The Scottish Reformation Part 16

Shortly after this, roused by the tidings of fresh persecutions which had reached him from Scotland, and especially by the account of the cruel executions of the humble martyrs of Perth by the cardinal and his party on St Paul's day, 1543-44, Alesius on 23rd April wrote to Melanchthon in the following terms:--

"Three days ago there were here several countrymen of mine, who declare that the cardinal rules all things at his pleasure in Scotland, and governs the governor himself. In the town of St Johnston he hung up four respectable citizens, for no other cause than because they had requested a monk, in the middle of his sermon, not to depart in his doctrine from the sacred text, and not to mix up notions of his own with the words of Christ. Along with these a most respectable matron, carrying a sucking child in her arms, was haled before the tribunal and condemned to death by drowning. They report that the constancy of the woman was such that, when her husband was led to the scaffold and mounted the ladder, she followed and mounted along with him, and entreated to be allowed to hang from the same beam. She encouraged him to be of good cheer, for in a few hours, said she, I shall be with Christ along with you. They declare also that the governor was inclined to liberate them, but that the cardinal suborned the n.o.bles to threaten that they would leave him if the condemned were not put to death. When the cardinal arrived with his army at Dundee, from which the monks had been expelled, all the citizens took to flight; and when he saw the town quite deserted he laughed, and remarked that he had expected to find it full of Lutherans."[316]

[Sidenote: He pleads for National Union.]

[Sidenote: He repels the Cry of Innovation.]

Before the expiry of that year Alesius addressed to the chief n.o.bles, prelates, barons, and to the whole people of Scotland, his Cohortatio ad concordiam pietatis ac doctrinae Christianae defensionem. This piece, Dr Lorimer tells us, "is instinct throughout with the spirit of true Christian patriotism, as well as with genuine evangelical earnestness and fervour. Lamenting the distractions of the kingdom by opposing political factions--the French faction and the English--he [like the author of the Complaynt of Scotland a few years later] implores his countrymen to lay aside these divisions, and demonstrates by many examples from cla.s.sical history the dangers of national disunion, and the duty of patriotic concord in defence of the safety and honour of their common country. His expostulations against the oppression and cruelty of the bishops, and his allusions to the martyrs who had suffered in the cause of truth, are full of interest; and his digression, in particular, upon the character and martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton, is a n.o.ble burst of eloquence and pathos. When he exhorts to national union he means union in the truth--union in the one great work of purifying religion and reforming the corruptions of the church of G.o.d. What urgent need there was of such a work he demonstrates at much length, and with great freedom and faithfulness. Unless the church of Christ be reformed it must perish from the earth, and those are its worst enemies, not its real friends, who oppose such indispensable reform."[317] "Everywhere," he says, "we see the church driven forward to such reform. Ask even those who are most solicitous for its welfare, and they will tell you that the church can no longer be safe or free from troubles unless it be strengthened by the removal of abuses. If this, then, is a measure of absolute necessity unless we would see the whole church go to ruin; if all men confess that this should be done, if facts themselves call with a loud voice that some care should be taken to relieve the labouring [bark of the] church, to purify her depraved doctrine, and to reform her whole administration,--why, I demand, are those maligned and vilified who discover and point out the church's faults and failings? The proper remedies could not possibly have been applied till the disease was known; and yet the men who point it out, warn of its virulence and danger, and wish to alleviate or entirely remove it, are hated and persecuted as much as if they had been themselves the cause of all." With equal vigour he repels the cry of innovation raised against the reformers and their teaching. Their work was rather an honest attempt at restoration. What they sought, he said, "was just such a change as would take place in the manners of an age if the gravity, modesty, and frugality of ancient times were to take the place of levity, lewdness, luxury, and other vices. Such a change might be termed the introduction of what was novel, but in fact it was only the reintroduction of what was old and primitive. Let us," he exclaims, "have innovation everywhere if only we can get the true for the false, seriousness for levity, and solid realities for empty dreams." "It is no new doctrine we bring, but the most ancient, nay rather the eternal truth, for it proclaims that Jesus Christ, the Son of G.o.d, came into the world to save sinners, and that we are saved by faith in Him. Of Him even Moses wrote, and to Him give all the prophets witness, that whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins. This is the old doctrine which runs through all the ages. Those which are really new are the doctrines which have obscured or contaminated it, brought in by those entrusted with the care of the vineyard of the Lord, and who, like the keepers of the vineyard in the Gospel parable, have maltreated and slain many of the Lord's messengers."

