Elders and Assemblies Rather Than Bishops

What distinguishes the Scottish settlement from the English one is not chiefly doctrine, since both are Reformed in their formularies, but government. Scotland developed a presbyterian polity in which authority rests in a graded series of courts, the kirk session in the parish, the presbytery over a district, the synod and the general assembly, each composed of ministers and of elders who are not clergy. No individual holds the authority a bishop holds, and the assembly can be addressed by a parish elder. That structure was contested for generations, since successive monarchs preferred bishops as instruments they could appoint, and the conflict ran through the covenanting period and the civil wars before a presbyterian settlement was fixed at the end of the seventeenth century.

The Church of Scotland remains the national church and is established, but the crown is not its governor and the sovereign attends its assembly as a guest rather than presiding. That difference is one reason the atlas catalogues England and Scotland as distinct religious regions rather than as parts of a single British settlement, since the two established churches have different doctrine, different worship and different government within one state.