period of the world's history. The history of Scotland during the Middle Age is hardly a history of the reign of the saints. Nevertheless, it was this conception of life as a vapour which appeareth for a little while,' that underlay the mediaeval society. It is the system of education devised by any community that most adequately expresses the ideals by which it lives. And what was the nature of the educational system devised by the Middle Age for the conservation of the established order? It was in the first and last instance conceived in the interests of the Church—that is, of the institution which was the life and soul of the generations over which it ruled. Instruction was given through the Church and for the Church, and its all-pervading aim was education, not for this world, but for the next. The teachers were churchmen; the subjects taught were prescribed by the Church, and these subjects were expressly chosen in view of the religious life. Thus, the life of Queen Margaret by Turgot may be regarded as marking the beginning of a new stage in the national culture.

So far as Scotland is concerned, the conception of man's destiny set forth in Turgot's book was that by which the nation lived from the eleventh to the sixteenth century when a new vision of human life and its possibilities dawned on Western Europe. In the case of Scotland we have no difficulty in fixing on the document which most distinctively signalises the opening of the new era. In the First Book of Discipline are laid down the foundations for the future national life as its authors conceived its highest interests. On the face of it, indeed, the Book of Discipline would seem to set forth essentially the same conceptions as those of Turgot. In the view of its authors man's earthly life is a state of probation, and his chief aim should be to assure himself of salvation in the next. For the attainment of this end it was the necessary condition that he should know the truth as it was to be found in the Church as it

had now been purified from human error. Here is the opening section of the Book which lays down the scheme of national education. 'Seeing that the office and dutie of the godly magistrate is not only to purge the Church of God from all superstition, and to set it at liberty from bondage of tyrants, but also to provide to the uttermost of his power how it may abide in the same purity to the posterities following, we cannot but freely communicate our judgments with your Honours in this behalf.' We see the primary intention of the authors of the Book when they presented to the civil magistrate their ideal of a system of national education; it was to ensure the conservation of that body

of doctrine which they deemed indispensable for man's right guidance on earth and his salvation hereafter. In presenting their scheme, moreover, they claimed the same power as the Church they had displaced-the power to dictate and regulate public instruction in all its departments and all its degrees. Above all things,' Knox wrote in the year of his death, preserve the kirk from the bondage of the universities.'

Thus it might seem that in their fundamental conceptions the authors of the First Book of Discipline were at one with the Church they had displaced. In point of fact, however, whatever their dogmatic views of the place of religion in life, they could not escape the influences of the age to which they belonged, and on these influences their educational scheme is the significant commentary. The governing fact of the new time had been the decisive emergence of the laity as a power in society and in the body politic. There had been two main causes, as we know, for this appearance of the laity as a factor that had now to be reckoned with in the leading States. The development of the towns in the different countries had produced communities of citizens with intelligence enlarged by their own civic life and by intercourse with other rival communities bent on objects similar to their own. The other cause had been the invention of printing, but for which the religious revolutions effected in the various countries would have been impossible. Previous to the invention of printing, instruction was gained only from persons and places sanctioned by the Church, and it was thus made easy for the ecclesiastical authorities to stamp out heretical opinion wherever it appeared. But when books were scattered broadcast among the peoples, it was no longer in the power of any organisation to suppress the expanding ideas regarding the possibilities of human life which implied the opening of a new page in the world's history. As formerly,' wrote a contemporary, the apostles of Christianity went forth, so now the disciples of the sacred art (of printing) go forth from Germany into all countries.' Thus, at the date when the Scottish reformers drafted their scheme of national education, they were face to face with conditions which had not existed in the Middle Age. Throughout that age a middle class did not exist; the Church, the king, and the feudal nobility controlled and directed between them all that concerned the main interests of the State. What was now happening in Scotland, however, showed that these conditions no longer obtained; it was by the support of the middle class in the chief towns that the

ancient Church had been overthrown and the new Church put in its place. If the new Church was to maintain its existence, therefore, the class which had been largely instrumental in creating it must be organised, educated, and directed on lines favourable to the Church's permanence. The task before the authors of the Book of Discipline, therefore, was the creation of a national system of instruction, which would include every class, and so produce the conditions requisite for the formation of an intelligent public opinion. Such an ideal was incompatible with the very being of the Church of the Middle Ages, and it is in the attempt to realise this ideal that we find all the difference between the age that had gone and the age that had come. It is true that underlying the educational system which is sketched in the Book we have the same conception of human life as 'a vapour which appeareth for a little while,' that dominated the Middle Ages, but, in point of fact, the provisions which it lays down for all classes of the people ensured a secular training for the service of society and the State which in the end was bound to react against the Church itself.