This was the last service, so far as we know, which Alesius was able to render to the cause of the Reformation in his native land, and it did not fail in due time to produce abundant and lasting fruit. As Major before him, so Knox after him, strenuously contended for union of Scotsmen among themselves; and after that, but only after that, for a league with England rather than with France. They laboured, and others entered into their labours, and, proceeding on the same lines on which they had worked, at last brought the conflict to a triumphant issue.

Tidings of their success filled Alesius with joy in the land of his exile. Even these, however, failed in his old age to tempt him back to the home of his youth, or the scene of those early struggles which were so deeply engraven on his memory and heart. And, so far as we know, he received no call to return from those who were then at the head of affairs in Scotland, though unquestionably he was more deeply read in theology than any one of them, and though, as unquestionably, the faculty of divinity was for several years but poorly supplied in the universities of Scotland, and preachers of ability, culture, and learning were very rare in the land.

[Sidenote: Appreciation of his Services.]

His life, especially after the close of the Schmalkaldic war, seems to have pa.s.sed tranquilly and happily at the great Lutheran University of Leipsic. He was loved and honoured by his colleagues and by his prince, and, as I have already hinted, he was the bosom friend and unremitting correspondent of Melanchthon. As his services had been called into requisition by the Preceptor Germaniae at the colloquies of Worms and Regensburg, so were they sought and got at the colloquy of Saxon theologians for the preparation of the Leipsic Interim in 1548, at that of Naumburg in 1554, at that of Nuremberg in 1555, and that of Dresden in 1561. "In all these"--the Leipsic professor, who on the occasion of the first centenary of his second rectorship p.r.o.nounced an oration on him, affirms that--"he so conducted himself that no one could charge him with want of perseverance in building up the truth, or of judiciousness in examining the errors of others, or of faithfulness and dexterity in the counsels he gave." M'Kenzie, who has inserted a sketch of his career in his 'Lives of Eminent Scotsmen,' a.s.sures us that in the conference of Naumburg he acquitted himself to the admiration of the whole a.s.sembly, for which he is highly commended by Camerarius in his 'Life of Melanchthon'; and further, that in the year 1555 the disciples of Andrew Osiander having raised great dissensions in the city of Nuremberg respecting the doctrine of justification, Melanchthon made choice of Alesius as the fittest person to appease them by his wisdom and learning, and that his management answered Melanchthon's expectations, though Alesius himself had previously taken a side in the controversy.

In the Majoristic controversy, Alesius, like Melanchthon, so far sided with Major as to maintain against the extreme Lutherans the necessity of good works, not to justification, but to final salvation; and in 1560 he seems to have discussed this question in one of his so-called _disputationes_.

With respect to his private life, we are told by Thomasius that he had by his English wife one son, whose name was Caspar, and who died while still a youth, and had a monument erected by his father to his memory, bearing the simple inscription, "Caspari. Filiolo. Alexander. Alesius.

Doctor. Lugens. Posuit." He had at least two daughters. One named Christina, Thomasius tells us, was married to a German bearing the cla.s.sical name Marcus Scipio: she outlived her husband, and died in 1604, in the fifty-ninth year of her age. The name of the other daughter does not seem to have been known to Thomasius, but as he states that she was given in marriage in 1557, we can have no doubt that she is the same Anna whose wedding is referred to in a letter of Alesius to Melanchthon, recently unearthed, and inviting him and other friends in Wittenberg to the wedding.[318]

[Sidenote: His Death.]

[Sidenote: Deserves a Memorial.]

