were enjoined in the Church by royal authority, and the Scots, whose theory of the rights of the Church was much more “high” than that of Laud, would, on this account alone, have met them with resistance.  But the canons used words and phrases which were intolerable to Scottish ears.  They spoke of a “chancel” and they commended auricular confession; they gave the Scottish bishops something like the authority of their English brethren, to the detriment of minister and kirk-session, and they made the use of a new prayer-book compulsory, and forbade any objection to it.  Two years elapsed before the book was actually introduced.  It was English, and it had been forced upon the Church by the State, and, worse than this, it was associated with the hated name of Laud and with his suspected designs upon the Protestant religion.  When it came it was found to follow the English prayer-book almost exactly; but such changes as there were seemed suspicious in the extreme.  In the communion service the rubric preceding the prayer of consecration read thus:  “During the time of consecration he shall stand at such a part of the holy table where he may with the more ease and decency use both his hands”.  The reference to both hands was suspected to mean the Elevation of the Host, and this suspicion was confirmed by the omission of the sentences “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving”, and “Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for thee, and be thankful”, from the words of administration.  On more general grounds, too, strong objection was taken to the book, and on July 23rd, 1637, there occurred the famous riot in St. Giles’s, which has become connected with the name of Jennie Geddes.  The objection was not, in any sense, to read prayers in themselves; the Book of Common Order had been read in St. Giles’s that very morning.  The difficulty lay in the particular book, and it is notable that the cries which have come down to us as prefacing the riot are all indicative of a suspected attempt to reintroduce Roman Catholicism.  “The mass is entered upon us.”  “Baal is in the Church.”  “Darest thou sing mass in my lug.”

The Privy Council was negligent in punishing the rioters, and it soon became evident that they had public opinion behind them.  Alexander Henderson, who ministered to a Fifeshire congregation in the old Norman church of Leuchars, and whom the king was to meet in other circumstances, issued a respectful and moderate protest, in which he did not deal with the particular points at issue, but asserted the ecclesiastical independence of Scotland.  Riots continued to disturb Edinburgh, and Charles was impotent to suppress them.  He refused Henderson’s “Supplication”; its supporters drew up a second petition boldly asking that the bishops should be tried as the real authors of the disturbances, and, in November, 1637, they chose a body of commissioners to represent them.