letter showed not merely an extreme insensibility to human sufferings; it lingered sickeningly in a delighted contemplation of them. To the powerful he counselled violence and cruelty’.
After some months in Dieppe, Knox returned to Scotland when Elizabeth had taken the English throne after Mary Tudor died, and he found himself in the midst of turmoil.
Muir creates a vivid picture of the nobles who were to work with Knox, the professor wrote:
‘ If one were to accept the description of the sexes in ‘The First Blast’, she (Mary of Guise) might stand as the masculine type and Knox himself as the feminine. In the battle between them calmness, self-control, reason, dignity were all on Mary’s side….. frenzy, vituperation and back-biting all on the side of Knox who was a man of notorious probity’.
Muir goes on about the destruction of the Catholic Churches and monasteries after Knox’s return to Scotland he wrote:
‘ The destruction of the religious buildings and works of art in Scotland has been debated by ( Protestant ) historians, antiquarians and theologians at length and with acrimony. Two examples, showing the fluctuations of opinion among Knox’s admirers, may be cited.
Dr. M’Crie’s apology is perhaps the most extra-ordinary.
He begins by treating the matter with elephantine facetiousness.
‘ Antiquarians,’ he said, ‘ have no reason to complain of the ravages of the reformers, who have left them such valuable remains, ( ruins ) and placed them in that very state which awakens in their minds the most lovely sentiments of the sublime and beautiful by reducing them to-ruins. The liberty which the Protestants demanded from the Regent ( Mary of Guise ), in fact, was twofold; they asked leave to worship as they liked, and to pull down monasteries and churches.
By open profession they considered both these claims equally legitimate.
It was only by the grace of God that British Protestants especially Scottish Presbyterians never ruled Italy, France, Spain, Prague, Austria, Russia, Greece etc. with all their wonderful ancient monuments and churches which would have been obliterated and destroyed by the serial Protestant-culture-wreckers who make the Barbarians and Huns look like pacifists.
Professor Hume Brown wrote about the desecration of Scotland’s heritage:
‘ In these blind outbursts, ‘ he said, ‘there was no expression of real religious feeling; it was simply the instinct of plunder, the natural delight in unlicensed action which in ordinary times is kept in check by the steady pressure of law’.
Muir disagrees with Hume Brown by writing;
‘ ( Hume Brown ) contradicts himself in another passage, for those blind outbursts had, he admitted, Knox’s ‘cordial approval’.
The destruction, then was essentially a policy rather than a blind outburst.
It began as early as 1540; it was continued by Paul Methuen, the first man in Scotland to set up a purified Church, Knox set the work going on a large scale.
Andrew Lang says bitterly: ‘The fragments of things beautiful that the Reformers overlooked were destroyed by the ( deranged ) Covenanters’.
A monument to Robert the Bruce among other things was destroyed in the religious frenzy.
Knox was the only reformer of great reputation who encouraged a general destruction of works of art, and he felt his isolation.
Calvin was severe enough in his reprobation of beauty, but robbery and pillage, even of Catholic property, his orderly mind could not abide’.
Professor Muir pursues the Knoxite desecrations:
‘ In his letter to Mrs. Locke he told, as we have seen, how the ‘ brethern had sacked the religious houses in Perth and threatened the priests with death. In his ‘History’ the priests were not threatened, and the looting was the work of the ‘rascal multitude’, not of the brethern. His mind refused to rest under such a monstrous accusation; the whole business in Perth now seemed more confused than ever, but the probability steadily grew that the mob had destroyed the monasteries. When he took up the pen they had destroyed the monasteries’.
The examination of the works, deeds and mind of Knox has baffled Scottish historians on how they could best present a picture of the ‘demented one’ into a picture of a responsible and Christian man whom so many of them depend upon as the founder of the Scottish Presbyterian movement, that they have staked their reputations on because of their involvement within Protestantism and the bitterness and hatred that it requires to keep its leaders in their mansions and palaces that they inhabit, not to forget their dedication to nepotism.
Edwin Muir explains about the (Book of Discipline) and some of his findings he wrote:
‘ Its most fundamental idea was the corruption of man’s nature, and its policy had necessarily, therefore, to be a policy of espionage and repression.
Its sole instrument for keeping or reclaiming its members was punishment.
It was to show its dual qualities to the full in the next century of Scottish history, with its ‘prophets’, its sadistic Kirk Sessions, its instances of intrepid constancy, its intolerance, its murders smiled on, its deeds of moderation execrated, its array of villains and of martyrs, but, above all, its stiff-necked blindness to the more spacious ideas which were moving mankind.
It is symbolical that the Book opened with a command to persecute, and almost closed with a plea for the extension of the scope of Capital punishment, its faults were a lack of understanding, an incapacity for human charity, and, above all, a consciously virtuous determination to compel and humiliate people for the greater glory of God’.
I ploughed my way through mountains of reference books and documents while attending Strathclyde University with other ‘mature’ students of various religious persuasions, I was shocked to hear that in the year 2003 many reasonable Protestants have been led to believe even in recent years that Roman Catholics had an inferior education, and many thought that was the reason why so many Catholics were refused employment with Protestant employers.
One could easily point the finger at Rangers Football club and the many world class Scottish Catholic footballers who were forced to ply their trade in England and abroad, who could have been performing and passing their talents on to Scottish kids, many of these great’s such as Billy Bremner, Joe Jordan, Lou Macari etc. would have been a bonus to Scotland if sectarianism was wiped out not only on sporting arenas, but in the general society where there are countless highly intelligent and well educated Catholics.
How can any nation on earth be successful when a large percentage of its population are discriminated against we have seen the brain drain from Scotland for centuries and the nation is impoverished in so many walks of life.
Professor Muir continues;
‘ As idolatry and adultery became feebler in Scotland, however, adultery rose in importance.
In the next few years there is scarcely a remonstrance of the ministers which does not contain a despairing injunction to Parliament to punish adultery with death’.
There is something that Muir wrote that intrigues me, he wrote that Knox arrived in Geneva with a student named Patrick on another page he writes this statement by John Knox:
‘ That great abuser of this commonwealth, that poltroon and vile knave Davie ( Rizzio ), was justly punished ( stabbed to death in front of 6 months pregnant Mary. Queen of Scots) for abusing of the commonwealth and for his other villainy, which we list not to express, by the council and hands of James Douglas, Earl of Morton, Patrick, Lord Lindsay, and the Lord Ruthven, with other assistors in their company, who all for their just act, and most worthy of praise’.
Was this the Patrick who was with Knox at Geneva that he congratulates for the heinous murder of Rizzio, who as one can clearly see from Knox’s pen that even after Rizzio was dead, the venomous hatred boiling and spitting from the mind of Knox.
If this was the same Patrick then this verifies Randolph’s letter to Cecil over Knox’s guilt in the murder. Muir concludes his biography of Knox and notes these items after he explained his last days he wrote:
‘ The man ( Knox ) who in England proclaimed that subjects were bound to obey their prince; who in Dieppe incited subjects to murder their prince; who in Geneva exhorted the faithful in Scotland to depose their prince; who in Scotland helped to drive one prince after another from the throne while loudly proclaiming his loyalty; who maintained that two brutal murders were admirable in the sight of God, and that a third, less brutal, must be wiped out by the execution of an unfortunate woman ( Mary Stuart ) who had no direct part in it, and whose guilt could not be proved; who pursued that woman to disgrace and destruction.