As we know, the scheme of national education sketched in the First Book of Discipline was never realised, but by this inner contradiction-the opposition between the theological intention of its authors and the secular developments it involved-the scheme may be regarded as embodying the tendencies of the age that was to follow. What specifically characterised that age-in the case of Scotland extending from the middle of the sixteenth to the close of the seventeenth century-was the gradual substitution of material for religious concerns as the main preoccupation of the different peoples. In England during the seventeenth century secular interests came to override concern for religion and the Church; Holland, the battle-ground of religion in the sixteenth century, became a nation of traders in the seventeenth; during the latter half of the same century Louis XIV. made the Church in France a mere personal convenience, and according to the historians of Germany the secularising process in that country dates from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 which closed the Thirty Years' War. In the case of Scotland during the same period it is the successive ecclesiastical struggles that are most prominently thrust on our attention, but this is largely due to the fact that the contemporary historians were churchmen whose interests were restricted to the sphere of religion. In the Acts of Parliament and in the Privy Council Register of the period we see another side to the national life. From these records we find that economical questions,

bearing on the material well-being of the country, came more and more to engage the minds of those responsible for its administration. If in the first half of the seventeenth century we have the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, in the second half we have the Report on Trade presented by the merchants of the country to the Privy Council in 1681-a report which was based upon keen observation of the conditions requisite for a flourishing home and foreign trade.

The period between the Reformation and the Revolution of 1689, therefore, may be regarded as a period of transition during which theological and secular interests were in continuous conflict for the dominant place in the national policy. By the opening of the eighteenth century the result of the conflict was no longer doubtful. If we desire a conclusive proof of the fact, we may find it in the Treaty of Union in 1707 which gave Scotland and England one legislative body. In the framing of that Treaty it was the material interests of both countries that dominated the minds of those who were responsible for it; in the times of the Covenants such a treaty would have been possible only on the condition of religion being its basis.

With the eighteenth century, therefore, we enter on another stage of development in the national history; and for that century, also, we have a document which embodies its conceptions of man and his eternal relations as distinctively as the previous documents we have been considering embody those of the respective ages to which they belong. This document is a book which is assured of permanent interest so long as a Scottish nation endures; it is the Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk. Unconsciously to himself, Carlyle, in the account he has given of his own life, has interpreted the tendencies, the tone of thought and feeling of his age with an expressiveness which leaves nothing to be desired. As we read his book, we realise that the world and his fellow-mortals are seen by him in lights which in previous centuries of the national history had not dawned on men's eyes. His intellectual attitude and his conception of life's duties and responsibilities are as characteristic of his age as were those of Adamnan and Turgot of the age to which they belonged. And, be it noted, that like Adamnan and Turgot, he also was a cleric. In considering the characteristics of his gospel, therefore, we have a further interesting commentary on the development of the national culture from the earliest stage of which we have the documentary history. What are the distinguishing notes in

Carlyle's book which so eminently mark it as a product of his age?

Carlyle was not a great original thinker who by force of mind and character gives a new direction to traditional currents of thought. The interest that belongs to him lies in the fact that by his natural qualities he represents in discreet moderation the prevailing tendencies of the age in which he lived. Fully to appreciate those tendencies we have to go beyond the limits of Scotland, for it was not in Scotland that they originated. Carlyle's life (he was born in 1722 and died in 1805) corresponded with the period when ideas, which had their birth in the seventeenth century, came to their full fruition in all the countries of Western Europe. It was in France that these ideas had their origin, and it is usual to associate their first decisive appearance with the publication of Descartes' Discourse on Method in 1657. In that discourse was pregnantly indicated an attitude of mind which for a century and a half was to determine not only men's speculations, but their habitual tone of feeling regarding matters which specially appeal to the emotions. Descartes' evangel, for such it was in his eyes, and in those of the thinkers who followed him, was the application of reason to human experience in the entire range of its content. It was to the explanation of nature that the new method was applied in the first instance, but in due course it came soon to be applied to man and his history. The particular form of demonstration which commended itself to Descartes and the philosophers of the eighteenth century as the one adequate organon was that of mathematical proof, and their preference for this mode of reasoning has a sufficient explanation. It was in the science of astronomy that the most impressive discoveries were made in the seventeenth century; and the two great discoverers, Galileo and Newton, were mathematicians. Before the close of that century we have the Ethic of Spinoza, in which the rationale of the universe is set forth in a series of quasi-mathematical formulas. In 1734 were published Voltaire's Letters on the English, in which he expounded the Newtonian system with such effect that in France, the country with which Scotland was in direct intellectual contact, Newtonism became the current designation for the attitude which came to dominate the French mind. Is it not amazing,' Horace Walpole wrote in 1764, 'that the most sensible people in France can never help being dominated by sounds. and general ideas? Now everybody must be a geomètre, now a philosophe.'