The Scottish nation was once isolated from Europe and the rest of the world.
They were known as an illiterate, barbarous people, with many fighting clans
and tribes.
But this nation went from isolation, being mocked and discredited by the
English neighbours, as Macquards, where they rose up to become the most
influential race of the modern world, influencing and dominating nearly every
aspect of the planet.
But they would have been insignificant if one man didn't decide to make a bold
stand.
Have you ever heard of a man by the name of John Knox?
He was a 16th century Scottish reformer, a very controversial figure.
To many he is labelled as a chauvinist.
But one of his greatest inspirations for him making a stand was him studying the
book of Daniel.
A journey from England to Scotland by train is very expensive.
It is actually cheaper to fly from England to Germany, where you pay half the price.
But the scenery is very beautiful.
But, as you arrive in Scotland's capital city since the 15th century, Edinburgh,
the home of the Scottish Parliament, when you come out of the station and take
a left, you'll walk up a long plight of stairs.
If you are unhealthy, good luck.
As you take a left at the top of the stairs and walk through an underpass,
within 5 minutes from the station you will see St Giles Cathedral, also known as the
High Kirk of Edinburgh.
It is known as the central place of worship of the Church of Scotland in
Edinburgh.
Inside the building, it is huge, and it was once the headquarters of the
father of Presbyterianism, John Knox.
This statue of him presents him as a man who was huge in stature, but contemporary
accounts of his day tell you that he was actually quite short.
But the man, nicknamed the Thundering Scott, had a will of steel, and his bold
stand was to greatly influence not only the landscape of Europe, but the entire
world.
But being a lone soldier does come with a price.
In his early career, he was kidnapped by a French invasion of Scotland, and was a
prisoner and a slave in fetters in France for two years until he was rescued.
And there were apparent death threats and assassination attempts on his life.
Though his beard could pass him as a modern-day Islamic imam, this man made a
stand when there was no free press, no free platform, and no organ.
The only way to defend your cause was via the church pulpit.
And John Knox was standing in the middle of a very intense period of human history,
the transition from the age of feudalism and the coming age of liberty.
And he was one of many who was to play a key and pivotal role that brought about
that change.
But what inspired him to make that stand?
Patrick Hamilton on the right and George Wishart on the left were two of many
martyrs in Scotland.
They were killed.
Why?
Because they put the authority of the Bible above the authority of the Catholic
Church.
That was a state crime.
It was John Knox's close friend, George Wishart, whose death had the
greatest impact on him.
Wishart's arrest, trial, and execution at the age of 33 was ordered by Scottish
statesman David Beaton, the most powerful figure in that nation, nicknamed the Cruel
Persecutor.
He was the Archbishop of St Andrews, Lord Chancellor of Scotland, and the last
Cardinal Legate of Scotland, prior to the Reformation, being the first Scotsman to
be raised in that position.
He had eight children with his mistress and was an implacable opponent of the
Reformation.
But he was murdered by men who wanted to avenge George Wishart's death,
and his mutilated body lay hanging from St Andrews Castle for months.
John Knox was to learn from these deaths, and he aligned himself and worked within
the birthplace of the Reformation, his sister country, England.
Off Westminster Bridge is the famous St Thomas' Hospital, that was re-founded by a
young man who was nicknamed the Young Josiah by the English reformers,
King Edward VI, who wanted to reform England, and he appointed John Knox.
John Knox became a chaplain in Westminster Cathedral and in Hampton Court Palace,
the home of the Tudor monarchy.
When King Edward VI continued and elaborated on his father's 1534 separation
of England from Papal Rome, Knox was to be a part of that work, where he ministered
in Berwick-upon-Teed, Newcastle, Kent and London, and left his mark on the
Church of England, being a chief foster father of English Protestantism,
who shaped the Articles and contributed to the Book of Common Prayer.
But the young king's life was cut short.
He got an illness and died at the young age of around 15 or 16.
And though he tried at all costs to exclude his sisters from being his
successor to the English throne, his older sister, Mary Tudor, was to turn
England into a bloodbath during her five-year reign, by setting alight all
those who put the word of God above the authority of the Catholic Church.