This man was clearly not that model of consistency and strength which history and his biographers have set before us.
He was rather a man who, when his object required it, was always ready to contradict himself, and used any means which suited him’.
Edwin Muir’s biography of John Knox is not well known in Scotland but thanks to Harry Reid highlighting his name in ( Outside Verdict ) and my determination of finding the copy that I have scrutinised from the Andersonian Library at Strathclyde University.
Professor Muir goes on;
‘ Another thing which may be reasonably attributed to Knox is the Kirk Session.
To describe the sordid and general tyranny which this fearful institution wielded for over two hundred years would be wearisome and would take too long.
It is only necessary to say that the time-honoured Scottish tradition of fornication triumphantly survived all its terrors’.
I have endeavoured to describe the sordid and general tyranny which the fearful institution wielded over Scotland for over four hundred years, along with the lies and propaganda that they have perfected to art form.
On the last pages of his informative biography Muir questions about the first hundred years of Presbyterianism in Scotland he writes that:
‘The ‘nearest-lying country’ could show Shakespeare, Spencer, Jonson, Marlowe, Donne, Milton, in poetry and the drama; Bacon, Browne, Taylor, Claredon, in prose; the beginnings of modern science; and music, architecture, philosophy, theology, oratory in abundance’.
Caustically Muir asks:
‘ Was it the influence of Calvinism which preserved Scotland from that infection’ ?
The infection of culture, arts, academia and every form of human enjoyment and liberty had been obliterated from Scottish society except for those who maintained the evil philosophies such as the leaders of Presbyterianism who are still trying to enforce these doctrines of oppression.
Edwin Muir continues with his conclusion:
‘ Calvinism, in the first place, was a “faith” which insisted with exclusive force on certain human interests, and banned all the rest.
It lopped off from religion music, painting and sculpture, and pruned architecture to a minimum; it frowned on all prose and poetry which was not sacred.
Calvinism in short, was a narrow specialised “kind of religion”, but it was also a peculiar religion- a religion which outraged the imagination, and no doubt helped, therefore, to produce that captivity of the imagination in Scotland.
Looking down on the island of Great Britain in the century which followed Knox’s death, the Almighty, it seemed, had rejected Shakespeare, Spencer, and Donne, and chosen Andrew Melville, Donald Cargill and Sandy Peden ( John White, Ian Paisley and Jack Glass ).
And if His choice was restricted to the godly, it was equally strange, for He liked the translators of the Scots version of the Psalms, and rejected Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw’.
Trying to understand Calvinists is a difficult chore especially in the 21st century where it is the Catholics that have all the pressure upon them over divorce, abortion, the birth pill and celibacy yet these issues are enshrined within the Catholic faith, and I don’t notice droves of Catholics flocking to join Protestant Churches which allow all of these questions to be freely accepted, while the Roman Catholics have to deal with the consequences of their conscience.
Protestantism is a follower of fashion and we all realise that there are so many different fashions and tastes as can be witnessed by the hundreds of Protestant sects who claim to be Christian and no doubt the ‘latest’ Jedi-Knights will soon be demanding recognition.
Professor Muir continues:
‘How could the country have avoided its fate of becoming for over a century an object-lesson in savage provincialism?
Hume, Burns, and men like them, it is true, lifted it from its isolation for a time during the next hundred years.What Knox really did was to rob Scotland of all the benefits of the Renaissance.
Scotland never enjoyed these as England did, and no doubt the lack of that immense advantage has had a permanent effect.
It can be felt, I imagine, even at the present day’.
The quotes from Dr. Muir’s biography of John Knox were written during the 1920s when Catholics were being persecuted on the streets of Scotland therefore I feel confident to credit him with first hand on site experience.
The work of Edwin Muir terrifies Presbyterian’s such as Harry Reid even though it was written during the 1920s, this shows the desperation that people such as he and his collaborators are in, because they know that their evil tyranny and subjugation of the Roman Catholic faithful, is about to be trampled into the annuls of extinction.
“Trying to understand Calvinists is a difficult chore especially in the 21st century where it is the Catholics that have all the pressure upon them over divorce, abortion, the birth pill and celibacy yet these issues are enshrined within the Catholic faith, and I don’t notice droves of Catholics flocking to join Protestant Churches which allow all of these questions to be freely accepted, while the Roman Catholics have to deal with the consequences of their conscience.”
The man who claims to be pope is doing his best to assure Catholics that the consequences of their conscience are nothing but a hangover from rigid and unmerciful former times in the Church. Environmental sustainability is what Catholics should be concerned about. The tragedy is that most Catholics will find this trade-off acceptable: Catholic sexual orthodoxy. for environmental concern.
Michael, the above essay was written before Feb 2013.
There are many gallant men and women in the last couple of hundred years who have linked specific aspects of the “Great Apostasy” to various “reformers” but I think that the whole bundle of Protestants and “New Agers” can be linked to the “Synagogue of Satan” that was/is excoriated by Christ Himself and the Apostles and their disciples.
The “Synagogue of Satan” is represented these days by Judaeo-Masonry and it has long roots in various pagan ideologies that present themselves in many Kabbalistic disguises.
In my opinion (as a layman in the Western Australian bush) the Enemy needs to be identified and called to account.
I rather suspect that anyone who has the temerity to link hostility to the God of propitiation with some effeminate notion of “mercy” is an idiot who can’t even see the world around him. “Mercy” is entirely meaningless without the precursor of “justice”. That is the whole story of Christianity… we are our brother’s keeper as Christ demonstrated by His miserable death.
Thank you, Brother Alexis !!!
This post answered a lot of questions I have always had about Knox and his religious heirs.
Blessings,
+Rene Henry Gracida
Reblogged this on Maryqueenofscots1587's Blog.
Written and researched by Frank Dougan
https://independent.academia.edu/FrankDougan/Papers
A. D. M. Barrell a Lecturer in Later Medieval History at Queen’s University Belfast writes in his book ‘ Medieval Scotland’. Published by Cambridge University Press ( 2000 ) The road to the Reformation.
‘ Although parishioners were encouraged to confess their sins, the church demanded this only at Easter’.
If we are to take his word as truth on this statement then one must assume that the Catholic Church was not so harsh as we are led to believe.
Barrell has conducted an in-depth search of Vatican Archives and he reveals a totally different picture of the political and ecumenical outline of pre-Reformation Scotland that has been covered up by most so-called ‘eminent’ Scottish Historians who have described the nation as though it had been a jungle of misery, yet with Barrell’s short chapter he describes Scotland as a nation that held her own with its European neighbours, though there are points that have to be properly investigated that I have endeavoured to examine.
He continues;
‘ And while some lay people had a deep vein of piety and reverence even for things they did not fully understand, were struck by the awe-inspiring mystery of the sacraments, others were doubtless very bored and restless during services’.
Over one billion people are still today awe-struck by the mysteries in the Mass, and I am sure that some may feel bored and restless, as with any form of lecture or service that requires an hour-or-more of contemplation as I am sure happens within Protestant congregations.
Barrell goes on;
‘Whoever the legal rector or vicar might be, the clerk who officiated was probably usually drawn, if not from the local community, at least from the same social stratum as the majority of the parishioners, a fact which may have made some members of the congregation, familiar with his past and character, skeptical that he really could act as mediator between them and God’.
