THE EARLIEST SCOTTISH UNIVERSITY.

II.

HE University of St. Andrews at first existed for about forty years merely as a teaching and degree-granting institute; that is to say, it confined itself to giving instruction, and attempted nothing more. In a short time three colleges were founded within the university, and these colleges aimed at something beyond mere instruction of the intellect-they aimed at educating the whole man, as they then understood that process-not only informing his understanding, but ordering his life, conduct, and manners, and providing for religious worship. No doubt the conception of life which those Catholic founders held was a cramped and confined one; the worship they provided may have been formal and corrupt; the means they took to carry out their conception may have been poor and faulty. But the root-conception itself—that of moulding not the intellect merely, but the whole man-was, in its essence, deep and true beyond anything we in these modern days dream of. Even after the Reformation, the Reformers still preserved, for several generations, the old Catholic idea of education, as distinguished from mere instruction; and they endeavoured, with their new lights, to combine the intellectual, the moral, and the spiritual elements-for they believed, and rightly, that thought, life, and worship should go hand in hand, and that they cannot be severed without grievous loss to young souls. But gradually the severance began, and in the universities of Germany and of Scotland it has long been complete. St. Andrews was, I believe, the latest of our universities to abandon the old idea that we had inherited from Catholic times. England, too, which has so much longer walked in the old way, and has attempted, by the college system in Oxford and Cambridge, to educate the whole man, has for the last twenty years been busy in casting off its old tradition. Men are eager for it, and they call it advance; but they cannot change the nature of things, and it is one of the deepest laws of that nature, that the intellectual and the spiritual parts of man are inseparably combined, and cannot be sundered without injury to the whole man. The intellect itself is impoverished or dwarfed when cut off from the spirit-the fountain-light of all our seeing. We may go on keeping up the divorce, and no doubt will do so for a long time to come, but it will be found that we are on a road which leads only to inanition. Perhaps in some far future, men may rediscover the true spiritual centre, and after long wanderings may return to make their thoughts, their lives, and their whole education revolve round it. However poor and inadequate may have been the way in which they carried it out, the Catholic universities were right in their ground conception-in their preference for education over

mere instruction, and in their endeavour to order their training according to this conception. We, who boast of our wider views and more scientific notions, have abandoned the attempt to educate the soul, and seek only to instruct the understanding.

When the storm of the Reformation which had been so long impending at length burst, no place in Scotland felt the violence of the shock more sensibly than St. Andrews. There were concentrated all the elements that could give fullest force to the collision. On the one hand, the numerous crowd of priests, monks, or canons, proud of their cathedral, and resolute to defend the ancient system, however corrupt, and these led by a prelate, John Hamilton, who, if less able, was not less unscrupulous and cruel than David Beaton. On the other hand, the young regents and teachers and students of St. Leonard's, still zealous for the new learning and the new faith, with their ardour not daunted but rather inflamed by the thought of their fellows who had suffered in the cause. And then, to stir the hostile elements and drive them to collision, John Knox, who for nearly forty years kept ever and anon appearing in St. Andrews as the cloud-compeller of the storm.

The

Knox was not a student at St. Andrews, as once some believed, but at Glasgow University. Wherever he graduated, he is found in St. Andrews as early as 1528 or 1529, teaching the scholastic philosophy with an ability which almost surpassed that of his teacher, Mair or Major. But he was not long held by these trammels. Gradually, by the study of St. Jerome and St. Augustine, he unlearned the Popish theology and opened his mind to the new faith. If Knox was not in St. Andrews when Patrick Hamilton was burnt, he must have been there very soon after, and must have received the full force of the thrill which that heroic death sent throughout Scotland. The years of Knox's sojourn in St. Andrews-from 1530 till 1542-were those of Beaton's most violent persecutions. names of at least ten confessors are preserved who suffered for their faith either at St. Andrews or elsewhere. Numbers more had to fly to the Continent to escape the fury of the cardinal. Knox the while, thrilled by these examples, and stimulated by converse with the society of St. Leonard's College, was pursuing his own thoughts, and by 1542 he had so fully embraced the reformed religion, that his views reached Beaton's ears, so that he had to fly from St. Andrews. Wherever his first university may have been, St. Andrews was to him the birthplace of his new faith. His second coming thither, was at Easter 1547, just after the murder of Beaton, when Knox became chaplain to the garrison of the castle, preached his first Protestant sermon from the pulpit of the parish church, and confronted, at a convention held in St. Leonard's yards, the learned men of the Abbey and the University, and confounded their ablest disputants by the power of his arguments in favour of the new doctrines. He was then taken prisoner, along with the garrison of the castle, on the last day of July, and carried off to serve in the French galleys.

