John Glas

John Glas , 1695-1773, Scottish minister, founder of an independent Presbyterian sect whose members were often called Glasites or Glassites. He believed that national churches and civil interference in religious matters are not authorized in the Scriptures. These views found expression in his Testimony of the King of Martyrs (1727). Glas was deposed from the ministry in 1730; he formed an independent congregation at Dundee. The Glasite church moved to Perth in 1733, where it was joined by Robert Sandeman, who later took the lead in extending the movement to England and America. There the Glasites were known as Sandemanians.

Lydgate, John (?1370–1449), spent nearly all his life in the monastery at Bury. He is one of the most voluminous of all English poets. Of his more readable poems, most were written in the first decade of the 15th cent. in a Chaucerian vein: The Complaint of the Black Knight (originally called A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe and modelled on Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess); The Temple of Glas (indebted to The House of Fame); The Floure of Curtesy (a Valentine's Day poem); and the allegorical Reason and Sensuality. As he grew older his poems became longer. His bulkiest works are his Troy Book (1412–20), a 30,000-line translation of Guido delle Colonne; The Siege of Thebes (1420–2), translated from a French prose redaction of the Roman de Thebes; The Pilgrimage of Man (1426–30), translated from Deguileville; and The Fall of Princes (1431–8), a translation of a French version of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. He was almost invariably coupled for praise with Chaucer and Gower up to the 17th cent.

Glasites (also Sandemanians), a small Scottish sect named after John Glas and his son-in-law Robert Sandeman. Glas, who was ordained in 1719 as minister of Tealing, near Dundee, came to hold that the existence of a State Church was unscriptural and challenged the basis of the Presbyterian establishment. He was deposed in 1730. He established independent congregations among his (mainly poor) followers, for whom unordained elders conducted communion services. Leadership gradually passed to Sandeman, who in Letters on Theron and Aspasio (1757) attacked the Calvinist teaching that God imputes the righteous acts of Christ to individual Christians, holding rather that a reasoned faith was the only basis for a proper relationship with God and the attainment of salvation.