May - the Free Presbyterian church of Scotland

144
The Free Presbyterian Magazine
One of Hamilton’s followers was John Gau (died c1553), who studied at
St Andrews and lived as an exile in Copenhagen in the 1530s. Little is known
about his life. In 1533 he published The Right Way to the Kingdom of Heaven,
which was printed at Malmo in Sweden on October 16. The book is about
100 pages long, and gives an exposition of the Ten Commandments, the
Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. It is largely a translation of a Danish
work by Christian Pedersen, which itself was a translation of a work by the
German reformer Urbanus Rhegius (1489-1541).
Gau follows the Roman (and Lutheran) practice of combining the First
and Second Commandments and breaking the Tenth into two, with the result
that the Second Commandment is effectively buried (by contrast, Patrick
Hamilton in Patrick’s Places gives the usual division of the Ten Commandments,
and the Lollards of Kyle were evidently familiar with the Second
Commandment). Gau has a Lutheran view of the Lord’s Supper: “We trow
that the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ is contained verily in the
sacrament of the altar under the form of bread and wine”. But he speaks of
communion in both kinds: “We which eats of one bread and drinks of one
cup”. He also goes through the Ave Maria (“Hail thou that art highly favoured,
the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women” (Lk 1:28)), which he
expounds briefly in a Protestant sense.
According to Professor James Kirk, Gau’s book “stressed the supremacy
of Scripture as the rule of faith and the right of the laity to read the vernacular
Bible . . . justification by faith alone. Headship of the Church belonged
to no mortal: Christ gave the keys of the kingdom to all Christians and not to
Peter alone . . . ministers of the Word should be chosen by Christian congregations
. . . instead of intercessory prayer to Mary and the saints, Christ
alone should be worshipped.”
Another of Hamilton’s followers was John Johnsone, presumably a student
at St Andrews, who had been an eye-witness of Hamilton’s martyrdom. Going
abroad, Johnsone published Ane comfortable exhortation of our most holy
Christian faith and her fruits, probably in Antwerp, in 1536. This is mainly
on practical aspects of Christianity and says little directly against Romanism.
Two other followers of Hamilton, who showed somewhat different attitudes
towards Rome, were John Macdowell and Alexander Alesius. Macdowell
was the Dominican prior of Wigton but was converted and fled to England
in 1534. He came under the protection of Thomas Cromwell and became
chaplain to Nicholas Shaxton, the Bishop of Salisbury. In 1537 he gained
fame as the first preacher in Salisbury Cathedral to assail the supremacy of
the Pope, for which he was violently handled by partisans of the Pope. He
subsequently fled to the Continent during the Marian persecution.