John Knox fortunately fled the country in 1553 to France.
And today, modern secular-minded, papal-leaning historians are trying to
downplay the roughly 288 martyrs and those who also suffered imprisonment,
torture and famine during her reign.
English reformer and editor of Matthew's Bible, John Rogers, was the first
Protestant martyr during Mary's reign.
He was followed by other Protestant ministers, from left to right,
Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.
The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, and they did not die in vain.
In Smithfield, in London, was the beginning of martyrdom, and St
Bartholomew's Hospital, on its wall, is a monument dedicated to the Smithfield
martyrs.
And the name that is engraved at the top is John Rogers, who was martyred in 1555.
Not far from that monument is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, known as St
Sepulchre without Newgate, and his name is also written at the top as vicar and first
Protestant martyr.
In Oxford is a monument as can be seen in the centre of the road, and at its top on
the steeple are the martyrs, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London and Westminster, and Hugh Latimer,
chaplain to King Edward VI.
Their names are engraved on the monument, but why were they martyred?
To be burned bearing witness to the sacred truths which they had affirmed and
maintained against the errors of the Church of Rome.
But their fellow reformer, John Knox, is sadly being undermined, and is
presented to the public as an unbalanced fanatical killjoy, who brutalised the
young teenage queen, Mary, Queen of Scots.
The play in the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Scotland is called Glory on Earth,
and it ran from the 20th of May to 10th of June 2017.
And as you listen to the responses from the crowd, Knox is ridiculed, and one
journal said that it is a call to arms for young women everywhere.
The Roman Catholic Church has an absolutely cunning and clever way of
making herself look like the victim of history, and the narrator has learned from
a teenager that the best way of studying history is to go to the original
documents.
On a road called Seething Lane in London, still stands a house that was once the
centre for gathering intelligence for the English government.
Its name still bears the title of its former occupant, Walsingham House,
and his documents can be found in the official archive of the UK government,
a building in Kew in Richmond, in Greater London, the National Archives,
that has documents dating back more than 1,000 years.
And a handful of them belong to Sir Francis Walsingham, the Principal
Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth I, known as her Spymaster, who is the
godfather of modern-day intelligence and the secret services.
He was a skilled diplomat whose knowledge of languages, French, Italian and Latin,
and his recruitment of people from Cambridge and Oxford, nurtured the art of
espionage and the questionable and controversial black art of psychological
warfare, where he had the tools and techniques for making and breaking codes,
and he was kept well informed on contemporary international politics.
A book was published in 2006, titled Elizabeth Spymaster, by a highly respected
OBE British historian, Robert Hutchinson, that is well documented and gives us a
picture of the vast intelligence apparatus of Sir Francis Walsingham.
An excerpt of it says that Sir Francis Walsingham changed the course of European
history.
His new network of intelligentsia was nearing full operational capability by
1580.
He now had agents based in 12 towns or cities in France, 9 in Germany,
4 in Italy, 3 in the Low Countries, 4 in Spain, and others within the huge
Turkish Empire in Algiers, Tripoli and Constantinople.
Eight years after his death, his reputation as a clever and devious
spymaster lived on.
He outdid the Jesuits in their own bowl, that is, at their own game, and
overreached them in their own equivocation, David Lloyd, the 17th
century English biographer, wrote admiringly, in his state, were these.
Many look at the fast-paced action-packed British intelligence flicks, mesmerized by
the plots and intrigued by the storylines.
But most are totally unaware that British intelligence, that consists of MI5 and
MI6, was developed in the 16th century to protect the realm and to counter the
deadly Catholic plots that were mostly spearheaded by Western Europe's once most
deadliest foes, the Sons of Loyola, the Jesuits.
English historians James Anthony Froud on the left and Protestant writer Walter
Walsh on the right, a member of the Royal Historical Society, both used state
documents to show what really happened during the days of John Knox and Queen
Mary of Scots.
And in the National Archives in Kew are a number of well-preserved documents that
details who Mary Queen of Scots was, and she definitely was not innocent,
but sinister and dark.
