JOHN: KNOX

by

A: TAYLOR INNES

Famous Scots: Series

Published byOliphant AndersonFerrier Edinbvrghand London

The designs and ornaments of thisvolume are by Mr Joseph Brown, and the printing from the press ofMessrs Turabull & Spears, Edinburgh. 

 _May_ 1896. 

CONTENTS

 PAGE

CHAPTER ITHE SCHOLAR AND PRIEST: HIS ENVIRONMENT 9

CHAPTER IITHE CRISIS: SINGLE OR TWO-FOLD? 25

CHAPTER IIITHE INNER LIFE: HIS WOMEN FRIENDS 48

CHAPTER IVTHE PUBLIC LIFE: TO THE PARLIAMENT OF 1560 65

CHAPTER VTHE PUBLIC LIFE: LEGISLATION AND CHURCH PLANS 95

CHAPTER VITHE PUBLIC LIFE: THE CONFLICT WITH QUEEN MARY 117

CHAPTER VIICLOSING YEARS AND DEATH 144

CHAPTER I

THE SCHOLAR AND PRIEST: HIS ENVIRONMENT

The century now closing has redeemed Knox from neglect, and has gatheredaround his name a mass of biographical material. That material, too, includes much that is of the nature of self-revelation, to be gleanedfrom familiar letters, as well as from his own history of his time. Yet, after all that has been brought together, Knox remains to many observersa mere hard outline, while to others he is almost an enigma--a blur, bright or black, upon the historic page. 

There is one real and great difficulty. For the first forty years of hislife we know absolutely nothing of the inner man. Yet at forty most menare already made. And in the case of this man, from about that dateonwards we find the character settled and fixed. Henceforward, duringthe whole later life with its continually changing drama, Knox remainsintensely and unchangeably the same. It is the contrast, perhaps thecrisis, which is worth studying. The contrast, indeed, is notunprecedented. More than one Knox-like prophet, in the solemn days ofearly faith, 'was in the desert until the time of his shewing untoIsrael'; and not the polished shaft only, but the rough spear-head too, has remained hid in the shadow of a mighty hand until the very day whenit was launched. But each such case impels us the more to inquire, Whatwas it after all which really made the man who in his turn made the age?

 * * * * *

Knox was born in or near Haddington in 1505. Of his father, WilliamKnox, and his mother, whose maiden name was Sinclair, nothing is known, except that the parents of both belonged to that district of country, and had fought under the standard of the House of Bothwell. We shallnever know which of the two contributed the insight or the audacity, thetenacity or the tenderness, the common-sense or the humour, which mustall have been part of Knox's natural character before it was mouldedfrom without. His father was of the 'simple, ' not of the gentle, sort;possibly a peasant, or frugal cultivator of the soil. But he savedenough to send one of his two sons, John, now in the eighteenth year ofhis age, and having, no doubt, received his earlier education in theexcellent grammar school of Haddington, to the University of Glasgow. Haddington was in the diocese of St Andrews, but a native of Haddington, John Major, was at this time Regent in Glasgow. He had brought fromParis, four years before, a vast academical reputation, and Knox now'sat as at his feet' during his last year of teaching in Glasgow. In1523, however, Major was transferred to St Andrews, and there he taughttheology for more than a quarter of a century, during the latter half ofwhich time he was Provost or Head of St Salvator's College. Whether Knoxat any time followed him there does not appear. Beza, Knox's earliestbiographer, thought he did. But Beza's information as to this portion ofthe life, though apparently derived from Knox's colleague andsuccessor, [1] is so extremely confused as to suggest that the Reformerwas equally reticent about it to those nearest him as he has chosen tobe to posterity. For nearly twenty years of manhood, indeed, Knoxdisappears from our view. And when, in 1540, he emerges again in hisnative district, it is as a notary and a priest. 'Sir John Knox' he wascalled by others, that being the style by which secular priests wereknown, unless they had taken not only the bachelor's but also themaster's degree at the University. [2] Knox in after years never alludedto his priesthood, though his adversaries did; but so late as 27th March1543 he describes himself in a notarial deed in his own handwriting as'John Knox, minister of the sacred altar, of the Diocese of St Andrews, notary by Apostolical authority. ' Apostolical means Papal, the notarialauthority being transmitted through the St Andrews Archbishop; and Knoxat this time does not shrink from dating his notarial act as in such ayear 'of the pontificate of our most holy Father and Lord in Christ, theLord Paul, Pope by the Providence of God. ' Only three years later, in1546, he was carrying a two-handed sword before Wishart, then in dangerof arrest and condemnation to the stake at the hands of the sameArchbishop Beaton under whom Knox held his orders. And in the followingyear, 1547, Knox is standing in the Church of St Andrews, and denouncingthe Pope (not as an individual, though the Pope of that day was aBorgia, but) as the official head of an Anti-Christian system. 

This early blank in the biography raises questions, some of which willnever be answered. We do not know at all when Knox took priest's orders. It was almost certainly not before 1530, for it was only in that yearthat he became eligible as being twenty-five years old. It may possiblyhave been as late as 1540, when his name is first found in a deed. Inthat and the two following years he seems to have resided at Samuelstonnear Haddington, and may have officiated in the little chapel there. Buthe was also at this time acting as 'Maister' or tutor to the sons ofseveral gentlemen of East Lothian, and he continued this down to 1547, the time of his own 'call' to preach the Evangel. Nor do we know whetherthe change in his views, which in 1547 was so complete, had been suddenon the one hand or gradual and long prepared on the other. Knox's ownsilence on this is very remarkable. A man of his fearless egoism andhonesty might have been expected to leave, if not an autobiography likethose of Augustine and Bunyan, at least a narrative of change like the_Force of Truth_ of Thomas Scott, or the _Apologia_ of John HenryNewman. He has not done so; indeed, the author who preserved for us somuch of that age, and of his own later history in it, seems for somereason to have judged his whole earlier period unworthy of record--oreven of recal. For we find no evidence of his having been moreconfidential on this subject with any of his contemporaries than he hasbeen with us. This certainly suggests that the change may have been veryrecent--determined, perhaps, wholly through the personal influence ofWishart, whom Knox so affectionately commemorates. Or, if it was notrecent, it is extremely unlikely that it can have been detailed, vivid, and striking, as well as prolonged. Knox was not the man to suppress anarrative, however painful to himself, which he could have held to be ina marked degree to the glory of God or for the good of men. But whateverthe reason was, the time past of his life sufficed this man for silenceand self-accusation. We may be sure that it would have done so (andperhaps done so equally), no matter whether those twenty years had beenspent in the complacent routine of a rustic in holy orders; in thedogmatism, defensive or aggressive, of scholastic youth; in fruitlessefforts to understand the new views of which he was one day to be thechief representative; or in half-hearted hesitation whether, afterhaving so far understood them, he could part with all things for theirsake. Which of these positions he held, or how far he may have passedfrom one to another, we may never be able to ascertain. But there is onetoo clear indication that Knox disliked, not only to record, but even torecal, his life in the Catholic communion. His greatest defect in afteryears, as a man and a writer, is his inability to sympathise with thosestill found entangled in that old life. He absolutely refuses to puthimself in their place, or to imagine how a position which was for somany years his own could be honestly chosen, or even honestly retainedfor a day, by another. This would have been a misfortune, and a moraldefect, even in a man not naturally of a sympathetic temper. But Knox, as we shall see, was a man of quick and tender nature, and had rather apassion for sympathising with those who were not on the other side ofthe gulf he thus fixed. And this one-sided incapacity for sympathy mustcertainly be connected with his one-sided reticence as to the earlierhalf of his own autobiography. 

Incapacity to sympathise with persons entangled in a system is onething, and disapproval of that system, or even violent rejection of it, is another. Knox, as is well known, broke absolutely with the churchsystem in which he was brought up. What was that system, and what wasKnox's individual outlook upon the Church--first, of Western Europe, andsecondly of Scotland?

We know at least that Knox, before breaking with the church system ofmediæval Europe, was for twenty years in close contact with it. And hiswas no mere external contact such as Haddington, with its magnificentchurches and monasteries, supplied. It commenced with study, and withstudy under the chief theological teacher of the land and the time. Major was the last of the scholastics in our country. But the energy ofthought of scholasticism, marvellous as it often was, was built upon thelines and contained within the limits of an already existing churchsystem. And that system was an authoritative one in every sense. Thehierarchy which governed the Church, and all but constituted it, wassacerdotal; that is, it interposed its own mediation at the point wherethe individual meets and deals with God. But it interposedcorrespondingly at every other point of the belief and practice of theprivate man, enforcing its doctrine upon the conscience, and itsdirection upon the will, of every member of the church. Nor was thesystem authoritative only over those who received or accepted it. Originally, indeed, and even in the age when the faith was digested intoa creed by the first Council, the emperor, himself an ardent member ofthe Church, left it free to all his subjects throughout the world to beits members or not as they chose. But that great experiment oftoleration lasted less than a century. For much more than a thousandyears the same faith, slowly transformed into a church system under thecentral administration of the Popes, had been made binding by imperialand municipal law upon every human being in Europe. 

Major, not only by his own earlier writings, but as the representativein Scotland of the University of Paris, recalled to his countrymen thegreat struggle of the Middle Age in favour of freedom--and especially ofchurch freedom against the Popes. That struggle indeed had Germanyrather than France for its original centre, and it was under the flag ofthe Empire that the progressive despotism of Hildebrand and hissuccessors over the feudal world was chiefly resisted. The Empire, however, was now a decaying force. Europe was being split intonationalities; and national churches--a novelty in Christendom--were, under various pretexts, coming into existence. For the last twocenturies France had thus been the chief national opponent of thecentralising influence of Rome, and the University of Paris was, duringthat time, the greatest theological school in the world. As such it hadmaintained the doctrine that the church universal could have no absolutemonarch, but was bound to maintain its own self-government, and that itsproper organ for this was a general council. And in the early part ofthe fifteenth century, when the schism caused by rival Popes had thrownback the Church upon its native powers, the University of Paris was thegreat influence which led the Councils of Constance and of Basle, notonly to assert this doctrine, but to carry it into effect. 

But Major, when Knox met him, represented in this matter a cause alreadylost. Even in the previous century the decrees of the reforming Councilswere at once frustrated by the successors of the Popes whom theydeposed, and in this sixteenth century a Lateran Council had alreadyanticipated the Vatican of the nineteenth by declaring the Pope to besupreme over Council and Church alike. Even the anti-Papal Councilsthemselves, too, were exclusively hierarchical, and accordingly theyopposed any independent right on the part of the laity, as well as allserious enquiries into the earlier practice and faith of the Church. Soat Constance the Chancellor of Paris, _Doctor Christianissimus_ as wellas statesman and mystic, compensated for his successful pressure uponRome by helping to send to the stake, notwithstanding the Emperor'ssafe-conduct, the pure-hearted Huss. The result was that, even beforethe time of Major, the expectation, so long cherished by Europe, of agreat reform through a great Council had died out. And the University ofParis, instead of continuing to act in place of that coming Council as'a sort of standing committee of the French, or even of the universal, Church, '[3] had become a reactionary and retarding power. It opposedHumanism, and was the stronghold of the method of teaching which the newgeneration knew as 'Sophistry. ' It opposed Reuchlin, and was preparingto oppose Luther, and to urge against its own most distinguished pupilsthe law of penal fire. It continued to oppose the despotism of the Pope, but it did so rather from the standpoint of a narrow and nationalistGallicanism, based largely upon the counter-despotism of the King. Thisselfish policy attained in Major's own time its fitting result andreward. The despotic King and despotic Pope found it convenient fortheir interests to partition between them the 'liberties' of theGallican Church; and by the Concordat of Bologna in 1516, Leo gained ahuge revenue from the ecclesiastical endowments of France, while Francisusurped the right of nominating all its bishops. The University, as wellas the Parliaments, resisted, and Major, who now lectured in theSorbonne as Doctor in Theology, and had become famous as arepresentative of the anti-Papal school of Occam, took his share in thework. He was preparing for publication a Commentary on the Gospel ofMatthew, and he now added to it four Disputations against the arbitrarypowers of Popes and Bishops, and especially against the authority ofPopes in temporal matters over Kings, and in spiritual matters overCouncils. It was all in vain. In 1517 the University was forced by theCrown to submit, after a protest of the broadest kind;[4] and in 1518Major returned to his native country a famous teacher, but a defeatedchurchman. Yet the grave fact for Scotland was that Major and his oldUniversity, and the Western hierarchy everywhere, henceforwardpractically acquiesced in their own defeat. A greater question hadarisen, and one which they were unwilling to face. On the other side ofthe Rhine, Luther and his friends now claimed for the individualChristian the same kind of freedom against Councils and Bishops whichthe previous century had claimed for Councils and Bishops against Popes. Paris took the lead in opposition to the new Evangel by its Academicdecrees of 1521. And when Major, in 1530, republished his Commentary, henot only omitted from it his Disputations against Papal absolutism, butdedicated it to Archbishop James Beaton as the 'supplanter' and'exterminator' of Lutheranism, and, above all, as the judge who, amidthe murmurings of many, had recently[5] and righteously condemned thenobly-born Patrick Hamilton. 

It may be well thus to represent to ourselves what must have been theoutlook into the Western Church of Major, or of any one who lookedthrough Major's eyes, in that year 1523. But I think it very unlikelythat Knox could have derived from such an outlook, or from Major in anyaspect, a serious impulse to his career as Reformer. Knox no doubtlearned from him scholastic logic, and turned it in later days with muchvigour to his own purposes. Major, too, may have unconsciously revealedto his pupils with how much hope the former generation had lookedforward to a council. We find afterwards that Knox and his friends, likeLuther in his earlier stages, when appealing against the hierarchy, sometimes appealed to a General Council. But neither side regarded thisas serious. It would have been more important if we could have shownthat Major transmitted to his pupil the opposition maintained forcenturies by his university to an ultramontane Pontiff as the hereditaryopponent of all Church freedom and all Church reform. But Luther and theGerman Reformers had already exaggerated this view, so far as to suggestthat the usurping chief of the Church must be the scriptural Antichrist. And their views, brought direct to Scotland by men like Hamilton, had, as we have seen, immensely increased the reaction in the mind of Major, which was begun abroad before 1518. It is, indeed, curious to noticehow in his later writings the old university feeling against tyranny inthe Church almost disappears, while the equally old and honourablefeeling of the learned Middle Age, and especially of its universities, against the tyranny of kings and nobles, finds expression alike in hishistory and his commentaries. Buchanan, who proclaimed to all Europe theconstitutional rights, even against their sovereign, of the people ofScotland, and Knox, the 'subject born within the same, ' who was destinedto translate that Radical theory so largely into fact, were both taughtby Major. And they may well have been much influenced on this side by aman who had long before written that 'the original and supreme powerresides in the whole of a free people, and is incapable of beingsurrendered, ' insomuch that an incorrigible tyrant may always be'deposed by that people as by a superior authority. '[6] For even Fergusthe First, he narrates, 'had no right' other than the nation's choice, and when Sir William Wallace was yet a boy, he was taught by hisScottish tutor to repeat continually the rude inspiring rhyme, '_Dicotibi verum Libertas optima rerum_. '[7] These views as to the rights ofman, and of Scottish men, may well have fanned, or even kindled, thestrong feeling of independence in secular matters and as a citizen, which burned in the breast of Knox. But as to spiritual matters and theChurch universal, the only feelings which we can imagine Major, on hisreturn from abroad, to have impressed upon the younger man fromHaddington are a despair of reform, and a disbelief in revolution. 

Let us turn, therefore, from abroad to the Church at home. It isadmitted on all hands that the clergy of this age in Scotland wereextraordinarily corrupt in life, a reproach which applied eminently tothe higher ranks and the representative men. But corruption of churchmenis always a symptom of deeper things. It does not appear that Scotlandwas much influenced by the spirit of the Renaissance, whether you applythat term to the intellectual passion for both knowledge and beautywhich spread over most parts of Europe during the three previouscenturies, or to the more specific and half-Pagan culture which in someparts of Europe was the result. It may be more important to observe thatthe Church in Scotland had not enjoyed any period of inward religiousrevival--any which could be described as native to it or original. Onthe contrary its great epoch had been its transformation, through royaland foreign influence, into the likeness of English and continentalcivilisation, as civilisation was understood in the Middle Age. And thattransformation in the days of Queen Margaret and her sons wasaccompanied, and to a large extent compensated, by a less desirableincorporation into the western ecclesiastical system. The later 'comingof the Friars' had not the same powerful effect in the remote northwhich it had in some other realms. And in any case that impulse too hadlong since yielded to a strong reaction, and the preachers were nowregarded with the disgust with which mankind usually resent the attemptto manipulate them by external means without a real message. But therewere two great sources of ruin to the Scottish church, both connectedwith its relation to a powerful aristocracy. One was the extraordinaryextent to which its high offices were used as sinecures for thefavourites, and the sons of favourites, of nobles and of kings. This didnot tend to impoverish the church; on the contrary, it made it an objectto all the great families to keep up the wealth on which they proposedthat their unworthy scions should feed. 'In proportion to the resourcesof the country the Scottish clergy were probably the richest inEurope. '[8] But the wealth, accumulated in idle and unworthy hands, wasnow a scandal to religion, and a constant fountain of immorality. Stillworse was the extent to which that wealth was in Scotland diverted fromits best uses to the less desirable side--the monastic side--of themediæval church. In the revival which came from England before thetwelfth century, a great impulse had been given to the parochialising ofthe country, and to keeping up religious life in every district andestate. But a prejudice running back to very early centuries branded theparish priests as seculars, and gradually drew away again the devotionand the means of the faithful from the parishes where they were needed, and to which they properly belonged. It drew them away, in Scotland, notonly to rich centres like cathedrals, with their too wasteful retinue, but far more to the great monasteries scattered over the land. Kings andbarons, who proposed to spend life so as to need after its close a gooddeal of intercession, naturally turned their eyes, even beforedeath-bed, to these wealthy strongholds of poverty and prayer; and of ahundred other places besides Melrose, we know 'That lands and livings, many a rood, had gifted the shrine for their soul's repose. ' But thetransfer, to such centres, of lands (which were supposed, by the feudallaw, to belong to chiefs rather than to the community), was not sodirect an injury to the people of Scotland, as the alienation to thesame institutions of parochial tithes--sometimes under the form ofalienating the churches to which the tithes were paid. These parochialtithes all possessors of land in the parish were bound by law to pay, whether they desired it or not. And, strictly, they should have beenpaid to the pastor of the parish and for its benefit. But by ascandalous corruption, often protested against by both Parliament andthe Church, the Lords of lands were allowed to divert the tithes, whichthey were already bound to pay, to congested ecclesiastical centres, sometimes to cathedrals, more often to religious houses of 'regulars. 'After this was done the monastery or religious House enjoyed the wholesheaves or tithes of the land in question; the local vicar, if the Houseappointed one, being entitled only to the 'lesser tithes' of domesticanimals, eggs, grass, etc. This robbery of the parishes ofScotland--parishes which were already far too large and too scattered, as John Major points out--was carried on to an extraordinary extent. Each of the religious houses of Holyrood and Kelso had the tithes oftwenty-seven parishes diverted or 'appropriated' to it. In somedistricts two-thirds of the whole parish churches were in the hands ofthe monks, and no fewer than thirty-four were bestowed on Arbroath Abbeyin the course of a single reign. When we remember that the Lords ofthese great houses were generally members--often unworthy members--ofthe families which were thus enriching them to the detriment of thecountry, we can imagine the complicated corruption which went on fromreign to reign. Unfortunately the nepotism and simony which resulted haddirect example and sanction in the relation to Scotland of the Head ofthe Church at Rome. [9] The most ardent Catholics admit this as true inrelation to Europe generally in the time with which we deal;[10] and theHoly See had been allowed some centuries before to claim Scotland as acountry which belonged to it in a peculiar sense, and the Church ofScotland as subject to it specially and immediately. The jealousy of anItalian potentate which was always powerful in England, and which hadnow, under Henry the Eighth, made it possible to reject the Romishsupremacy while retaining the whole of Roman Catholic doctrine, hadlittle influence farther north. Scotland followed the Pope, even when hewent to Avignon, and when England had accepted his rival or Anti-Pope. And while in this it sympathised with France, it had little of thattraditional dislike to high Ultramontane claims which we saw to havebeen so strong in Paris. The Pope remained the centre of our churchsystem, and there were in Scotland no projects of serious reform exceptthose which went so deep as (in the case of the Lollards and otherprecursors of the Reformation) to break with the existing ecclesiasticalmachine as a whole, and so to challenge the deadliest penalties of thelaw. 

For it is a mistake to suppose that heresy, in the modern misuse of theword (as equivalent to false doctrine), was greatly dreaded in the RomanCatholic Church, or savagely punished by our ancient code. In Scotland, as elsewhere, the fundamental law was that of Theodosius and the empire, that every man must be a member of the Catholic Church, and submit toit. That law was indeed the original establishment of the Church, andfor many centuries there had been in Scotland no penalty for breaking itexcept death. But the Church, when its authority was thus once for allsufficiently secured, was, in the early Middle Age, rather tolerant oftheological opinion. And not until error had been published andpersisted in, in face of the injunctions of authority--not until theheresy thus threatened to be internal schism, or repudiation of thatauthority--was the secular power usually invoked. Unfortunately WesternEurope as a whole, ever since its intellectual awakening three or morecenturies ago, was moving on to precisely this crisis; and the veryexistence of the Church, in the sense of a body of which all citizenswere compulsorily members, was now felt to be at stake. The Scottishsovereign had long since been taken bound, by his coronation oath, tointerpose his authority; and the present King, delivered in 1528 fromthe tutory of the Douglases by the Beatons, had thrown himself into theside of those powerful ecclesiastics. A statute, the first againstheresy for nearly a century, was passed two years after Knox went tocollege. When he was twenty-three years old, England was preparing toreject the Pope's supremacy; but Scotland was so far from it that thisyear Patrick Hamilton was burned at St Andrews. When he was thirty-fouryears old, the English revolution had been accomplished by the despoticHenry; but his Scottish nephew had refused to follow the lead, and inthat year five other heretics were burned on the Castle-hill ofEdinburgh, the popular 'Commons King' looking on. On James V. 's deaththere was a slight reaction under the Regent, and Parliament evensanctioned the publication of the Scriptures. But Arran made his peacewith the Church in 1543, and Beaton, the able but worldly Archbishop ofSt Andrews, and as such Knox's diocesan, became once more the leader ofScotland. He had already instituted the Inquisition throughout his see;he was now advanced to be Papal Legate; and he was fully prepared topress into execution the Acts which a few years before he and the Kinghad persuaded the Parliament to pass. Not to be a member of the Churchhad always meant death. But now it was death by statute to argue againstthe Pope's authority; it was made unlawful even to enter into discussionon matters of religion; and those in Scotland who were merely_suspected_ of heresy were pronounced incapable of any office there. And, lastly, those who left the country to avoid the fatal censure ofits Church on such crimes as these, were held by law to be alreadycondemned. The illustrious Buchanan was one of those who thus fled. Knoxremained, and suddenly becomes visible. 

[1] Knox's later biographer, Dr Hume Brown, has given to the world aletter from Sir Peter Young to Beza, transmitting a posthumous portraitof Knox, which is thus no doubt the original of the likeness in Beza'sIcones, and makes the latter our only trustworthy representation of him. The letter adds, 'You may look for (expectabis) his full history fromMaster Lawson'; and this raises the hope that Beza's biography, foundedupon the memoir of Knox's colleague, James Lawson, as the _icon_probably was upon the Edinburgh portrait, would be of great value. Inpoint of fact Beza's biography does give great prominence to Knox'sclosing pastorate and last days, as his newly-appointed colleague mightbe expected to do. But about his early years it is hopelesslyinaccurate, to say the least. 

[2] So, in Shakespeare, Sir Hugh, who is 'of the Church'; Sir Topas thecurate, whose beard and gown the clown borrows; Sir Oliver Martext, whowill not be 'flouted out of his calling;' and Sir Nathaniel, who claimsto have 'taste and feeling, ' and whose female parishioners call himindifferently the 'Person' or the 'Parson. '

[3] Rashdall's 'Universities of Europe, ' i. 525. 

[4] The Act of Appeal of the University lays down principles which applyfar beyond the bounds of Gallicanism; that 'the Pope, although he holdshis power immediately from God, is not prevented, by his possession ofthis power, from going wrong'; that 'if he commands that which isunjust, he may righteously be resisted'; and 'if, by the action of thepowers that be, we are deprived of the means of resisting the Pope, there remains one remedy, founded on natural law, which no Prince cantake away--the remedy of appeal, which is competent to every individual, by divine right, and natural right, and human right. ' And, accordingly, the University, protesting that the Basle Council's decrees of the pasthave been set aside, Appeals to a Council in the future. --Bulaeus''Hist. Of the University of Paris, ' vol. Viii. P. 92. 