Throughout my research most historians are of one conclusion that the parish priests were not condemned as a body that did not conform to decency towards their congregations.
No doubt there were some clerics who went astray in some aspects as corruption is not exclusive, particularly as we have seen in recent years people who are elected to positions of trust especially at Westminster and the Civil Service which is particularly prone to nepotism and an inbuilt devotion to distort the truth, which has caused all of these islands to be in constant turmoil and in a state of war at sometime or another, with almost every nation in the world, not for the reward of the proletariat, but for the greed and lust for power of the Whitehall Mandarins.
Clerics would not have lasted five minuets in the job as the congregations of their parishes would not have allowed them in if the had such a distasteful character as Barrell suggests, and as we see in today’s world any priest that steps out of line is drummed out by his parishioners, as is the same for all the major religious institutions.
The Belfast lecturer continues;
‘ The medieval church placed considerable emphasis on the idea of judgment, both after death and, ultimately, at the end of the world’.
Surely this is what the Christianity is based on behave in this world and you’ll be looked after in the next one.
Barrell writes;
‘ By stressing the eternal consequences of misbehaviour on earth, the church hoped to impose some discipline on a society which, even if not senselessly violent and brutish, was not exactly subtle in sorting out it’s problems’.
These words are difficult to swallow written by a lecturer in Belfast indicating that 16th century Scots didn’t have a senseless violent streak in their lives, especially when we must consider the horrendous brutality at the murder of the Scottish Cardinal Beaton ( stabbed dozens of times and hung outside his house window until his flesh rotted ) and Rizzio
(stabbed many times in front of Mary and her friends ) and the queen’s husband Lord Darnley and his servant ( both strangled ) then two or three Regents ( shot to death ) and to suggest that the Catholic Church was wrong in trying to impose discipline on society was wrong, then he should take a trip outside the ivory tower he lives in a have a look at the devastation that his neighbours of both persuasion are living in Belfast and Derry then perhaps review his thoughts on discipline and his condemnation of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church.
The next part that he writes is hilarious considering that Christianity is a spiritual blessing,
Barrell say’s;
‘ The message was brought home partly through wall paintings, stained glass windows and other visual aids, because themes such as the end of the world and the pains of hell could be depicted in such media more effectively than could more abstract concepts such as love and redemption’.
Hell-Fire and Brimstone have been the backbone of Protestantism since it began so how on earth can anyone complain that Catholics used the same rhetoric, and as for the other visual aids I presume he means paintings by the great Masters, on the subject of love and redemption that is hardly an appropriate item for believers in a philosophy that has enslaved and subjugated a third of the world’s population, and created genocide and concentration camps.
Barrell writes;
‘ Pilgrimages can be regarded as excuses for holidays, the medieval equivalent of a trip to the seaside, and they were sometimes encouraged by offering indulgences as incentives to pilgrims, but it would be too cynical simply to dismiss the spiritual side of the practice on these grounds’.
These last words are very kind of him but lets face the facts, if the Church was telling its parishioners to go for a holiday while visiting a shrine I’m sure that the people that lived pre-1560 would have jumped at the chance of a ‘wee trip’ away from their hum-drum lives as do people today.
As for indulgences these are common practice in every walk of life in present talk we call them favours, someone does you a favour you do it back, and sometimes we have to pay some dosh.
On a beach in Hong Kong where I worked in 1983-84, there is an ornamental bridge with a legend written on it that states;
‘ Everytime you walk over this bridge you will add another day onto your life’.
I don’t know if it’s a true statement but I can tell you that every time I went to that beach I made sure I walked over that bridge a few times.
Countless billions of people go to Rome, Lourdes, Fatima, Bethlehem, Jerusalem and many other places on a pilgrimage are they all stupid as A. D. M. Barrell would have you believe, or perhaps they have a deep trust in the faith that beckons them there ?
He writes;
‘ There is no evidence that sixteenth-century parish priests were appreciably more ignorant than their predecessors’.
Barrell writes that many Protestant writers condemned monasteries as lax and dens of vice
he elabourates on his challenge by writing;
‘ At Kinloss in Moray two abbots, Thomas Crystal and Robert Reid, increased the number of monks, built up the monastic library, and attracted the services of Giovanni Ferrerio, a Renaissance scholar from Piedmont who settled at Kinloss and taught the young monks.
At Cambuskenneth near Stirling Alexander Myelin, who became abbot in 1518, improved the academic standing of the monastery and attempted to introduce strict observance of the Augustinian rule, and efforts towards reform and a greater emphasis on university attendance are found at several other Scottish houses.. A Carthusian monastery was established at Perth as late as James 1’s reign.
( Such examples provide a necessary corrective to the image of decadence and decline.)’
The above passage clearly highlights the evidence of a great emphasis that was undertaken by the Catholic Church on education rather than the lies that Protestant Historians and writers would have people believe with their consistent denouncement of the Catholic Institutions that had been flourishing before 1560.
He continues;
‘ William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, has been described as remarkably unselfseeking and indifferent to power and a genuine patriot ( who ) strove constantly to make the community of the realm a workable reality.’
From the far north of Scotland to the Central Belt there was a lot of progress being made by intellects for the benefit of the Scottish society.
Barrell wrote;
‘ In great churches and cathedrals and abbeys there was an almost constant succession of services through the day and night; even in lesser churches, the proliferation of private alters in the later Middle Ages meant that divine offices were being celebrated almost continuously.’
When one looks at the churches of today both Catholic and Protestant and we see how few people attend services, the question that I pose would churches have been opened day and night with a constant succession of masses if there were no people interested, and especially as the Protestant Historians constantly have blasted out that the Catholic clerics were too busy doing other things and were not dedicated to their congregations.
Who performed these constant successions of services, as they only lasted about one hour so there must have been many priests that were fulfilling their obligations, and this evidence of devotion to the Roman Catholic Faith could never be equaled by the Protestant Churches even though they had Church Police demanding that men must bring their wife and family to church or suffer severe consequences.
This puts paid to the illicit propaganda that the Reformation was an overnight sensational success as is still being preached by Harry Reid in his recent book ( Outside Verdict ) and many of his fellow blinkerd Presbyterian writers.
Barrell goes on;
‘ In an age of ignorance, with scientific knowledge virtually non-existent, the hand of supernatural powers was visible everywhere.’
Fan-me-with-a-kipper !
Has anything changed in the 21st century which is bursting with scientific knowledge and most of the world’s population still believes in some-sort of supernatural powers, and superstitions that are involved in everyday life which includes the majority of members of all religions and non-religions.
The world has always been filled with ideologies and cults and devotion to a greater being and a place in the spiritual world.
Therefore the Catholic Church cannot exclusively be blamed though Barrell seems to think otherwise as he writes;
‘ In some respects, the religion of medieval Christians was based on terror of the hereafter, on superstition, on a blind, unquestioning faith in the saints and in churchmen as intercessors, even on a baleful and suffocating ignorance.’
Churchmen of all faiths have always been believed to be intercessors and have always been paid by people for some favour be it baptism, marriage, sick visits, funerals as a thanks for performing a service, and the hereafter ‘terror’ wasn’t invented by Roman Catholics, and if one is to face the facts….if we did not have a supernatural ‘terror’ to challenge mankind we would all be living in a state of mayhem and madness, such as Scotland and Ireland has lived through since Henry VIII and John Knox and their deviants tried to destroy the Roman Catholic Faith on these islands.
