ABSTRACT
Mid sixteenth-century Scottish culture was dominated by a struggle between two versions of Christian faith and practice, the Roman and the Protestant. In this latter case, initial Lutheran influences gave way to Calvinist or Reformed.1 The impact of Geneva grew after about 1550, and continued to gain strength with Andrew Melville’s return in 1574. However, there were those, sometimes few in number, who might accept Calvin’s theology but not his conclusions about ecclesiastical polity, and thus the later-divided Protestantism of Scotland would witness conflicting interpretations of events culminating in the Scottish Reformation of 1560. This bifurcation of the spiritual, moral, and political universe deepened over the decades, so that in the revolutionary period of the National Covenant, the same dichotomized view dominated the Protestant mind, even if the primary battles were now being fought between varieties of Protestants. Presbyterians identified Episcopalians and Arminians as Roman Catholics, and Episcopalians, who included all the Arminians, sometimes cast the Presbyterians as Jesuits!