[5] This uncompromising preface took the place of one in which Major, onhis arrival in Scotland in 1518, praised the same Archbishop, then inGlasgow, for his many-sided and 'chamaelon-like mildness. ' It isgenerally recognised that the stern policy latterly carried on under thenominal authority of James Beaton was really inspired by his nephew andcoadjutor, David Beaton, the future cardinal. 

[6] 'Expositio Matt. ' fol. 71. (Paris. )

[7] 'I tell the truth to thee, there's nought like Liberty!'--Major's'History of Greater Britain. '

[8] Hume Brown's 'Knox, ' i. 44. 

[9] See Scots Acts, A. D. 1471, c. 43. 

[10]

 An Petrus Romae fuerit, sub judice lis est: Simonem Romae nemo fuisse negat. 

CHAPTER II

THE CRISIS: SINGLE OR TWO-FOLD?

On this dark background Knox for the first time appears in history. Butwe catch sight of him merely as an attendant on the attractive figure ofGeorge Wishart. At Cambridge Wishart had been 'courteous, lowly, lovely, glad to teach, and desirous to learn'; when he returned to Scotland, Knox and others found him 'a man of such graces as before him were neverheard within this realm. ' He had preached in several parts of Scotland, and was brought in the spring of 1546 by certain gentlemen of EastLothian, 'who then were earnest professors of Christ Jesus, ' to theneighbourhood of Haddington. On the morning of his last sermon in thattown he had received (in the mansion-house of Lethington, 'the lairdwhereof, ' father of the famous William Maitland, 'was ever civil, albeitnot persuaded in religion') a letter, 'which received and read, hecalled for John Knox, who had waited upon him carefully from the time hecame to Lothian. ' And the same evening, with a presentiment of hiscoming arrest, he 'took his good-night, as it were for ever, ' of all hisacquaintance, and

 'John Knox pressing to have gone with the said Master George, he said, "Nay, return to your bairns, and God bless you! One is sufficient for one sacrifice. " And so he caused a two-handed sword (which commonly was carried with the said Master George) be taken from the said John Knox, who, although unwillingly, obeyed, and returned with Hugh Douglas of Longniddrie. '[11]

The same night Wishart was arrested by the Earl of Bothwell, andafterwards handed over to the Cardinal Archbishop, tried by him as aheretic, and on 1st March 1546 burned in front of his castle of StAndrews. Ere long this stronghold was stormed, and the Cardinal murderedin his own chamber by a number of the gentlemen of Fife, whose raid waspartly in revenge for Wishart's death. They shut themselves up in thecastle for protection, and we hear no more of John Knox till thefollowing year. Then we are told that, 'wearied of removing from placeto place, by reason of the persecution that came upon him by the Bishopof St Andrews, ' he joined Leslie's band in their hold in St Andrews, inconsequence of the desire of his pupils' parents 'that himself mighthave the benefit of the castle, and their children the benefit of hisdoctrine [teaching]. ' It is plain that by this time what Knox taught wasthe doctrine of Wishart. Indeed he had not been long in St Andrews when, urged by the congregation there, he consented to become its preacher. And his very first sermon in this capacity rang out the full note of thecoming reform or rather revolution in the religion of Scotland. 

Now, this is a startlingly sudden transition. The change from theposition of a nameless notary under Papal authority, who is in additiona minister of the altar of the Catholic Church, to that of a preacher inthe whole armour of the Puritan Reformation, is great. Was thetransition a public and official one only? Was it a change merelyecclesiastical or political? Or was it preceded by a more private changeand a personal crisis? And was that private and personal crisis merelyintellectual? Was it, that is, the adoption of a new dogma only, orperhaps the acceptance of a new system? Or if there was somethingbesides these, was it nothing more than the resolve of a very powerfulwill--such a will as we must all ascribe to Knox? Was this all? Or wasthere here rather, perhaps, the sort of change which determines the willinstead of being determined by it--a personal change, in the sense ofbeing emotional and inward as well as deep and permanent--a new _set_ ofthe whole man, and so the beginning of an inner as well as of an outerand public life?

The question is of the highest interest, but as we have said, there isno direct answer. It would be easy for each reader to supply the void byreasoning out, according to his own prepossessions, what must have been, or what ought to have been, the experience of such a man at such a time. It would be easy--but unprofitable. Far better would it be could weadduce from his own utterances evidence--indirect evidence even--thatthe crisis which he declines to record really took place; and that thegreat outward career was founded on a new personal life within. Nowthere is such an utterance, which has been hitherto by no meanssufficiently recognised. It is 'a meditation or prayer, thrown forth ofmy sorrowful heart and pronounced by my half-dead tongue, ' on 12thMarch, 1566, at a moment when Knox's cause was in extremity of danger. Mary had joined the Catholic League and driven the Protestant Lords intoEngland, and their attempted counter-plot had failed by the defection ofDarnley. Knox had now before him certain exile and possible death, andon the eve of leaving Edinburgh he sat down and wrote privately thefollowing personal confession. Five years later, when publishing hislast book, after the national victory but amid great public troubles, heprefixed a preface explaining that he had already 'taken good-night atthe world and at all the fasherie of the same, ' and henceforward wishedhis brethren only to pray that God would 'put an end to my long andpainful battle. ' And with this preface he now printed the old meditationor confession of 1566. It is therefore autobiographical by a doubletitle. And it is made even more interesting by the striking rubric withwhich the writer heads it. 

 JOHN KNOX, WITH DELIBERATE MIND, TO HIS GOD. 

 'Be merciful unto me, O Lord, and call not into judgment my manifold sins; and chiefly those whereof the world is not able to accuse me. In youth, mid age, and now after many battles, I find nothing in me but vanity and corruption. For, in quietness I am negligent; in trouble impatient, tending to desperation; and in the mean [middle] state I am so carried away with vain fantasies, that alas! O Lord, they withdraw me from the presence of thy Majesty. Pride and ambition assault me on the one part, covetousness and malice trouble me on the other; briefly, O Lord, the affections of the flesh do almost suppress the operation of Thy Spirit. I take Thee, O Lord, who only knowest the secrets of hearts, to record, that in none of the foresaid do I delight; but that with them I am troubled, and that sore against the desire of my inward man, which sobs for my corruption, and would repose in Thy mercy alone. To the which I clame [cry] in the promise that Thou hast made to all penitent sinners (of whose number I profess myself to be one), in the obedience and death of my only Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ. In whom, by Thy mere grace, I doubt not myself to be elected to eternal salvation, whereof Thou hast given unto me (unto me, O Lord, most wretched and unthankful creature) most assured signs. For being drowned in ignorance Thou hast given to me knowledge above the common sort of my brethren; my tongue hast Thou used to set forth Thy glory, to oppugne idolatry, errors, and false doctrine. Thou hast compelled me to forespeak, as well deliverance to the afflicted, as destruction to certain inobedient, the performance whereof, not I alone, but the very blind world has already seen. But above all, O Lord, Thou, by the power of Thy Holy Spirit, hast sealed unto my heart remission of my sins, which I acknowledge and confess myself to have received by the precious blood of Jesus Christ once shed; in whose perfect obedience I am assured my manifold rebellions are defaced, my grievous sins purged, and my soul made the tabernacle of Thy Godly Majesty--Thou, O Father of mercies, Thy Son our Lord Jesus, my only Saviour, Mediator, and Advocate, and Thy Holy Spirit, remaining in the same by true faith, which is the only victory that overcometh the world. '[12]

This window into the heart of a great man is not less transparentbecause it opens upwards. Its revelation of an inner life, with thealternations proper to it of struggle and victory, will receiveconfirmation as we go on. As we go on too we shall be arrested by theintense personal sympathy which Knox showed in helping those around himwho were still weaker and more tempted than himself--a sympathy in whichmany will find a surer proof of the existence of a life within, thaneven in this record of his deliberate and devotional mind. What thisrecord now suggests to us is that the personal life which it reveals hada foundation in some personal and moral crisis. The truth and light cameto him when he was 'drowned in ignorance, ' and the change cannot have_originated_ in any fancy as to his own predestination, or in anyforesight by himself of his own public services. The foundation, as itis put by Knox, was deeper, and was, in his view, common to him with allChristian men. It is a transaction of the individual with the Divine, inwhich the man comes to God by 'true faith. ' And this faith is, or oughtto be, absolute and assured, simply because it is faith in the offerand promise of God himself in his Evangel. This was the teaching ofWishart, as it had been of Patrick Hamilton before him. It was theteaching which Hamilton had derived from Luther, and Wishart from bothLuther and the Reformers of Switzerland. Later on, when the minordifferences between the two schools of Protestantism had declaredthemselves, it might fairly be said that Knox, and with him Scotland, founded their religion not so much (with Luther) on the central doctrineof immediate access to God through his promise, as (with Calvin) on themore general doctrine of the immediate authority of God through hisword. But the former--the Evangel--was the original life and light ofthe Reformation everywhere, and its glow as of 'glad confident morning'now flushed the whole sky of Western Europe. [13] Knox himself alwayspreached it, and on the day before his death he let fall an expressionwhich indicates that his acceptance of it had rescued him at this verydate from the tossings of an inward sea. 'Go, read where I cast my firstanchor!' he said to his wife. 'And so she read the seventeenth of John'sGospel. ' Now the 'Evangel of John' was what Knox tells us he taughtfrom day to day in the chapel, within the Castle of St Andrews, at acertain hour; and when on entering the city he took up this book of theNew Testament, he took it up at the point 'where he left at hisdeparture from Longniddry where before his residence was, ' and whitherWishart had sent him back to his pupils a year before. And of all partsof this Evangel the rock-built anchorage of the seventeenth chapter maysurely best claim to be that commemorated in Knox's stately anddeliberate words. 

But these conjectures must not make us forget the fact that Knox himselfplaces an undoubted and great crisis at the threshold of his publiclife. His teaching in 1547 of John's Gospel, and of a certain'catechism, ' though carried on within the walls, sometimes of thechapel, and sometimes of the parish kirk, of St Andrews, was supposed tobe private or tutorial. Soon, however, the more influential men thereurged him 'that he would take the preaching place upon him. But heutterly refused, alleging that he would not run where God had not calledhim.... Whereupon, they privily among themselves advising, having withthem in council Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, they concluded that theywould give a charge to the said John, and that publicly by the mouth oftheir preacher. ' And so, after a sermon turning on the power of thechurch or congregation to call men to the ministry, 'The said John Rough, preacher, directed his words to the said John Knox, saying, "Brother, ye shall not be offended, albeit that I speak unto you that which I have in charge, even from all those that are here present, which is this: In the name of God, and of His Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of these that presently call you by my mouth, I charge you that you refuse not this holy vocation, but ... That you take upon you the public office and charge of preaching, even as you look to avoid God's heavy displeasure, and desire that He shall multiply His graces with you. " And in the end, he said to those that were present, "Was not this your charge to me? And do ye not approve this vocation?" They answered, "It was: and we approve it. " Whereat the said John, abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears, and withdrew himself to his chamber. His countenance and behaviour, from that day till the day that he was compelled to present himself to the public place of preaching, did sufficiently declare the grief and trouble of his heart; for no man saw any sign of mirth in him, neither yet had he pleasure to accompany any man, many days together. '[14]

There is no reason to think that Knox exaggerates the importance of thisscene in his own history. A man has but one life, and the choosing evenof his secular work in it is sometimes so difficult as to make himwelcome any external compulsion. But the necessity of an external andeven a divine vocation, in order to justify a man's devoting his life tohandling things divine, has long been a tradition of the ChristianChurch--and especially of the Scottish church, which in its parts, andas a whole, has been repeatedly convulsed by this question of 'TheCall. ' And in Knox's time, as in the earliest age of Christianity, whatis now a tradition was a very stern fact. The men who were thus callinghim knew well, and Knox himself, more clear of vision than any of them, knew better, that what they were inviting him to was in all probabilitya violent death. Rough himself perished in the flames at Smithfield; andfour months after this vocation Knox was sitting chained and half-nakedin the galleys at Rouen, under the lash of a French slave-driver. He didnot perhaps himself always remember how the future then appeared to him. Old men looking back upon their past are apt 'to see in their life thestory of their life, ' and the Reformer, after his later amazingvictories, sometimes speaks as if these had been his in hope, or even inpromise, from the outset of his career. But it is plain to us now, as westudy his letters in those early years, that he was repeatedly broughtto accept what we know to have been the real probability--viz. , that, while the ultimate triumph of the Evangel would be secure, it might bebrought about only after his own failure and ruin. Such were thealternatives which Knox--a man of undoubted sensitiveness andtenderness, and who describes himself as naturally 'fearful'[15]--had toponder during those days of seclusion at St Andrews. Of one thing he hadno doubt. The call, if once he accepted it, was irrevocable;[16] and hemust thenceforward go straight on, abandoning the many resources ofsilence and of flight which might still be open to a private man. 

But this was not all. It would be doing injustice to Knox, and to ourmaterials, to suppose that personal considerations were the only oneswhich pressed upon him in this crisis. He never, in any circumstances, could have been a man of 'a private spirit, ' and his present call wasexpressly to bear the public burden. But the burden so proposed wasoverwhelming. Was it by his mouth that his countrymen were to be urgedto expose themselves, individually, to certain danger and possible ruin?Was it upon his initiative that his country was to be divided, distracted, and probably destroyed--deprived of its old faith, severedfrom its old alliances, and hurled into revolt from its five hundredyears of Christian peace?[17] The risk to his country was extreme. Andif, by some marvellous conspiration of providences, Scotland passedthrough all this without ruin, was Knox prepared to face the moretremendous responsibilities of success? Did he hear in that hour thevoice by which leaders of Movements in later days have been chilled, 'Thou couldst a people raise, but couldst not rule?' For if we assumethat he felt entitled to back this weight of leadership upon God andEvangel, the question still remained, Was even the Evangel strong enoughto bear this burden of a nation's future? That it was able to guide andsave the individual man, through all changes and chances of this lifeand the life beyond, Knox may have been assured. But the questions whichrose behind were those of Church organisation and social reconstruction. Was it possible, and was it lawful, to accept the existing Churchsystem, in whole or in part, and to build upon that? And if this wasimpossible, if Christ's Church must go back to the Divine foundation inHis new-discovered Word, was that Word sufficient, not for foundationmerely, but for all superstructure--for doctrine, discipline, andworship alike? Or would the Church be entitled to impose its own wiseand reasonable additions to the recovered statute-book of Scripture?Lastly, if such a new Church shone already in 'devout imagination'before Knox, he must have also had some forecast of its new relations tofeudal and royal Scotland. Was he to plead merely for freedom, under aneutral civil authority? Or in the event of the chiefs of the nation, orsome of them, individually adopting the new faith, were they to adopt itfor themselves alone; or for subjects and vassals too, as under theformer regime? And were they to enforce it, by feudal or royal or evenlegislative authority, on unwilling subjects and unwilling vassals too?

I think it clear that all these questions must have passed before themind of Knox during that week of agitated seclusion within the castlewalls. Not only so. There is evidence in his own writings that when atthe close of that time he came forth to take up the public work, hehad already formed his conclusions as to all the main principles onwhich it was to proceed. And from these he never afterwards varied. Thirteen years were still to elapse before they resulted in Scotlandin a religious revolution; and during those years of wandering andexile Knox learned much from the wisest and best of the newleaders--much from them; and much, too, from his own experience, whichhe was in the future to reduce to details of practice. But hisprinciples were the same from the first. He believed fundamentally inthe gracious Word of God revealed to man, as overriding andover-ruling all other authorities. His first sermon denounced thewhole existing church system as an Anti-Christian substitute, interposed between man and that original message. But, strange to say, the part of the discourse which at once aroused controversy was hissweeping denial of the Church's right to institute ceremonies, theground of denial being that 'man may neither make nor devise areligion that is acceptable to God. ' He was thus Protestant andPuritan[18] from the first, as his master Wishart was before him, andhis choice had now to be made according to his convictions. We, looking back upon the past at our ease, may recognise that on some ofthese matters he was too hasty in his conclusions--especially in hisconclusions as to his opponents, and the duty towards them which theparty now oppressed would have, in the unlikely event of its cominginto power. But we are bound to remember--Knox himself insists uponit--that he did not take up the function of guide to his people at hisown hand, or accept it at his own leisure. He was suddenly called uponin God's name to accept or refuse an almost hopeless task, but one inwhich success and failure involved the greatest alternatives to him. That preaching the Gospel to which he was called, if it meant on theone hand, in the event of failure, exile or death, meant on the other, in case of success, the salvation of a whole people now sitting indarkness. But he had to accept the task as a whole or to refuse it;and his conclusions as to what that task involved were fused intounity--in some respects into premature unity--in the glow of a suprememoral trial. For the week of deliberation before he emerged as theteacher of the Congregation was certainly not spent upon detaileddifficulties either of future legislation or present consistency. Itprolonged itself rather in poise and struggle against the more obviousand tremendous obstacles, reinforced no doubt by a thousand moreremote behind them. But the ultimate question was whether the giganticstrain of all of these combined would be too much for an anchordropped by one strong hand into the depths of the Evangel. 

And so that week saved a nation--perhaps a man. 

For I think it quite a possible thing that this crisis in St Andrews, the only one recorded or even suggested by Knox himself, may have beenthe one personal crisis of his life. I cannot indeed say with Carlyle, that before this Knox 'seemed well content to guide his own steps by thelight of the Reformation, nowise unduly intruding it on others ... Resolute he to walk by the truth, and speak the truth when called to doit; not ambitious of more, not fancying himself capable of more. '[19]Of all men living or dead, this is the one whom it is most impossible tothink of as acquiescing in such an easy relation to those around him, oreven as attempting so to acquiesce--at least without inwardself-question and torture. We must remember that Knox had undoubtedlybefore this time embraced the doctrinal system of the Reformation, nodoubt in the form taught by Wishart. And a catechism of that doctrine, perhaps founded upon or identical with that which Wishart brought fromBasel, he gave to his East Lothian pupils. Long before his external'call' at St Andrews, the inward impulse to preach the message to hisfellow-men, and to champion their right to receive it, must have pressedupon his conscience. Was this pearl worth the price of selling all tobuy it? And was such a price demanded of him individually? If thesequestions were still unanswered--for that they had been put, and putincessantly, I have no doubt--then the Knox whom we know was stillwaiting to be born, and the representative of Scotland was like Scotlanditself, 'as yet without a soul. '[20] He had carried a sword beforeWishart, and he and the gentlemen of East Lothian would have defendedtheir saintly guest at the peril of their lives. He had been followedthereafter by the persecution of his bishop, until he made up his mindfor exile in Germany (rather than in England, where he heard that theRomish doctrine flourished under Royal Supremacy). And after the'slaughter of the Cardinal, ' he took refuge within the strong walls ofthe vacant castle, like other men whose sympathies made them, in thequaint words of the chronicler[21], 'suspect themselves guilty of thedeath' of Beaton, though they might not have known of it before thefact. But all this Knox might conceivably have done, and still haveborne about with him a troubled and divided mind, until the address ofRough flashed out upon his conscience his true vocation, and sent him intears and solitude to make proof of the Evangel--and of the Evangel inthat form which takes hold of both eternities. This final crisis maythus have been the only one. And if it were so, Knox would not be thefirst man who has found in self-consecration a new birth; nor the firstprophet whose 'Here am I' has been answered by fire from the altar andthe assurance that iniquity is purged. 

But even if we assume, what is more probable, that the crisis in StAndrews was not the first, but the second, in Knox's religious life, theresult for the purposes of critical biography is the same. For the latercrisis resumed and gathered up into itself, on a higher plane, and withmore intensity, the elements of the change which went before. It was, onthis assumption, a new call; and a call to higher and public work. Butit was a call in the same name, and to the same man, to do new work onthe strength of principles and motives to which he had already committedhimself. It was, in short, a greater strain, but upon the first anchor. 

This point has acquired more importance since Carlyle, and so many of uswho follow him as admirers of Knox, have adopted the modern trick ofspeech of calling him a Prophet to his time. It is assumed that Knoxtook the same view, [22] and that he held himself to have had, if not aprophet's supernatural endowment and vocation, at least a specialmission and an extraordinary call. The question is complicated by otherthings than the special and extraordinary work which he, in point offact, achieved. We find that, in the course of that work, Knox, a man ofpiercing intuitions in personal and public matters, repeatedly committedhimself to judgments, and even predictions, which were unexpectedlyverified. And some of these he himself regarded, as we have seen alreadyin his deliberate Meditation, as not intuitions merely, but privateintimations given by God to his own heart and mind. Naturally, too, aman of Knox's devout and yet passionate temper was disposed to lay asmuch stress upon these incidents as they would bear; while themarvel-mongers around him, and in the next generation, went fartherstill. But the main fact to remember is, that Knox all his life insistedthat such incidents, whatever their occasional value, were no part ofhis original mission, and were outside the bounds of his life-longvocation. The passage in which he is disposed to make most of them isthe following; and it is worth quoting also, because of the strikingterms in which he incidentally describes his real work and permanentcall. He is explaining why, after twenty years' preaching, he has neverpublished even a sermon, and now publishes one with nothing butwholesome admonitions for the time. (This wholesome sermon was the onewhich so much offended Darnley. )

 'Considering myself rather called of my God to instruct the ignorant, comfort the sorrowful, confirm the weak, and rebuke the proud, by tongue and lively voice in these most corrupt days, than to compose books for the age to come: seeing that so much is written (and that by men of most singular condition), and yet so little well observed; I decreed to contain myself within the bonds [bounds?] of that vocation, whereunto I found myself specially called. I dare not deny (lest that in so doing I should be injurious to the giver), but that God hath revealed to me secrets unknown to the world; and also that he hath made my tongue a trumpet, to forewarn realms and nations, yea, certain great personages, of translations and changes, when no such things were feared, nor yet were appearing; a portion whereof cannot the world deny (be it never so blind) to be fulfilled, and the rest, alas! I fear shall follow with greater expedition, and in more full perfection, than my sorrowful heart desireth. Those revelations and assurances notwithstanding, I did ever abstain to commit anything to writ, contented only to have obeyed the charge of Him who commanded me to cry. '[23]

And when he did 'cry, ' from the pulpit or elsewhere, he was careful tofound his claim to be heard, not on private intimations, but on God'sopen word. As early as 1554 he denounces judgment to come upon England(which, by the way, was not fulfilled in the sense which he expected), but he adds immediately--

 'This my affirmation proceedeth, not from any conjecture of man's fantasy, but from the ordinary course of God's judgments against manifest contemners of his precepts from the beginning;'[24]

and more fully in another contemporary document--

 'But ye would know the grounds of my certitude: God grant that hearing them ye may understand and steadfastly believe the same. My assurances are not the marvels of Merlin, nor yet the dark sentences of profane prophesies; but, 1. The plain truth of God's word, 2. The invincible justice of the everlasting God, and 3. The ordinary course of his punishments and plagues from the beginning, are my assurance and grounds. '[25]

This was early in his career. At its close Knox, now very frail, wasdeeply aggrieved by the troubles caused by Lethington and Kirkaldy, whoheld the castle of Edinburgh. His verbal predictions of their comingend, as reported (after the event however) by those around hisdeath-bed, and his assurance at the same time of 'mercy to the soul' ofthe chivalrous Kirkaldy, are among the most striking incidents of thiskind in his life. But in his Will, written contemporaneously on 13th May1572, he says, 'I am not ignorant that many would that I should enter into particular determination of these present troubles; to whom I plainly and simply answer, that, as I never exceeded the bounds of God's Scriptures, so will I not do, in this part, by God's grace. '[26]

This did not prevent him from freely describing his old friends in theCastle as murderers, and predicting their destruction, especially asthey seemed now to be planning a counter-revolution in the interest ofthe exiled Queen of Scots. They retorted by accusing him, among otherthings, of prejudging her and 'entering into God's secret counsel. ' Knoxroused himself to answer the charges in detail. But there remained, headds, 'One thing that is most bitter to me, and most fearful, if that my accusers were able to prove their accusation, to wit, that I proudly and arrogantly entered into God's secret counsel, as if I were called thereto. God be merciful to my accusators, of their rash and ungodly judgment! If they understood how fearful my conscience is, and ever has been, to exceed the bounds of my vocation, they would not so boldly have accused me. I am not ignorant that the secrets of God appertain to Himself alone: but things revealed in His law appertain to us and our children for ever. What I have spoken against the adultery, against the murder, against the pride, and against the idolatry of that wicked woman, I spake not as one that entered into God's secret counsel, but being one (of God's great mercy) called to preach according to His blessed will, revealed in His most holy word. '[27]