It is clear one of Walsh's tasks was to review seditious books that were compiled
by the Jesuits, and in 1577, May the 28th, it was discovered that Mary Queen of Scots
was working with the Jesuits, one of many plots that were detected.
John Knox's name is only mentioned a couple of times in the British state
papers as a licensed preacher under the leadership of King Edward VI.
But most are unaware that he collaborated with the English government and shared
intel with Queen Elizabeth I and Lord Burley about a rumoured Franco-Spanish
invasion and takeover of the British Isles, and to make by force Mary Queen of
Scots monarch of both Scotland and England.
In the 1973 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 13, under John Knox,
it reads that in Scotland, matters wreaked a crisis in the spring of 1559.
At this juncture, Henry II of France died and power fell into the hands of the
Guises, the brothers of the Queen Regent and uncles of the young Queen of France,
Mary Queen of Scots.
Strong French intervention in Scotland was now assured in furtherance of the Guises'
plan to displace Elizabeth and to unite France, Scotland and England under Francis
II of France and Mary.
A French victory in Scotland would place Elizabeth and England in grave peril.
If not for religious, then for political reasons, it behoved England to make common
cause with the Scottish Reformation.
Knox lost no opportunity of driving this fact home to William Cecil, afterwards
Lord Burley and Elizabeth.
The autumn and winter of 1559 saw the Scottish Protestants in desperate plight.
Only Knox's superhuman exertions and indomitable spirit kept the cause in
being.
In the blackest hour, his great sermon at Stirling put fresh heart into despairing
Protestant leaders and saved off a revocable defeat.
On Knox's resolution alone, in those months hung the fate, not only of Scottish
Protestantism, but of Elizabeth England and perhaps of the Reformation throughout
Europe.
John Knox was a serious brother.
Both himself and Walsingham's painstaking endearing efforts saved Europe of being
gobbled up by a complete Roman Catholic takeover by the Franco-Spanish armies.
John Knox believed that the confiscated property of lands and houses that were
once owned by the Catholic Church in Scotland should be equally distributed to
provide for the poor and the needy.
But a greedy elite thwarted his plans and he was very upset.
Along with other church ministers, John Knox compiled the Book of Discipline
that outlined an elaborate educational scheme from parish school up to
university, compulsory for all and free to the poor, where a peasant child,
both girls and boys, can get access to education, and not just the nobility and
the elite.
And he believed not the state, but the church should finance this
venture.
John Knox, unlike other reformers, was not born into privilege, but from
humble beginnings.
But he was assisted by some of the nobility.
One of them, before his untimely assassination, was James Stuart,
the Earl of Moray, Regent of Scotland and the half-brother of Mary, Queen of Scots.
This is how John Knox wanted to reform Scotland.
But his nemesis, Mary Queen of Scots, is pictured as this guilty party by
modern-day stage productions.
But why was she so eager to govern both the thrones of Scotland and England?
There is a reason why.
Henry Tudor, also known as Henry VII, was an English monarch of Welsh descent
who started the House of Tudor monarchy in England.
He had a few children to continue the lineage.
His successor to the English throne was Henry VIII, who also had a number of
children to continue their legacy.
And this allegorical painting shows him seated with his daughter Mary and her
husband Philip II of Spain on the left, and his son Edward VI and his other
daughter Elizabeth I on the right.
Margaret Tudor was the brother of King Henry VIII and the daughter of King Henry
VII.
She married James Stuart, also known as James IV of Scotland, therefore forming an
alliance between the Tudor and Stuart monarchy of England and Scotland.
They had a child together, James V, and he married French Queen Marie or Mary
the Guise of the Guise dynasty, that now formed a Franco-Scottish
bloodline alliance.
James V of Scotland and his wife, Mary or Marie, had a child who was born in
Scotland but was raised in France, and she was Mary Stuart, better known as
Mary Queen of the Scots.
This Queen was therefore a descendant of the Tudors of England, being the
great-niece of King Henry VIII, the Stuarts of Scotland on her father's
side and the Guises of France on her mother's side.