This beast created by these monsters has kept Scotland and Ireland living in a medieval time warp politically, economically, intellectually and culturally and I need only to remind you that Scotland is ruled by a foreign power that drains not only the natural mineral resources of the nation, but also the man-power to act as cannon-fodder for their bourgeois wars of domination and subjugation.
One only as to look at recent Westminster History, in 1972 the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath allowed plans to be drawn up to deport hundreds-of-thousands of Irish Catholics from their homes in Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland and create an all Protestant State in the north.
These are exactly the same plans that the British used in South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and many other nations around the world it’s called ethnic cleansing, unfortunately for many British colonists the policy that they invented is now backfiring on them as the indigenous inhabitants of their former empire are demanding that their heritage be returned to the hands of the rightful owners such as is happening in Zimbabwe while the British bourgeoisie are claiming that the whites are being denied their human rights, which to me sounds hypocritical as they stole the land in the first place, and as for human rights these are only now being allowed at this moment in time in Britain because membership of the European Union demands that everyone has freedom to live in an equal society. One must realize that in Britain the aristocracy still legally have possession of lands taken from the British people by force over 1000 years ago, therefor would it not be reasonable to assume that the aristocracy from nations colonized by Britain should not have the same rights to reclaim their own lands back from foreign invaders.
Barrell writes;
‘ Post-Reformation writers castigated James V for failing to follow the example of his uncle, Henry VIII, in breaking with Rome’.
Should James have broke with Rome because a murdering madman was desperate to take over Scotland while he had plans to destroy all the places of higher education and worship which he did and left the nation in a state of economic and ecclesiastical desperation.
He proceeded to note;
‘ In 1525 parliament promulgated a statute against the import of Lutheran works, threatening with imprisonment and escheat those who brought such literature through Scottish seaports.’
Most writers on the Reformation usually refer to this incident as though it was only the Catholic Government of Scotland who employed this tactic.
I would like to know how many books have been banned by law in ‘ democratic’ Protestant Britain possibly thousands and many in recent years, one in particular springs to mind that was banned from 1928 till 1960, ( Lady Chatterley’s Lover) by D. H. Lawrence published by Penguin Books, the Government used sexual content as the excuse, actually the real reason behind the book being banned was because D.H. Lawrence exposed the inadequacies and corruption of the then ruling classes, and as I have mentioned about Harry Reid he advocates that you should not read Edwin Muir’s condemnation of John Knox.
A. D. M. Barrell informs his reader that Bible study in the vernacular became lawful by act of parliament in 1543.
This was seventeen years before the Scottish Reformation.
He continues;
‘ The parliamentary measures of 1560 were negative rather than positive. They abolished the Mass and rejected papal jurisdiction, but did not create fresh administrative structures for the church. The reformers faced the thorny problem of how Protestant ministers were to be endowed’.
Over one thousand Catholic churches had been closed in Scotland at that date and as I have previously written there were only over 200 ministers seven years later, this lets one see clearly that the Reformation was forced upon a nation that had previously had churches open day and night with continuous services.
Ian D. White was Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Lancaster. He was author of numerous books and articles including; ( Scotland Before the Industrial Revolution: An Economic and Social History 1050-1750 )
In his book ( Scotland’s Society and Economy in Transition, 1560-1760 ) Published by Macmillan Press Ltd. 1997 he writes;
” There is some evidence that tensions in Scottish society, from the magnates to the tenants, may have been greater than was once thought. Religion undoubtedly played a part,
triggering off the revolution crisis, but it is hard to believe that religious discontent alone motivated the rebellion.
By closing down all the Catholic Churches in Scotland in 1560 this gave the traitors who would eventually hand the liberty of the nation over to England, the opportunity to seize power without any struggle as the local churches were the center point of life in those days and most news from other towns and villages was brought there, therefor by closing the main gathering places the churches, and disposing of the priests as you cannot have mass without a priest, and we have seen this same policy in the former Eastern Block countries where all the churches were closed, but the proletariat won their freedom to open them.
The Scottish Protestant Reformation was an ideology imposed by force on an unwilling people in Scotland and it was only by terrorist tactics and draconian laws which still exist, has Protestantism been the scourge of the Celtic nations.
Ian D. Whyte continues;
‘ In some ways the Reformation strengthened the position of the aristocracy. Protestantism also gave the nobles an ideological justification for their position in the state, as godly magistrates, and they benefited more tangibly from the acquisition of church lands.
The development of the Calvinist church with its kirk sessions gave a greater role locally to lairds and feuars as church elders’.
The descendants of these people mentioned by Professor Whyte still hold the balance of power in most cities, towns and villages in Scotland today in positions as councilors, JPs, MPs, lawyers and judges and civil servants and tax collectors, is it any wonder that the nation is still subservient to Westminster to whom the above mentioned hold allegiance to keep them in positions of power and wealth, while they allow the resources of Scotland to be drained away and squandered on military technology and imperialist ambitions.
Professor Whyte writes;
‘ There was certainly a major expansion of credit following the Reformation, especially after 1587 when Parliament allowed interest at up to 10 per cent to be charged’.
A. D. M . Barrell notes in his book ( Medieval Scotland, The road to Reformation )
‘ Popes sometimes allowed bishops to borrow money, despite the church’s objection to the charging of interest on loans’.
The value of the Scottish pound had shrunk from 1560 inflation was out of control in the 1580s and 90s there were famine conditions according to Ian D. Whyte who writes;
‘ Taxation had been infrequent before 1600 ( The Reformation ) It became more regular after 1607 and virtually annual from 1612.
200,000 Scots pounds was levied between 1600 and 1609 but this rose to 507,000 pounds between 1610 and 1619.
The tax of 1621, designed to raise 1.2 million pounds over four years, was greater than the entire bill for the previous 50 years. ( Before 1560 )
The total taxation imposed between 1620 and 1629, 2.4 million pounds, seemed vast compared with earlier levies but…. between 1630 and 1639 the figure rose to 4 million pounds’.
This money was being robbed from the Scots proletariat to build a Protestant state, Barrell writes;
‘ Clashes between papal and local jurisdiction were much less frequent than the post-Reformation notion of interfering popes might suggest’.
Do these figures indicate that the Reformation was good for Scotland as Protestant historians insist ?
Prior to the Reformation Scotland had been quite steady economically and solid trade links had been established within Europe, over a hundred collages were under construction the Scottish Queen was the most celebrated personality in Europe and what happened, the country was ravished and impoverished by Knoxites and has remained so through his disciples.
One does not need a degree in economics to see the state of Scotland before and after the Reformation and the nation has never ventured into a state of wealth and prosperity such as it enjoyed before 1560, and in relation to other European nations Scotland is a poor relation, and to the Westminster government the Scottish nation is treated with contempt as beggars.
The road between Glasgow and Edinburgh is laughable as a major transport artery and it’s worse between Stirling, Perth, Dundee and Aberdeen Scotland’s oil capital.
A ferry service between Scotland and Europe has only started in 2002, hospitals, schools, jobs, council housing and policing are worse than in Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Italy, Austria though I could say that they are not far away from the standards in Russia, but I must add that in the town of Vladimir 180 kilometers east of Moscow, in 1996 when I was there the whole town of over 500,000 people was supplied by free hot water from a central plant, for central heating and constant boiling water for everyday use.