The old man's irritation was most natural. For, on the one hand, hisaccusers had hit a blot. He was sometimes extremely dogmatic, imperious, and rash in his application of 'God's revealed will' both to persons andthings. But the form in which they put it--that he posed as a prophet, as one having a special message from God's secret counsel, instead of ageneral commission to proclaim that revealed will--was not only false, but struck at the roots of his whole life and work. It is demonstrablethat from Knox's first teaching in East Lothian and first preaching inSt Andrews onwards, the meaning of both teaching and preaching was acall to the common Scottish man, and to every man, to go to God directwithout any intermediation except God's open word. [28] And I think itplain that this direct and divine call _to all_ was not only the meaningbut the strength of the message in Scotland as elsewhere. It seems to usnow as if the burden which it laid on the individual--on frail andfeeble women, for example, in that time of persecution--wasoverwhelming. It is most pathetic to find Knox, when sitting down towrite tender and consoling messages to those in such circumstances, pre-occupied with urging the obligation of each one of them individuallyto hold fast, against possible torture or death, that which each one hadindividually received. But he never shrank from it, or from pointing outthat such relation to God himself was the noblest privilege. And theevidence is plain that all over the Europe of that age this reception ofa Divine message direct to the individual, in the newly openedScriptures, was, not a burden, but a source of incomparable energy andexhilaration--alike to men and women, to the simple and the learned, tothe young and--stranger still--to the old. Knox knew it; and he knewthat his claiming a special message or ambassadorship would be, not somuch 'exceeding the bounds' of his vocation, as denying it altogether. He was imperious and dogmatic by nature; and he took these naturalqualities with him into his new work. But he would have shuddered at theidea of formally interposing his own personality between the hearers ofthat time and the message which they received. And he would haveregarded the office of a mere prophet--the bearer, that is, of a specialmessage, even though that message be divine--as a degradation, if, inorder to attain it, he had to lay down the preaching of 'that doctrineand that heavenly religion, whereof it hath pleased His mercifulprovidence to make _me, among others, a simple soldier andwitness-bearer unto men_. '[29]

Does it follow that Knox--who thus rejected strongly the idea of being aprophet to his time, and insisted instead upon his merely receiving andtransmitting the one message which was common to all--that this man wastherefore little more to his age than any other might be? By no means. The same message comes to all men in an age, and is received by many, but it is received by each in a different way. [30] And the way in whichthis message was then received by one man in East Lothian made all thedifference to Scotland, and perhaps to Europe. It must not be forgotten, indeed, that the result of it upon Knox himself was to transform him. Socertain is this that some have felt as if this were the case of onewho, up to about his fortieth year, was an ordinary, commonplace, andrepresentative Scotsman, and was thereafter changed utterly, but only bybeing filled with the sacred fire of conviction. This is only about halfthe truth, though it is an important half--to Knox himself by far themore important. But it is not the whole, and it is far from the whole_for us_. The author who has enabled us to see his own confused andchanging age under 'the broad clear light of that wonderful book'[31]the 'History of the Reformation in Scotland, ' and who outside that bookwas the utterer of many an armed and winged word which pursues andsmites us to this day, must have been born with nothing less thangenius--genius to observe, to narrate, and to judge. Even had he writtenas a mere recluse and critic, looking out upon his world from a monk'scell or from the corner of a housetop, the vividness, the tenderness, the sarcasm and the humour would still have been there. But Knox'sgenius was predominantly practical; and the difference between thetransformation which befell him, and that which changed so many othermen in his time, was that in Knox's case it changed one who was born tobe a statesman. He probably never would have become one, but for thelight which for him as for the others made all things new. But in theothers it resulted in a self-consecration whose outlook was chiefly uponthe next world, and in the present was doubtfully bounded by possiblemartyrdom and possible evasion or escape. In the case of Knox theinstinctive outlook was not for himself only, but for others and for hiscountry. And while he saw from the first, far more clearly than they, the embattled strength of the forces with which they all had tocontend, the unbending will of this man rejected all idea of concessionor compromise, evasion or escape. And his native sagacity (made keeneras well as more comprehensive now that it looked down from that remoteand stormless anchorage), revealed to him that there was at least thepossibility of the mightiest earthly fabric breaking up before him inunexpected collapse. 

Our conclusion then must be that the call which Knox received was onecommon to him with every man and woman of that time--to accept theEvangel--and common to him with every preacher of that time--to preachthe Evangel; but that this man's large conception of what such a callpractically meant, not for himself alone, but for all around him and forhis country, made it from the first for him a public call, and compelledhim to hear in the invitation of the St Andrews congregation the divinecommission for his life-long work. From the first, and in conception aswell as execution, that work was great and revolutionary. And from thefirst, and in its very plan, it involved serious errors. But Knoxhimself, in this and every stage of his career, claimed to be judged byno lower tribunal than that Authority whose dread and strait command heat the first accepted. And if there are some things in that career whichhis country has simply to forgive, we shall not reckon among these theoriginal resolve of that day in St Andrews--a resolve which has madeKnox more to Scotland 'than any million of unblameable Scotchmen whoneed no forgiveness. '

 * * * * *

But there are few who will doubt the sincerity, or the strength, of theimpulse which launched Knox upon his public career. There are manyhowever who, recognising that he was a great public man, doubtpersistently whether he was anything more. They are not satisfied withthe evidence of trumpet-tones from the pulpit, or of solemn andpassionate prayer at some crisis of a career. These are part of thefurniture of the orator, the statesman, and the prophet. Was there aprivate life at all, as distinguished from the inner side of that whichwas public? And was that private life genuine and tender and strong?Have we another window into this man's breast--opening in this case, notupwards and Godwards, but towards the men--or women--around him? Wehave: and it is fortunate that the evidence on this subject is found, not at a late date in Knox's life, as is the Meditation of 1563, butclose to the threshold of his career. 

[11] The quotations are from Knox himself--in the first book of his'History of the Reformation in Scotland. '

When quoting from any part of Knox's 'Works' (David Laing's edition insix volumes), I propose to modernise the spelling, but in other respectsto retain Knox's English. It will be found surprisingly modern. 

[12] 'Works, ' vi. 483

[13] 'The end and intent of the Scripture, ' according to the translationby George Wishart, Knox's earliest master, of the First Helvetic orSwiss Confession, is, 'to declare that God is benevolent andfriendly-minded to mankind; and that he hath declared that kindness inand through Jesu Christ, his only Son; the which kindness is received byfaith; but this faith is effectuous through charity, and expressed in aninnocent life. ' And even more strikingly, the very first question of thefamous Palatinate Catechism for Churches and Schools, though thatcatechism is Calvinistic in its conception rather than Lutheran, andcame out so late as 1563, bursts out as follows:--

'What is thy only comfort in life and death?

'_Ans. _ That I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not myown, but belong to my faithful Saviour, Jesus Christ, who with hisprecious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me fromall the power of the Devil. '

[14] 'Works, ' i. 187. 

[15] On his death-bed. The Regent Morton's famous epitaph spoken byKnox's grave, is an imperfect echo of what the Reformer ten days before, in bidding farewell to the Kirk (Session) of Edinburgh, had said of hisown past career:--'In respect that he bore God's message, to whom hemust make account for the same, he (albeit he was weak and an unworthycreature, _and a fearful man_) feared not the faces of men. '--'Works, 'vi. 637. 

[16] One of the most eloquent documents of the time is the address in1565 to the half-starved ministers of the Kirk (inspired and perhapswritten by Knox), urging that having put their hands to the plough, theycould not look back:--

'God hath honoured us so, that men have judged us the messengers of theEverlasting. By us hath He disclosed idolatry, by us are the Wicked ofthe world rebuked, and by us hath our God comforted the consciences ofmany.... And shall we for poverty leave the flock of Jesus Christ beforethat it utterly refuse us?... The price of Jesus Christ, his death andpassion, is committed to our charge, the eyes of men are bent upon us, and we must answer before that Judge.... He preserved us in the darknessof our mothers' bosom, He provided our food in their breasts, andinstructed us to use the same, when we knew Him not, He hath nourishedus in the time of blindness and of impiety; and will He now despise us, when we call upon Him, and preach the glorious Gospel of His dear Sonour Lord Jesus?'--'Works, ' vi. 425. 

[17] Seven years after this time, Knox, writing from abroad to 'hissisters in Edinburgh, ' tells of the 'cogitations' which God permittedSatan even at that late date to put into his mind--

'Shall Christ, the author of peace, concord, and quietness, be preachedwhere war is proclaimed, sedition engendered, and tumults appear torise? Shall not His Evangel be accused as the cause of all calamitywhich is like to follow? What comfort canst thou have to see theone-half of the people rise up against the other; yea, to jeopard theone to murder and destroy the other? But above all, what joy shall it beto thy heart to behold with thine eyes thy native country betrayed intothe hands of strangers, which to no man's judgment can be avoided, because they who ought to defend it and the liberties thereof are soblind, dull, and obstinate that they will not see their owndestruction?'--'Works, ' iv. 251. 

[18] The two sources which, next to his own report of this sermon, bestindicate his earliest standpoint, are (1) the (second) _BaselConfession_--better known as the First Confession of Helvetia--whichWishart had brought with him from the Continent, and before his deathhad translated into English, and which Knox, therefore, must have knownand may have used; and (2) the treatise of his friend, the layman andlawyer, Balnaves, written two years later, and which Knox then sent fromRouen to St Andrews with his own approval and abridgement. The former isdistinctly 'Reformed' and Puritan, and lays down that all ceremonies, other than the two instituted sacraments and preaching, 'as vessels, garments, wax-lights, altars, ' are unprofitable, and 'serve to subvertthe true religion'; while Balnaves repeats the more fundamentalprinciple of Knox's sermon (that all religion which is 'not commanded, 'or which is 'invented' with the best motives, is wrong). And bothtreatises shew that Knox must have had also before him from the firstthe thorny question of the relation of the Church and the privateChristian to the civil magistrate--for both solve it, like Knox himself(but unlike Luther in his original Confession of Augsburg), by givingthe Magistrate sweeping and intolerant powers of reforming alike thereligion and the Church. 

[19] 'Lectures on Heroes: The Hero as Priest. 

[20] Carlyle, as above. 

[21] Lindsay of Pitscottie. 

[22] Thus, Mrs M'Cunn, in her charming volume on Knox as a 'Leader ofReligion, ' says that he 'constantly claimed the position accorded to theHebrew prophets, and claimed it on the same grounds as they. ' And evenDr Hume Brown, when narrating Knox's refusal in the Galleys to kiss the'Idol' presented to him, adds: 'It is in such passages as these that wesee how completely Knox identified his action with that of the Hebrewprophets' (vol. I. 84), the passage founded upon being one in which Knoxpoints out that 'the same obedience that God required of his peopleIsrael, ' even in idolatrous Babylon, was required by Him of the'Scottish men' in France, and was actually given by 'that whole numberduring the time of their bondage, ' not merely by the one unnamedprisoner who flung the painted 'board' into the Loire. One reason whythe prisoner is unnamed is no doubt that here, as in a hundred otherplaces more explicitly, Knox would impress us with the feeling that noother or higher obedience in such matters is required of minister orprophet or apostle, than is required of the humblest man or the youngestchild in God's people. 

[23] 'Works, ' vi. 230. 

[24] 'Works, ' iii. 245. 

[25] 'Works, ' iii. 169. 

[26] 'Works, ' vi. P. Lvi. 

[27] 'Works, ' vi. 592. 

[28] The right of every man to do so, and his duty to do so, were boththere: the only question might be whether, of the two, the right to doit (as with Luther), or the duty to do it (as with Calvin) was first andfundamental. 

[29] 'Works, ' iii. 155. 

[30] Recipitur in modum recipientis. 

[31] John Hill Burton's 'History of Scotland, ' iii. 339. He adds, 'Therecertainly is in the English language no other parallel to it in theclearness, vigour, and picturesqueness with which it renders the historyof a stirring period. 

CHAPTER III

THE INNER LIFE: HIS WOMEN FRIENDS

Before the age with which we are dealing there was, throughout Europe, acertain barrier between the religious life on the one hand and thedomestic and private life--the ordinary _vie intime_--on the other. Among the men and women of the new era that barrier was broken down. Thereligious was no longer a recognised class: religion was no longer aluxury for the few, or to be partaken of in sacred places and at fixeddays and hours. The common man, if a Christian man at all, was to be sonow in his common and daily life, living it out from day to day on thedeepest principles and from the highest motives. And the Christianwoman, having a similar and an equal vocation, undertook the likeresponsibilities. But her responsibilities were in that age oftransition very perplexing, and more than ever invited friendly counseland pastoral care. Now what was John Knox's private life? He was twicemarried, and we know from his correspondence that even before his firstmarriage there were women of high position and character to whom hesustained what may be called personal and pastoral relations. Have weany documents from that time by which to illustrate, and perhaps totest, the principles of his inward and personal life, before we go on tofind these written large in the scroll of his country's history?

Norham Castle, near Berwick, is still a very striking pile, especiallyto those who come upon it, as the writer did, after four days leisurelywalking down the banks of the great border river. Every curve of thestream had its natural beauty intertwined with some association ofhistory or the poets, from the first morning on Neidpath Fell, to thefourth evening when

 'Day set on Norham's castled steep, And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, And Cheviot's mountains lone. The battled towers, the donjon keep, The loophole grates where captives weep, The flanking walls that round it sweep'--

are all still there, though the inmates are no longer captives. Norhamis, indeed, best known as the scene of the whole of the first canto of'Marmion. ' In that poem Sir Hugh the Heron is supposed to have been Lordof it, while his wife is away in Scotland, prepared to sing ballads ofLochinvar to the ill-fated King on his last evening in Holyrood. Butwhen Knox, delivered from the galleys, preached in Berwick in 1549, theCaptain of the Hold of Norham, only six miles off, was Richard Bowes. And his lady, born Elizabeth Aske, and co-heiress of Aske in Yorkshire(already an elderly woman and mother of _fifteen children_), becameKnox's chief friend, and after he left Berwick for Newcastle hiscorrespondent, chiefly as to her religious troubles. Most of the lettersof Knox to her which are preserved are in the year 1553, and one of theearliest of these acknowledges a communication 'from you and my dearestspouse. ' This means that Marjory Bowes, the fifth daughter in that largehousehold, had already been _sponsa_ or betrothed, with her mother'sconsent, to the Scottish preacher. Knox, now forty-eight years old, hadrecently declined an English bishopric, offered him through the Duke ofNorthumberland, but was still chaplain to the King. A letter toMarjory, undated, follows, in which he explains to his 'dearly belovedsister' some passages of Scripture, and adds--'The Spirit of God shallinstruct your heart what is most comfortable to the troubled conscienceof your mother. ' This communication ends with the subdued or slypostscript, 'I think this be the first letter that ever I wrote toyou. '[32] In July, while Knox was in London, Mary Tudor ascended thethrone, and everything began to look threatening. In September Knoxacknowledges the 'boldness and constancy' of Mrs Bowes in pushing hiscause with her husband, who was as yet 'unconvinced in religion, ' but heurges her not to trouble herself too much in the matter. He wouldhimself press for the betrothal being changed into marriage, or at leastacknowledged. 'It becomes me now to jeopard my life for the comfort anddeliverance of my own flesh, as that I will do by God's grace; both fearand friendship of all earthly creature laid aside. '[33] Mrs Bowessuggested that, in addition to writing her husband, he should lay hiscase before an elder brother, Sir Robert Bowes, Warden of the Marches, who seems to have acted as head of the family. Sir Robert turned out tobe more hostile to the perilous alliance proposed for his niece thaneven her father; and Knox wrote that 'his disdainful, yea, despitefulwords have so pierced my heart that my life is bitter unto me. ' WhenKnox was about to have 'declared his heart' in the whole matter, SirRobert interrupted him with, 'Away with your rhetorical reasons! for Iwill not be persuaded with them. ' Knox, indignant, predicted to themother of his betrothed that 'the days should be few that England shouldgive me bread, '[34] but adds again, 'Be sure I will not forget you andyour company so long as mortal man may remember any earthlycreature. '[35] He escaped from England very soon, and not till September1555 did he return, and that on Mrs Bowes' invitation; and with theresult that he brought off to Geneva, where he was now pastor of adistinguished English colony, not only his wife Marjory, but his wife'smother too. Here his two sons, Nathaniel and Eleazar, afterwardsstudents at Cambridge and ministers of the Church of England, were born. But in 1559 wife and mother-in-law accompanied or followed him from theContinent to Edinburgh. During the anxious and critical winter whichfollowed, Mrs Knox seems to have acted as her husband's amanuensis, but'the rest of my wife hath been so unrestful since her arriving here, that scarcely could she tell upon the morrow what she wrote atnight. '[36] Next year brought victory and peace, but too late for her;for in December 1560, about the time when the first General Assembly wassitting in Edinburgh, Knox's wife died. We learn this from the 'Historyof the Reformation, ' in which Knox records a meeting of that datebetween himself and the two foremost nobles of Scotland, Chatelheraultand Moray, upon public affairs, 'he upon the one part comforting them, and they upon the other part comforting him, for he was in no smallheaviness by reason of the late death of his dear bedfellow, MarjorieBowes. '[37] And of her we have no further record, except Calvin'sepithet of _suavissima_, [38] and her husband's repetition years after, in his Last Will, of the 'benediction that their dearest mother left' toher two sons, 'whereto, now as then, I from my troubled heart say, Amen. '[39]

Four years passed, and Knox, still minister of Edinburgh, and now in hisfifty-ninth year, was seen riding home with a second wife, 'not like aprophet or old decrepit priest as he was, ' said his Catholicadversaries, 'but with his bands of taffetie fastened with goldenrings. ' The lady for whom he put on this state was Margaret Stewart, thedaughter of his friend Lord Ochiltree, and the same critics assure usthat 'by sorcery and witchcraft he did so allure that poor gentlewoman, that she could not live without him. ' Queen Mary was angry when sheheard of it, because the bride 'was of the blood, ' _i. E. _ related to theRoyal house; and even Knox's friends did not like his union at that agewith a girl of seventeen. Young Mrs Knox seems, however, to have playedher part well, especially as mother of three daughters; she tended theirfather carefully in his last illness; and no one will regret that twoyears after his death she made a more suitable marriage as to years withAndrew Ker of Faudonside, one of the fierce band whose daggers hadclashed ten years before in the body of David Rizzio. 

Knox's liking for feminine society, and his suspicion that he had morequalifications for it than the world has believed, come out sometimes ina casual way. After one of his famous interviews with Queen Mary, he wasordered to wait her pleasure in the ante-room. 

 'The said John stood in the chamber, as one whom men had never seen (so were all afraid), except that the Lord Ochiltree bare him company; and therefore began he to _forge_ talking of the ladies who were there sitting in all their gorgeous apparel; which espied, he merrily said, "O fair ladies, how pleasing were this life of yours if it should ever abide, and then in the end that we might pass to heaven with all this gay gear. But fye upon that knave Death, that will come whether we will or not! And when he has laid on his arrest, the foul worms will be busy with this flesh, be it never so fair and so tender; and the silly soul, I fear, shall be so feeble, that it can neither carry with it gold, garnassing, targetting, pearl, nor precious stones. " And by such means _procured he the company of women_. '

These moralities, however merrily intended and at the time successful, would have perhaps been more appropriate in the Forest of Arden or thegraveyard of Hamlet, than among the four Maries in Holyrood; and foranything that is to be of autobiographical value we must go elsewhereand go deeper. His wives contribute nothing; we may hope that they wereas happy as the countries which have no history. And if that is too muchto believe--or too little to hope--we shall find enough in the next fewpages to satisfy us that they had near them in all their trials a strongand tender heart. But of their inward troubles, and of the sympathythese may have drawn forth, Knox is not the historian--he refuses to bethe historian even of his own inner life. He unfolds himself in writingonly to the women who are in trouble, and at a distance. And the onlyconcession to domesticity is in the fact that his chief correspondentis, if not a wife, a prospective mother-in-law. 

The letters to her are the most important of all, and the followingextract is from one published among the letters of 1553 as 'The First toMrs Bowes. ' It was by no means the first, even in that year; but it isthe one which Knox himself long afterwards selected as the first forrepublication and as best illustrating the original relation betweenhimself and the lady recently deceased. In it he had said, writing fromLondon to Norham:--

 'Since the first day that it pleased the providence of God to bring you and me into familiarity, I have always delighted in your company; and when labour would permit, you know that I have not spared hours to talk and commune with you, the fruit whereof I did not then fully understand nor perceive. But now absent, and so absent that by corporal presence neither of us can receive comfort of other, I call to mind how that ofttimes when, with dolorous hearts, we have begun our talking, God hath sent great comfort unto both, _which for my own part I commonly want_. The exposition of your troubles, and acknowledging of your infirmity, were first unto me a very mirror and glass wherein I beheld myself so rightly painted forth, that nothing could be more evident to my own eyes. And then the searching of the Scriptures for God's sweet promises, and for his mercies freely given unto miserable offenders--(for his nature delighteth to shew mercy where most misery reigneth)--the collection and applying of God's mercies, I say, were unto me as the breaking and handling with my own hands of the most sweet and delectable unguents, whereof I could not but receive some comfort by their natural sweet odours. '[40]

The sympathy that flows through this beautiful passage comes out verystrongly in another written in bodily illness. His importunatecorrespondent had proposed to call for him in Newcastle that very day. Knox suggests to-morrow instead. 

 'This day ye know to be the day of my study and prayer unto God; yet if your trouble be intolerable, or if ye think my presence may release your pain, do as the Spirit shall move you, for you know that I will be offended with nothing that you do in God's name. And O, how glad would I be to feed the hungry and give medicine to the sick! Your messenger found me in bed, after a sore trouble and most dolorous night, and so dolour may complain to dolour when we two meet. '[41]

Another letter, also to Mrs Bowes, is from London, and reveals a veryremarkable scene. He acknowledges receiving one letter from Marjory, andone from her mother, the latter, as usual, full of complaint. 

 'The very instant hour that your letter was presented unto me, was I talking of you, by reason that three honest poor women were come to me, and were complaining their great infirmity, and were showing unto me the great assaults of the enemy, and I was opening the cause and commodities thereof, whereby all our eyes wept at once; and I was praying unto God that ye and some others had been there with me for the space of two hours. And even at that instant came your letters to my hands; whereof one part I read unto them, and one of them said, "O would to God I might speak with that person, for I perceive that there be more tempted than I. "'[42]

The persuasive ingenuity which would suggest to the Lady of Norham thatshe was a source not only of comfort but of strength to those troubledlike herself, turns out much to our advantage. For Knox puts _himself_, first of all, in the place of those whom he would either advise orconsole. And in the earliest dated letter of his which we possess thereis a vivid picture of what took place between two people who were muchin earnest, three and a half centuries ago, about this life and thenext. Knox has written fully to Mrs Bowes, and adds--

 'After the writing of these preceding, your brother and mine, Harry Wycliffe, did advertise me by writing that your adversary took occasion to trouble you, because that _I did start back from you_ rehearsing your infirmities. I remember myself to have so done, and _that is my common consuetude when anything pierceth or toucheth my heart_. Call to your mind what I did standing at the cupboard at Alnwick: in very deed I thought that no creature had been tempted as I was. And when that I heard proceed from your mouth the very words that he troubles me with, I did wonder and from my heart lament your sore trouble, knowing in myself the dolour thereof. '[43]

What was the temptation which Knox thought no creature shared with him, but which he found, as he stood at the cupboard at Alnwick, had come toMrs Bowes in the same form, and even in the same words? As it happens, we can answer with great certainty. It was a temptation to infidelity or'incredulity': the adversary 'would cause you abhor that, and hate it, wherein stands only salvation and life, ' viz. , the name, as well as thewhole message, of Jesus Christ. So it is put in this letter; and inothers, apparently later, we read--

 'That ye are of that foolish sort of men that say in their heart, "There is no God, " I wonder that the Devil shames not to allege that contrary [to] you; but he is a liar, and father of the same. For if in your heart ye said there is no God, why then should ye suffer anguish and care by reason that the enemy troubles you with that thought? Who can be afraid, day and night, for that which is not?'[44]

Again--

 'He would persuade you that God's Word is of no effect, but that it is a vain tale invented by man, and so all that is spoken of Jesus, the Son of God, is but a vain fable.... He says the Scriptures of God are but a tale, and no credit is to be given to them.... [45] Before he troubled you that there is not a Saviour, and now he affirms that ye shall be like to Francis Spira, who denied Christ's doctrine. '[46]

In that age, which broke through the crust of mere authority to seeksome 'foundation of belief, 'there must have been many of both sexes inthis state of mind; though each doubter might think that 'no creature'shared it. The new doctrine of individual faith and individualresponsibility was one for women as well as men, and they had a specialclaim on the sympathy of their teachers when central doubts attackedthem. Whether these doubts in the case of Mrs Bowes, _or in that ofKnox_, arose in the line of any particular enquiries does not appear. Hetreats them as if they were rather moral than intellectual, and born ofthe feebleness of the soul under temptation. And in this relation itsays not a little for his estimate of Mrs Bowes, whom he was leavingbehind under the Marian persecution, and with her husband and most ofher family hostile to her, that, instead of attenuating, he rathermagnifies the external difficulties she had to meet. 