Her son, who the famous 1611 Bible is named after, James Stuart, King James VI
of Scotland and the First of England, secured that position, and he was almost
blown up by Guy Fawkes and his fellow co-Catholic conspirators in a failed coup
who wanted to replace him with a Catholic king in what wasn't accomplished with Mary
Queen of the Scots.
When John Knox was summoned to her court, Mary Queen of Scots feared that her
Scottish subjects were more obedient to him than to her, and though she could
charm many with her bright intellect, not so with Knox.
He told her that both Queen and subjects should obey God and not the religion of
the monarch, for that violates their human rights.
Your will, madame, said Knox, is no reason, neither does it make that Roman
harlot to be the true and immaculate spouse of Jesus Christ.
John Knox brought Mary to tears.
Her authority was being challenged.
But as he read through the state papers, Sir Francis Walsingham intercepted a plan
in 1568, December 20th, of an attempt between France and Spain for altering the
religion of England, and he wanted to place the Queen of Scots on the throne.
In 1571, another plot was intercepted of an attempt of Spain invading England and
setting up the Queen of Scots as the monarch.
And in 1575, another plan was intercepted, where several Scots refugees in France
attempted to liberate Mary Queen of Scots, who was under house arrest in England.
There was also another reason why the English intelligence was so sharp.
In the year John Knox died in 1572, as shown in the film Queen Margot,
was the famous St. Bartholomew's Massacre, where roughly estimated 70,000 Protestants
were massacred by a Catholic mob throughout France.
Neither rank, sex, nor age was spared.
In the Vatican, in St. Peter's Basilica, is a statue of Pope Gregory XIII,
who the famous 1582 calendar is named after.
He sits above his master, the dragon, but he endorsed the massacre.
This coin struck by him is a glorification of that massacre in 1572.
But who inspired the Catholic monarch, Catherine de' Medici, as can be seen in
this painting, to conduct this papal bloodbath?
In a book titled The Power and the Secret of the Jesuits, published in 1930,
by Austrian cultural historian and writer René Fulop-Miller, he documents that it
was Diego Lainez, the second superior general of the Jesuits, back then labelled
the Black Pope, because of the colour of his ecclesiastical clothing, who
intellectually masterminded the massacre after a firm meeting with Catherine de'
Medici.
Make no concessions to heresy, Lainez had declared, addressing himself to
the Queen Regent, who was Catherine de' Medici, but rather uphold the Catholic
faith with all your authority.
Then will God, mindful of your piety, reserve to you your earthly kingdom,
and admit you to the kingdom of heaven.
If, however, on the other hand, you are unmindful of your duties toward
God, then tremble lest, together with the heavenly kingdom, you lose also your
earthly kingdom.
Sir Francis Walsingham was an eyewitness to this bloodbath, for he was the English
diplomat to Paris in France, who just about escaped it with his family where he
smuggled them out, and what he saw was to scar him for life.
And he saw what could happen to England and its Protestant subjects if the
European armies of Papal Rome were to ever conquer England.
These three documents was the indictment of Mary, Queen of Scots.
They are a record of her secret liaison with fellow conspirators to undermine the
English throne and place her as Queen.
This one, titled State Paper 53.4.18, Mary, Queen of Scots, is what Walsingham
used at her trial.
It was a letter Mary wrote to Anthony Badminton of six gentlemen who were
assigned to kill Queen Elizabeth I.
And the two ciphers also in blue leather folio volumes, State Paper 53.4.22-23,
are Walsingham's interception of Mary's letters that were written in codes.
Walsingham's cipher school was able to decode these secret messages of Mary and
expose her as a deadly, treasonous woman.
She was executed for her crimes against the state and her body still lies in
Westminster Cathedral in a well-preserved coffin at the back.
But it was John Knox who first hindered her plans.
But what was the impact he left in Scotland?
Writers like John Lorenz von Mosheim, the German Lutheran church historian,
preserved his legacy in his famous work An Ecclesiastical History.
Philip Schaff, the Swiss-American German-educated Protestant theologian,
also preserved John Knox's legacy in his History of the Christian Church.
And Thomas McCree or McCrye the Younger, a Scottish minister and church historian,
wrote one of the first biographies on John Knox's life.
