Introduction

The Scots Confession is not a document of the Westminster Assembly: it is almost ninety years older. It is the first confession of faith of the reformed Church of Scotland, the one that Church professed from 1560 until it adopted the Westminster Confession in 1647. It is, therefore, the confession that the Westminster Confession came to replace, and the one the Scottish commissioners knew by heart when they took their seats in the Assembly. That is why we include it here, at the beginning of the annexed documents, as a forerunner.

It was born in a few days. In August 1560, after the death of the regent Mary of Guise and the departure of the French troops, the Parliament that was to carry out the Reformation met in Edinburgh. The barons and ministers who were asking for the reformation of religion were charged with setting down in writing a summary of the doctrine they wished to see established, and within four days they presented this Confession. It was drawn up by six ministers, known as "the six Johns" because they all bore that name: John Knox, John Winram, John Spottiswoode, John Willock, John Douglas and John Row. On 17 August 1560 the three estates read it in full Parliament and ratified it "as wholesome and sound Doctrine, grounded upon the infallible Truth of Gods Word". Queen Mary, who was living in France, never approved it; Parliament ratified it again in 1567, by then under James VI.

One can tell that it was written by men who had just come through persecution and war. The preface speaks of "the rage of Sathan" against them and of a whole year of troubles, and it adds an invitation that few confessions make: if anyone finds in it anything contrary to the Word of God, let him say so in writing, and they promise to give him satisfaction from the Scriptures or to amend. What follows are twenty-five articles, from God and the creation to the resurrection of the flesh, written with more warmth than technical precision. The eighteenth gives the three notes by which the true Church is known: the true preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments and ecclesiastical discipline rightly exercised. The twentieth affirms that councils may err and that their decrees bind only in so far as they are proved by the Scriptures. The twenty-first rejects both transubstantiation and those who make the sacraments "nothing else but naked and bare signes". And the twenty-fourth charges the civil magistrates with the conservation and purgation of religion.

Read alongside the Westminster Confession, it shows how much changed in ninety years and how much remained. The doctrine is the same; what changes is the degree of precision. The Scots Confession has no chapter on the covenant, nor does it develop justification or adoption as Westminster will do; on the other hand, it speaks more vividly of the Church and of the sacraments, and its language is more that of preaching than of definition. Westminster does not contradict it: it orders it, completes it and refines it after another century of controversies.

Nor did it disappear in 1647. The National Covenant of 1638, which we also publish, bound its subscribers to maintain the "Confession of Faith" ratified by Parliament, that is, this one. And when the General Assembly approved the Westminster Confession in 1647, it did so as part of the uniformity promised in the Solemn League and Covenant, without declaring the former one erroneous: the Church of Scotland did not change her faith, but her confession.

The original is written in Middle Scots, the language of Edinburgh in the sixteenth century. For the English text we publish the version printed in London in 1644, within John Knox's History of the Reformation in the edition of David Buchanan, which is the form in which English readers read it in the time of the Assembly; we reproduce it with its spelling and with the scripture references that this print sets in the margin. We have collated it sentence by sentence with the Scots text of 1560 as the records of Parliament preserve it, and where the 1644 print departed from the sense of the original (it omitted a negation, skipped a clause or put one word in place of another) we have corrected it by the Scots; the marginal references that cannot exist have been corrected with the help of the Scottish edition of 1681. The English of 1644 lacks the sentence with which the record of Parliament closes the Confession: "These acts and articles were read in the face of Parliament and ratified by the three estates of this realm at Edinburgh, the seventeenth day of August, the year of God one thousand five hundred and sixty".