Series 1 > Miscellany of the Scottish History Society (Second volume)

INTRODUCTION
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the Roman and Protestant communions (who held a cure in
Aberdeen from 1626 until his elevation to the see of
Edinburgh in 1634).1
Moreover, as a lawyer and as a man, Mr. Burnet must
have been greatly impressed by certain important works
which were even then issuing from the press, and by the
political events of which they were the result. His personal
acquaintance with the famous Grotius must be ascribed to
a later date. But the condemnation of the great lawyer to
perpetual imprisonment, upon the triumph of a Calvinistic
party at the Synod of Dort, must have at once illustrated
the dangers of ecclesiastical despotism and have intensified
the interest excited. by his early religious works. In these,
which are not marked by the doctrinal laxity of Grotius’s
later life or by his eventual apparent approximation to
Roman Catholicism, the earnest lawyer will have found not
only professional edification, but a religious attitude more
congenial to his own mind than that of contemporary
Puritanism. Placed as he was in the very vortex of Puritan
agitation, his judicial training and temper were no doubt
rendering him increasingly sensitive to the narrowness of
Calvinistic theology, the virulent fanaticism of extreme
Puritan zeal, and the reviving tendency to arrogate for the
Kirk a supreme despotic authority in politics, no less than in
morals and religion. Under these circumstances there was
much to attract him in the ardent yet mild devotion, the
broad and tolerant theology, no less than in the firm political
Erastianism of the great Dutch Jurist.2
We have nothing further to record of Robert Burnet,
between the years 1626-37, save an intimate friendship with
the ‘ excellent and accomplished ’ John, first Earl of Lauder¬
dale, son-in-law of his father’s old friend and kinsman Chan-
1 Burnet, preface to the Life of Bedell; Mathieson, Politics and Religion in
Scotland, vol. i. pp. 327-8, 334-8.
2 See Supplement to Burnet, pp. 453, 458.