Jenny Geddes (Part Five - Conclusion)

From: Jenny Geddes, or Presbyterianism and its great Conflict with Despotism,by Rev. W. P. Breed, D.D., Philadelphia, Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1869.

The magistrates managed to keep the peace in the afternoon, but when the performance was over the tumult in the streets was greater than ever. The Earl of Roxborough, returning with the bishop in his carriage, was so pelted with stones and so pressed by the crowd that his life was in danger.

Thus the scene that opened with such pomp and circumstance closed in discomfiture and chagrin. The liturgy, prepared with such care and painstaking, and from which so much was hoped, went up like a rocket and came down as rockets are wont to descend. Here ended the first lesson.

Now, he would be marvelously astray who should suppose that this sudden hurricane at St. Giles was but a passing and unmeaning summer squall. It was in truth the outburst of a national feeling. A mighty ferment at this time pervaded the national mind. Great principles were at stake, and the Scottish masses, well comprehending their nature and the drift of events, were solemnly resolved to vindicate their settled religious convictions in the great controversy at whatever hazard and cost.

When that irregular band of patriots, dressed in Indian attire, marched through the streets of Boston and tossed those tea-chests into the bay, they at the same time virtually tossed British sovereignty overboard; and Jenny Geddes' party at St. Giles signed the death-warrant of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny in both Scotland and England! The storm had been gathering for nearly forty years, and this bursting of the cloud marked a crisis in a great national revolution. It was the first formidable outbreak against the tyranny of the Stuarts, and Jenny Geddes' stool was the first shell sent screaming through the air at those merciless oppressors of the two realms, and the echoes of that shell are reverberating to-day among the hills.

"Protestantism was a revolt against spiritual sovereignties, popes, and much else. Presbyterianism carried out the revolt against earthly sovereignties and despotisms. Protestantism has been called the grand root from which our whole subsequent European history branches out; for the spiritual will always body itself forth in the temporal history of men. The spiritual is the beginning of the temporal. And now, sure enough, the cry is everywhere for liberty, equality, independence, and so forth; instead of kings, ballot-boxes and electoral suffrages."

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Copyright 1999 © First Presbyterian Church of Rowlett
See a PDF file of this article in The Blue Banner, v8#11-12.

Source: http://www.fpcr.org/blue_banner_articles/jgeddes.htm