In almost every country in the world one can have a leisurely drink outside a street cafe but not in Scotland which still enforces draconian Presbyterian laws, and one must remember that the weather has nothing to do with this pastime as they have dreadful winters all over Europe also.
A. D. M. Barrell narrates;
‘ Until 1558 at the earliest the Scottish political community had been indecisive, neither wholeheartedly embracing Protestantism’.
I love this next line that so many historians have written such as Barrell has here;
‘ But even those who had little interest in doctrinal change must have felt apprehensive at the prospect of Scotland becoming little more than a satellite of the French kingdom, and this may have fostered a sense of national identity which proved a fertile ground for the ( illegal ) legislation of the Reformation Parliament’.
Scotland is today a satellite of the English and Scots traitors at Westminster and as for national identity Protestantism has all but wiped out the language and cultures of all the Celtic Scots. It was never the French who invaded and plundered Scotland and deported the men, women and children it was the English who have tried since Roman times to dominate the nation, Scotland would have been a greater country if she would have been linked with France perhaps the finest democracy and Republic in Europe today.
Barrell writes briefly about Mary Stuart’s return to Scotland he notes;
‘ The queen’s behaviour served to discredit the old church, throughout these momentous events, however, political expediency played at least as great a part as religious convictions’.
The Catholic Church had been banned before she came back to Scotland and she knew this but it did not stop her returning to her home-land, so how could her behaviour discredit something that was not there anymore, she was never charged or convicted of any crime, though she was murdered for staying a Catholic she could have pretended to embrace Protestantism as all around her had done, though Mary had real bottle to the very end, especially when she was martyred under the blows of an axe that needed three strikes to dispose of one of Scotland’s greatest ever children.
He continues;
‘ The ( Catholic ) Scottish church stemmed from inappropriate relaxation’s of canon law, for instance to allow the king’s illegitimate children to hold bishoprics and abbeys’.
This has always been a sore point with writers on Scottish history the children of the king holding these minor posts within the Catholic Church, this is another of the great Protestant hypocrisies as the queen that Knox and his gangsters adhered to was illegitimate Elizabeth I, and the Regent that the Protestants set up to run Scotland after they forced Mary to abdicate, was the illegitimate brother of Mary Stuart, Lord Moray ( James Stuart ) who was once a commendator at St. Andrews when he was a Catholic.
His mother stood gloating over Mary while she was miss-carrying twin babies along with John Knox and George Buchanan as they were venemously forcing her to sign the abdication paper covered in her dead children’s blood.
Ian D. Whyte comments;
‘ Greater contact with the English nobility after 1603 may have helped to generate an identity crisis and inferiority complex among Scottish magnates as they moved from being the leaders of society in an independent nation to a poor, provincial nobility, this generating envy, frustration and ultimately aggression.
Scottish nobles were characteristically informal with their followers and inferiors, just as Scottish monarchs had been with their magnates, in a manner similar to that of France.
The Scottish and French courts were designed to allow relatively free access to the monarch. The English court from the reign of Henry VIII onwards, had been structured to preserve distance between monarchs and their subjects. Scottish society was strongly hierarchical and status conscious but because in the sixteenth century that hierarchy was universally recognised and was seen to be stable, men of different ranks could treat each other in an informal way’.
He continues on the faults of Presbyterianism;
‘ The power of puritanical Presbyterianism has been portrayed as a negative and ruthlessly repressive force, which impoverished popular culture and turned seventeenth-century Scotland into a cultural wilderness’.
Professor Whyte goes on;
‘ The new church appealed particularly to middling groups in society: lairds, feuars, larger tenants and burgesses. It was from their ranks that many of the new ministers were drawn. The ministers came to form a new social elite that identified with the middle ranks of society rather than with its traditional feudal leaders. By the middle of the seventeenth century ministers had started to become a self-perpetuating caste, with son following father into the church. They were also an increasingly wealthy group. Edinburgh’s ministers were paid one thousand two hundred pound a year. This along with income from glebe lands, often made them the wealthiest men in their parishes after the major landowner, on a par with, or better off than, many lairds’.
I have previously pointed out that ministers took the lead from their mentor John Knox who siphoned off money for his money lending activities, prior to 1560 parish priests were so impoverished that the relied desperately on their parishioners to fund them.
Professor Whyte has already written that the period in question noted above 1629, £2.4 million were raised in taxes in Scotland, assuming that 1000 former Catholic churches had been re-opened by then and the ministers were paid approximately the same, then half of all Scottish tax revenues were paid to the Church of Scotland ministers which equals £1,200,000 this lets one see clearly why the ministers were better off financially than many landowners.
Whyte notes;
‘ It thus became the business of the church to regulate the lives of everyone, sometimes to an obsessive and unhealthy degree’.
One can clearly distinguish the similarities that have scourged Scotland with these regulations not unlike a friend of mine from Germany once told me that when he was at school during World War 2, he said the children were taught that British and Americans were demons, and we have seen Cambodia, and some former Communist states that committed the same extremes in brainwashing their populations.
Actually the demons that the Germans feared are the strange breed of creatures that run Britain and USA mostly life long Civil Servants and Permanent Secretaries who are mostly from the aristocracy and Free-Masons.
Professor Whyte continues;
‘ They ( Presbyterians ) were a strong agent of social control and regulation. They developed what has sometimes been seen as a moral and spiritual tyranny over everyday life. By about 1620 most parishes, except those in more remote parts of the Highlands, had active kirk sessions enforcing strict moral discipline.
Kirk sessions comprised the minister and the elected elders of a parish sitting, often weekly, as a tribunal, before which people were called and interrogated. The elders were chosen from the most prominent men in the community and more prosperous tenants in rural parishes.
Kirk sessions’ procedures resembled those of the High Court of Justiciary and because of this evidence was acceptable to the central criminal court.
People were presumed guilty until proven innocent.
Remorseless interrogation of witnesses and defendants proceeded until a session was sure that the truth had been reached.
They might deny a midwife to a woman in labour until she named the father, or the child might be refused baptism.’
This was the act carried out against Mary Stuart when she almost bled to death during her miscarriage.
Professor Whyte’s statement comes as no surprise that Knox’s policy of torture had been approved by his disciples and has been adhered to for generations.
Whyte goes on to inform his reader;
‘ Elders usually had defined areas of their parish to keep under observation, acting as a kind of moral police force. Their powers within their community were sweeping.
Accompanied by a witness, elders could enter people’s houses if they suspected that an offense was being committed or a fugitive from ( Presbyterian ) discipline harboured.
People could be accused of crimes in the street.’
Today in the 21st century Presbyterian elders and their off-springs still hold considerable power in the Scottish Parliament and the Justiciary and councils all over Scotland that have all been indoctrinated by the same policies.
These are the times that Harry Reid advocates to return to in his appraisal of the Church of Scotland and he longs for a return to and more sectarianism and less democracy and no doubt censorship against writers who wish to expose this demented ideology.
There are Protestant ministers today such as Jack Glass in Glasgow and Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland who still enjoy power over many people.
Professor Whyte tells us that ministers used presbytery meetings to obtain information about parishioners he writes;
‘It was not unknown for kirk sessions to advertise in newspapers for information about absconders. ( from Presbyterianism ) The system of issuing certificates of good moral conduct, given to people leaving a parish and ‘ required’ before settlement elsewhere was allowed, represented a further element of control, as did the sessions’ management of poor relief.’