 'Your adversary, sister, doth labour that ye should doubt whether this be the Word of God or not. If there had never been testimonial of the undoubted truth thereof before these our ages, may not such things as we see daily come to pass prove the verity thereof? Doth it not affirm that it shall be preached, and yet contemned and lightly regarded by many; that the true professors thereof shall be hated with [by] father, mother, and others of the contrary religion; that the most faithful shall cruelly be persecuted? And come not all these things to pass in ourselves?'[47]

But sceptical or speculative doubts were not Mrs Bowes' chief trouble. She writes Knox complaining of her temptations--even temptations ofsense. And chiefly and continually she complained of past guilt andpresent sin, by reason of which she felt as if 'remission of sins inChrist Jesus pertained nothing to her. '[48] This was not a case for the'sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort' which the Church of Englandascribes to the doctrine of Predestination rightly used. Nor does Knoxdeal with it--at least in his letters--by the simple and peremptorypreaching of the Evangel. He recognised it as a case calling forsympathy, and he does not find the sympathy hard. Knox, indeed, like theother Reformers, had parted for ever with the mediæval idea of salvationby self-torture--even by self-torture for sin. Like all the wisest ofthe human race, too--even before Christianity came to sanction theirsurmise--he held that religion must be an objective thing, and thatsalvation lies in dealing, not with ourselves, but with One outside ofus and above. Yet it is a salvation from sin, and the new life nowspringing up throughout Europe was intensely a moral life. The faith, too, on which the age laid so much stress as a 'coming' to God, involvedrepentance as a 'turning' to God. And while repentance no longer meantpenance, whether of body or mind, it meant--and as Knox puts itrepeatedly--'it _contains within itself_ a dolour for sin, a hatred ofsin, and yet hope of mercy'; and it is renewed as often as the occasionarises for renewed deliverance from the evil. Accordingly, Knox now actson the principle which he announced years afterwards in a letter toanother friend, [49] and again and again tears open his own heart tocomfort others by shewing that he, with hope or assurance in Christ, still felt the burden and assault of sin. 

 'I can write to you by my own experience. I have sometimes been in that security that I felt not dolour for sin, neither yet displeasure against myself for any iniquity in that I did offend. But rather my vain heart did thus flatter myself, (I write the truth to my own confusion, and to the glory of my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ), 'Thou hast suffered great trouble for professing of Christ's truth; God has done great things for thee. '... O Mother! this was a subtle serpent who thus could pour in venom, I not perceiving it; but blessed be my God who permitted me not to sleep long in that estate. I drank, shortly after this flattery of myself, a cup of contra-poison, the bitterness whereof doth yet so remain in my breast, that whatever I have suffered, or presently do, I repute as dung, yea, and myself worthy of damnation for my ingratitude towards my God. The like Mother, might have come to you, ' &c. [50]

Mrs Bowes lived in her famous son-in-law's house till close upon herdeath. By that time he had come to recognise that her experience was anexceptional[51] and, perhaps, a morbid one; and at a very early date hemanifestly felt the pressure of her constant applications to him forhelp. Yet throughout the correspondence his unfailing attitude to her isthat of admirably tender solicitude; and when he has to go into exile inthe beginning of 1554 he first sits down and writes--still partly in theform of letters to her--a treatise on Affliction. It is of great andpermanent value, the subject not being one which our race can as yetclaim to have outgrown: but I shall make no reference to its contents. Even in his previous and ordinary letters, however, Knox had reached theconclusion that her case was one of inward Affliction, rather than, asshe would have it, of sin. And the treatment of this great subject of'desertion, ' by one who was a standard-bearer of the new doctrine offaith and assurance, is remarkably beautiful. 'It is dolorous to thefaithful, ' he writes another friend, 'to lack the sensible feeling ofGod's mercy and goodness (and the sensible feeling thereof he lackethwhat time he fully cannot rest and repose upon the same). And yet asnothing more commonly cometh to God's children, so is there no exercisemore profitable for his soldiers than is the same. ' But to Mrs Bowes hepoints out, what she certainly would not have observed, that 'it dothno more offend God's Majesty that the spirit sometimes lie as it wereasleep, neither having sense of great dolour nor great comfort, morethan it doth offend him that the body use the natural rest, ceasing fromall external exercise. ' And again, varying the figure, 'no more is Goddispleased, although that sometimes the body be sick, and subject todiseases, and so unable to do the calling; no more is he offended, although the soul in that case be diseased and sick. And as the naturalfather will not kill the body of the child, albeit through sickness itfaint, and abhor comfortable meats, no more (and much less) will ourheavenly Father kill our souls, albeit, through spiritual infirmity andweakness of our faith, sometimes we refuse the lively food of hiscomfortable promises.... [52] 'You are sick, dear sister, ' he had saidelsewhere, 'and therefore, ' alluding even to her confidences ofscepticism as to Christian doctrine, 'you abhor the succour of mostwholesome food. ' 'Fear not, ' he sums up in a subsequent letter, 'theinfirmity that you find either in flesh or spirit. Only abstain fromexternal iniquity'--which he supplements elsewhere with the morepositive advice, 'Be fervent in reading, fervent in prayer, and mercifulto the poor, according to your power, and God shall put an end to alldolours, when least is thought [according] to the judgment of man. ' Andin the meantime, 'Dear mother, he that is sorry for absence of virtue isnot altogether destitute of the same ... Our hunger cries unto God. 'Knox himself, he assured his troubled friend, never ceased to pray forher; but 'although I would cease, and yourself would cease, and allother creature, yet your dolour continually cryeth and returneth notvoid from the presence of our God. '[53]

Mrs Bowes was not the only 'mirror and glass' in whom Knox allows us tosee his inner self 'painted, ' though the woman-hearted warrior is limnedin the letters to her more nearly at full length. Two ladies inEdinburgh, one the wife of the Lord Clerk Register, and the other of theCity Clerk, were his friends and correspondents, at a later date, butwhile he was still in exile. And in a letter 'to his sisters' in thattown, he unbosoms himself as usual as to the principles of his innerlife, but adds--

 Alas! as the wounded man, be he never so expert in physic or surgery, cannot suddenly mitigate his own pain and dolour, no more can I the fear and grief of my heart, although I am not altogether ignorant what is to be done. '[54]

The same sentiment is expanded in one of a number of letters sent to agroup of 'merchants' wives in London, ' which probably included the'three honest poor women'[55] of whom we have already heard. Of thisgroup the most remarkable was Mrs Anna Locke, of the family whichafterwards yielded the famous John Locke. She, like Mrs Bowes, followedKnox to Geneva amid the stream of exiles from London; and his letters toher give the impression that she was not only wealthy and energetic, butpossessed of higher character and more accomplishments than thewell-born Elizabeth Bowes. The letters to the latter were writtenchiefly in 1553. The following, to Mrs Locke, is sent from Scotlandafter Knox's return there, and is dated on last day of 1559:--

 'God make yourself participant of the same comfort which you write unto me. And in very deed, dear sister, I have no less need of comfort (notwithstanding that I am not altogether ignorant) than hath the living man to be fed, although in store he hath great substance. I have read the cares and temptations of Moses, and sometimes I supposed myself to be well practised in such dangerous battles. But, alas! I now perceive that all my practice before was but mere speculation; for one day of troubles since my last arrival in Scotland, hath more pierced my heart than all the torments of the galleys did the space of nineteen months; for that torment, for the most part, did touch the body, but this pierces the soul and inward affections. Then I was assuredly persuaded that I should not die till I had preached Jesus Christ, even where I now am. And yet having now my hearty desire, I am nothing satisfied, neither yet rejoice. My God, remove my unthankfulness!'[56]

Men of this expansive and confiding temperament are attractive, and willoccasionally get into trouble, even in later life. We find Mrs Bowes erelong complaining that she 'had not been equally made privy to Knox'scoming into the country with others, ' and needing to be assured that'none is this day within the realm of England, with whom I would moregladly speak (only she whom God hath offered unto me, and commanded meto love as my own flesh, excepted) than with you. '[57] Mrs Locke, lateron, points out that she has not had a letter for a whole year. And thiselicits not only the assurance that it is not the absence of one year ortwo 'that can quench in my heart that familiar acquaintance in ChristJesus, which half a year did engender, and almost two years did nourishand confirm, ' but also the following striking general statement, which, like many things from Knox, impresses us by a certain straightforwardand noble egotism:

 'Of nature I am churlish, and in conditions[58] different from many: yet one thing I ashame not to affirm, that familiarity once thoroughly contracted was never yet broken on my default. The cause may be that I have rather need of all, than that any have need of me. '[59]

It may be true that Knox never broke a friendship with either sex. Buthis friendships with men were masculine and very reserved in tone; andwe may be quite sure that the memorable concluding sentence of the aboveparagraph would never have been written except to a woman. Most peoplewill be delighted to see already fallen under the 'regimen of women' thevery man who was to set the trumpet to his lips against it. But thosewho study Knox's life are indebted to his familiar correspondence, andespecially to the earlier part of it, for far more than thegratification of this not unkindly malice. For these letters, I think, prove to all--what the finer ear might have gathered with certainty frommany things even in his public writings--that the main source of thatoutward and active career was an inner life. 

We must part for ever with the idea of Knox as a human cannon-ball, endowed simply with force of will, and tearing and shattering as itgoes. The views which at a definite period gave this tremendous impulseto a nature previously passive, are not obscure, and are perfectlytraceable. They are views upon which Knox continually insists as commonto himself with all Christian men, and which _were_ common to him withthe mass of Christian men--and women--who were the strength of that timeand the hope of the age to follow. They were views which, when receivedwith full conviction by any individual, led outwardly to suffering onthe one hand, or, on the other, to shattering the whole compacted systemof opposing intolerance. But they were views which, when thus translatedinto convictions, not only pressed outward with explosive force, butalso, and necessarily, spread inwards in reflux and expansion to refreshand animate the man. They might have done so--in the case of some men ofthat time they did--without overflowing into the private life and intosympathetic converse and confidence with others. But Knox was soconstituted as to need this also and to supply it. And the fragments ofhis correspondence which are all that remain to us, and which probablywere all that an extraordinarily busy public work permitted, areconclusive on some things and instructive on others. They are conclusiveas to the existence, under that breastplate of hammered iron with whichKnox confronted all outward opposition, of a private and personallife--a life inward, secret, and deep, and a life also rich, tender, andeminently sympathetic. They are conclusive also, I think, of this innerlife being the source and spring of the life without, instead of beingmerely derived from it. And they will thus be found instructive as tothe influence of that hidden life, in its strength and its limitationsalike, on the external career which we have now to trace. 

[32] 'Works, ' iii. 395. 

[33] 'Works, ' iii. 376. 

[34] 'Works, ' iii. 378. 

[35] 'Works, ' iii. 358. 

[36] 'Works, ' vi. 104. 

[37] 'Works, ' ii. 138. 

[38] 'Calvini Epistolæ, ' Ep. 306. 

[39] 'Works, ' vi. P. Lvii. 

[40] 'Works, ' iii. 337. 

[41] 'Works, ' iii. 352. 

[42] 'Works, ' iii. 379. Compare, or contrast, this scene of the threepoor women with another recorded by a still greater master of English. The tinker had gone on business one day to Bedford:

 'In one of the streets of that town, I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, and talking about the things of God.... But they were far above, out of my reach; for their talk was about a new birth, the work of God on their hearts, also how they were convinced of their miserable state.... And methought they spake as if joy did make them speak; they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they were to me as if they had found a new world, as if they were people that dwelt alone, and were not to be reckoned among their neighbours. '--Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_. 

[43] 'Works, ' iii. 350. 

[44] 'Works, ' iii. 360. 

[45] 'Works, ' iii. 366. 

[46] 'Works, ' iii. 368. 

[47] 'Works, ' iii. 357. Browning makes his good old Pope feel, in thelater Renaissance, as if Christian heroism had been

 'so possible When in the way stood Nero's cross and stake, So hard now'--

and, looking back almost regretfully to Nero's time, to ask--

 'How could saints and martyrs _fail_ see truth Streak the night's blackness?'

'The Ring and the Book. The Pope, ' line 1827. 

[48] 'Works, ' vi. 514. 

[49] 'The examples of God's children always complaining of their ownwretchedness serve for the penitent that _they_ slide not intodesperation. '--'Works, ' vi. 85. 

[50] 'Works, ' iii. 386. 

[51] 'Works, ' vi. 513. 

[52] It is of the letter from which the above is taken that Knox inpublishing it long after says apologetically, 'If it serve not for thisestate of Scotland, yet it will serve a troubled conscience, so long asthe Kirk of God remaineth in either realm. '--'Works, ' vi. 617. 

[53] 'Works, ' iii. 362. 

[54] 'Works, ' iv. 252. 

[55] 'Honest' in that age meant something nearly equivalent to'honourable, ' and that they were 'poor women' may refer to troubleswhich they brought to him, other than want of money. 

[56] 'Works, ' vi. 104. 

[57] 'Works, ' iii. 370. 

[58] 'Conditions' refers to inward nature, not outward circumstances. Itmay be explained by a letter written nine years later, also to a friendin England, in which Knox apologises for not having written him foryears, during which the Reformer had been 'tossed with many storms, ' yetmight have sent a letter, 'if that this my churlish nature, _for themost part oppressed with melancholy_, had not staid tongue and pen fromdoing of their duty. '--'Works, ' vi. 566. Knox in 1553 was sufferingseverely from gravel and dyspepsia; one of these was already an 'oldmalady'; and both seem to have clung to him during the rest of his life. 

[59] 'Works, ' vi. 11. 

CHAPTER IV

THE PUBLIC LIFE: TO THE PARLIAMENT OF 1560

Knox had preached only for a few months in St Andrews in 1547, when thecastle capitulated to the foreign fleet, and he and his companions wereflung into the French galleys. There for nineteen months he toiled atthe oar under the lash, and through the cold of two winters, and theheat of the intervening summer, had leisure to count the cost of thechoice so recently made. It is a tribute to his constancy that menchiefly remember this dark time by its spots of colour--as when, atNantes, he flung Our Lady's image into the Loire--'She is light enough:let her learn to swim!' And when off St Andrews they pointed out to himthe steeple of the kirk, the emaciated prisoner replied, 'Yes, I know itwell: and I am fully persuaded, how weak that ever I now appear, that Ishall not depart this life till that my tongue shall glorify His godlyname in the same place. ' But this first apprenticeship to sorrow wentdeep into the man. It was when he was 'in Rouen, lying in irons, andsore troubled by corporal infirmity, in a galley named _Notre Dame_, 'that he sent a letter to his St Andrews friends. And in it he asks themto 'Consider'--his countrymen have scarcely as yet considered itsufficiently--'Consider, brethren, it is no speculative theologue whichdesireth to give you courage, but even your brother in affliction, whichpartly hath experience what Satan's wrath may do against the chosen ofGod. '[60] His spirit indeed was in no wise broken: on his escape fromFrance he became again a garrison preacher, and gained over KingEdward's rude soldiers in Berwick an ascendancy, even greater than hehad held in St Andrews over the young lairds of Fife. But, though notbroken, it was chastened. It was during the following years, andespecially in 1553, that he wrote the deeply sympathetic letters fromwhich we have already quoted. And in 1554, when he left England toescape Mary Tudor, he introduces into a short but admirable treatise onPrayer some autobiographical references, which seem to date back to theextreme suffering of his captivity, 'when not only the ungodly, but evenmy faithful brethren, yea, and my own self, that is, all naturalunderstanding, judged my cause (case) to be irremediable. '

 'The frail flesh, oppressed with fear and pain, desireth deliverance, ever abhorring and drawing back from obedience giving. O Christian brethren, I write by experience ... I know the grudging and murmuring complaints of the flesh; I know the anger, wrath, and indignation which it conceiveth against God, calling all his promises in doubt, and being ready every hour utterly to fall from God. Against which rests [remains] only faith. '

Knox's faith sprang readily to whatever active duty was set before it. On his escape from France he spent, as we have seen, five years inEngland, and at the close of that period we have his own assurance thathe had become almost an Englishman. 

 'Sometime I have thought that impossible it had been, so to have removed my affection from the realm of Scotland, that any realm or nation could have been equally dear to me. But God I take to record in my conscience that the troubles present (and appearing to be) in the realm of England are doubly more dolorous unto my heart than ever were the troubles of Scotland. '[61]

He had laboured incessantly in many parts of England, first as licensedpreacher and then as King's chaplain, and this of course brought him incontact with church politics as well as the Evangel. It was owing toKnox's remonstrances that, when King Edward's Council put kneeling atthe Sacrament into the Prayer-Book, they accompanied it with the Rubric, which is still retained, and which testifies 'that thereby no adorationis intended or ought to be done. ' So far his position was reasonable, and even conciliatory. But as early as 1550, when requested, perhaps bythe Council of the North, to 'give his confession' in Newcastle as tothe Mass, he repeated the Puritan view of his first St Andrews sermon, but now in his favourite form of a syllogism, and with its major clausedangerously enlarged. 

 'All worshipping, honouring, or service invented by the brain of man in the religion of God, without his own express commandment, is _Idolatry_. [62] The Mass is invented by the brain of man without any commandment of God, therefore it is idolatry. '

To Knox's five years in England now succeeded five years which may besaid to have been spent on the Continent. He first drifted to Frankfort, and was put in charge of the English congregation there. Very soon thetwo parties, which have ever since divided the Church of England, madetheir appearance in this representative fragment of it. Knox, of course, took the Puritan side as to the form of worship; but a large part of hiscongregation insisted on the full service of King Edward's book. Thematter was brought to a close in rather an unfortunate way by two ofKnox's opponents lodging an accusation against him before theMagistrates, of treason against the Emperor, the English Queen, and herSpanish husband. Frankfort was an imperial city, and Knox was thus nolonger safe there. He went to Geneva, which was then, under Calvin'sinfluence, an illustrious centre of the reformed faith; and was at oncecalled to be co-pastor there (along with Goodman) of theEnglish-speaking congregation. Knox's later biographer points out thehistoric importance of this 'the first Puritan congregation. ' It was thesource of Elizabethan Non-conformity, and 'it is in the writings of Knoxand Goodman that those doctrines were first unflinchingly expoundedwhich eventually became the tradition of Puritanism. '[63] The ChurchOrder, too, which they adopted became afterwards that of worship inScotland; their Psalms were the model for the English and Scotchversions; and, above all, the Genevan Bible, prepared by the members ofKnox's congregation at the very time he was their minister, continuedfor three-quarters of a century thereafter to be 'the household book ofthe English-speaking nations. ' It is called the happiest and mostpeaceful time of Knox's life. But it was a time of incessant preparationfor still greater things, and in this short biography we must confineourselves to what bears either on the man himself or on his supreme workfor his native country. 

For during all Knox's life on the Continent he seems to have kept inview the problem of how the Evangel could be set free in Scotland. Henever had any doubt as to the duty of the individual to confess it inthe teeth of the Magistrate and of the law. But how could men combinetogether to do so, against authority otherwise lawful? On this andsimilar points he proposed questions on his first arrival in Switzerlandto the leading theologians. Bullinger, with the approval of Calvin, gavean answer which may have suggested to Knox the idea that a people (theArmenians are specially instanced) may revolt against 'their legitimatemagistrate' who persecutes the truth, provided they have an inferiormagistrate to lead them. [64] And next year, 1555, Knox made a memorablevisit to Scotland. There James the Fifth's widow, Mary of Lorraine, wasnow Regent, and so chief 'Magistrate. ' She was during all those yearsnot disposed to be intolerant, and the prospect was everywhereencouraging. From Edinburgh Knox writes to Mrs Bowes (still inNorthumberland), thanking her for being

 'the instrument to draw me from the den of my own ease (you alone did draw me from the rest of quiet study) to contemplate and behold the fervent thirst of our brethren, night and day sobbing and groaning for the bread of life. If I had not seen it with my eyes in my own country, I could not have believed it. Depart I cannot, unto such time as God quench their thirst a little. ' And accordingly later on he adds, 'The trumpet blew the old sound three days together, till private houses of indifferent largeness could not contain the voice of it. God for Christ his Son's sake grant me to be mindful that the sobs of my heart have not been in vain, nor neglected in the presence of his Majesty. O sweet were the death that should follow such forty days in Edinburgh as here I have had three!'[65]

It was in the midst of this glowing enthusiasm that Knox attended anEdinburgh supper party in the house of Erskine, the Laird of Dun, wherethe question was formally discussed whether those who believed theEvangel could countenance by their presence the celebration of the Mass?Knox maintained the negative, and as young Maitland of Lethington andother acute doubters were there, all views were well represented. But inthe end the Reformer's zeal prevailed, and another step was taken tomaking Protestantism a public if not a permitted thing in Scotland. FromEdinburgh he took journeys to Forfarshire, to West Lothian, to Ayrshire, and to Renfrewshire; and after half a year spent in incessant preaching, followed occasionally by administering the Sacraments, he was at lastcited to appear before the bishops in the Blackfriars Church, Edinburgh. He went, but attended by so many friends that nothing was attemptedagainst him for the time. And now, at the suggestion of Glencairn andMarischal, two of the lords who were favourable to the new doctrine, Knox sat down to write a letter to the Queen Dowager, as Regent ofScotland. It had hitherto been Mary of Lorraine's policy to play off theProtestant party, which had leanings to England, against the Catholicside, which was faithful to France. Knox accordingly blesses 'God, whoby the dew of his heavenly grace, hath so quenched the fire ofdispleasure in your Grace's heart, ' and with unprecedented courtesyapologises 'that a man of base estate and condition dare enterprise toadmonish a Princess so honourable, endued with wisdom and gracessingular. ' Those whom Knox represented were a small minority ofScotchmen; but that did not prevent him demanding of the Regent far morethan mere neutrality or 'indifferency' between the contending parties. He demands of her the reform of both religion and the church. He admitsthat 'your Grace's _power_ is not so free as a public Reformationperchance would require'; you 'cannot hastily abolish superstition, ... Which to a public Reformation is requisite and necessary. But if thezeal of God's glory be fervent in your Grace's heart, you will not bywicked laws maintain idolatry, neither will you suffer the fury ofBishops to murder and devour. ' The Queen Regent was not disposed to govery far with the bishops, but still less was she fervent for God'sglory and public Reformation. Accordingly, on the first Court day shehanded Knox's letter, perhaps unread, to the Bishop of Glasgow, with thewords, 'Please you, my Lord, to read a Pasquil. ' The unwise jest came toKnox's ears, and some years after he published his letter with resentfuladditions and interpolations. In these he assumed--much too soon--thatthere was no longer hope of the Regent becoming personally convinced ofthe Evangel. But he at the same time modified his 'Petition' on behalfof his party to this, 'that our doctrine may be tried by the plain wordof God, and that liberty be granted to us to utter and declare our mindsat large in every article and point which are now in controversy'; andon his own behalf and 'in the name of the Lord Jesus, that with_indifferency_ I may be heard to preach, to reason, and to dispute inthat cause. '

But now, in July 1556, letters came to Knox in Edinburgh from hiscongregation in Geneva, 'commanding him in God's name, as he was theirchosen pastor, to repair unto them for their comfort. ' He at oncecomplied, sending before him from Norham to Dieppe his wife and hermother. Scotland was not yet ripe. The lay professors of the Evangelindeed were not seriously molested after his departure. But on the otherhand Knox himself was at once cited to appear in Edinburgh, condemned inabsence as a contumacious heretic, and burned at the Cross in the HighStreet--in effigy. Neither this, nor his daily work in Geneva, had theeffect of withdrawing him for a day from his solicitude for his nativecountry. On leaving it he wrote an admirable 'Letter of WholesomeCounsel'[66] urging the continual study of the word of God in familiesand in congregations. 

 'Within your own houses, I say, in some cases, ye are bishops and kings; your wife, children, servants, and family are your bishopric and charge; of you it shall be required how carefully and diligently ye have always instructed them in God's true knowledge, how that ye have studied in them to plant virtue and repress vice. And therefore, I say, ye must make them partakers in reading, exhorting, and in making common prayers, which, I would, in every house were used once a day at least. '

And for each congregation he urged an order of procedure much nearerthat of apostolic times than that which the Reformed Church, at his owninstance, afterwards instituted in Scotland. 