Scotland was an isolated country from the rest of Europe, known for its fighting
clans.
But Knox was to put it onto the highest plains in Europe.
Thomas Sewell is an American economist and is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University.
He wrote what the Scots were like prior to and after the Reformation.
In his book, Intellectuals and Race, he said In earlier centuries, Scotland had
been one of the most backward nations on the fringes of European civilisation.
Later, Scots had a spectacular rise to the forefront of European civilisation.
As far back as Roman times, Scotland lagged behind England and, as late as the
14th century, there were said to be no Scottish barons who could write his own
name.
Scottish agriculture was primitive and its industry virtually non-existent.
The people were illiterate and there was no law and order except for the arbitrary
ethics of local clan chiefs.
The spread of the English language, beginning in the Scottish lowlands,
opened a whole new world of literature in numerous fields to the Scots.
Fields in which there was little or no literature in the indigenous Gaelic
language.
Education caught on so widely in the Scottish lowlands that they had compulsory
education before England did and developed the most extensive system of schools in
Europe, and that was down to John Knox.
From the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, most of the
leading British intellectual figures were either from Scotland or of Scottish
ancestry.
These included David Hume in philosophy, Adam Smith in economics, Joseph Black in
chemistry, Robert Adam in architecture, James Watt in engineering, Sir Walter
Scott in literature and John Stuart Mill in economics, philosophy and political
science.
In medicine, Scots likewise moved to the forefront, not only in Britain but also in
Russia, where Catherine the Great had a Scottish physician, and in America,
where Scots established some of the earliest medical schools.
Scots also set the world standard in engineering in general and shipbuilding in
particular.
By 1871, nearly half the ships built in Great Britain were built in Scotland.
Scottish universities surged ahead of English universities in science and
engineering.
In short, the Scots surpassed those from whom they once learned.
From reading the works of Thomas Sewell, you would think that he borrowed it
verbatim from a Scottish writer who wrote about his homeland and its development
since the Reformation.
East Preston Bell Ground is a well-kept cemetery in Edinburgh in Scotland that has
the remains of what looks like many affluent people in Scotland, where the
graves are very well kept, and among them lies the remains of a man and his family.
His name is Dr James Aitken Wiley, a Protestant professor and Scottish
historian.
At the bottom of his grave are the words, till he come, where he waits to arise at
the first resurrection.
But until then, let us resurrect his words.
Wiley was, and the narrator will say still is, a prolific writer and the leading
Protestant authority throughout the English-speaking world in Christendom.
He was not a patriot who romanticised about the past, he was not a polemic,
and did not believe in the deus hero worship of the great man of history like
fellow Scot Thomas Carlyle.
He was balanced, and from young Wiley knew that through all the ages of the future,
the foremost place among Scotsmen must belong to Knox.
John Knox never feared man because he never mistrusted God.
Knox grasped the eternal principle of liberty, the government of the human
conscience, by the Bible.
And planting his reformation upon this foundation stone, he endowed it with the
attribute of durability.
From an early date, Scotland had been in course of preparation for the part it was
to act in the great movement of the 16th century.
A small country, it was parted by barbarism as well as by distance from the
rest of the world.
The land was the dwelling of savage tribes who practised the horrid rites and
worshipped, under other names, the deities to which the ancient Assyrians
had bowed down.
Of all the countries of Europe, Scotland is the country which owes most to
the reformation, seeing it received most from it.
The reformation found Scotland a country of inhospitable bogs and moors,
and it has made it a country of gardens and richly cultivated fields.
The reformation found Scotland a land without letters, and it gave it a
literature destined to endure while the language lasts, rivalling in terseness and
elegance of diction the purest models of the Augustan era, and far excelling them
in dignity of matter and grandeur of sentiments.
The reformation found Scotland a land without arts, and made it the inventress
of the steam engine which has revolutionised the labour of the world,
and is destined, after carving its own soil with the marvels of industry and
trade, to extend the blessings of commerce to the remotest shores and the rudest
tribes.
In a word, the reformation found Scotland the least of the European nations,
and it has placed it in conjunction with its sister of England at the head of the
nations of the earth.