Knox's third coming to St. Andrews is that famous one which all men know. Archbishop Hamilton, hearing that he meant to preach in the cathedral church, sent him word that if he dared to enter that pulpit the soldiers would have orders to fire upon him. In the face of that threat Knox ascended the pulpit, and, for four successive days, discoursed on Christ's purifying the temple at Jerusalem. The sequel need hardly be told. The purifying of the cathedral was entrusted to the hands of the rascal multitude,' and we know how they purified it. After desecrating the cathedral, and wrecking it of its ornaments, they fell with still wilder fury on the priory, the monasteries of the Black Friars and the Grey, the provostry of Kirkheugh, and the ancient church of St. Regulus, and overthrew them either with partial or total destruction.

Once again the fourth time and the last-he came, in May 1571. Worn out with age and infirmity, and with harassment in Edinburgh, he sought repose in St. Andrews. That repose he did not find. The Hamiltons and other factions still harassed him. Some members of the University showed their hostility to him, especially Professor Archibald Hamilton; St. Salvator's and St. Mary's Colleges were disaffected towards him. Some of the professors were even suspected of Popery. But St. Leonard's was with him.

James Melville, in his famous Diary,' says:-

Our haill Collage, maisters and schollars, was sound and zealous in the guid cause; the other twa Collages nocht sa; for in the new Collage, howbeit Mr. John Douglass, their Rector, was guid aneuch, the thrie uther maisters and sum of the Regentes war euill-myndit, viz., Messrs. Robert, Archbald and Jhone Hamiltons (wharof the last twa becam apostates), hated Mr. Knox and the guid cause; and the Commissar, Mr. Wilyeam Skein could nocht lyk weill of his doctrine. The auld Collage was reulit be Mr. Jhon Rutherford, a man lernit in philosophie, but invyus corrupt.

James Melville, who was a first-year student at St. Leonard's when Knox came, further says:

Of all the benefits that I had that year (1571) was the coming of that maist notable profet and apostle of our nation, Mr. Johne Knox. I heard him teach there the prophecies of Daniel, that simmer and the wintar following. I had my pen and my little buike, and tuke any sic things as I could comprehend. In the opening up of his text, he was moderate the space of half-an-hour; but when he entered to application he made me so to grew and tremble that I could not hald a pen to wryt. He was very weik. I saw him, every day of his doctrine, go hulie and fear (slowly and warily), with a furring of marticks about his neck, a staffe in the ane hand, and his servand halden up the uther oxter, from the Abbey to the parish kirk, and by two men lifted up to the pulpit, whar he behovit to lean at his first entrie, bot, ere he haid done with his sermone, he was sa active and vigorous that he was lyk to ding the pulpit to blads, and flie out of it.

Melville tells that during this, Knox's last sojourn in St. Andrews, He ludgit down in the Abbey [so that parts of the Abbey must still have been habitable] beside our College, and our Primarius, Mr. James Wilkie,

our Regents, Mr. Nicol Dalgleise, Mr. Wilyeame Colace, and Mr. John Davidson went in ordinarilie to his grace efter denner and supper. ... Mr. Knox wald sum tyme com in, and repose him in our Collage yeard, and call us schollars unto him, and bless us, and exhort us to knaw God and his wark in our countrey, and stand be the guid cause, to use our tyme weill, and lern the guid instructiones and follow the guid example of our Maisters. Soon after this, in August, 1572, Knox left St. Andrews and returned to Edinburgh to die, desiring, in his own words, that I may end my battel; for, as the worlde is wearie of me, so am I of it.'

Such personal incidents as these, interesting in themselves, are almost the only things we know about the University. In 1560, the year when the reformed religion was set up in Scotland, everything in the colleges of St. Andrews connected with the Roman faith and worship were swept away; and how violent must have been the shock we can imagine, when we remember how entirely ecclesiastical these foundations were, and how ingrained into them were all the usages of the ancient faith.