 'I think it necessary that for the conference [comparing] of Scriptures, assemblies of brethren be had. The order therein to be observed is expressed by St Paul, ' ... After 'confession' and 'invocation, ' 'let some place of Scripture be plainly and distinctly read, so much as shall be thought sufficient for one day or time, which ended, if any brother have exhortation, question, or doubt, let him not fear to speak or move the same, so that he do it with moderation, either to edify or to be edified. And hereof I doubt not but great profit shall shortly ensue; for, first, by hearing reading and conferring the Scriptures in the Assembly, the whole body of the Scriptures of God shall become familiar, the judgments and spirits of men shall be tried, their patience and modesty shall be known, and finally their gifts and utterance shall appear. '

If any difficulty of interpretation occurs, it should be 'put in writingbefore ye dismiss the congregation, ' with the view of consulting somewise adviser. Many, he hopes, would be glad to help them. 

 'Of myself I will speak as I think; I will more gladly spend fifteen hours in communicating my judgment with you, in explaining as God pleases to open to me any place of Scripture, than half an hour in any matter beside. '

Before six months had passed, however, Knox, who was again abroad, hadbecome troubled by the too great freedom of opinion and the dangers ofconsequent freedom of life even in the Protestant community, and hisletter 'To the Brethren'[67] in Scotland from Dieppe, againstAnabaptists and Sectarians, foreshadows the more rigid form which was tobe one day impressed upon Church doctrine and life in his native land. 

During the ensuing year, 1557, everything was peaceful and hopeful. TheProtestants kept their worship private, but it spread from town totown, and from the land of one friendly baron to his neighbours'territory. Knox had been formally condemned, but those he left behindwere not molested, and in March four of the Lords wrote him to Genevaasking him to return to Scotland. They accompanied this with assurancesthat though 'the Magistrates in this country' were in the same state asbefore, the Churchmen there were daily in less estimation. Afterconsulting Calvin, Knox said farewell to his congregation, and had gotas far homewards as Dieppe, where he was much disappointed to receive'contrary letters. ' His reply, indignantly acquiescing, indicates theplan which by this time he had formed in order to solve the combineddifficulties in theory and practice which beset Scotland. He remindedhis correspondents--Glencairn, Lorne, Erskine, and James Stewart--invery memorable words, that they were themselves magistrates, or at leastrepresentatives of the people, and had duties accordingly. 

 'Your subjects, yea, your brethren, are oppressed, their bodies and souls holden in bondage; and God speaketh to your consciences (unless ye be dead with the blind world) that you ought to hazard your own lives (be it against kings and emperors) for their deliverance. For only for that cause are ye called Princes of the people, and ye receive of your brethren honour, tribute and homage at God's commandment; not by reason of your birth and progeny (as the most part of men falsely do suppose), but by reason of your office and duty, which is to vindicate and deliver your subjects and brethren from all violence and oppression, to the utmost of your power. '[68]

The effect of this and other encouragements was to bring matters to apoint in Scotland. The Protestant party, which had now been joined byArgyll and Morton, entered into the kind of engagement which was thencalled a 'Band, ' and afterwards became widely known in Scotland as a'Covenant. ' This document, dated 3rd December 1557, bound thesignatories to 'apply our whole power, substance, and our very lives, tomaintain, set forward, and establish the most blessed Word of God andhis congregation ... Unto which holy word and congregation we do joinus, and also do forsake and renounce the congregation of Satan. ' Thisimportant step, which seems to have been represented by rumour in Dieppeas something like rebellion in Scotland, apparently startled Knox. Afortnight after it took place he writes the 'Lords of the Congregation, 'as they were henceforth called, a letter of caution, urging them to

 'seek the favour of the Authority, that by it, if possible be, the cause in which ye labour may be promoted, _or at the least not persecuted_, which thing after all humble request if ye can not attain, then, with open and solemn protestation of your obedience to be given to the Authority in all things not plainly repugning to God, ye lawfully may attempt the extremity, which is to provide, whether the Authority will consent or no, that Christ's Evangel may be duly preached, and his holy Sacraments rightly ministered unto you, and to your brethren the subjects of that realm. '

The Lords of the Congregation were disposed to be at least as cautiousas Knox, and during the following year, 1558, there was a remarkableapproximation to a possible settlement in Scotland on the basis oftoleration. The 'Band' of the congregation does not at all suggest thatthe Barons who joined in it, and thereby bound themselves to defendtheir religion against the pressure and tyranny of outsiders, wouldthink it right themselves to exercise a counter pressure and tyrannyupon their own vassals within their own lands. And Knox's intimationthat the Authority--_i. E. _, the Regent and Parliament--though refusingto promote the Evangel, ought to be asked at least _not to persecuteit_, was most timely. He held, indeed, at this time, that such aconcession, if granted, ought to bar not only insurrection, but even apartial and divided establishment of religion. The state of matters wasreflected in two resolutions which the Congregation came to immediatelyafter the Band. By the first, common prayers were to be read on Sundaysin the churches--which must mean in the churches where the innovatorshad influence--by the curates, 'if qualified, ' and, if not, by those ofthe parishioners who were. But the second provided that preaching be, inthe meantime, 'had and used privately in quiet houses, ' greatconventions being avoided 'till God move the Prince to grant publicpreaching. ' And another influence now entered into the history. Knox hadinitiated an aristocratic revolution. But the Burghs of Scotland hadbeen there, as in every other country of Europe, fortresses of freedomand the advance-guard of constitutional civilisation. And it was nowresolved, that the brethren in every _town_ 'should assemble together. And this our weak beginning did God so bless, that within few months thehearts of many were so strengthened, that we sought to have the _face ofa church_ among us. '... And the town of Dundee in particular 'began toerect the face of a public church reformed. '[69] Henceforward the greattowns became more and more prepared to be the centres of the futurestruggle. Meantime, however, early in 1558, the 'First Petition of theProtestants of Scotland' was presented to the Regent. It protestedagainst the existing tyranny, and craved, in general and cautious terms, a 'public Reformation, ' laying stress on church services in the vulgartongue, and offering to submit differences to be publicly decided, notonly by the New Testament, but by the writings of the Fathers and thelaws of Justinian. The offer seems to have been at once accepted. But, according to the account of Knox, who, of course, was still abroad, theproposed public discussion came to nothing, because both parties fellback upon other conditions of arbitration; the Protestants now demandingthat the Scriptures alone should decide all controversy, the Catholicsinsisting on Councils and Canon Law. The next step was a proposal by theBishops of 'Articles of Reconciliation, ' according to which the OldChurch was to remain publicly established, while the Protestants mightprivately pray and baptise in the vulgar tongue. This the innovatingparty declined, and pressed for 'reformation. ' And now the Regent, whomKnox afterwards came to regard as 'crafty and dissimulate, ' and who, nodoubt, even now desired to please and 'make her profit of both parties, 'announced to the Congregation her decision. 'She gave to us permission_to use ourselves_ godly, according to our desires, provided that weshould not make public assemblies in Edinburgh or Leith'--_i. E. _, in thecapital. The Queen went so far as to promise positive 'assistance to ourpreachers, ' the assistance no doubt being rather private and personal, and the whole arrangement being an interim one, 'until some uniformorder might be established by a Parliament. ' It was a great step inadvance; indeed, Knox says, 'we departed fully contented with heranswer;'[70] and it is impossible not to speculate on what the resultmight have been had the order finally established by Parliament beenthat both parties should permanently 'use themselves godly according totheir desires, ' with a publicly acknowledged right of proselytism orpersuasion. 

But from both sides there still came some things hostile to the adventin Scotland of that toleration which the modern conscience has approved. In April 1558 Walter Myln, a priest eighty-two years of age, was seizedby order of the Archbishop of St Andrews, condemned for heresy, andburned there amid the general but ineffectual resentment of the people. The sentence was quite legal under the laws which still enforcedmembership of the Catholic Church upon all Scotchmen. But the last manwho had been so condemned was Knox; and he no longer delayed to publishin Geneva an Appellation or appeal against his sentence, directed to thenobles, the estates and the commonalty of Scotland. His demand for areturn to the primitive Gospel under the Divine authority is powerfuland eloquent. His reasons, on the other hand, for 'appeal from thesentence and judgment of the visible Church to the knowledge of thetemporal magistrate' are difficult to reconcile with the position whichKnox afterwards took up when that Church was on his own side; and theyare indeed chiefly drawn from the Old Testament. It is not until weobserve from his re-statement of the case farther on, that his was anappeal 'against a sentence of death, ' that the argument once morestraightens itself out so as to suit the lips even of Paul. But Knoxdeclines now to remain on the defensive. He accuses his accusers ofheresy and idolatry, and calls upon the nobles of Scotland to decideagainst them according to God's Word. Here, again, the appeal, so longas it is made to the conscience of all men and of nobles alike, is verycogent. Nor is it less so as addressed specially to the mostrepresentative and intelligent Scotchmen of the time, for such the Lordsof the Congregation undoubtedly were. It becomes doubtful only when itinsists on the right of these temporal 'Princes of the people' to reformthe Church--apparently even without the consent of its majority; and itbecomes worse than doubtful when he urges their duty as magistrates torepress false religion and to punish idolatry with death. Along withthis, however, was published a shorter letter 'To his Beloved Brethrenthe Commonalty of Scotland. ' To these subjects born within the same, their brother John Knox wishes in it 'the spirit of righteous judgment;'and that in a tone of independence which must have sounded to Scottishpeasants and burghers like a call to a new life. For in this treatise, unlike the last, each private Scottish man is urged to judge of whatclaimed to be the original truth, even against an admittedly ancientsystem. And 'If that system was an error in the beginning, so it is inthe end, and the longer that it be followed, and the more that doreceive it, it is the more pestilent, and more to be avoided. '

 'Neither would I that ye should esteem the Reformation and care of religion less to appertain to you, because ye are no kings, rulers, judges, nobles, nor in authority. Beloved brethren, ye are God's creatures, created and formed to His own image and similitude, for whose redemption was shed the most precious blood of the only beloved Son of God.... For albeit God hath put and ordained distinction and difference between the king and subjects, between the rulers and the common people, in the regimen and administration of civil policies, yet in the hope of the life to come He hath made all equal.... And this is the equality which is between the king and subjects, the most rich or noble, and between the poorest and men of lowest estate; to wit, that as the one is obliged to believe in heart, and with mouth to confess, the Lord Jesus to be the only Saviour of the world, so also is the other. '

And by this time Knox has reasoned out for himself the right of thepeople to maintain the true Church, and to band in defence of it--thoughthat right he even now recognises only when they cannot do better. 

 'And if in this point your superiors be negligent, or yet pretend to maintain tyrants in their tyranny, most justly ye may provide true teachers for yourselves, be it in your cities, towns, or villages: them ye may maintain and defend against all that shall persecute them, and by that means shall labour to defraud you of that most comfortable food of your souls, Christ's evangel truly preached. Ye may, moreover, withhold the fruits and profits which your false Bishops and clergy most unjustly receive of you, unto such time as they be compelled faithfully to do their charge and duties. '

These appeals by Knox can only have made their way in Scotland graduallyand privately. But as the year 1558 went on, the prospect of unionbecame more hopeful. The Queen Regent acted as if 'the duty of theMagistrate' were to prevent majorities and minorities from laying handson each other. And, then at least, this was not an easy work. TheBishops tyrannised in details in localities where the barons were stillon their side; but Myln was the last Protestant martyr in Scotland. Onthe other hand, the adherents of the congregation became so bold, especially in the towns, that (as Knox tells us) 'the images were stolenaway in all parts of the country, and in Edinburgh was that great idolcalled St Gile first _drowned_ in the North Loch, and after burned. '[71]This was too much, and the Regent allowed the Bishops to summon theiconoclast preachers for the 19th of July. But a party of Western lairdsheard of it on their way from the army of the Border, and insisted oninterviewing the Queen. Knox's vivid account of what followed must bequoted. It includes a delicious phonograph of the Scots speech of Maryof Lorraine, who, to the desire to please all men which was common toher with her more famous daughter, seems to have added real good natureand kindliness of heart. James Chalmers of Gadgirth, a roughAyrshireman, burst out against the Bishops--

 '"Madam, we vow to God we shall make one day of it. They oppress us and our tenants for feeding of their idle bellies; they trouble our preachers, and would murder them and us: shall we suffer this any longer? No, madam, it shall not be. " And therewith every man put on his steel bonnet. There was heard nothing of the Queen's part but "My joys, my hearts, what ails you? Me means no evil to you nor to your preachers. The Bishops shall do you no wrong. Ye are all my loving subjects. Me knew nothing of this proclamation. The day of your preachers shall be discharged, and me will hear the controversy that is betwixt the Bishops and you. They shall do you no wrong. My Lords, " said she to the Bishops, "I forbid you either to trouble them or their preachers. " And unto the gentlemen, who were wondrously commoved, she turned again and said, "O, my hearts, should ye not love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind? and should ye not love your neighbours as yourselves?" With these and the like fair words she kept the Bishops from buffets at that time. '[72]

Her daughter Mary, the celebrated Queen of Scots, had been married inApril to Francis, the Dauphin of France, and the Regent, rejoicing inthis long hoped-for alliance, had one thing more at heart. The ScotsParliament was to meet in November, and she hoped that it would conferthe crown 'Matrimonial' of Scotland upon her son-in-law, thusconsolidating the two kingdoms. In view of this meeting the Lords of theCongregation prepared a petition, the leading prayer of which would havepractically freed Scotland from the intolerance of existing legislationin the matter of religion--

 'We most humbly desire that _all such Acts of Parliament_, as in the time of darkness gave power to the churchmen to execute their tyranny against us, by reason that we to them were delated as heretics, may be _suspended and abrogated_. '[73]

Here again was a proposal which, if taken by itself, would havesatisfied the modern view of liberty of conscience. But the petitionerswent on to say that they did not object to a _temporal_ judge of heresy, provided he judged according to the Word of God; and they looked forwardto a decision of 'all controversies in religion, ' not however byParliament, but by a General Council. This proposal was first handed tothe Queen Regent, who 'spared not amiable looks and good words inabundance, but always she kept our Bill close in her pocket. ' Bothparties in Parliament being thus pleased, the Crown Matrimonial wasconsented to, and before the Session closed, the Protestant Lords readan important protest, repeating the positions which they had alreadytaken up. 

 1. 'We protest, that seeing we cannot obtain a just reformation, according to God's word, that it be lawful to us _to use ourselves_ in matters of religion and conscience, as we must answer unto God. 

 2. 'That we shall incur no danger in life or lands, or other political pains, for not observing such Acts as heretofore have passed in favour of our adversaries. '

They added a protest that if any tumult should arise 'for the diversityof religion, ' and if any abuses should be 'violently reformed, ' itshould not be imputed to them, who desired a reformation in matters ofreligion by the Authority. From that Authority, however, they, inclosing--somewhat inconsistently but most rightfully--demanded once morethe 'indifferency' which becometh God's Lieutenant. 

Parliament declined to record the Protest, but the Queen Regent said inher confidential way to the Lords, 'Me will remember what is protested;and me shall put good order after this to all things. ' Knox wasdelighted, and in writing to Calvin commended her 'for excellentknowledge in God's word, and good will towards the advancement of hisglory. ' There is no reason to suppose that Mary of Lorraine had attainedto much more than a kindly appreciation of all parties around her, andto that general sense of justice which is strong in rulers and other menso long as they have no personal interest to the contrary. Yet underthis feminine 'regimen' Scotland was now within measurable distance ofbeing, alone among the commonwealths of Europe, the home of liberty ofworship and freedom of conscience. But that great time was not come; andthe small northern land was now caught up again into the whirl ofEuropean politics. On the 17th November 1558 Mary of England, theunhappy wife of Philip, died; and her Protestant sister Elizabeth, thedaughter of Anne Boleyn, succeeded. It became at once the chief point inthe policy of Catholic Europe that France and Scotland should be fastbound together in religion and turned, along with Spain, as one forcefor the restoration or re-conquest of England. For if the English queenwas an illegitimate heretic, then Mary Stuart, already Queen of Scotlandand Dauphiness of France, was now Queen of England too; and withoutdelay the French king quartered the arms of England with those of Mary'sown country and that of her adoption. The magnificent bribe of a thirdcrown for that fair 'daughter of debate' was too much for her mother inScotland, who in any case would have found a continued toleration thereirreconcileable with the traditions of their House of Guise. The Regentnow, in her mild way, joined the cruel Catholic crusade of the FrenchCourt, and from the beginning of 1559 the conciliatory policy which haddistinguished the previous year in Scotland was at an end. 

But its results were not ended. They had spread through all ranks, andhad gone down to the foundations of society. On New Year's Day of 1559there was found affixed to the door of every religious house in Scotlandthe following document--the most extraordinary imitation of a legal writthat Scotland has seen. It is probably not written by Knox, but by someother strong pen. It bears to be a notice or 'summons' of ejectment forthe ensuing Whitsunday, and is called

 THE BEGGARS' WARNING. 

 The Blind, Crooked, Bedrels [bedfast], Widows, Orphans, and all other Poor, so visited by the hand of God as they may not work, TO

 The Flocks of all Friars within this realm, we wish restitution of wrongs bypast, and reformation in time coming, for salutation. 

 * * * * *

 Ye yourselves are not ignorant, and though ye would be it is now, thanks to God, known to the whole world, by His infallible word, that the benignity or alms of all Christian people pertains to us allanerly [exclusively]; which ye, being hale of body, stark, sturdy, and able to work, what [partly] under pretence of poverty (and nevertheless possessing most easily all abundance) what [partly] through cloaked and hooded simplicity, though your proudness is known, and what [partly] by feigned holiness, which now is declared superstition and idolatry, have these many years, express against God's word and the practice of His Holy Apostles, to our great torment alas! most falsely stolen from us. And as ye have, by your false doctrine and wresting of God's word (learned of your father Satan), induced the whole people high and low, into sure hope and belief, that to clothe, feed, and nourish you is the only acceptable alms allowed before God, and to give one penny or one piece of bread once in the week, is enough for us; Even so ye have persuaded them to build to you great hospitals, and maintain you therein by their purse, which only pertains now to us by all law, as builded and doted [given] to the poor--of whose number ye are not, nor can be repute, neither by the law of God, nor yet by no other law proceeding of nature, reason, or civil policy.... We have thought good, therefore, before we enter with you in conflict, to warn you, in the name of the great God, by this public writing, affixed on your gates, where ye now dwell, that ye remove forth of our said hospitals betwixt this and the feast of Whitsunday next, so that we the only lawful proprietors thereof may enter thereto, and afterward enjoy these _commodities of the Kirk_, which ye have hereunto wrongously holden from us: Certifying you, if ye fail, we will at the said term, in whole number (with the help of God and the assistance of His saints in earth, of whose readie support we doubt not), enter and take possession of _our said patrimony_, and eject you utterly forth of the same. 

 _Let him therefore that before has stolen, steal no more; but rather let him work with his hands that he may be helpful to the poor. _

 FROM THE WHOLE CITIES, TOWNS, AND VILLAGES OF SCOTLAND, THE FIRST DAY OF JANUARY, 1558 {1559}. [74]

As it turned out, this summons was in some cases literally fulfilled, and a revolutionary ejectment carried out by Whitsunday 1559. But nowfrom another side came another warning to put the house of the Church inorder. The Catholic barons presented a petition for its reform, and theRegent called a Provincial Council on 1st March. It dealt, however, almost exclusively with the lives and duties of the clergy, and leavinguntouched the central grievance--the legal authority of the Church andof the Pope over all subjects--had no effect whatever on the public. Immediately after, all 'unauthorised' preaching was forbidden. TheProtestants, astonished, waited on the Regent and reminded her of herpromises. She replied, in words which were often recalled during thereigns of her Stewart descendants, that 'it became not subjects toburden their Princes with promises, farther than it pleaseth them tokeep the same, ' and the preachers were ordered to appear before her atStirling. But now Knox, who had kept up constant communication fromGeneva with his friends, suddenly appears on the scene. On 2d May hewrites from Edinburgh to Mrs Locke:

 'I am come, I praise my God, even in the brunt of the battle: for my fellow-preachers have a day appointed to answer before the Queen Regent, the 10th of this instant, where I intend, if God impede not, also to be present: by life, by death, or else by both, to glorify His godly name, who thus mercifully hath heard my long cries. '[75]

The day after this letter was written, Knox was 'blown loud to thehorn, ' _i. E. _, declared an excommunicated outlaw: but he had meantimeleft for Dundee, where he was received with acclamation, and from thencedeparted to Perth, now the centre of Protestantism. There, day by day, he preached to excited multitudes in the Parish Church; and it wasafter a sermon there, 'vehement against idolatry, ' that a foolishpriest, attempting to perform mass in the same building, was set upon bythe mob of Perth, who had an old feud with the clergy. From the churchthe multitude streamed away to the magnificent Religious Houses whichhad adorned the town, and sacked and burned them so thoroughly that onlythe walls were left standing. It wanted yet four days to thatWhitsunday, for ejection on which the 'rascal multitude' had last NewYear's Day warned the Friars! The Queen Regent resented this outrageousviolence, but was forced to come to an interim agreement with the Lordsof the Congregation. On her entry into Perth they moved into Fife, andKnox having preached in Crail and Anstruther, resolved to do so also inthe Parish Church of St Andrews on Sunday. But the St Andrews populacehad not yet declared themselves; the Regent's hostile army was onlytwelve miles off; and the Archbishop--who had occupied the town with ahundred spears and a dozen of culverins--now threatened his life if heattempted it. It was a moment for a bold man. At the hour fixed Knoxmade his appearance. No one ventured to attack him. He preached with hisusual impetuous eloquence on 'casting the buyers and sellers out of thetemple, ' and at its close the magistrates and council permitted themajority of the people to destroy most of the monasteries, and strip thechurches and cathedral of their apparatus of 'idolatry. ' Knox was alwaysmore comfortable where he could say that such proceedings werecountenanced by the local authority, or by the majority of a civiccommunity. In Edinburgh, to which the Congregation next moved, themajority had hitherto been hostile to them; and now, on the QueenRegent's departure, the pulpits were for the first time opened to whatwas the legitimate glory of the new movement--free and unfetteredpreaching. Knox, church-statesman though he was, threw himself into thiswork with a delight that lifted him above calculation of consequences. 

 'The long thirst of my wretched heart is satisfied, in abundance that is above my expectation; for now, forty days and more hath God used my tongue in my native country to the manifestation of His glory. Whatever now shall follow, as touching my own carcase, His Holy Name be praised. '[76]

The castle, however, still remained faithful to the Regent, and on herforces approaching Edinburgh, both parties agreed to a truce tillJanuary, which, as respects the town and its religion, provided that--

 'The town of Edinburgh shall, without compulsion, use and choose what religion and manner thereof they please, to the said day; _so that every man may have freedom to use his own conscience_ to the day foresaid. '[77]

The truce was to be for six months, to January 1560, and it was employedby both parties in preparing for a renewed struggle, and, on the side ofthe Congregation, in negotiations with Elizabeth and her ministers. Politically, this last step was of the highest importance. For the firsttime for centuries, it healed the breach with 'our auld enemies ofEngland, ' as the Scots statutes had so often described them, andfounded an alliance between the two kingdoms, which has since that datebeen only changed in order to become a union. And in this negotiationthe agent and secretary was Knox. [78] He corresponded with the Queen'sgreat minister Cecil (Elizabeth herself would not hear Knox's name). Andit says not a little for the self-command and honesty of the Englishstatesman, that he trusted so fully a man whose first letter, writtenseveral years before--a letter, too, asking a favour--commenced byKnox's 'discharging his conscience' in this way:--

 'In time past, being overcome with common iniquity, you have followed the world in the way of perdition: for ... To the shedding of the blood of God's dear children have you, by silence, consented and subscribed. Of necessity it is, that carnal wisdom and worldly policy, (to both which, you are bruited to be much inclined) give place to God's simple and naked truth. '

Cecil had made no answer to this or to similar subsequent remarks, buthe now wrote asking the Congregation, 'if support should be sent hence, what manner of amity might ensue betwixt these two realms, and how the same might be hoped to be perpetual, and not to be so slender as heretofore hath been, without other assurance of continuance than from time to time hath pleased France. '

And the answer, in Knox's handwriting, is signed by the Protestantlords, and assures England

 'of our constancy (as men may promise) till our lives end; yea, farther, we will divulgate and set abroad a charge and commandment to our posterity, that the amity and league between you and us contracted and begun in Christ Jesus may by them be kept inviolated for ever. '

There was to be in the future a still more Solemn League and Covenantbetween the two nations, it too having for its object the deliverance(and, alas! also the uniformity) of religion in both kingdoms. But thatpublic, and this private, league were alike disavowed by the Sovereign, and both became the badge of rebellion. The Queen Regent, indeed, hadnow fortified Leith, and was filling it with French soldiers. The Lordsof the Congregation, founding on this as a breach of faith, resolved tosuspend her from the regency, and did so by a proclamation, strangelysigned: 'By us, the nobility and commons of the Protestants of theChurch of Scotland. ' The preachers approved, Knox, however, demandingthat a door be still kept open for her restoration. War, of course, atonce followed, and it turned out to be very much a fight betweenEdinburgh and Leith, then not unequally matched. [79] Soon theProtestants got the worst of it. On the last day of October the French, pouring up Leith Walk, drove them back into the Canongate, attackedLeith Wynd, and sent their horsemen in headlong flight through theNetherbow Port and up the High Street. Five days after, the forces ofthe Congregation having advanced to Restalrig, were enclosed by twoadvancing bodies of the enemy, and so jammed in near Holyrood, betweenthe crags of the Calton on the one side and the crags of Arthur Seat onthe other, as to be extricated only with most serious loss. Confusionand dismay seized upon all, and at midnight they marched out ofEdinburgh, pursued by voices of reproach and execration from theoverhanging roofs. Next night they gathered helplessly at Stirling. Buton the following day Knox entered the pulpit there, and preached amemorable sermon. It recalled the despairing Congregation to a mood ofresolute trust and hope. And yet his text was the Psalm which tells ofthe vine brought from Egypt to be planted in the land, but now wastedand broken down; and the preacher throughout refused even to suggest tothe shrinking multitude any lower hope than the vouchsafed shining againof the Divine countenance. There remains only, he concluded, 'that we turn to the Eternal our God, who beats down to death, to the intent that he may raise up again, to leave the remembrance of his wondrous deliverance, to the praise of his own name ... Yea, whatsoever shall become of us and of our mortal carcases, I doubt not but that this cause, in despite of Satan, shall prevail in the realm of Scotland. '

But his words were as life from the dead, and the sermon, which Buchananalso commemorates, was long after recalled by the preacher himself in StGiles, in another great crisis of the Evangel. 