Presbyterianism is based on total control of every aspect of the proletariat’s life not only the mind in spiritual matters but every function of life, unlike Catholicism which takes hundreds of years to come to a major conclusion and it is visibly clear in today’s modern world the so-called Catholic nations seem to enjoy the most liberal regimes, other than the nations who are still being plagued by interference from Protestant Britain and USA.
Through out the world sex is an important part of every society, and I have always believed that people that shout the most loud against this issue of nature seem to have some problems within their lives. I am not referring to people who choose to be celibate for religious beliefs.
Professor Whyte writes;
‘In St. Andrews between 1560 and 1600 about 1,000 cases of sexual misconduct were dealt with in a town whose population can only have been around 4,000.
The most frequent types of cases that they dealt with were sexual, especially fornication and adultery’.
Now I realise why so many Scots have emigrated and why politicians loved to escape to Westminster where if these rules applied today most MPs would be in Presbyterian jails in fact most of the world’s population would be under lock and key.
Whyte persists;
‘ Of the sexual misdemeanour fornication formed the bulk, followed by adultery, with a handful of cases of incest’.
Professor Whyte informs his reader of some of the punishments handed down by the Presbyterian dictators by writing;
‘ They also included a ritual of public humiliation, this usually consisted of sitting on a stool of repentance in church on Sundays, more serious cases might involve the culprit being forced to wear sackcloth or being placed in the jougs, an iron neck collar fastened to the outside wall of the church or churchyard, prior to sitting on the stool’.
One must be aware of the fact that this was the Presbyterian Kirk that was carrying out these tortures not the legal institutions, though they were inseparably entwined together as they still are to this very day.
These punishments were barbaric in comparison to Roman Catholic penance that priests handed out at confession, which were mostly prayer and self-assessment and humility within one’s self and to repay anything that had been stolen.
This horrendous form of religion replaced churches that were open day and night and where one’s misdemeanours were kept in private with the priest the same applies to the present.
White proceeds;
‘ Punishments for fornication usually involved a fine and three appearances on the stool of repentance- six times for a relapse. Adulterers might be on the stool weekly for up to nine months.’
Don’t forget that the man or woman who sat on the ‘church stool’ had also been chained by-the-neck like an animal outside in sub-zero temperatures and all weather, and obviously have been shunned by everyone where they lived by order of the Kirk’s ministers and elders.
It was the Irish famine that changed the lives of Protestants in Britain because of the influx of over 1 million Catholics who could not be controlled by the deviant Presbyterian brainwashers, or otherwise we would all be still under the jackboot of ministers and elders and their associates.
Most sensible Protestants don’t regard Roman Catholics as their enemy and one can clearly see both persuasions living and working in harmony despite the discrimination that The Kirk and its sects preach.
Dr. Whyte goes on about punishments;
‘ People who showed no contrition or who could not pay a fine might be imprisoned in the church steeple for up to two weeks and those considered beyond redemption banished from the community.’
These tortures were carried out not against criminals who had broken the legal statutes of the country these were for Kirk ‘crimes’.
He goes on;
‘ Slander cases also appeared on the stool’.
This would possibly have always been women ?
‘Sabbath breaking included selling and drinking ale.’
No doubt what broke the back of these rules can be attributed to the Irish emigrants who were inclined to enjoy a tipple everyday of the week.
Whyte continued;
‘ With the rise of the kirk sessions the practice of handfasting, or sleeping together after betrothal, died out.’
This was after 1560.
‘ Something as minor as a young man and woman being seen together in the wrong place at the wrong time could result in a charge of ‘ scandalous carriage’, a term which seemed to have included much of what would have been accepted in England as normal courtship.
Professor Whyte highlights something that is still practised in Scotland.
‘ The success of the kirk sessions was partly due to their co-operation with the secular courts. There was sometimes an overlap in the kinds of cases tried by kirk sessions and baron courts but the same people were often involved in running each court, with elders acting as the baillies and officers of baron courts. There was no clear-cut division between crimes and sins’.
During the late 1990s the chief Law-Lord in Britain was a member of one of the ( serious ) Presbyterian sects.
Are people who belong to these 16th century throwbacks of sound mind and are they rational enough to be leaders of a society that is multi-religious and cultural, especially when the very essence of the demented ideology that they adhere to is one of unquestionable domination from the cradle to the crypt within their ranks.
It is quite obvious that members of these sects cannot hold respect for anyone other than their own zombie like families and there are many other groups of people around the world that are entangled in excessive ideologies so this affliction is not unique to Presbyterianism, the thought provoking questions is are they mentally stable enough to hold any positions of Government and Justiciary because of intensive indoctrination that they must have had to undertake to be a member of cults that are holding the proletariat within their ranks to theologies based on condemnation of freedom loving people and the majority of the world’s population who want to live in a more liberal, happy and equal society.
The 1745 rebellion was a cry of desperation for freedom from the tyranny that was being imposed upon the people by the Presbyterians and 50 years afterwards Scottish Poet and Bard, Robert Burns was still crying for the same.
The men and boys at Cullodon faced terrifying canons and rifles, armed only with swords and rushed defiantly into the jaws of death not because they knew they could have won on the day, but to prove that they could not be defeated over the passage of time….. and now the flowers are blooming in the ground fertilised with the blood of free men at Culloden.
Refer to the statement by the Kirk on that horrendous day that I have previously written and on Professor Gordon Donaldson’s dismissal of Scottish heroes, which kept him in his highly paid job for the boys and allowed him access to corrupt the minds of Scottish children with Protestant propaganda.
Wallace played the same cards as did Mary Stuart they may have been martyred by the English but their names are carved into the soul of Scotland.
Professor Whyte examined the situation of funds for the poor and needy he writes about Presbyterian parishes;
‘ Others loaned out much of their money in order to maximise income from interest. Kirk sessions continued to exert a strong influence over communities throughout the first three quarters of the eighteenth century’.
I mentioned earlier in this investigation about D. H. Lawrence’s book ( Lady Chatterley’s Lover ) by Penguin Books on the pen-ultimate pages he writes about socialism not sex, though the proletariat understand these factors more than anything else and no doubt this was Lawrence’s method of bringing attention to the most important issues of his time at the climax of his superb classic he wrote;
‘ I sometimes sit in the Wellington ( bar ) and talk to the men. They grumble a lot, but they’re not going to alter anything. As everybody says, the Notts-Derby miners have got their hearts in the right place. But the rest of their anatomy must be in the wrong place, in a world that has no use for them. I like them, but they don’t cheer me much; not enough of the old fighting-cock in them. They talk a lot about nationalisation, nationalisation of royalties, nationalisation of the whole industry.
But you can’t nationalise coal and leave all the other industries as they are. The men are very apathetic. They feel the whole damned thing is doomed, and I believe it is. Some of the young ones spout about a Soviet, but there’s not much conviction about anything.
We’ve got this great industrial population, and they’ve got to be fed. The young ones get mad because they’ve no money to spend. Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilisation and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out. Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.
I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out’.
D. H. Lawrence wrote these sentiments during the 1920s and the Depression its easy to see clearly why the Government and National Churches clamoured to get this book banned as it was just over a decade from the Irish, Russian, and German revolutions and Lawrence’s writing exposed the gap between the rich and the poor millions of whom had lost their loved ones in the barbaric 1914-18 war that served to make the rich even more wealthy and the poor in worse conditions, which led to the next 1939-45 war and the rich got richer, and the poor are still living in manufactured housing projects that are modern slums because they were so badly and cheaply constructed that it is not financially feasible to redevelop these dwellings so they are allowed to deteriorate into ghost towns.