This well-researched book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, by Arthur L.
Herman, an American public historian that was published in 2001, is the only known
modern work that credits John Knox as developing the Scottish culture,
whereby most historians credit Scotland's greatness to the Enlightenment period of
the 1700s.
King James VI of Scotland and the First of England's tutors were some of the best
minds in Scotland.
Scottish historian George Buchanan, on the left, was a protestant and known as
Scotland's greatest humanist.
He was educated in Paris, France and was a tutor to the young king.
Sir Peter Young, on the right, was also a protestant.
He was a Scottish diplomat who studied under Theodore Beezer in Geneva,
Scotland.
He was also a tutor to the young king.
John Napier, the 8th Lord of Murchiston, was also a Scottish protestant.
He was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer.
He wrote a commentary on the Book of Revelation, published in 1593,
and, like John Knox, identified the papacy as the harlot of Revelation, chapter 17.
But he was also the discoverer of logarithms that revolutionised the
mathematics from the 17th century to this day, from his 1614 publication that he
spent over 20 years devising.
Both the knowledge of science, math and the Bible were interchangeable at
that time period, and one Scot made some very serious contributions.
Alexander Cruden was a Scottish author who made one of the earliest concordances of
the Bible.
In Camden Passage, a small alleyway in Angel, in North London, is where he lived
and where he died.
And there is a monument just above this restaurant, on the top left, where it
describes him as a humanist scholar and intellectual.
A Tute appointed bookseller to Queen Caroline in 1737, who compiled the
concordance of the Bible.
But the Scots were to also influence philosophy, literature, architecture and
construction, economics, building on England's foundation.
And in the field of science were its top academic institutions, like the University
of Glasgow, where it trained many of the leading men in the 1700s and onwards.
In London's Piccadilly, the white building on the right houses the Royal Astronomical
Society, that encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar system science,
geophysics and closely related branches of science.
Thomas Dick, the Scottish Church minister and scientist, who harmonised the Bible
and science, was educated at the University of Glasgow.
Joseph Black, Scottish physician and chemist, is best known for his discoveries
of magnesium, the concept of latent heat and the rediscovery of fixed air,
that we call today carbon dioxide.
He was also educated at the University of Glasgow, where he also became a professor
of anatomy and chemistry at that institution.
Scottish anatomist and physician William Hunter has a museum named after him to
further his studies.
He was educated at the University of Glasgow.
His younger brother, the surgeon John Hunter, though not educated in Glasgow,
but in London, also has a museum named after him in London for his contributions
to science.
In London's Embankment is an architectural work that was designed by a Scot.
This neoclassical style of building is called Somerset House on London's Waterloo
Bridge.
Overlooking London's River Thames, it is also the campus of London's King
College.
It was designed by Swiss-born Scottish architect Sir William Chambers,
a member of the Swedish East India Company, the Royal Academy and the
architectural tutor to the young Prince of Wales, later King George III, but he had a
rival.
It was Robert Adam who transformed the art of building in the modern world,
and this Scot was to also have an impact on modern architecture.
There is a road named after him by the Wallace Collection behind London's
Selfridges, and the house where he once lived still has a plaque bearing his name.
It is on a road called Fitzroy Square, and he was one of the men who reintroduced
neoclassical architecture into Britain.
And in the field of finance, when you come out of Bank Station in London's famous
Square Mile, there is a building designed in neoclassical architecture.
It is the headquarters of the Bank of England, the central bank of the United
Kingdom, the second oldest central bank and the eighth oldest bank in the world,
that was set up in 1694 for the benefit of English merchants in the 17th century
after a terrible naval defeat from the French on the 10th of July 1690 on the
English Channel at the Battle of Beachy Head, that would inspire England to build
a powerful Royal Navy that would help in the development of trade, agriculture and
industry, and the newly developed economic system of trafficking in slaves that
contributed greatly to the build-up of the finances of the British Empire.
Slave traders and bankers badly needed credit, so the merchants became the
bankers of the slave trade, where the Bank of England governed the whole system of
commercial credit.
But who was one of its chief co-creators?