Alesius himself died on the 17th March 1565, and was buried at Leipsic; but no stone was raised, or, if raised, now remains, to tell where his ashes repose. In all probability it was in his son's grave, in the church of St Paul, in the city of Leipsic, that his ashes were laid to rest. The only monuments to his memory reared at the time and still existing are those furnished by our own John Johnston--second master of St Mary's College, and colleague of Andrew Melville--in his Latin poems on the Scottish martyrs and confessors, and ent.i.tled ?e?? Stefa??? and by Beza in his 'Icones.' Johnston, joining together Macchabaeus and Alesius, says:--

"Sors eadem exilii n.o.bis, vitaeque laborumque, Ex quo nos Christi conciliavit amor.

Una salus amborum, unum et commune periclum; Pertulimus pariter praest.i.te cuncta Deo.

Dania te coluit. Me Lipsia culta docentem.

Audiit, et sacros hausit ab ore sonus."[319]

Beza says, "He was a man dear to all the learned, who would have been a distinguished ornament of Scotland if that country had recovered the light of the Gospel at an earlier period; and who, when rejected by both Scotland and England, was most eagerly embraced by the evangelical church of Saxony, and continued to be warmly cherished and esteemed by her to the day of his death." The man who was held in such high esteem by the reforming Archbishops of Cologne and Canterbury; who was the bosom friend of Melanchthon; who was highly thought of by Luther, and warmly eulogised by Beza and Johnston, was certainly not one whose memory his countrymen should willingly let die. He was unquestionably the most cultured, probably also the most liberal and conciliatory, of the Scottish theologians of the sixteenth century. He was the first to plead publicly before the authorities of the nation for the right of every household and every individual to have access to the Word of G.o.d in the vernacular tongue, and to impress on parents the sacred duty of sedulously inculcating its teaching on their children, and therefore, as Christopher Anderson has said, "the man who struck the first note in giving a tone to that character," for which his native country has since been known, and often since commended, as Bible-loving Scotland. Had his countrymen not so long lost sight of him, perhaps some stone of remembrance might have been found to his memory in Germany; but surely, though he was so long an exile, the chief memorial of his birth and death ought to be in Edinburgh or St Andrews. "There, in reference to the cause he advocated, no inappropriate emblem" would be "a father and his child reading the same sacred volume; and, for a motto, in remembrance of his position at the moment, perhaps his own memorable quotation of the Athenian, 'Strike, but hear me.'"[320]

FOOTNOTES:

[283] [Alesius thus proceeds: "Et in mari inter tempestates et 18 diebus subtus terram in teterrimo specu inter bufones et serpentes custodivit (oportet enim me haec alicubi commemorare pro grat.i.tudine erga Deum).

Hic igitur Salvator omnium, maxime fidelium, perficiet id quod per me facere inst.i.tuit" (In Alteram ad Timotheum expositio. Autore Alexandro Alesio. D. Lipsiae, 1551, sign. A 2).]

[284] D'Aubigne's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi. 13, 14.

[D'Aubigne is here following, or rather embellishing, the account which Alesius thus gives in another of his works: "Pueri, me adhuc puero, quasdam sententias excerptas ex Joanne, scriptas in membrana, ut illam, in principio erat verb.u.m, Ecce agnus Dei, &c., Sic Deus dilexit mundum, Ego sum resurrectio et vita, &c., ac similes, vel auro et argento inclusas circa collum gestabant, non tam ornamenti causa, quam quod magnam vim et virtutem in his collocarent contra incantationes et pericula, in quae diabolus saepe pueros incautos solet conjicere. Memini frequenter, et quoties reminiscor, toto corpore cohorresco, me in praerupto altissimi montis manibus et pedibus reptantem, ac proximum praecipitio, subito translatum nescio a quo aut quomodo, in alium loc.u.m: et alia vice ex eminentiori deambulacro aedium patris cadentem inter acervum lapidum poliendorum ad aedificium, servatum esse divinitus.