From a book by Cecil Sinclair ( Tracing Scottish Local History ) Published by the Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh HMSO. ( 1994 ) Parishes Church records are recorded;
No. 6.7
‘ Until the beginning of this century ( 20th ) most kirk sessions seemed to spend most of their time checking on the moral behaviour of the parishioners, particularly rebuking those who had engaged in extra-marital fornication.
The offenders might have to confess before the congregation or sit on a public stool of repentance. Other offences which concerned the kirk sessions were working or gaming on the Sabbath, defamation, swearing, drunkenness and other anti-social behaviour’.
No. 6.12
‘ The highest court of the Church of Scotland is the General Assembly. The General Assembly’s records are referenced CH.1. In the CH.1 repertory, you should look particularly for references to your parish in the separate catalogue of General Assembly papers CH.1/2.
These papers which are bound into volumes are listed chronologically and in detail up to 1777.
Round about 1710, you will find lists of papists and states of popery in various parishes, e.g. in the parish of Crathie and Braemar:
” The papists…arrived at that height of insolence as not only to erect houses for their meetings and worship but also to travell on the Lords day by the very kirk doores in troops as people were conveening by way of Contempt Yea at their meetings they made publick proclamatione of banns their priests avowedly married the persons they proclaimed they had penny briddells ( weddings ) to quhich people assembled in great numbers they had at them Musick and Dancing and all this in View of the Kirk”. ( CH.1/2/29/3, f. 219 )
As can be clearly seen from Church of Scotland records there were great numbers of Scottish Catholics over 150 years after the Reformation had started and like Mary Stuart on her first day back in her homeland, they also suffered from condemnation for enjoying Musick and Dancing.
No. 6.15.
‘ Not all parishioners worshipped in the Church of Scotland’.
Alexander Broadie Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University writes in his book The Scottish Enlightenment ;
‘ Thomas Aikenhead matriculated at Edinburgh University in 1693, and proceeded to the study of arts. In November 1696 he was charged with blasphemy. On Christmas Eve 1696 he was found guilty and sentenced to death’.
Christmas had been banned by Presbyterian’s as a time of love and peace.
Broadie goes on;
‘ On 6th of January 1697 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland encouraged the king ( William of Orange ) to execute vigorously the laws restraining ‘ the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land’
( Hunter, ‘Aikenhead the Atheist, p.237 ) and just two days later Aikenhead was hanged.
It was a bad decade for Scotland ( under Presbyterian tyranny ) ; a year after Aikenhead’s death six were found guilty in Paisley ( at Kirk sessions ) of the charge of witchcraft….. and five were hanged’.
These criminals who follow this horrendous ideology should not be allowed to participate in the lives of decent people and as I have reported from the Scottish Records Office that many acts of cruelty have been carried out by the Kirk until recent times.
Professor Broadie continues;
‘ In the 1740s, and therefore well into the Age of Enlightenment in Scotland, there were many in the Kirk whose attitude resembled that of Aikenhead’s accusers.
William Leechman, elected professor of divinity at Glasgow in 1743, with the support of the university’s moral philosophy professor, Francis Hutcheson, was charged with heresy almost immediately upon his appointment.
Yet Leechman was a deeply religious man, this not withstanding Hume’s description of him as an atheist.
Hume read Leechman’s sermon; ‘ on the nature, reasonableness, and advantages of prayer; with an attempt to answer the objections against it. A sermon ( 1743 ) and declared to his close friend William Mure of Caldwell, a former student of Leechman’s at Edinburgh….. ‘ I am sorry to find the Author to be a rank Atheist’.
‘Hume would say that all of the elders in the Presbytery of Glasgow were atheists’.
These people represented everything that was opposed to the true meaning of Christianity and I have pointed out from Harry Reid’s ( Outside Verdict ) he consulted many atheists during recent years who believe in Presbyterianism but not in the mystery of God.
The problem that still exists with those who rule Scottish society is that universities, schools and collages and the civil service are staffed by many with similar views who all play the Protestant card which keeps them in their highly paid and influential jobs.
When someone declares that they are an atheist that should be for them to face the consequences of their own conscience but they should not be allowed to pretend that they are also Christians, I am sure there are many atheists who don’t mind their children being taught or being ruled by people who hold the same ideas, as is their rights in a free society, but there are millions who don’t wish to be deceived, though I can understand why so many Protestants adhere to atheism as an escape from the distorted propaganda that they have been brainwashed with especially against their fellow human beings who adhere to Catholicism.
Presbyterian-ism is synonymous with class distinction take this example from a book by The Open University in Scotland and Dundee University, edited by Anthony Cooke, Ian Donnachie, Ann MacSween and Christopher A. Whatley ( Modern Scottish History 1707 to the Present. Volume 1 : The Transformation of Scotland, 1707-1850 ) Published by Tuckwell Press 1998.
‘ Where there was one large landowner in the parish, he ( rarely she ) and his family sat in a ‘ laird’s loft ’ constructed inside the churches, whilst in royal burghs the provost and town council ( mostly church elders ) often had their own loft or reserved pews. In this way the parish church on a Sunday increasingly mirrored the sharpening social gradations in the parish at large.
The minister supervised the schoolmaster ( the ‘dominie’ ) who conducted the parish school, whilst the beadle had a variety of functions – including renting out a mortcloth for covering the dead at funerals in the kirkyard’.
The Kirk was a structure of tiers with its reserved pews for the rich and as for the renting of death covers from the Kirk this was no different from the Catholic’s plenary indulgences which has always been condemned by Protestant historians.
The Open University book continues to highlight the problems that Professor Whyte describes thus;
‘ The kirk sessions was the local court for the trying of cases against parishioners accused of ecclesiastical offences, but many of these were also civil offences. Discovery of a pregnant spinster was usually the starting point for such cases, with the result that women were, by modern standards, rather harshly treated.
The Kirk above all sought acknowledgement of guilt and submission to its authority: failure to do so could cause a variety of problems to an accused person, including the refusal of the minister to provide a ‘ testificate’ ( or testimonial ) to a parishioner wishing to move to another parish. Punishment usually came in two forms: a fine, and the ‘ purging of the scandal’ by standing or sitting in a prominent place in church ( in some places on a punishment stool ) whilst the minister ‘ ranted’ at the offender’.
The Open University writers narrate on the Patronage of ministers and the chaos that it caused;
‘ Objecting parishioners would seek to physically prevent the clergymen from entering his church. Human barricades would be formed, the church would be locked and the key conveniently ‘ lost’ and many induction’s were postponed for a week or more ( decaying bodies would be unburied ) it became common for a detachment of troops or cavalry (English ) to attend the next attempt ( to get in the church ).
These occasions became standard in Scottish parishes after 1740’.
The Scottish Protestant Church had been reduced to a laughing stock considering that pre-1560 Catholic Churches had been functioning night and day seven days per week without the proletariat being dragged from the streets and subjected to all forms of despicable methods of degradation and humiliation in front of friends and family for months on end…… the Open University goes on;
‘ All over Scotland churches fell into severe disrepair, and by the 1790s clergy were complaining openly about dampness, falling roofs, lack of ventilation or heating, and
unsurfaced floors where the rubbing of worshippers’ feet was unearthing skeletons.
