Before the Reformation, according to the most trustworthy accounts, more than the half of the wealth of Scotland belonged to the clergy, and the greater part of this was in the hands of a few individuals. The effect of such a state of things, as it has always been in every age and country, was the corruption of the whole order of the clergy, and of the whole system of religion. "Avarice, ambition, and the love of secular pomp, reigned among the superior orders. Bishops and abbots rivaled the first nobility in magnificence, and preceded them in honors; they were privy councilors, and lords of session as well as of parliament, and had long engrossed the principal offices of state. A vacant bishopric or abbacy called forth powerful competitors, who contended for it as for a principality or petty kingdom. Inferior benefices were openly put to sale, or bestowed on the illiterate and unworthy minions of courtiers; on dice-players, strolling bards, and the natural sons of bishops. The bishops never, on any occasion, condescended to preach; from the erection of the regular Scottish Episcopacy down to the era of the Reformation, history mentions only one instance of a bishop preaching, and that was Dunbar, Archbishop of Glasgow, for the purpose of excluding the Reformer, George Wishart."
The lives of the clergy, corrupted by wealth and ignorance, became such a scandal to religion, and such an outrage on decency, that we cannot transfer the description of the most conscientious historian to our pages. But all historians are agreed, both Catholic and Protestant, that monasteries and all religious houses became the nurseries of superstition and idleness, and ultimately the haunts of lewdness and wickedness. Yet it was deemed impious and sacrilegious to speak of reducing their numbers or alienating their funds. "The kingdom swarmed with ignorant, idle, luxurious monks, who, like locusts, devoured the fruits of the earth, and filled the air with pestilential infection; with friars, white, black, and gray; canons regular, Carmelites, Carthusians, Cordeliers, Dominicans, Franciscan conventuals, and observantines, Jacobins, Premonstratensians, monks of Tyrone, and of Vallis Caulium, and Hospitallers, or Holy Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; nuns of St. Austin, St. Clair, St. Scholastica, and St. Catherine of Sienna, with canonesses of various clans."
Without an adequate knowledge of the state of Christendom before the Reformation, it would be impossible to form a just estimate of the necessity and importance of that most merciful revolution. At this distance of time and with such a changed state of society before us, it is difficult to believe that such enormous abuses then prevailed in the church. Of the doctrines of Christianity almost nothing remained but the name. At the same time we as firmly believe, that the Lord had His hidden ones—His true witnesses, who mourned over the evil ways and intolerance of the high and dominant party. The Lord Himself in His address to Thyatira, speaks of a remnant then in separation from the corruptions of Jezebel, and that their good works increased as the darkness thickened. "I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first." The lives, faith, and works of this remnant were no doubt regulated by the word of God; but this very circumstance ensured their obscurity, and their absence from the page of history. The silver line of God's sovereign grace could never be interrupted, and tens of thousands from the darkest ages shall reflect the glory of that grace forever. In quietness they fulfilled their peaceful mission, and as peacefully passed off the scene, but left no record of their labors of love on the pages of the annalist. Not so with the proud, the ambitious, the fanatic, the hypocrite: all such stand prominent on the pages of ecclesiastical history. But there is another tribunal besides that of posterity before which both must stand, and be measured by God's own standard.
But we return to our theme—the state of religion in Scotland before the Reformation.