"Non tribuo hanc salutem sententiis ex Joanne, quas forsan aliorum puerorum more circ.u.mferebam: sed fidei parentum, qui harum sententiam mente circ.u.mferebant, et pro me orabant. Sed tamen, ut mihi videtur, magis deceret n.o.bilitatem Christianam, has et similes sententias in auro et lapidibus preciosis insculptas a collo dependentes circ.u.mferre, quam ethnicorum Regum ac Caesarum imagines" (Commentarius in Evangelium Joannis. Basileae, 1553. Epistola Dedicatoria, pp. 14-16).]

[285] [In a list of names without a heading, he appears as "Alexr.

Allane na. Lau.," which shows that of the nations into which the members of the university were then cla.s.sified, he belonged to Lothian. In the list of determinants he appears as "Allexr. Alan." Opposite his name and the names of his cla.s.s-fellows is the word "pauperes," which shows that they paid no fees.]

[286] He himself at a later period ingenuously acknowledges that his arguments in great part were borrowed from the treatise of an English bishop, namely Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who at the request of Henry VIII. had replied to Luther's attack on that monarch.

[287] D'Aubigne's Reformation in the Time of Calvin, vi. 59, 60.

[288] Laing's Knox, i. 40, 41.

[289] [See it so described in the pa.s.sage quoted, _supra_, p. 240 n.]

[290] [He calls it a _latrina_ in his 'Responsio ad Cochlei Calumnias,'

sign. A v.]

[291] [Now known as Bishop's Hall.]

[292] Responsio ad Cochlei Calumnias, sign. A vj.

[293] Responsio ad Cochlei Calumnias, sign. A vj.

[294] Ibid.

[295] No doubt James Wedderburn, merchant at the West Kirk Style of Dundee, who carried on a large trade with the Continent, and was known to be friendly to those holding the reformed opinions. One of his sons was then studying at St Andrews, and probably had been the means of communication between the canons and Dundee to secure beforehand a speedy departure for their fugitive friend. [For many interesting details concerning the sons of this Dundee merchant, see Dr Mitch.e.l.l's Wedderburns and their Work, 1867; and also his edition of The Gude and G.o.dlie Ballatis, 1897, pp. xvii-x.x.xii, lx.x.xiii-civ.]

[296] [In his Introduction (pp. xviii-xx) to Gau's 'Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Heuine,' Dr Mitch.e.l.l says: "The treatise 'De Apostolicis Traditionibus,' in which he [_i.e._, Alesius] has given an account of his visit, and of the manner in which he was received by his countrymen and the reforming preachers of Malmo, is one of the rarest of his minor treatises, and is not to be found in any of our Scottish libraries, nor in the British Museum, nor even in the library of the University of Leipsic, in which he was so long an honoured professor.... Neither the name of Gau nor that of any other of his countrymen then in the city is given by Alesius.... Princ.i.p.al Lorimer has ingeniously conjectured that Gau may have come out to act as chaplain to his countrymen at Malmo. And I am inclined to accept the conjecture to a modified extent.... At any rate, we find that before the close of 1533 he was in Denmark, and had got such an accurate knowledge of the Danish language that he had translated and published a treatise of considerable length from Danish into his native Scotch." In the Appendix to the same Introduction (p.

xlv) Dr Mitch.e.l.l explains that "modern Danish scholars express doubts whether, in the early part of the 16th century, any nation, save the German as represented by the Hanseatic League, was organised as a distinct community at Malmo."]

[297] [This sentence is interlined, and the word which seems to be _first_ is rather indistinct.]

[298] In the preceding narrative I have availed myself of the details which Alesius has given us of his labours and sufferings in his commentaries and lesser treatises, and especially in two of the smallest of them, both published in 1533, the one bearing the t.i.tle--"Alexandri Alesii Epistola contra decretum quoddam Episcoporu in Scotia, quod prohibet legere Noui Testamenti libros lingua vernacula"; the other "Alexandri Alesii Scotti Responsio ad Cochlei Calvmnias."