The device of using the poor fund to install fixed pews which, after the allocation of a portion of their family ( of heriditors, ministers, elders ) friends and tenants, ( the rest of the pews ) were rented out to parishioners at ‘ economic ’ rates, and all felt cheated at having to pay more to worship in their parish church whilst having no say in who their minister should be.’
The OU’s book editors describe the divisions that were inevitable within the ranks of the bourgeoisie Protestant brainwashers;
‘ They became subject to internal rancour, and they split into different churches repeatedly between the 1740s and the 1800s. Moreover, a large number of denominations and sects emerged as a result of opposition to patronage in the Church of Scotland, including the Relief Church ( formed 1756 ), the Glasites and the Old Scots Independents’.
One must consider that members of these sects have been ruling Scotland for over 400 years is it little wonder that so many Scots are still living below the European levels of poverty because the nation has been so divided in so many aspects of normal life.
This has not changed as only recently in 2003 Protestant Church sects in Scotland are still continuously talking and arguing about uniting.
They cannot unite for very long as they are so divided in degrees of hate against true Christians and other faiths.
The Open University records;
‘ When in 1842, the government ( Westminster ) refused to abolish patronage and accede to Chalmers’ demands that the Church of Scotland should be permitted sovereignty within the state, church schism loomed immediately. Chalmers orchestrated the spectacular walk-out of the Evangelicals from the General Assembly in St. Andrew’s Church in Edinburgh’s George Street on 18th May 1843’.
Chalmers wrote in 1821;
‘ The Religious spirit, once so characteristic of our nation ( pre-1560 ) has been rapidly subsiding…more particularly in our great towns, the population have so outgrown the old ecclesiastical system, as to have accumulated there into so many masses of practical heathenism’.
This statement was made before Irish Catholics arrived in Scotland due to the famine that was to blight Ireland therefore one must realise that the people Chalmers refers to are mostly Protestants who couldn’t stomach the bile and distortions that had been fed to them.
The Open University writers go on;
‘ The principal biographer of Chalmers, Stewart J. Brown, has argued ( 1982 ) that the Disruption was a ‘ failure’ for Chalmers, and was also a ‘tragedy for organised religion in Scotland’.
Presbyterian-ism is the tragedy that has afflicted Scotland with its vice-grip hold over the minds of the proletariat.
Stewart J. Brown wrote in the Open University book;
‘ The Disruption of the Church of Scotland was the most important event in the history of nineteenth-century Scotland. The events of 1843 shattered one of the major institutional foundations of Scottish identity, divided the Scottish nation ( again ) and contributed significantly to the process of assimilation into a larger British parliamentary state that was increasingly secular in orientation.
The Disruption was not only the break-up of the national religious Establishment; it was also a disruption in Scottish identity.’
I must intervene on this point as a national identity requires a longer time span than the 300 years that Protestant apologists make claims over.
Brown continues;
‘ It was a radical break from its Reformation and Covenanting past, and a turning-away from the vision of the unified godly commonwealth. The Disruption undermined the Presbyterian nationalism that had shaped early modern Scotland.’
The only nationalism that I can attribute to Presbyterian-ism is to be linked to Westminster which upholds their constitution otherwise they will become as impotent as their ideology which is total domination over the hearts and souls of the proletariat not only of Scotland, but the world.
Clough ( quoted in Storrar 1990 ) asserted that;
‘ What might have developed into a declaration of independence…merely turned into the Disruption of the Kirk, and not the rupture of the ( English colony ) state’.
The Open University editors go on;
‘ The city of Glasgow became the focus of the Catholic community in Scotland; from reputedly only 30 Catholics in the city in 1778’.
Please note the Declaration of Arbroath that only 100 were needed but in Glasgow only 30 were required more that two hundred years after Mary Stuart’s martyrdom and the March 10th 1615 St. John Ogilvy’s brutal murder at Glasgow Cross by Presbyterian Knoxites who’s followers submitted and invited English domination.
The Open University’s editors examine the evil of Protestantism and present a vivid description of attacks on Scottish Catholics during 1778 that still exist today in many places and Northern Ireland;
‘ The Catholic Church and practice of the Catholic faith were subjected to extensive legal impediments. Eighteenth-century Scotland inherited a battery of measures from the previous century ( over two centuries ): Catholic mass was illegal, Catholics could not inherit or sell property or become teachers, and even being a Catholic was illegal, with kirk presbyteries having the power to declare them rebels.
The Protestant host society was extremely hostile to Catholicism’.
The OU editors fall into the same trap as many Scottish history writers by claiming the Protestants were the hosts of Catholics contrary to the fact that Scottish Catholics had formed and created the once independent nation.
They write on;
‘ This hostility was institutionalised within all echelons of the Presbyterian establishment. When, in the late 1770s, an attempt was made in Parliament ( Westminster ) to provide relief ( or freedom ) for British Catholics, the urban elite of Edinburgh ( ministers, elders etc. ) and Glasgow helped organise the artisanal mob to sack property owned by Catholics’.
A newspaper recounted one disturbance in Glasgow in October 1778: The Scots Magazine.
‘ During the time of morning service, a mob gathered round a house just by the Collage Church, where they understood that a few Catholics assembled for worship. The mob not only insulted, but terrified the poor people to the highest degree.
Some poor Highland woman had their caps and cloaks torn off them, and were pelted with dirt and stones. In short, the rabble continued their outrages till night, when they broke all the windows of the house, breathing blood and slaughter to all Papists, and in every respect profaning the Lord’s day in a grosser manner than was ever known to be done in Britain’.
This passage could equally describe the 20th century, actually its a fairly accurate interpretation of what has gone on in Scotland since 1560 not only against Catholics but also includes the Protestant proletariat who were trying to escape the jaws of the beast.
The O.U. editors wrote;
‘ Presbyterian’s viewed Catholics as ill-educated and superstitious peasants, whether from the Western Highlands or from Ireland. Catholicism threatened Scotland by undermining the Presbyterian Church of Scotland ( especially including ministers’ income ), by promoting ‘ delusion’, and ‘perverting’ the people.’
I am sure that many Protestant indoctrinates are happy that Catholics fought for the freedom that they only now partially have as the Kirk would still have their own people chained by-the-neck and sitting on punishment stools, and one can view these same antics of hatred and sectarianism by Orange-men, women and children, politicians, ministers and teachers on the streets of 21st century Scotland.
The O. U. writer continues;
‘ In 1689 support for William of Orange was far from universal and subsequent events – the Glencoe massacre of 1692 and the failure of the Darian venture, for which King William III was held responsible – made it more likely that they would seek an accommodation with the French monarch and thereby threaten England’s security on her northern frontier.
Anglo-Scottish Protestant culture could help to integrate the English and the Scots but it could not forge a new multinational British state’.
Written and researched by Francis Joseph Dougan AKA Frank Dougan.
Thank you Alexis for posting my essay. God bless, Frank Dougan…6200 views by Academics Mary Queen of Scots persecuted by Scottish Protestant Dictator John Knox and Church of Scotland and Church of England by Frank Dougan https://www.academia.edu/1952504/Mary_Queen_of_Scots_persecuted_by_Scottish_Protestant_Dictator_John_Knox……Written_and_researched_by_Frank_Dougan via @academia