Two years before the Reformation very few students entered the University, owing to the tumults about religion,' says the Matriculation Book; and in the next year, owing to the universal upturning of all things, the graduation ceremonies had to be suspended. When the Reformation was actually established, the greater number of the regents joined the winning side, and became Protestants. Several of the St. Salvator men, however, refused to swim with the stream, and among them William Cranston, the Principal of the college. He and some others preferred to demit their offices rather than relinquish the ancient faith. But, besides sweeping the colleges clean of everything connected with the Roman faith and worship, the Reformers were minded to make other changes in the University, which, however, they were prevented from then carrying out, as their hands were full of other and more necessary work. When Cranston demitted his office as Principal of St. Salvator's, he was succeeded by John Rutherford. He was a scholar, and wrote Latin in the improved style, acquired by study of the classics. He was still more a philosopher, and published a treatise on the Art of Reasoning, which, though strictly Aristotelian in its principles, is said to have marked a stage in the progress of philosophy in Scotland, and to have been an unquestionable benefit to the University and the nation.' At the Reformation John Douglas was the head of St. Mary's, and John Duncanson the head of St. Leonard's. These both conformed to the new régime, and Douglas afterwards became Tulchan Archbishop of St. Andrews.

It was twenty years before any effectual commission took the University in hand, and till then, and even after it, the mode of teaching and the academical exercises in philosophy and arts remained much the same as they had been in Mair's time, before the Reformation.

But if the Parliament and General Assembly could not find time

to reorganise the Universities, they or their leaders took care that the ablest men of the time were placed in the most prominent academic posts. Two such-the men next to Knox in power of intellect and strength of will-filled the principalships of two of the colleges: the one a contemporary and fellow-worker with Knox; the other his successor, and the completer of his work. The first of these, George Buchanan, was probably the greatest scholar whom Scotland ever produced. After having studied in St. Andrews, under Mair; then having passed to the Continent, where he was knocked from pillar to post, as a poor, almost mendicant scholar; then, after having narrowly escaped the hands of the Inquisition,--he returned to Scotland, and received, in 1564, from Queen Mary Stuart, his first piece of preferment, a portion of the forfeited revenue of the Abbey of Crossraguel. About this time he became Queen Mary's tutor, and read Livy with her-it is said in that house in South Street (Domus sumptuosa) which still bears her name. By Mary's treacherous half-brother, Regent Murray, Buchanan was appointed, in 1566, to the principalship of St. Leonard's, which he held till 1570. While he was still Principal of St. Leonard's, in 1568, he went with the Regent to England, as one of the accusers of his Queen and former pupil, and used his scholarship to compose a Latin 'Detection of her actions, which he laid before her judges at Westminster, and circulated industriously in the English Court. Whoever else might accuse Mary, was it not the depth of baseness in Buchanan to do so? Add to this, that if, as is now by many believed, the casket letters were forgeries, then Buchanan must have been guilty of even a deeper baseness than that of ingratitude. Appointed afterwards to be one of the young king's preceptors, he showed to James the same harsh spirit he had shown towards his mother. Traditions are still rife among the Scottish peasantry how he buffeted his royal pupil; and, as Mr. Hill Burton observes, the zeal with which these traditions have been preserved, and the zest with which they are still told by the people, show how much fellow-feeling they have for this humbly born and bitter republican.' Once it is told that, when Buchanan had been inflicting dorsal discipline' on the young prince, the Countess of Mar, hearing the cries, entered and asked him how he dared to lift his hand against the Lord's anointed. The grim reply of the sour, coarse stoic was such as may be imagined, but cannot be here repeated. In after years James used to say of some high official that he ever 'trembled at his approach, it minded him so of his old pedagogue.' No wonder that, when Buchanan tried to impress the young king with his views as to the duty of a constitutional monarch, it only drove James to the opposite extreme, so that in after years he loathed the very thought of Buchanan, and warned his son Charles against his books and opinions as against poison.

6

6

Buchanan held the principalship of St. Leonard's for only four years (1566-1570). The only official duty imposed on him was to