Introduction

If the Scots Confession is the faith of the Scottish Reformation, the Second Book of Discipline is its form of government. Nor is it the work of the Westminster Assembly: it was drawn up between 1576 and 1578, seventy years earlier. But it is the first complete treatise of the presbyterian government of the Church, and the Scottish commissioners who came to Westminster in 1643 had it in their minds when the Form of Government was debated. That is why we include it here, together with the Scots Confession, as a forerunner.

There had been a First Book of Discipline, drawn up in 1560 by the same ministers who wrote the Confession. It was a programme of reformation for a newly born Church: ministers, readers, superintendents, schools in every parish, universities, the use of the goods of the Church. Parliament never approved it, in large part because the nobles who had kept those goods for themselves would not give them back. Fifteen years later the situation had changed: the Crown had once again appointed bishops, who drew the revenues of the old bishoprics and to whom it was intended to give authority over the ministers. In the face of this, the General Assembly charged a commission with setting down in writing the government of the Church. The soul of that commission was Andrew Melville, who had returned from Geneva in 1574, and the Assembly approved the result in 1578.

Its starting point is a distinction that runs through the whole book: the power of the Church and that of the civil magistrate both come from God, but they are distinct. The Church has a spiritual government of her own, which flows immediately from Christ, "the onely spirituall king and governour of his kirk"; the magistrates ought to maintain and defend her, but not govern her, and the ministers ought not to exercise civil jurisdiction. Almost twenty years later, in 1596, Melville told James VI to his face: in Scotland there are two kings and two kingdoms, and in the kingdom of Christ, which is the Church, the king is not the head, but a member.

On that foundation the book describes the ordinary and perpetual offices of the Church (pastors, doctors, elders and deacons), how each is to be called and ordained, and the assemblies by which the Church is governed: the consistory of elders in each congregation, the provincial assemblies, the national and the general. From this it draws its most disputed conclusion: the name of bishop belongs to every pastor, and there is in the Word of God no office of a bishop who rules over the other ministers. The last chapters deal with the patrimony of the Church, the office of the Christian magistrate, the abuses that still remained (among them patronage, which the book sought to abolish) and the benefits that the reformation would bring to all the estates of the realm.

Parliament never ratified it as such. The General Assembly ordered it to be registered in its acts in 1581, and during the reign of James VI it was the banner of those who resisted the bishops: in 1592 Parliament recognised the presbyteries and assemblies by law, but a few years later the king restored episcopacy. When the Glasgow Assembly of 1638 overthrew it, it was to this book that men returned. The Westminster Form of Government says in substance the same, with more brevity and with more scriptural support: the same offices, the same assemblies, the same refusal of a bishop above the presbyters.

The text we publish is that of the oldest print, the edition that David Calderwood, exiled in the Low Countries, brought out in 1621 together with the First Book, at a time when the bishops were once again governing the Church of Scotland. We reproduce it with its spelling, transcribed from the images of the print and collated with the London reprint of 1641. We have corrected the evident misprints of the press (transposed letters, repeated words), and we have given the three Greek words of the text their accents.