 'From the beginning of God's mighty working within this realm, I have been with you in your most desperate tentations. Ask your own consciences, and let them answer you before God, if that I--not I, but God's Spirit by me--in your greatest extremity willed you not ever to depend upon your God, and in His name promised unto you victory and preservation from your enemies, so that ye would only depend upon his protection and prefer His glory to your own lives and worldly commodity. In your most extreme dangers I have been with you: St Johnstone, Cupar Muir, and the Crags of Edinburgh, are yet recent in my heart: yea, that dark and dolorous night wherein all ye, my Lords, with shame and fear left this town, is yet in my mind; and God forbid that ever I forget it!'

'The voice of one man, ' it was afterwards said of Knox by the Englishambassador in Edinburgh, 'is able in one hour to put more life in usthan five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears. ' This dayin Stirling was the very lowest point of the fortunes of theCongregation, and from this hour they began to rise. There were reversesstill; but Scotland was sick of the French, and the end was to come withthe coming year. In April 1560, the English forces surrounded Leith; theQueen Regent withdrew from it into the Castle of Edinburgh; and theLords of the Congregation, stronger than they were originally by theaccession of the Duke of Hamilton and the Earls of Morton andHuntly, [80] made one more 'Band' or Covenant. In it for the last timethey fall back on liberty of conscience; for all they bind themselves tois, 'with our bodies, goods, friends, and all that we may do, to set forward the Reformation of Religion, according to God's word; and procure, by all means possible, that the truth of God's word may have _free passage within this realm_, with due administration of the Sacraments, and all things depending upon the said word. '[81]

A copy of this Band, by which each subscriber also bound himself not tomake separate overtures to the Regent, was brought to her in the Castle. Knox, who by this time was become very hostile to Mary of Lorraine, andreports much doubtful gossip as to her rejoicing over the victories andcruelties of her soldiers, says that when she read the Band, she spokein quite another and milder sense. 

 'The malediction of God I give unto them that counselled me to persecute the preachers, and to refuse the petitions of the best part of the true subjects of this realm. '

But the time was past for her co-operating for the welfare of thatrealm. She had fallen into a dropsy, and, becoming daily worse, sent forthe Earls Argyll, Glencairn, and Marischal, and the Lord James (herhusband's son). They came to her separately, and to each she confessedthat she had made a mistake, and should have acceded to the arrangementthey had proposed. 'They gave unto her both the counsel and the comfortwhich they could in that extremity, and willed her to send for somegodly learned man, of whom she might receive instruction. ' They proposedWillock; but even that gentle preacher did not set forth 'the virtue andstrength of the death of Jesus Christ, ' without touching also upon 'thevanity and abomination of that idol, the mass. ' The dying woman saidnothing, good or bad, of the form in which Christianity had been firstpresented, long years ago, to her childish eyes. But 'she did openlyconfess "that there was no salvation but in and by the death of JesusChrist. "' And Knox, holding that in this 'Christ Jesus got no smallvictory' over her, grudges extremely that to her approval of 'the chiefhead of our religion, wherein we dissent from all Papists and Papistry, 'she added no condemnation of opposing ways. But Mary of Lorraine haduttered the last even of her good-natured 'maledictions, ' and on the10th of June the Regent of Scotland ended her 'unhappy life'--a life, that is, which had pleased neither party, though in its later years agreat revolution, carried through at the expense of comparatively littleviolence or bloodshed, had narrowly missed attaining an even idealresult. 

And now those troubles were over. Nine months before, her daughter hadbecome Queen of France, and a treaty was now concluded at Edinburgh, between the Queen of England on the one part and the 'King and Queen ofFrance and Scotland' on the other, by which the French troops andofficials withdrew from Scotland, and an indemnity was granted to theinsurgent nobility for all that the Congregation had done. Elizabethstill looked on them as rebels; but Cecil, with more foresight, instructed her plenipotentiaries to provide 'that the government ofScotland be granted to the nation of the land'; and the treaty providedfor a Council of Administration in the absence from Edinburgh of theSovereigns, and--more important still--for an immediate meeting of theEstates, which was to be as valid as if presided over by them. [82] Themost important Parliament which Scotland has ever seen sat on 1st August1560, and was very largely attended by nobles, lairds, and burghrepresentatives. Naturally, a petition was at once laid before it forthe abolition of the old Church system. Equally naturally, this was metby a request for a statement of the new Church doctrine--a confession offaith. It was prepared by Knox and three others, and in four dayspresented to the Parliament. 

'I never heard, ' says the English envoy to Cecil, 'matters of so greatimportance, neither sooner despatched nor with better will agreed unto. 'Knox's narrative, which is borne out by the records of Parliament, saysthat

 'This our Confession was publicly read, first in audience of the Lords of the Articles, and after, in audience of the whole Parliament, where were present, not only such as professed Christ Jesus, but also a great number of the adversaries of our religion, such as the fore-named bishops, and some others of the temporal estate, who were commanded, in God's name, to object, if they could, anything against that doctrine. '

The ministers were present to defend it, but there was no opposition, and a second day was appointed, when the Confession was again read over, article by article, and then a vote was taken. Three, or at the mostfive, temporal peers voted against ratifying it; 'and yet for theirdisassenting they produced no better reason but, We will believe as ourfathers believed. ' Nor was this strange, for the Bishops present, Knoxsays, 'spake nothing, ' Randolph explaining that the three who got totheir feet, headed by the St Andrew's primate, said the doctrine was amatter new and strange to them, which they had not examined, and whichthey could not 'utterly condemn, ' or, on the other hand, quite consentto. The vote on the side of the majority was largely a rejoicingoutburst of individual conviction. The Earl Marischal indeed, took theobvious ground that

 'seeing that my Lords Bishops, who for their learning can, and for that zeal they should bear to the verity, would (as I suppose) gainsay anything that directly repugns to the verity of God--seeing, I say, my Lords here present speak nothing in the contrary of the doctrine proposed, I cannot but hold it to be the very truth of God, and the contrary to be deceivable doctrine. '

The rest of the Lords, says Randolph, with common consent, and 'as glada will as ever I heard men speak, ' allowed the same. 

 'Divers, with protestation of their conscience and faith, desired rather presently to end their lives than ever to think contrary unto that allowed there. Many also offered to shed their blood in defence of the same. The old Lord of Lindsay, as grave and goodly a man as ever I saw, said: "I have lived many years; I am the oldest in this company of my sort; now that it hath pleased God to let me see this day, where so many nobles and others have allowed so worthy a work, I will say, with Simeon, _Nunc dimittis_. "'

It was the birthday of a people. For not in that assembly alone, andwithin the dim walls of the old Parliament House of Edinburgh, was thatfaith confessed and those vows made. Everywhere the Scottish burgess andthe Scottish peasant felt himself called to deal, individually andimmediately, with Christianity and the divine; and everywhere thecontact was ennobling. 'Common man' as he was, 'the vague, shorelessuniverse had become for him a firm city, and a dwelling-place which heknew. Such virtue was in belief: in these words well spoken, _Ibelieve_. '[83] But being a common man in Scotland, his religion couldnot be isolated, or his faith for himself alone. Wherever he dwelt, 'inour towns and places reformed, ' he was already a member of aself-governing republic, a republic within the Scottish State but not ofit, and subject to an invisible King. 'The good old cause' was alreadyborn. It kindled itself, as that son of the Burgher mason in Annandalesays again, 'like a beacon set on high; high as heaven, yet attainablefrom earth, whereby the meanest man becomes not a citizen only, but amember of Christ's visible Church; a veritable hero, if he prove a trueman. '

 * * * * *

Day by day at this critical epoch Knox preached in St Giles from the'prophet Haggeus, ' on what he called The Building of the House. In onesense the foundation was laid already. In another, Parliament might becalled upon to supply one. What foundation was Parliament to lay, andwhat structure was promised for the days to come?

[60] 'Works, ' iii. 10. 

[61] 'Works, ' iii. 133. 

[62] 'Works, ' iii. 34. The rashness of the general proposition here canonly be appreciated when we remember Knox's view that it was the duty ofthe Magistrate not only to suppress idolatry, but to punish it withdeath. 

[63] Hume Brown, i. 203. 

[64] 'Works, ' iii. 224. 

[65] 'Works, ' iv. 217, 218. 

[66] 'Works, ' iv. 129. 

[67] 'Works, ' iv. 261. 

[68] 'Works, ' i. 272. 

[69] 'Works, ' i. 300. 

[70] 'Works, ' i. 307. 

[71] 'Works, ' i. 256. 

[72] 'Works, ' i. 258. 

[73] 'Works, ' i. 310. 

[74] 'Works, ' i. 320. 

[75] 'Works, ' vi. 21. 

[76] 'Works, ' vi. 26. 

[77] 'Works, ' i. 378. Knox objected to this unlimited freedom ofconscience being granted, even for a time; and actually succeeded inretaining the public worship on the ground that Edinburgh _had_ chosenalready, though under compulsion. The interest lies in the fact that, atevery turn of the open struggle which now took place between the twoparties, the true ultimate solution, that of toleration, came to thefront. But it was proposed, or suggested, by each party only when thatparty was in the minority, and ignored as soon as it regained the powerto do wrong. See the following additional pages in Knox's ownHistory:--'Works, ' i. 389, 390, 428 ('idolatry _and_ murder'), 432, 442('chief duty'), and 444. 

[78] Knox himself takes care in his History 'to let the posterity thatshall follow understand, by what instruments God wrought the familiarityand friendship, that after we found in England. '--'Works, ' ii. 43. 

[79] 'It is not unknown to the most part of this realm, that there hasbeen an old hatred and contention betwixt Edinburgh and Leith; Edinburghseeking continually to possess that liberty which by donation of kingsthey have long enjoyed, and Leith, by the contrary, aspiring to aliberty and freedom in prejudice of Edinburgh. '--Declaration of theLords of the Congregation in 1559. 'Works, ' i. 426. 

[80] Lesser barons sign too, from Cranstoun and Cessford on the Borders, to Leslie of Buchan and John Innes of that Ilk in the North. 

[81] 'Works, ' ii. 61. It is dated 26 April 1560. 

[82] It does not say that all its acts were to be valid. On thecontrary, 'certain Articles concerning religion' having been presentedon the part of the nobles and people of Scotland, and not meddled withby the plenipotentiaries 'as being of such importance that they judgedthem proper to be remitted to the King and Queen, ' it was provided thatthe Estates, on their meeting, should choose some persons of quality 'torepair to their Majesties and remonstrate to them the state of theiraffairs, particularly those last mentioned. '

[83] Thomas Carlyle. 

CHAPTER V

THE PUBLIC LIFE: LEGISLATION AND CHURCH PLANS

The Confession presented to the Parliament of 1560 was one of a groupwhich sprang as if from the soil, in almost every country in Europe. They had all a strong family likeness; but not because one imitated theother. They were honest attempts to represent the impression made on themind of that age by the newly discovered Scriptures, and thatimpression--the first impression at least--was everywhere the same. Andeverywhere it was overwhelmingly strong. So far as Knox at least isconcerned, he plainly held the extreme view, not only that no one couldread the Scriptures without finding in them the new doctrine, butthat--as he quite calmly observed on one memorable occasion in StGiles--'all Papists are infidels, ' either refusing to consult the light, or denying it when seen. And, of course, nothing was more calculated toconfirm this view than a scene like that which we have just described, and which had been recently rehearsed in innumerable cases in Scotlandand elsewhere. But, in truth, the new light dazzled all eyes. Later on, men had to analyse it, and they found there were distinctions to be madeas to its value:--for example, between truth natural and truth revealed, between the Old Testament and the New, between the truths even of theNew Testament and its sacraments--distinctions which some amongthemselves admitted, and which others refused. The very lastpublication, too, of Knox in 1572 was an answer to a Scottish Jesuit;for by that time a counter-Reformation, which also was not without itsconvictions, had begun. But, in the meantime, the energy and the triumphwere all on one side. And although only the first step had been taken, it must be remembered that the first step was, in Scotland, the greatone. With the really Protestant party, and, of course, with thePuritans, the confession of truth was fundamental. Subsequentarrangements as to the State, and even as to the Church, weresubordinate--they were, at the best, mere corollaries from the centraldoctrine affecting the individual. In every case truth comes first: andhuman authority a long way later on. In this transaction, for example, of the 17th August 1560, nothing is clearer than that the Parliament didnot adopt the doctrine in any way on the authority of the new-bornChurch. All the forms of a free and deliberate voting of the doctrine_as truth_--as the creed of the estates, not of the Church, were gonethrough. Still less, on the other hand, did the Church really adopt iton the authority of the Parliament; (though it must be confessed thatthis expression of it--the written creed of 1560--had no formal sanctionother than that of the State). But it was the confession 'professed bythe Protestants, ' and exhibited by them 'to the estates;' and itcontained in itself abundant and adequate foundation for thatindependence of the Church which became so dear to Scotland in followingages, and of which Knox himself has always been recognised as, more thanany other man, the historical embodiment. 

The great confession in this creed that 'as we believe in oneGod--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost--so do we most constantly believe thatfrom the beginning there has been, now is, and to the end of the worldshall be, one Kirk, ' is there so deduced from the everlasting purposeand revelations of God, and is so concentrated upon the duty and theprivilege of the individual man, that the church in Scotland, even hadit never become national, would have stood square and perhaps risen highupon this one foundation. But it was by no means intended to stand onthat foundation alone, however adequate. And it was with a view tofurther steps--not all of them taken at this time--that clauses as tothe civil magistrate were introduced in the penultimate chapter, assigning to him 'principally' the conservation and purgation of thereligion--by which, it is carefully explained, is meant not only the'maintenance' of the true religion, but the 'suppressing' of the false. One more remark may be made. Theoretically, the Church could improve itscreed. In France it was read aloud on the first day of each yearlyAssembly, that amendments or alterations upon it might be proposed; andin Scotland also the view was strongly held that the only standardunchangeable by the Church was Scripture. This theoretical view, however, was not to have much immediate practical result; especially asthe Confession was now ratified by the Parliament. And this was donewithout change or qualification, though the preface prefixed to it bythe Churchmen admits its fallibility and invites amendment--a view inwhich Knox had long since been encouraged by his earliest teacher. [84]

The congregation had confessed the doctrine to the Parliament, and theParliament had accepted and approved it. Had the Parliament more to do?

Some things were absolutely necessary. It had to wipe out the previouslegislation against the profession of the new faith. The Evangel had tobe set free by statute. Once liberated from the ban of the law underwhich its previous victories had been won, it could finish its workindependently, and without difficulty sweep the whole of Scotland. AndKnox had no doubt as to the right of the Kirk to act independently, oras to its duty to do so--if it could not do more and better. Already, before the Parliament met, the members of it who were Protestants hadgathered together in Edinburgh, and arranged for fixing this and thatminister of the word in the various centres of population. And once thelegal obstacles to proselytism were removed, the way would be open for amore glorious advance than they had yet seen. But such a work in thefuture, though comparatively easy, and though in Knox's view certain inits result, would be slow. Why not do it all at a stroke? Instead ofmerely revoking the intolerant laws, why not turn them against the otherside?

A very strong petition had been already presented against the RomishChurch, and exactly a week after the ratification of the Confession, three Acts were passed. [85] These three Acts, with that ratification, constituted the public 'state of religion' during the seven years ofMary's reign, and they were re-enacted on her abdication in 1567 as thefoundation of the regime of Protestantism. Of the three, the first wasonly ambiguously intolerant, for though it ordained that the Pope 'haveno jurisdiction nor authority within this realm, ' that might be held toreject mainly the Papal encroachment upon civil power. The second wasnot intolerant at all, and as being well within the power and duty ofthe nation, it ought to have come first. By it all Acts bypast, andespecially those of the five Jameses, not agreeing with God's Word andcontrary to the Confession, and 'wherethrow divers innocents didsuffer, ' were abolished and extinguished for ever. But the third, passedthe same day, proceeded on the preamble that 'notwithstanding thereformation already made, according to God's Word, yet there is some ofthe said Papist Kirk that stubbornly persevere in their wicked idolatrysaying Mass and baptising. ' And it ordained, against not only them butall dissenters and outsiders for all time, 'that no manner of person inany time coming administer _any_ of the Sacraments foresaid, secretly orany other manner of way, but they that are admitted, or have power tothat effect. ' And lastly, with regard to the large minority (if, indeed, it was not a clear majority) of the nation who still clung to theirordinary worship, it provided that no one 'shall say Mass, nor yet hearMass, nor be present thereat, ' under the pains, for the first fault, ofconfiscation of goods and bodily punishment, for the second, ofbanishment, and for the third, of _death_. 

This has always remained the fundamental positive ordinance among thestatutes of the Reformation; though it may be fair to take along with itthe first of these three Acts, and especially a positive clause in itwhich forbids bishops to exercise jurisdiction by Papal authority. Nofarther establishment of the Church was at the time attempted; and therewas indeed no farther legislation till Mary's downfall in 1567. In thatyear the three Acts of 1560 were anew passed; and they were followed bythe formal statement (more or less implied even in the legislation of1560) that the ministers and people professing Christ according to theEvangel and the Reformed Sacraments and Confession are 'the only trueand holy Kirk of Jesus Christ within this realm. ' An Act followed bywhich each king at his coronation was to take an oath to maintain thisreligion, and also, explicitly, to root out all heretics and enemies 'tothe true worship of God that shall be convict by the true Kirk of God. 'It seems difficult for statutory religion to go farther: but the solidsystem and block of intolerance was completed by a group of statutes in1572, the year of Knox's death. They ordain that Papists and others notjoining in the Reformed worship shall after warning be excommunicated bythe Church (of which a previous Act, somewhat inconsistently, haddeclared them not to be at all members); and that 'none shall be reputedas loyal and faithful subjects to our sovereign Lord or his authority, but be punishable as rebels and gain-standers of the same, who shall notgive their confession, and make their profession of the said truereligion. '

Scotland had taken the wrong legislative turning. The only defence ofthese statutes, and it is a very inadequate one, is that they could notbe fully enforced and were not, and that perhaps they were not quiteintended to be enforced. In point of fact Scotland in the Reformationtime had little blood-shedding for mere religion on either side to shew, compared to the deluge which stained the scaffolds of continentalEurope. That is no answer to the criticism that the only law now neededwas one to 'abolish and extinguish' the persecuting laws which had beenenacted of old. But even to such a critic, and on the ground of theory, there is something to be said. It is not true that the new theory wasworse than the old. On the contrary, the old theory allowed no privatejudgment to the individual at all; he was bound by the authority of theChurch, and it was no comfort to him to know that the state was bound byit too. On the Protestant theory neither the individual nor the statewere in the first instance so bound; both were free to find and utterthe truth, free for the first time for a thousand years! It was thisfeeling--that the state was free truthwards and Godwards--whichaccounted for half of the enthusiasm in the Scots Parliament a weekbefore. And it was not at once perceived, there or elsewhere, that forthe state to make use of this freedom by embracing a creed itself--eventhough it now embraced it as the true creed and no longer as theChurch's creed--was perilous for the more fundamental freedom of theindividual. He would be sure to feel aggrieved by his state adopting thecreed which was not his. And the state might readily be led into holdingthat it had adopted it not for its officials only but for its subjects, and might shape its legislation accordingly. 

Knox was more responsible for the result than any other man, and for himalso there is something to be said. The view that the state must adopt areligion for all its subjects and compel them all to be members of itsChurch, was common ground in that age; both parties proclaimed it(except when they were in too hopeless a minority), and the fewAnabaptists and others who anticipated the doctrine of modern times hadnot been able to get it into practical politics. Knox too, in his firstcontact with the Reformed faith (and the contact, as we know, was aplunge), had found the tenet of the magistrate's duty in an exaggeratedform. And in that form he now reproduced it. The statement of hisConfession of 1560 that 'To Kings, Princes, Rulers, and Magistrates weaffirm that chiefly and most principally the conservation and purgationof the Religion appertains, ' is not at all stronger than that in theFirst Confession of Helvetia which Wishart had brought with him before1545. Switzerland, taught by bitter experience, exchanged it for amilder statement in its Second Confession of 1566. [86] But Calvin andBeza and Knox's friends in the French Protestant Church generally hadheld to the stronger view of the magistrate's duty, even amid all hispersecutions of them; and Knox's passionate indignation against idolatryhad led him, even in his early English career, to maintain the duty notonly of the magistrate, but even of the subject in so far as he hadpower, to punish it with death. Indeed his only chance of escaping fromthe vicious circle of that murderous syllogism[87] was by going back tothe right of the individual to stand against the magistrate, and if needbe to combine against him, in defence of truth. On this side even thatearly Helvetic Confession had proclaimed (in Wishart's words but inKnox's spirit), that subjects should obey the magistrate only 'so longas his commandments, statutes, and empires, evidently repugn not withHim for whose sake we honour and worship the magistrate. ' And Knox inlater years had travelled so far on the road of modern constitutionalismas to maintain the right of subjects to combine against and overthrowthe ruler whose intolerant statutes so _repugned_. How far he hadexactly gone would have appeared had the chapter 'of the obedience ordisobedience that subjects owe unto their magistrates' appeared in theScottish Confession unrevised. Randolph says that the 'author of thiswork' was advised by Lethington and Winram to leave it out. Something, if not a whole chapter, has been left out; and the consequence is thatthe first Confession of the Scottish Church and people is very muchoverweighted on the side of absolute power. But had that chapter gonein, it would have been difficult not to have recognised even then, thatthere was an inconsistency between the alleged high function of themagistrate as to religion, and the _disobedience_ which on that head hissubjects may 'owe unto him'--an inconsistency even in theory. Theinconsistency in practice Providence was to make its early care. 

 * * * * *

It had been necessary for Parliament to revoke its old persecutingstatutes. And on that side it had gone farther, proscribing the oldreligion and Church, and setting up, if not a new church, at least a newreligion. But, on another side, and one with which Parliament alonecould deal, there was also something necessary. What was to be done withthe huge endowments of the Church now abolished and proscribed? And whatprovision was to be made by the State for that 'maintenance of the truereligion' to which it had bound itself, and for its spread among apeople, half of whom were not even acquainted with it, though all ofthem were already bound to it by law?

