In the autumn of 1696 the Estates of Scotland met at Edinburgh.  The attendance was thin; and the session lasted only five weeks.  A supply amounting to little more than a hundred thousand pounds sterling was voted.  Two Acts for the securing of the government were passed.  One of those Acts required all persons in public trust to sign an Association similar to the Association which had been so generally subscribed in the south of the island.  The other Act provided that the Parliament of Scotland should not be dissolved by the death of the King.  But by far the most important event of this short session was the passing of the Act for the settling of Schools.  By this memorable law it was, in the Scotch phrase, statuted and ordained that every parish in the realm should provide a commodious schoolhouse and should pay a moderate stipend to a schoolmaster.  The effect could not be immediately felt.  But, before one generation had passed away, it began to be evident that the common people of Scotland were superior in intelligence to the common people of any other country in Europe.  To whatever land the Scotchman might wander, to whatever calling he might betake himself, in America or in India, in trade or in war, the advantage which he derived from his early training raised him above his competitors.  If he was taken into a warehouse as a porter, he soon became foreman.  If he enlisted in the army, he soon became a serjeant.  Scotland, meanwhile, in spite of the barrenness of her soil and the severity of her climate, made such progress in agriculture, in manufactures, in commerce, in letters, in science, in all that constitutes civilisation, as the Old World had never seen equalled, and as even the New World has scarcely seen surpassed.

This wonderful change is to be attributed, not indeed solely, but principally, to the national system of education.  But to the men by whom that system was established posterity owes no gratitude.  They knew not what they were doing.  They were the unconscious instruments of enlightening the understandings and humanising the hearts of millions.  But their own understandings were as dark and their own hearts as obdurate as those of the Familiars of the Inquisition at Lisbon.  In the very month in which the Act for the settling of Schools was touched with the sceptre, the rulers of the Church and State in Scotland began to carry on with vigour two persecutions worthy of the tenth century, a persecution of witches and a persecution of infidels.  A crowd of wretches, guilty only of being old and miserable, were accused of trafficking with the devil.  The Privy Council was not ashamed to issue a Commission for the trial of twenty-two of these poor creatures.796 The shops of the booksellers of Edinburgh were strictly searched for heretical works.  Impious books, among which the sages of the Presbytery ranked Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, were strictly suppressed.797 But the destruction of mere paper and sheepskin would not satisfy the bigots.  Their hatred required victims who could feel, and was not appeased till they had perpetrated a crime such as has never since polluted the island.