William Paterson, a Dumfriesshire Scot, was a man who had drawn up the original
proposal for the Bank of England.
Another Scot, a convicted murderer and economist, John Law, set up a bank in
France, the Banque Générale, that could issue paper money or banknotes.
He was responsible for the Mississippi Company bubble that financed the monopoly
and expansion of the French Empire.
Another Scottish economist, Adam Smith, famous for the work World of Nations,
that has played one of the major contributions to economic and political
theory, laid the foundations of classical free market economic theory, and he was
also educated at the University of Glasgow.
What about modern trains and rail travel?
How did the modern world get to reach their destinations in rapid time?
In London's Science Museum are many, many inventions that are dedicated to the
history of rail travel.
Both Thomas Sewell and James Akinwiley are clear that it was the Scots who started
rail travel, but it was developed from the English.
This is the workshop of James Watt, the Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer
and chemist, educated at the University of Glasgow, who developed a steam engine that
has impacted modern travel.
He was a fellowship at the Royal Society of both London and Edinburgh, and the
London Independent says that his workshop changed the world.
And the Guardian said that James Watt changed history and the future of our
planet.
But it doesn't stop there.
Most of us, not all, for there is a lot of poverty out there, possess a mobile cell
phone.
And modern smartphones are like computers, where you can pay bills, take pictures,
watch a documentary, film or the news, make a call and the list goes on.
But who is responsible for this invention?
Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell is credited with patenting the telephone.
But there seems to be a very heated discussion of recent times, for Americans
are claiming that he stole it from them.
What about the television?
Homes that are privileged have their slick paper-thin flat-screen TVs on the wall,
or it is like having a cinema in your living room with surround sound.
But once again, it was an invention that was developed by another Scot,
John Logie Beard, an unknown figure in the development of modern day technology.
In London's Soho, there is a street just off Oxford Street called Fifth Street.
And as you walk down the road, there is a plaque that commemorates the
house where John Logie Beard first developed or demonstrated television.
But with greatness always comes wickedness and abuses, and unbeknownst to many,
the Scots greatly profited from slavery.
The narrator's surname, McQueen, Mac meaning son of, son of a queen,
is Scottish Celtic.
So the Scots played a role in those Caribbean slave plantations, though the
Scottish educational system prefers that it is not mentioned in the curriculum to
be taught in the schools.
Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian and philosopher, whose statue stands in
Chelsea, saw the slave trade as a fully justified act, embracing the racist ideas
of other Scots, David Hume and John Hunter.
And he shared his views with another Scot, whose statue is in Embankment Gardens,
John Stuart Mill, a proponent of utilitarianism.
He inherited a lot of his ideas from his father.
They both at one time lived in the same house, and his father was a Scotsman whose
name was James Mill, an opponent of religion and one of the chief strategists
of British colonial rule in India.
When Britain ruled India, the jewel in the crown it was called, they left some very
bad scars, famines, massacres, and by the time India got its independence
in 1947, over 90% of the population were illiterate.
The Scots have also influenced how the world measures the age of the earth.
The earth is young, thousands of years old, but there are those who have a
uniformitarian view, which is the theory that geological processes are always due
to continuously and uniformly operating forces.
James Hutton, a Scottish geologist, physician and naturalist, was the original
proposer of uniformitarianism that taught that sedimentary strata were laid down
slowly over long periods and this continuous cycle of events would take an
immense time or millions of years.
This view was embraced by English naturalist Charles Lyell, the man who
inspired Charles Darwin, and it is the accepted basis for geological teaching
today.
But as this study draws to a close, we will look at two more Scotsmen trained
at the University of Glasgow who influence the modern world.
William Thompson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was an Irish-born Scottish physicist and
engineer who is famous for being the discoverer of the second law of
thermodynamics and an inventor of telegraphic and scientific instruments.
Just off Belgravesca in Belgravia, that houses a high number of foreign
embassies in London, is a road called Eton Place.
It was once the home of the Scottish inventor Lord Kelvin.
On display in London's Science Museum is one of his inventions, a tide-predicting
machine to predict the motion of tides in the 1870s.