The question of the endowments was a more difficult one, theoreticallyand practically, than that of the yearly tithes. For the former had beenactual gifts, made to the Church or its officials by kings, barons, andother individuals, when there was no law compelling them to give them. What right had the State now to touch these? Two things are to berecalled before answer. All these individual donors had been by lawcompelled not only to be members of that Church, but to accept it(whether they wished to do so or not) as the exclusive receiver ofwhatever charities they might desire to institute or to bequeath. Formany centuries past in Scotland the proposal to do otherwise would havebeen not only futile, but a deadly risk to him who tried it. Then, secondly, the same law which had bound the individual to the Church asthe exclusive administrator of charities, had kept him in compulsoryignorance of other objects of munificence than those which the Churchsanctioned; or if by chance that pious ignorance was broken, it sternlyforbade him to support them. For reasons such as these the modernEuropean state has never been able to treat ancient endowments madeunder the pressure of its own intolerance with the same respect as ifthe donors had been really free--free to know, and free to act. Thepresumption that the donor or testator, if he were living now, wouldhave acted far otherwise than he did, and that in altering hisdestination the State may be carrying out what he really would havewished, is in such cases by no means without foundation. Knox and othersreveal to us that this feeling was overwhelmingly strong at the timewith which we are dealing, especially in the minds of the descendantsand representatives of the donors themselves. And in the minds of thecommon people, and of Knox as one sprung from them, there was lying, unexpressed, the feeling which in modern times has been expressed soloudly, that the claim of the individual, whether superior or sovereign, to alienate for unworthy uses huge tracts of territory which carry alongwith them the lives and labours of masses of men--and of men who havenever consented to it--is a claim doubtful in its origin and perniciousin its results. All over Protestant Europe the conclusion even of thewise and just was, that, subject to proper qualifications, the ancientendowments of the Church were now the treasury of the people. 

But there was another part of the patrimony of the old Church on whichKnox had a still stronger opinion--viz. , the yearly tithes or Teinds. Tothese, in his view, that Church and its ministers had neither the divineright which they had claimed, nor any right at all. The 'commandment' ofthe State indeed had compelled men, often cruelly and unjustly, to paythem to the Church. But the State was now free to dispose of thembetter, and it was bound to dispose of them justly. And in so far asthey should still be exacted at all, they must now be devoted to themost useful and the most charitable purposes--purposes which shouldcertainly include the support of the ministry, but should include manyother things too. One of the positions taken up by Knox in his veryfirst sermon in St Andrews (following the views which he reports as heldby the Lollards of Kyle), was, 'The teinds by God's law do not appertainof necessity to the Kirkmen. '[88] And now the Book of Discipline, underits head of 'The Rents and Patrimony of the Kirk, ' demanded that

 'Two sorts of men, that is to say, the ministers and the poor, together with the schools, when order shall be taken thereanent, must be sustained upon the charges of the church. '[89]

And again--

 '_Of the teinds_ must not only the ministers be sustained, but also the poor and schools. '

The kirk was now powerful, and the poor and the schools were weak; andKnox now as ever put forward the strong to champion those who could nothelp themselves. But he had long before come to the conclusion, [90] thatof the classes here co-ordinated as having a right to the teinds, it wasthe right of the poor that was fundamental, and the claim of theministers was secondary or ancillary, and perhaps only to be sustainedin so far as they preached and distributed to the poor, or possiblyonly in so far as they were of, and represented, the poor. Accordinglythe Assembly of 1562, in a Supplication, no doubt written by Knox, andcertainly breathing what had been his spirit ever since the early daysof Wishart, conjoins the cause of both in passionate eloquence:

 'The Poor be of three sorts: the poor labourers of the ground; the poor desolate beggars, orphans, widows, and strangers; and the poor ministers of Christ Jesus His holy Evangel: which are _all_ so cruelly treated.... For now the poor labourers of the ground are so oppressed by the cruelty of those that pay their Third, that they for the most part _advance upon the poor_ whatsoever they pay to the Queen or to any other. As for the very indigent and poor, _to whom God commands a sustentation to be provided of the Teinds_, they are so despised that it is a wonder that the sun giveth light and heat to the earth where God's name is so frequently called upon, and no mercy, according to His commandment, shown to His creatures. And also for the ministers, their livings are so appointed, that the most part shall live but a beggar's life. And all cometh of that impiety--'[91]

The position that the 'patrimony of the Church' is fundamentally ratherthe 'patrimony of the poor, ' and that ecclesiastics are merely itsdistributors, was anything but new. It is a commonplace[92] among thelearned of the Catholic Church--the difference was that at this crisisit was possible for Scotland to act upon it, and that the state wasurged to remember the poor by a man who, with all his devotion to Godand to the other world, burned with compassion for the hard wroughtlabourers of his people. For it will be observed that here, aselsewhere, Knox is concerned, not only for the 'very indigent, ' and thetechnically 'poor, '[93] but for those especially whom he calls 'yourpoor brethren; the labourers and manurers (hand-workers) of the ground. 'In the Book of Discipline, before entering upon its provisions fordividing the tithe between the ministers, the poor, and the schools, heurges that the labourers must be allowed 'to pay so reasonable teinds, that they may feel some benefit of Christ Jesus, now preached untothem. ' For

 'With the grief of our hearts we hear that some gentlemen are now as cruel over their tenants as ever were the Papists, requiring of them whatever before they paid to the Church, so that the Papistical tyranny shall only be changed into the tyranny of the lord or of the laird. '... But 'the gentlemen, barons, earls, lords, and others, must be content to live upon their just rents, and suffer the Church to be restored to her liberty, that in her restitution, the poor, who heretofore by the cruel Papists have been spoiled and oppressed, may now receive some comfort and relaxation. '

For Knox had now fully conceived that magnificent scheme ofstatesmanship for Scotland, which is preserved for us in his book ofDiscipline, presented, after the Confession, to the Estates of Scotlandin 1560. [94] How long this project may have been in incubation in hismind, we do not know. But the germ of it may have been very earlyindeed. It may have come into existence simultaneously with his earliesthope for the 'liberty' and 'restitution' of the oppressed and captivekirk. For I shall now for the last time quote a passage from that earlySwiss Confession which his master Wishart had brought over with him toScotland so long ago; a passage which in its bold comprehensiveness maywell have been the original even in his (Knox's) early East Lothiandays, of his later 'devout imagination. ' The Church, said the SwissReformers, as translated by the Scot (and translated, as there is highauthority for believing, [95] for the express purpose of founding aProtestant Church in Scotland--or at least in those burghs of Scotlandwhich had received his teaching), is entitled to call upon themagistrate for

 'A right and diligent institution of the discipline of citizens, and of the schools a just correction and nurture, with liberality towards the ministers of the Church, with a solicitate and thoughtful charge of the poor, to which end all the riches of the Church [in German, _die Güter der Kirche_] is referred. '[96]

Knox's 'Book' and scheme are an expansion of this one sentence. It wasstatesmanship in the fullest sense, including a poor-law and a system ofeducation, higher and elementary, for the whole country. But it was inthe first place a Book of the Church. And while its 'system of nationaleducation was realised only in its most imperfect fashion, its _systemof religious instruction_ was carried into effect with results thatwould alone stamp the First Book of Discipline as the most importantdocument in Scottish history' (Hume Brown). Even on the Church side itis somewhat too despotic. The power of discipline and of exclusion whichis necessary to every self-governing society was rightly preserved. Butin its application it tended here, as in Geneva, to press too much uponthe detail of individual life. So, too, the prominence now given topreaching, and the duty laid down of habitually waiting upon it, mayseem inconsistent with the primitive Protestant authority of the Word ofGod alone. This, however, would have been modified, had the system of'weekly prophesyings' (which provided for not one man only but for allwho are qualified communicating their views), taken root in Scotland, asit has so largely done in Wales. And even as it was, this work of atrained ministry, and especially the preaching, passed in those earlydays like a ploughshare through the whole soil and substance of theScottish character, and left enduring and admirable results. 

Had Knox been able to throw himself directly upon the people, all wouldhave been well. But the people were to be approached through hereditaryrulers, whose consent was necessary for funds with which the Churchmight administer, not the department of religion and worship only, butthose also of national education and national charity. That the Churchshould be administrator was not the difficulty. Whether, indeed, theselection of one religion, to be by ordinance of Parliament the religionof the subjects of the State, was justifiable, will always be gravelyquestioned. But, rightly or wrongly, that had already been done; and itwas clearly fitting that the body which was thus in a sense madeco-extensive with the nation, should undertake national duties, of akind cognate with those properly its own. No one--except perhaps theCatholics--doubted that the new Church, with both the new learning andthe new enthusiasm behind it, was better fitted to administer alikeeducation and charity than either the Estates or the Crown. And Knox'sgreat scheme proposed that the Church, in addition to administering itsown religion and worship, should in every parish provide--1. That thosenot able to work should be supported; 2. That those who were able shouldbe compelled to work; 3. That every child should have a public schoolprovided for it; 4. That every youth of promise should have an open waythrough a system of public schools on to the Universities. It was agreat plan, but a perfectly reasonable one. And there was abundance ofmoney for it. For the wealth of the Church now abolished, which the lawheld to be, at least after the death of the existing life-renters, atthe disposal of the Crown, [97] and which was indeed afterwardstransferred to it by statute, [98] is generally calculated to haveamounted to nearly one half of the whole wealth of the country. But thecrowning sin of the old hierarchy had been that on the approach of theReformation they commenced, in the teeth of their own canons, toalienate the temporalities which they had held only in trust, to thelords and lairds around them as private holders. And the process ofwaste thus initiated by the Church and the nobles was continued by theCrown and its favourites; the result being that the aristocracy soenriched became a body with personal interests hostile to the people andtheir new Church. Even in the first flush of the Reformation all thatthe Reformers could procure was an immediate 'assumption' by the Crownof one-third of the benefices. And even of this one-third, only a partwas to go to the Church, the rest being divided between the oldpossessors and the Crown; or, as Knox pithily put it, 'two parts arefreely given to the devil, and the third must be divided between God andthe devil. ' Even God's part, however, was scandalously ill-paid duringMary's reign, and in addition the Church objected to receiving by way ofgift from the Crown what they should have received rather as due fromthe parishes and the people. This came out very instructively in theAssembly of December 1566. The Queen was now courting the Protestants, and had signed an offer for a considerable sum for the maintenance ofthe ministers. What was to be said to her offer? The Assembly firstrequested the opinion of Knox and the other ministers, as the personsconcerned. They retired for conference, and 'very gravely' answered--

 'That it was their duty to preach to the people the Word of God truly and sincerely, and to crave of the auditors the things that were necessary for their _sustentation_, as of duty the pastors might justly crave of their flock. '[99]

This striking reversion to the Apostolic rule--all the more strikingbecause it is easily reconcilable with the now accepted doctrine oftoleration--was, no doubt, not only in substance but in form theutterance of Knox. But so also, if we are to judge by internal evidence, was the formal answer of the Assembly. They accepted the Queen's giftunder the pressure of present necessity, but

 Not the less, in consideration [of] the law of God ordains the persons who hear the doctrine of salvation at the mouths of his ministers, and thereby receive special food to the nourishment of their souls, to communicate temporal _sustentation_ on [to] their preachers: Their answer is, That having just title to crave the bodily food at the hands of the said persons, and finding no others bound unto them, they _only require at their own flock_, that they will sustain them according to their bounden duty, and what it shall please them to give for their sustentation, if it were but bread and water, neither will they refuse it, nor desist from the vocation. But to take from others contrary to their will, whom they serve not, they judge it not their duty, nor yet reasonable. '[100]

The principle so admirably laid down by Knox has become the principle ofmodern Presbyterianism throughout the world. And even in that day itrequired nothing to be added to it except the recognition thatCatholics, and others outside the 'flock, ' who were merely statutory'auditors, ' were not bound to its pastor in the tithe, or otherproportion, of their means. Elementary as this may now seem, it was ofcourse too much for that age. The same Assembly went on to declare that'the teinds properly pertain to the Kirk, ' and while they should beapplied not only to the ministers, but also to 'the sustentation of thepoor, maintaining of schools, repairing of kirks, and other godly uses, 'such application should be 'at the discretion of the Kirk. ' It was allright, provided the intolerant establishment were to remain. For in thatcase the tithes as a State tax were the proper means for the Statemaintaining church and school and poor; and as the Church had alreadybeen set by the State over both poor and school, it was the fitadministrator of all. And all this ascendancy was about to be renewed;for two months after this Assembly Bothwell murdered Darnley, and threemonths later Mary married Bothwell and abdicated. And the greatParliamentary settlement of 1567 commenced with the long delayedratification of the three old statutes of 1560; two Acts being nowadded, one declaring that the Reformed Church is the only Church withinthe realm, the other giving it jurisdiction over Catholics and allothers. It was fit that between these two later Acts should beinterposed another, [101] giving the ministers a first claim on the'thirds' of benefices, 'aye and until the Kirk come to the fullpossession of their proper patrimony, which is the teinds. ' The properpatrimony of the ancient Church was, perhaps, rather the endowmentswhich had been gifted to it; yet Knox, who abhorred the idea ofinheriting anything from that old Church, took a share of that money, even from the State, with reluctance. But the tithes, to be enforcedyearly from Scotsmen by the law, he claimed freely, for they were due tothe poor, were due to learning and the school, and were above all due tothe Kirk, as entrusted with these other interests no less than with itsown. 

The battle was not over. The scheme of the Book of Discipline remained, even after the statutes of 1567, a mere 'imagination, ' all attemptedembodiment of it being starved by the nobility and the crown. And in ourown century the Church, retaining its statutory jurisdiction overCatholics and Nonconformists, has lost its statutory control over boththe schools and the poor, while it has never got anything like 'fullpossession' or even administration of the teinds, in which all threewere to share, but of which it desired to be sole trustee. 

It it easy for us, looking back--superfluously easy--to see thefundamental mistake in Knox's legislation. But taking that first step ofintolerant establishment as fixed, I see nothing in his proposedsuperstructure which was not admirable and heroic, and also--as heroicthings so often are--sane and even practicable. And it was all conceivedin the interest of the people--of those 'poor brethren' of land andburgh, with whom Knox increasingly identified himself. No doubt the Kirkhad no right to claim administration, even as trustee, of the tenth ofthe yearly fruits of all Scottish industry. But when we think of theobjects to which these fruits were to be applied, we shall not bedisposed to deal hardly with such a claim. It is not the divided anddisinherited Churches of Scotland alone--it is, even more, the 'poorlabourers of the ground'--who have reason, in these later days, to joinin the death-bed denunciation by Knox of the 'merciless devourers of thepatrimony of the Kirk. '

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Knox's statesmanship may have failed--partly because an unjust andunchristian principle was unawares imbedded in its foundation, andpartly because the hereditary legislators of Scotland could not rise tothe level of its peasant-reformer. But Knox's churchmanship did notfail. It might well have been contended that the freedom of the Churchhad been compromised by the legislation which was granted or petitionedfor. But that was not the Church's view, and the internal organisationwhich nobles and politicians refused to sanction, the Church, claimingto be free, instantly took up as its own work. In each town or parishthe elders and deacons met weekly with the pastor for the care of thecongregation. And these 'particular Kirks' now met half-yearlyrepresentatively as the 'Universal Kirk' of Scotland. From its firstmeeting in December 1560 onwards, the General Assembly or Supreme Courtof the Church was convened by the authority of the Church itself, andyear by year laid the deep foundations of the social and religiousfuture of Scotland. It was a great work--nothing less than organising arude nation into a self-governing Church. And there were difficultiesand dangers in plenty, some of them unforeseen. The nobles wererapacious, the people were divided, the ministers leaned to dogmatism, the lawyers leaned to Erastianism, the Lowlands were menaced byEpiscopacy, the Highlands were emerging from heathenism, and betweenthem both there stretched a broad belt of unreformed Popery. There werea hundred difficulties like these, but they were all accepted as in thelong day's work. For in Scotland the dayspring was now risen upon men!

What we have here to remember is, that of this huge national strugglethe chief weight lay on the shoulders of Knox, a mere pastor inEdinburgh. And during the first seven years of its continuance thisindomitable man was sustaining another doubtful conflict, in which theissues not for Scotland only, but for Europe, were so momentous that itmust be looked at separately. 

[84] The writers of the Scottish Confession in 1560 protest 'that if anyman will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugningto God's holy word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and forChristian charity's sake, to admonish us of the same in write; and we ofour honour and fidelity do promise unto him satisfaction from the mouthof God (that is, from His Holy Scriptures), or else reformation of thatwhich he shall prove to be amiss. '--'Works, ' ii. 96. 

Wishart, the translator in or before 1545 of the First HelveticConfession, adds to it this similar and very beautiful declaration:--

'It is not our mind for to prescribe by these brief chapters a certainrule of the faith to all churches and congregations, for we know noother rule of faith but the Holy Scripture; and, therefore, we are wellcontented with them that agree with these things, howbeit they useanother manner of speaking or Confession, different partly to this ofours in words; for rather should the matter be considered than thewords. And therefore we make it free for all men to use their own sortof speaking, as they shall perceive most profitable for their churches, and we shall use the same liberty. And if any man will attempt tocorrupt the true meaning of this our Confession, he shall hear both aconfession and a defence of the verity and truth. It was our pleasure touse these words at this present time, that we might declare our opinionin our religion and worshipping of God. '--'Miscellany of WodrowSociety, ' i. 23. 

This 'declaration' is not in the original Confession, either in Latin orGerman, and must have been written, probably by Wishart himself, ratherfor the English readers or the Scottish churches for whom the rest wastranslated. It is a remarkable legacy. 

[85] As now in the Statute Book, 1567, chaps. 2, 3, and 5. 

[86] It may be interesting to read the statement of the First Helveticin Wishart's translation (though this is one of the paragraphs in whichthat translation mangles the Latin and German originals). It is given inthe 'Miscellany of the Wodrow Society, ' i. 21:

'Seeing every magistrate and high power is of God, his chief andprincipal office is (except he would rather use tyranny) to defend thetrue worshipping of God from all blasphemy, and to procure true religion... _then after_ to judge the people by equal and godly laws to exerciseand maintain judgment and justice, &c. ' (Sec. 26); and (Sec. 24), 'Theythat bring in ungodly sects and opinions ... Should be constrained andpunished by the magistrates and high powers. '

The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 rather inverts the order put bythe First. 'The magistrate's _principal_ office is to procure andpreserve peace and public tranquillity. _And_ he never can do this morehappily' than by promoting religion, extirpating idolatry, and defendingthe Church.... For 'the care of religion belongs, ' not to the magistratesimply, but 'to the pious magistrate. '

[87] See page 67 and note. 

[88] 'Works, ' i. 8, 194. 

[89] 'Works, ' ii. 221, 222. 

[90] Knox's opinion was asked upon the point in or before 1556, and heanswered ('Works, ' iv. 127), 'Touching Tithes, by the law of God theyappertain to no priest, for now we have no levitical priesthood; but bylaw, positive gift, custom, they appertain to princes, and by theircommandment to "men of kirk, " as they would be termed. In their firstdonation respect was had to another end, as their own law doth witness, than now is observed. For first, respect was had that such as wereaccounted distributors of those things that were given to churchmen, should have their reasonable sustentation of the same, making justaccount of the rest, how it was to be bestowed upon the poor, thestranger, the widow, the fatherless, _for whose relief all such rentsand duties were chiefly appointed to the church_. Secondly, thatprovision should be made for the ministers of the church, &c. '

[91] 'Works, ' ii. 340. 

[92] Thomassin, a very great authority, devotes no fewer than eightchapters of his third folio _De Beneficiis_ to proving from Councils andthe Fathers that 'Res Ecclesiae, res et patrimonia sunt pauperum. Earumbeneficiarii non domini sunt sed dispensatores. ' After voluminousevidence from all the centuries, he holds it superfluously plain thatall beneficed men are 'mere dispensers and administrators, notproprietors nor even possessors, of what is truly the patrimony of thepoor, ' and what is held as trustee for the indigent by Christ Himself;so much so, that when this property of the poor is diverted to support abishop or other dignitary, he is not entitled to enjoy his house, table, or garments, unless these have a certain suggestion and savour ofdestitution--_necesse est paupertatis odore aliquo perfundi_. Thomassin, of course, holds that the Church has a divine right totithes; but it is a divine right to administer, not to enjoy, them. Knoxand the Reformers denied the divine right even to administer: they urgedthat the State should make the Kirk _its_ administrators. 

[93] For them too, and even for the strong and sturdy and the JollyBeggars among them, he had a certain fellow-feeling; as is witnessed bythe zest with which he records their 'Warning' (p. 82). The one point, indeed, at which Knox and Burns come together is 'A man's a man for a'that!'

[94] 'Works, ' ii. 183 to 260. 

[95] I am indebted for this view to Dr. A. F. Mitchell, EmeritusProfessor of Church History in St Andrews, to whom all are indebted whoare interested in the historical learning of either the Reformation orthe Covenant. 

[96] The 'end' to which or for which all the Church patrimony is heresaid to be given, does not seem to be merely the 'charge of the poor';though Protestants as well as Catholics often urge that as fundamentallytrue. It seems to be rather the whole group of good objects which aregathered together. The Latin and German originals must be consulted. 

[97] Stair's 'Institutions, ' ii. 3, 36. Erskine's 'Institutes, ' ii. 10, 19. 

[98] 1587, c. 29. 

[99] 'Works, ' ii. 538. 

[100] 'Book of the Universall Kirk of Scotland, ' p. 46. The significanceof this utterance was long ago pointed out by the Rev. J. C. Macphail, D. D. , of Pilrig Church, Edinburgh. 

[101] 1567, c. 10. 

CHAPTER VI

THE PUBLIC LIFE: THE CONFLICT WITH QUEEN MARY

Parliament had made a great and revolutionary change. It had acted as ifthe government had been already granted to it, or, in Cecil's phrase, to'the nation of the land. ' And the change was on one side a breaking offof the old alliance with Catholic France. But the sovereigns ofScotland, now and for the last twelvemonth, were no other than the Kingand Queen of France. They, rather than Parliament, were the 'Authority, 'which, according to the consistent theory of that age, had the right tomake and enforce changes of religion; and which, according to the morepuzzling theory of Knox, had the right to do so--provided the religionso to be enforced was the true one. Accordingly the new Confession ofFaith and the statutes passed by the late Parliament, were sent to Parisby the Lord St John. He waited there long, but, of course, brought backno ratification. But that, says Knox, 'we little regarded, nor yet doregard'; for, he adds, falling back rather too late upon one of thosegreat principles his utterance of which has sunk into the hearts of hiscountrymen, 'all that we did was rather to shew our dutiful obedience than to beg of them any strength to our religion, which from God has full power, and needeth not the suffrage of man, but in so far as man hath need to believe it, if that ever he shall have participation of the life everlasting. '[102]

It was no wonder that the royal pair did not ratify a ProtestantConfession, for during their brief reign over France they were thecentre of a keen crusade against Protestantism, conducted far more byMary's counsellors and uncles, the Guises, than by her feeble-mindedhusband. Towards the end of 1560 this had gone so far that secretpreparations seem to have been made for immediately anticipating the StBartholomew of twelve years later. But the sudden death of Francis andthe widowhood of Mary changed the whole situation. The new King was inthe power, not of the Guises, but of his mother, Catherine de Medici;and Mary of Scots would now have to accept a second or a third place inParis. But in Europe, and in the politics of Europe, the beautiful youngwidow sprang at once into the foremost rank, and became the star of alleyes. Ex-Queen of France, Queen-presumptive of England, and actual Queenof Scotland, which had always been the link between the other two, andto which she was now to return, the marriage destiny of this girl ofeighteen would probably decide the wavering balance of Christendom. [103]

Mary understood her high part, and accepted it with alacrity. Fascinating and beautiful, keen-witted and strong-willed, she would havefound herself at home in this great game of politics, even if it had notturned upon an element of intense personal interest for herself. Butwhile all men knew that her hand was the chief prize of the game, almostthe first man to act on this knowledge, strange to say, was Knox. TheTreaty of Edinburgh had acknowledged the right of the Duke (Hamilton orChatelherault), and of his eldest son Arran, as the next in successionto the Scottish crown after its present holder. And while that presentholder was still married to the King of France, the Scottish nobles hadurged Arran as a suitable husband for Elizabeth of England. It would bethe best arrangement, they thought, for binding the two countriestogether, and counteracting the inevitable pull asunder from theSovereigns in Paris. Elizabeth, however, had replied, to the gravedispleasure of the Estates, that she was not 'presently disposed tomarry. ' And now a new question was raised. Scotland was, of course, still more deeply interested in the probable second marriage of its ownQueen. Arran, an extremely flighty young man, was at this moment muchunder the personal influence of the Reformer; and it was with Knox'sprivity, and perhaps on his suggestion, and certainly without theknowledge of the nobility generally, that before Mary had been a widowfor a month, her young Protestant cousin sent her a ring and a secretletter of courtship. It was again in vain. When Elizabeth refused him, the Estates had been offended, but Arran himself bore the loss with muchresignation. Now, however, the case was different; and though Mary atall times treated her young kinsman with kindness, Arran took her promptrejection of his present overtures grievously to heart, and his wits, never very stable, were soon completely overturned. Knox, however, hadnow fair warning that Mary Stuart knew herself to be more than a mereQueen of Scots, and that the infinitely difficult questions, which herapproaching return to Scotland must necessarily raise, were not to beevaded on easy terms. 

