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‘God Hath Put such Secretes in Nature’: The Reformed Kirk, Church-Building and the Religious Landscape in Early Modern Scotland*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Andrew Spicer*
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University

Extract

Although the Reformed tradition advocated the primacy of the Word of God, the writings of Calvin and other theologians also emphasized the importance of the natural world for revealing the glory of God. As early as 1534, Calvin argued that God had

raised everywhere, in all places and in all things, his ensigns and emblems, under blazons so clear and intelligible that no one can pretend ignorance in not knowing such a sovereign Lord, who has so amply exalted his magnificence; who has in all parts of the world, in heaven and on earth, written and as it were engraved the glory of his power, goodness, wisdom and eternity …

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010

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Footnotes

*

CalvinJean, Sermons of Maister Iohm Caluin, vpon the booke of lob, trans. GoldingArthur (London, 1580), 476. I am grateful to the Marquess of Linlithgow and the archivist of Hopetoun House, Patrick Cadell, for permission to consult and quote from the Hopetoun House Archives, South Queensferry [hereafter HHA]. This paper is a fruit of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Project, ‘The Early Modern Parish Church and the Religious Landscape’, at Oxford Brookes University.

References

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43 D. Stevenson, ‘The Radical Party in the Kirk, 1637–45’, JEH 25 (1974), 135–65, at 136–37.

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53 NAS, CH2/234/3, Minutes of the Presbytery of Lanark, 1691–1699, 189, 216, 240; CH2/234/4, Minutes of the Presbytery of Lanark, 1699–1709, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 17, 30, 32, 35, 45, 56, 139, 145, 151. For religious discipline, see CH2/234/3, 229, 234, 238.

54 HHA, Accounts, volume 1, memorandum of 5 March 1696.

55 HHA, Bundle 116, Extract Act of Assembly 1738 Respecting the chaplain at Leadhills; NAS, CH1/2/76, General Assembly Papers, Main Series (1738), fols 299—303. See also CH1/2/106, General Assembly Papers, Main Series (1765), fols 304–305.

56 Calvin, , Iob, 47677 Google Scholar (on Job 28: 1–9).

57 ‘Diary of Sir James Hope’, ed. Balfour Paul, 153—54. For an alternative political interpretation, see Williamson, , ‘Union with England’, 315.Google Scholar

58 See Spicer, , ‘“What kinde of house”’, 8798.Google Scholar