But the most influential chemist of the 19th century also had a classmate who was
studying in his chemistry class, fellow Scot and medical missionary and
explorer from the London Missionary Society, David Livingstone, who has a
sextant in his hand.
David Livingstone was a serious man.
He may look like he had issues from this photo, but it was very rare to see people
smile in the 19th century photo-ops.
But in his exploration in the interior of Africa, he was to expose one of the most
downplayed, rarely spoken about episodes of modern human history, the Arab Muslim's
role in the slave trade in Africa.
Slavery, till this very day, is still a touchy subject.
Though it has existed for thousands of years and still continues to this day,
everybody today sees themselves as victims when both blacks, whites and Arabs all
collectively played a central role.
It is rumoured that in Arab-dominated states in Mauritanian West Africa and the
famine-cholera-stricken Yemen, blacks are still slaves in the Muslim
world.
This courageous missionary wanted to put an end to it, and David Livingstone
attended night classes to get the education he craved.
By the time he was 14, he had learned Latin and Greek, and mastered stacks of
theological literature.
He got on well with Africans, better in fact than he did with white Europeans.
Livingstone clashed repeatedly with the local Moors, those were the Dutch
descendants who later set up the state of apartheid in South Africa, especially when
he supported a local native revolt against their rule.
Livingstone did what he could to hinder the slave traders.
He did not hesitate to give modern firearms to African communities to fight
them off.
Livingstone's third and final African expedition was sponsored by the Royal
Geographical Society.
He planned to discover the source of the Nile in Eastern Africa.
This was one serious brother, whose last expedition was financed by the Royal
Geographical Society.
He was so respected by them, that on the north side of their building, on the main
road called Kensington Gorge, is a bronze statue of Scotsman David Livingstone.
He died in Africa, but his body was transferred to England where he now sleeps
in Westminster Cathedral until the first resurrection.
But his children, his daughter and his son on the left, his son Caesar and his
daughter standing, still continued in bettering race relations as can be seen in
this photo that was taken in Nottingham.
But none of these accomplishments of the Scots would have been possible if John
Knox did not make a bold stand.
Behind this church in a parking lot are his remains, under number 23.
Many feel this greatly discredits him, but like Livingstone and others before
them, these all died in faith, not having received the promises,
but having seen them afar off.
John Knox was to preserve many of his theological and prophetic beliefs that he
committed to his two secretaries, that many reformers and churches in
succeeding centuries in the English speaking world were to continue to expound
upon in their prophetic discourses of where they were in time.
Knox preserved it in his The History of the Reformation of Religion within the
Realm of Scotland that was published between 1559 and 1566.
At Easter, after Anno 1547, came to the castle of St. Andrews John Knox,
and so the next Sunday was appointed to the said John to express his mind in the
public preaching place, which day approaching, the said John took the next
written text in Daniel 7 and made a short discourse of the four empires.
The Babylonian, the Persian, that of the Greek, and the fourth of the Romans,
in the destruction of Ruth, wrote up that last piece, which he affirmed to be the
Roman church, for no other power that ever hath yet been to all the notes that God
hath showed to the prophet appertain except to it alone.
The man of sin, the Antichrist, the whore of Babylon.
And what will this power attempt to do?
And shall speak great words against the Most High, and shall consume the saints of
the Most High, and think to change times and laws, and they shall be given into his
hands until a time, and times, and dividing of time.
This was John Knox's expose of Daniel chapter 7.
Unfortunately, the Banner of Truth 1982 and 1994 reprint edition edits out the
four kingdoms in Daniel chapter 7, whether it's deliberately or by mistake,
the narrator cannot say.
But that is why the narrator only deals with originals.
John Knox left his mark on the planet, both in the religious world and in the
secular world.
And even though there are those who are trying to eclipse his legacy, it was the
martyrdom of his close friend George Wishart and his study on the book of
Daniel that shaped his worldview and steered his path towards reforming a
state.
We are living in a time where church freedoms are slowly and gently being
chipped away, each and every day.
And while there are many who are scared, those who carefully study the book of
Daniel, like John Knox, will not worry about the future at all.
Thank you for watching.