[299] [The nature of the arguments used by Alesius in this epistle may be learned from the lengthy extracts quoted in Christopher Anderson's Annals of the English Bible, 1845, ii. 430-437.]

[300] [This reply by Cochlaeus, which is dated 6th June 1533, is ent.i.tled: "An Expediat Laicis, legere Noui Testamenti libros lingua Vernacula? Ad Serenissimvm Scotiae Regem Iacob.u.m V. Disputatio inter Alexandrum Alesium Scotum, & Iohannem Cochlaeum Germanum. Anno dni M.D. x.x.xIII." A beautiful copy of this very rare work was secured at the Laing sale for the library of the Church of Scotland. There is also a copy in the Signet Library. A few extracts may be found in Anderson's Annals, ii. 439-441.]

[301] [A beautiful copy of this excessively rare tract was also secured for the Church library at the Laing sale.]

[302] [For a translation by Dr Mitch.e.l.l of that part of the Responsio which relates to the opinions of Alesius, see Appendix E.]

[303] [Dr Mitch.e.l.l possessed copies of several of the other tracts of Cochlaeus, as well as of this: "Pro Scotiae Regno Apologia Iohannis Cochlei, adversvs personatum Alexandrum Alesium Scotum. Ad Sereniss.

Scotoru rege. M.D.x.x.xIIII." It ends: "Excusum Lipsiae apud Michaelem Blum."]

[304] [Alesius says: "I was at Antwerp whan a contryman of myne, whose name was John Foster, did send a somme of mony unto Cochleus by a marchant from the Bisshop of S. Andrews, which geveth him yerely so long as he liveth a certen stipend. And it chanced by the goodnes of G.o.d, wherby He discloseth the wickednes of these hipocytes (_sic_), that a pistle of Cochleus which he sent unto a certen bisshop of Pole came unto my handes, wherin he complayneth that he hath gret losse and evel fortune in setting forth of bokes, for as moch as no man wil wetesaue to rede his bokes. And he beggeth a yerely stipend of the bisshops of Pole, saing that he hath bene n.o.bly rewarded of the King of Scottys and of the Archbisshop of S. Andrews and of the Bisshop of Glasguo" ('Of the Auctorite of the Word of G.o.d').]

[305] [From the Treasurer's Accounts, as quoted by M'Crie, it appears that the servant who brought over his book received 10 (M'Crie's Knox, 1855, p. 321 n.).]

[306] [15th March 1542-43 (Acts of Parliament, ii. 415).]

[307] [The t.i.tle is: "De Avthoritate Verbi Dei Liber Alexandri Alesij, contra Episcopum Lundensem. An. M.D.XLII." The preface is dated: "Francfordiae ad Oderam. Calend. Maijs. an. Domini M.D.XL." The colophon is: "Argentorati apvd Cratonem Mylivm an. M.D.XLII. mense Septembri."

The translation, which is in black-letter, bears no date, place, or printer's name. For a copy of its t.i.tle, see _infra_, p. 268 n.]

[308] [Alesius says that he was the bearer of the Loci Theologici, which he had persuaded Melanchthon to dedicate to Henry VIII. (Foreign Calendar, Elizabeth, i. 525).]

[309] [He was in London during the time of the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn. He sent Elizabeth an account of a dream or vision which he then had. See Appendix F.]

[310] [There is "great uncertainty" as to whether this meeting took place in 1536 or 1537 (Hardwick's Reformation, 1883, p. 182 n.). The year 1537 is given by Alesius in his 'De Avthoritate Verbi Dei' (p. 18), and is repeated in the translation. In the latter it is said: "Contrary to all my expectacion I chanced to fall agayn into such a disputacyon as I was in before, and in maner with like adversarys.... Unto this disputacion I came sodenly unprepared, for as I did mete bi chance in the streate the right excellent Lord Crumwel going unto the Parlament Howse in the yeare 1537, he whan he sawe me called me unto him, and toke me with him to the Parlament House to Westmyster (_sic_), where we fownd all the bisshops gathered together."]