There was among these one theoretical question which _ought_ to havebeen a difficulty for Knox, but of which he was not now disposed tomake much. According to his view women should not be sovereigns at all. But, in truth, this was but one branch of the general grievance ofarbitrary power in that age. The Reformation took place, we must alwaysremember, at a time when the hereditary authority of kings was greaterthan either before or since. And this arbitrary power of one man became, if possible, a little more absurd when it happened to be the power ofone woman. In 1557, Knox had found himself confronted with a Queen ofEngland, a Queen of Scotland, and a Queen-Regent in Scotland--all ofthem ladies immersed in Catholicism, and each in a position which, inhis view, implied the duty of selecting religion for all her lieges. We, in our time, have a very simple way of getting rid of such anintolerable difficulty. But in that age a man even of the boldness ofKnox was thankful to mitigate it. He thought he found a mitigation inthe view (held by thinkers and publicists at the time commonly enough)that women should not be entrusted with such a power; and, in 1558, hepublished anonymously his 'First Blast of the Trumpet against theMonstrous Regiment [Regimen or Rule] of Women. ' Though anonymous, thebook was well known to be his; and being Knox's it was founded not somuch on theory as on Scripture precedents, largely misread according tothe exigencies of the argument. But the publication was, in any case, apractical mistake. Mary of England died immediately after, and wassucceeded by Elizabeth, who was rather more of a woman than her sister, but to whom Knox and Scotland looked as their only ally againstContinental Catholicism. Knox repeatedly tried to explain to the newEnglish Queen; but that very great but very feminine ruler never forgavehis book. Meantime he came, as we saw, into more personal contact withthe Queen-Regent of Scotland, and had the highest hopes from her. Ultimately she disappointed these; but even when she was deposed by thenobles, to whom he had originally looked as the agents in the Reform, Knox insisted on keeping open a door for her restoration, in the eventof her coming in the meantime to think with himself. And now herdaughter was come to her native country as Queen in her own right. Knox, taught by experience, had already taken part in private overtures toher, and was no longer disposed to stand on any theoretical difficultyas to the rule of a woman. The practical difficulties were enough. 

And the practical difficulties were tremendous. Had Mary ruled as amodern constitutional Queen, with toleration of religion all around, things would have been easy. She would have enjoyed the freedom whichshe granted to the lowest of her subjects, and every one of them wouldhave supported her enthusiastically against domestic and foreignaggression. But the reign of religion which, according to her firstproclamation, she, on her arrival, 'found publicly and universallystanding, ' was very different. It was one by which half the lieges wereforbidden the exercise of their own religion and of their ordinaryworship; and by which Scotland and all its rulers were pledged to afaith she had been trained as a child to detest, and as a Queen tosuppress. The situation was impossible from the first. The only questionwas, how long it would last. 

Knox would have met it fairly by making her acknowledgment of theProtestant Acts and Confession a condition of her being acknowledged byScotland. And had the fact been known that Mary, by three secretdocuments, executed just before her childless marriage to the Dauphin, had already handed over her native kingdom, in the event of her havingno issue, to the King of France, the crisis, which was to be postponedfor so many years, might have come at once. But an intermediate planwas arranged in Paris through 'the man whom all the godly did mostreverence, ' and whose weight of character was gradually giving him theforemost place in Scotland--Lord James Stewart, the Queen's naturalbrother. Mary, quick to understand men, put herself under her brother'sguidance, and the result was that she was joyfully received inEdinburgh, and a proclamation was issued forbidding, on the one hand, any 'alteration or innovation of the state of religion' as Her Majestyfound it in the realm on her arrival, and, on the other, any tumult orviolence, especially against Her Majesty's French domestics andfollowers. So, on the first Sunday, while the Evangel was publiclypreached in St Giles in Edinburgh, and in all the great towns and burghsof Scotland, mass was privately celebrated in her chapel at Holyrood, the Lord James with his sword keeping the door, to 'stop all Scottishmen to enter in, ' whether to join in the worship or to disturb it. Itwas drawing a different line from that which had been fixed by therecent Parliament, whose Acts also the new Queen had evaded ratifying. Knox's passion against 'idolatry, ' beyond all other forms of falsereligion or irreligion, was fully shared by the mass of his followers, and he tells us that, on this occasion, he worked in private 'rather tomitigate, yea to sloken, that fervency that God had kindled in others. 'But in the pulpit 'next Sunday' he said that 'one Mass was more fearfulto him than if ten thousand armed enemies were landed in any part of therealm, of purpose to suppress the whole religion'--an exaggeration ofintolerance which is unintelligible, until we remember that the 'onemass' which he was thinking of was that of the ruler who might soon havethe power, and perhaps had already the intention, of suppressingreligion. 

Mary had come to Scotland with the deliberate plan of conciliating andcapturing her native kingdom, and she was not the woman to shrink fromwhatever seemed to be necessary in the process. It may have been herbrother who suggested a meeting between two people whom, in differentways, he certainly liked as well as admired. In any case, Knox was nowat once sent for to the Court, and there followed the first of thefamous interviews between Knox and the Queen, recorded in the FourthBook of his History. The detailed truth of these Dialogues is not to beinferred merely from their vigour and verisimilitude. It results equallyfrom the fact that, throughout, Knox represents the young Queen asmeeting him with perfect intelligence, while on most points she actuallyhas the better of the argument. The vindication of Knox has come, not somuch from what he has himself so faithfully recorded, as from thejudgment of history on the whole situation, and on the relation to it ofspeakers who were also actors. 

The first is probably the most important of the dialogues. [104] Mary andher brother received Knox in Holyrood, two ladies standing in the otherend of the room. She commenced by taxing him with his book against her'regimen. ' He explained that, if Scotland was satisfied with a femaleruler, he would not object. 

 'But yet, ' said she, 'ye have taught the people to receive another religion than their Princes can allow: And how can that doctrine be of God, seeing that God commands subjects to obey their Princes?'

 Knox, in answer, ignored the article of his Confession which bears closely on this point, [105] and fell back on the more fundamental truth. 

 'Madam, as right religion took neither original nor authority from worldly princes, but from the Eternal God alone, so are not subjects bound to frame their religion according to the appetites of their Princes. '

 He easily illustrated this by instances of men in Scripture, who resisted such commands of Princes, and suffered. 

 'But yet, ' said she, 'they resisted not with the sword. '

 'God, ' said he, 'Madam, had not given unto them the power and the means. '

 'Think ye, ' quoth she, 'that subjects, having power, may resist their Princes?'

 'If their Princes exceed their bounds, ' quoth he, 'Madam, and do against that wherefore they should be obeyed, it is no doubt but they may be resisted, even by power. '

 That Princes should regulate the religion of subjects Knox held to be within their 'bounds, ' but only apparently if they regulated it aright, and according to the Word. Otherwise, he now explained, the prince might be restrained, like a father 'stricken with a frenzy. ' At this remarkable argument the Queen 'stood, as it were, amazed more than the quarter of an hour. ' Recovering herself, she said--

 'Well, then, I perceive that my subjects shall obey you and not me. '... 

 'God forbid, ' answered he, in words which really express his fundamental view, 'that ever I take upon me to command any to obey me, or yet to set subjects at liberty to do what pleaseth them. But my travel is that both princes and subjects obey God, who, ' he added, 'commands queens to be nurses unto His people. '

 'Yea, ' quoth she, 'but ye are not the Church that I will nourish. I will defend the Kirk of Rome, for, I think, it is the true Kirk of God. '

 'Your will, ' quoth he, 'Madam, is no reason; neither doth your thought make that Roman harlot to be the true and immaculate spouse of Jesus Christ. '... 

 'My conscience, ' said she, 'is not so. '

 'Conscience, Madam, requires knowledge, and I fear that right knowledge ye have none. '

 'But, ' said she, 'I have both heard and read. '

 ... 'Have ye heard, ' said he, 'any teach, but such as the Pope and his Cardinals have allowed?'

 The Queen avoided a direct answer, [106] but took the next point with unfailing acuteness. 

 'Ye interpret the Scriptures, ' said she, 'in one manner, and they interpret in another; whom shall I believe? and who shall be judge?'

 And Knox's answer is from his side perfect--

 'Ye shall believe God, that plainly speaketh in His word; and farther than the word teacheth you, ye neither shall believe the one nor the other. The word of God is plain in itself; and if there appear any obscurity in one place, the Holy Ghost, who is never contrarious to Himself, explains the same more clearly in other places. '

The conference was long, and was ended with mutual courtesies. Bothparties in the country suspected that the new sovereign might begradually coming round to the new faith. No triumph could have been moreglorious for Knox, and at the opening of the interview he had used everymethod of conciliation. But he never henceforth deceived himself as tothe chances in this case. Outwardly, the Queen remained friendly, and heremained loyal; but his opinion as expressed privately, immediatelyafter this first meeting, was recorded later on. 

 'If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and His truth, my judgment faileth me. '

Induration of heart was not a charitable judgment to pass against ayoung woman brought up in the worst school of morals in Europe, but whomthe speaker held never to have met 'God and his truth' till thatforenoon. Yet, as usual, Knox's judgment was by no means wholly wrong. There is a certain brilliant hardness about the charm of Mary Queen ofScots, even with posterity; and as to religion, whatever may have beenthe case in the later years of her sad imprisonment, there is noevidence in her early days in Scotland of personal or earnest interestin the religion even of her own church. [107] And a tender and seriousinterest in religion was held by the whole Protestantism of that day tobe the one gate for the individual into 'God's truth. ' Had his Queenshown anything of this spirit of earnest enquiry, our rough Reformermight have been precipitate to help her steps, though they should be asyet on the wrong side of the dividing line. But Mary made no pretenceson the subject, and it was her misfortune, and that of all around, thather opinion on religion--a matter in which she took no more interestthan was natural to her years--should have been all important to hersubjects. They at least were, or professed to be, in earnest about it;and the man who in her presence now represented that earnestness made nopretences either. But we may be sure that Knox's judgment on a 'proudmind' as to the more central and personal truths of religion, would notbe mitigated by that keen 'wit' which played so freely round itsexternal parts, and transfixed so easily his own theory of Church andState. We know from himself that Mary, having found the weak point ofthe intolerant legislation, took care to press upon it. She was 'evercrying conscience, conscience! it is a sore thing to constrain theconscience;'[108] and she selected for her 'flattering words' the bestof the men around her, till from the question, 'Why may not the Queenhave her own Mass, and the form of her religion? what can that hurt usor our religion?' there came a formal discussion and a vote of the Lordsthat they were not entitled to constrain her. This state of matterscontinued during the year 1562. But the real danger, of course, was fromabroad, and Knox had intelligence of all that was going on there. InDecember 1562 a victory of the Guises in France had been followed bydancing at Holyrood; and Knox preached against 'taking pleasure for thedispleasure of God's people. ' The Queen sent for him, and suggested hisspeaking to herself privately rather than haranguing publicly upon herdomestic proceedings: a proposal which he so promptly rejected that sheat once turned her back on him. It was on this occasion that, hearingthe whisper as he went out, 'He is not afraid, ' he replied, with a'reasonably merry' countenance, 'Wherefore should the pleasing face of agentlewoman affray me? I have looked into the faces of many angry men, and yet have not been affrayed above measure. ' But the effect of thatpleasing face upon others around may be measured by a letter writtennext day to Cecil by Randolph, who had for some time been QueenElizabeth's envoy in Edinburgh. He was an intelligent and well-meaningman; but Mary was far more than a match for him, as she had been inFrance for an abler diplomatist, Throckmorton. Randolph tells theEnglish minister that Knox is still full of 'good zeal and affection' toEngland. 'I know also that his travail and care is great to unite thehearts of the princes and people of these two realms in perpetual loveand hearty kindness. ' In the previous year Randolph had heard anincident of Knox's first interview with Mary, which we only know fromhis letter. Even then Knox 'knocked so hastily upon her heart that hemade her weep, as well you know there be of that sex that will do thatas well for anger as for grief. ' But since that date the Queen of Scotshad turned her caressing courtesy directly upon this Englishman, andeven the golden cup which she presented to him at Lord James Stewart'smarriage had perhaps less influence with Randolph than the bright eyesof one of her 'four Maries' whom he was now pursuing. So he adds nowthat Knox 'is so full of mistrust in all the Queen's doings, words, andsayings, as though he were either of God's privy counsel, that know howHe had determined of her from the beginning, or that he knew the secretsof her heart so well, that neither she did nor could have for ever onegood thought of God or of His true religion. ' No criticism could be moreacute. And yet the research of later times has shown that Knox'sjudgment, or information, as to what Mary of Scots was now doing, wassuperior to that of all around him. This was the very close of 1562, andin the next month of January she extended her Catholic correspondence, which had hitherto been chiefly with the Guises and her Cardinal uncle, by letters to the Pope. [109] On the 31st she writes Pius IV. Assuringhim of her devotion to the Church, and that for it and for therestoration to it of her kingdom she is ready to sacrifice herlife. [110] The bearer, too, of this secret missive was CardinalGranvelle, from Madrid, and deep at this moment in the persecutingplans of Alva and his master Philip. For a new and greater danger wasnow rising for Scotland. Hitherto the chief pretenders for the hand ofthe Queen of Scots had been the Archduke Charles, and the Duke of Anjou. (The new King of France was also supposed to be in love with her. ) Butnow the project was pressed of a marriage between her and Don Carlos, the oldest son of Philip and the heir of the mighty monarchy of Spain. And it was with this full in her mind, and with the determination totake a step forward in her own kingdom, that Mary again sent forKnox--this time to Lochleven, where she was hawking. The occasion waswell chosen. The Queen's mass was now tolerated: why should not privatesubjects also be allowed to have it, provided they worshipped privately?'Who can stop the Queen's subjects to be of the Queen's religion?'Already many Catholics had acted upon this reasoning at Easter of 1563;but in the West the Protestant barons and magistrates, instead ofcomplaining to the Queen and her Council, had apprehended thewrong-doers and proposed to punish them. 'For two hours' the Queen urgedhim to persuade the gentlemen of the West 'not to put hands to punishany man for _the using of themselves_ in their religion as pleasedthem. ' Nothing could be more clearly right. But nothing could be moreclearly against the law; and Knox assured her that if she would enforcethat law herself her subjects would be quiet. But 'Will ye, ' said she, 'that they shall take my sword into their hand?'

'The sword of justice, Madam, ' he answered, 'is God's; and if themagistrate will not use it the people must do so. And therefore it shallbe profitable to your Majesty to consider what is the thing your Grace'ssubjects look to receive of your Majesty, and what it is that ye oughtto do unto them by mutual contract. They are bound to obey you, andthat not but in God. You are bound to keep laws unto them. You crave ofthem service: they crave of you protection and defence against wickeddoers. '

The Queen, 'somewhat offended, passed to her supper, ' and Knox preparedto return to Edinburgh. But her brother, afterwards the Regent, hadheard the result of the conference, and Mary learned that matters couldnot safely be left in this condition. Next morning the Queen sent forKnox as she was going out hawking. She had apparently forgotten all thekeen dispute of the evening before; and her manner was caressing andconfidential. What did Mr Knox think of Lord Ruthven's offering her aring? 'I cannot love him, ' she added, 'for I know him to useenchantment. ' Was Mr Knox not going to Dumfries, to make the Bishop ofAthens the superintendent of the Kirk in that county? He was, Knoxanswered; the proposed superintendent being a man in whom he hadconfidence. 'If you knew him, ' said Mary, 'as well as I do, ye wouldnever promote him to that office, nor yet to any other within the Kirk. 'In yet another matter, and one more private and delicate, she requiredhis help. Her half-sister, Lady Argyll, and the Earl, her husband, were, she was afraid, not on good terms. Knox had once reconciled them before, but, 'do this much _for my sake_, as once again to put them at unity. 'And so she dismissed him with promises to enforce the laws against themass. 

Knox for once fell under the spell. He seems to have believed that thismost charming of women was at last leaning to the side of her nativeland. And so he sat down and wrote a long letter to Argyll. He went toDumfries, and on making enquiry, he found that the Queen was right inher shrewd estimate of the proposed superintendent, and took means toprevent the election. It turned out, too, that she had kept her promiseabout citing offenders, and no fewer than forty-eight persons, one ofthem an Archbishop, had been indicted. The first Parliament since herlanding had been summoned for June, and Moray and Lethington seem tohave suggested to Knox that the Queen would be glad then to ratify theActs of 1560, in exchange for the approval by the estates of somesuitable marriage. Even now, it was these two heads of the Protestantparty whom Knox trusted rather than Mary. But the young Queen hadoutwitted all of them together. The prosecutions throughout the countryhad pacified the Protestants, and they did not come up to theParliament. When it met, it did not even ask that the 'state ofreligion' should be ratified. Meantime the Cardinal of Lorraine hadcarried to the Council of Trent the adhesion of the Queen of Scots, anda special congregation was held by it for the private reception of herletter. Worse still, the plan for a Spanish marriage, and for setting aScoto-Spanish queen upon the throne of the Bloody Mary, was now activelyprosecuted. All this spring, while professing to carry out her promisesto Knox, Mary was negotiating with Madrid, and 'already, in imagination, Queen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Spain, Flanders, Naples, and theIndies, ' she was but little interested in the plans which her Scottishnobility were proposing for her to England. Knox had hoped that if not aProtestant noble like Leicester or Arran, at least a royal Protestantlike the King of Denmark or the King of Sweden, would, with Elizabeth'shelp, be a successful suitor. But Queen Elizabeth, whom Knox pithilydescribes as 'neither good Protestant nor yet resolute Papist, ' was notdisposed to help any one to marry before herself, least of all herlovely cousin. And the Scottish statesmen, Moray and Maitland, like herown English advisers often, were now so driven to desperation byElizabeth's vacillations that they had actually--possibly with the hopeof frightening her--pressed both at home and abroad the project ofmarrying the Queen of Scots to the heir of Spain! This apparently cameto the knowledge of Knox along with the refusal to meet his hopes on thepart of the Scots Parliament; and now his cup was full. Lord JamesStewart, by this time the Earl of Moray, son-in-law of the EarlMarischal, and gifted with great estates of the forfeited Earl ofHuntly, had been his chief friend. But 'familiarly after that time theyspake not together more than a year and a half; for the said John, byhis letter, gave a discharge to the said Earl of all fartherintromission or care with his affairs. ' In this stately letter Knoxrecalled all their past career in common, and added that, seeing hishopes had been disappointed, 'I commit you to your own wit, and to the conducting of those who better please you. I praise my God, I this day leave you victor of your enemies, promoted to great honours, and in credit and authority with your sovereign. If so ye long continue, none within the realm shall be more glad than I shall be; but if that after this ye shall decay (as I fear that ye shall) then call to mind by what means God exalted you. '

But the pulpit remained to him, and the pulpit in those days hadsometimes to combine the functions of free Parliament and free press. Knox went into St Giles', and in a great sermon before the assembledLords, from whose retrospective eloquence we have already quoted, [111]he drove right at the heart of the situation. 

 'And now, my Lords, to put end to all, I hear of the Queen's marriage; dukes, brethren to emperors, and kings, all strive for the best game. But this, my Lords, will I say--note the day, and bear witness after--whensoever the nobility of Scotland, professing the Lord Jesus, consent that an infidel (and all Papists are infidels) shall be head to your Sovereign, ye do as far as in you lieth to banish Christ Jesus from this realm; ye bring God's vengeance upon the country, a plague upon yourselves, and perchance ye shall do small comfort to your Sovereign. '

That sovereign could scarcely be expected to take the same view, and forthe last time the Queen sent for Knox. No one knew so well as she thathe had laid his finger on the true hinge of the political question, andthat her opponent would have a far stronger case now than at any oftheir previous interviews. She burst into tears the moment he entered. 'I have borne with you, ' she said most truly, 'in all your rigorousmanner of speaking; I have sought your favour by all possible means. ''True it is, madam, ' he answered, 'your Grace and I have been at diverscontroversies, in the which I never perceived your Grace to be offendedat me. ' Knox's complacency is sometimes thick-skinned: but he was notwrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than thegenerality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understoodand, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and that she hadat least enjoyed the dialectic conflicts in which she had held her ownso well. But the matter was more serious now. 'What have you to do withmy marriage?' she demanded. Knox in answer hinted that she had herselfinvited him to give her private advice; but what he had said was in thepulpit, where he had to speak to the nobility and to think of the goodof the whole commonwealth. 

'What have you to do, ' she persisted, 'with my marriage? or what are youwithin this commonwealth?'

'A subject born within the same, ' said he, 'Madam. And albeit I neitherbe earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me (how abject thatever I be in your eyes) a profitable member within the same. '

Under the new discipline the preacher claimed a right to utter opinionseven as to private marriages, and used it much beyond what thefundamental principles of Protestantism could justify. But Knox was nowdealing with his Queen, and he felt himself well within the line of hisduty in repeating to herself the deadly consequences to Scotland if itsnobility ever consented to her being 'subject to an unfaithful husband. 'It was unanswerable, except by a new passion of tears, under which theReformer stood at first silent and unmoved. He broke silence at lastwith a clumsy attempt to explain or to console; and Mary's indignationwas not diminished by Knox's quaint protest that he was really atenderhearted man, and could scarcely bear to see his own children weepwhen corrected for their faults. She broke with him finally; and Knox, dismissed to the ante-chamber, found himself so solitary, though amongthe ladies of the Court, that (as we have already seen) he attempted to'procure the company of women' by moralisings which they too may havefound impressive rather than delightful. 

From this point--June 1563--the history slopes steadily downwards. Mary's ambition was still to be Queen of Spain. Messengers on thesubject went to Spain and came to Scotland. But her plans were secretlycounterworked by her old enemy Catherine de Medici, the FrenchQueen-mother, and Philip changed his mind continually. In December anincident happened which shewed Knox's new position. A riot arose in theQueen's absence between Catholics who wished to worship in her privatechapel and Protestants who wished to prevent or denounce it. The latterwere indicted for 'invading' the palace. Knox instantly wrote a lettersummoning the faithful to attend in a body along with them; and he wascited to appear before the Queen in Council on a charge of 'convocationof the lieges. ' Once more he stood before Mary, but now it was at herbar. Knox had the weakness of listening to gossip, especially as to whathis feminine adversaries said; and he records not only what he saw, that'her pomp lacked one principal point, to wit, womanly gravity, ' but alsothat she was heard to observe--this time apparently in admirableScots--'Yon man gart me greet, and grat never tear himself. I will seeif I can gar him greet. ' Knox absolutely refused to withdraw his letteror to apologise for it: and though the Council did not desire to justifyhis conduct, they heard with some sympathy his plea that Papists werenot good advisers of princes, being sons of him who was 'a murderer fromthe beginning. ' Lethington, the Secretary, conducted the prosecution, and it was probably he who at this point remarked--

'You forget yourself: you are not now in the pulpit. '

'I am in the place, ' said Knox--and again his word has becomememorable--'where I am demanded of conscience to speak the truth, andtherefore the truth I speak, impugn it whoso list. '

The votes were taken twice over; but the nobles steadily refused to findKnox guilty, and 'that night there was neither dancing nor fiddling inthe palace. ' During the whole of 1564, however, Knox and the GeneralAssembly were divided from the Protestant courtiers, who argued, withperfect justice, that the attitude of the Reformer and his fellowpreachers to the Queen was one of scarcely veiled disloyalty. In a longand formal conference upon the subject, Knox said some things so plainlythat Lethington answered--

'Then will ye make subjects to control their princes and rulers?'

'And what harm, ' said the other, 'should the Commonwealth receive, ifthat the corrupt affections of ignorant rulers were moderated, and sobridled by the wisdom and discretion of godly subjects that they shoulddo wrong nor violence to no man?'

But even the leading men of the Court, themselves Protestants, were nowbeginning to be disquieted by a sense that they did not know what theirqueen was planning, and that they could not be responsible for heractions. During this year, 1564, she was making herself moreindependent, both of them and of her old advisers in France; one greatstep being the promotion of the Italian, Rizzio, who was now herconfidential secretary. The Spanish marriage was becoming more hopeless, and the eyes of Mary's Catholic friends were now turning in anotherdirection. The man at the English court nearest to the English thronewas young Henry Darnley, and Elizabeth had herself jealously suggestedthat 'yonder long lad' might possibly please her Scottish cousin. Maryand he were both great-grandchildren of Henry VII. , and their unionwould consolidate the Scottish claim to the English crown--a dangerousresult for the daughter of Ann Boleyn. That was a sufficient reason forDarnley not being encouraged to go to Scotland; but he was at lastallowed to leave London secretly in February 1565. The young people metin Wemyss Castle, and it was soon plain that Mary and her handsomecousin were on the best terms. Archbishop Beaton, acting as hersecretary in Paris, was still pressing King Philip, and on the 15th ofMarch he warned the Spanish ambassador that unless his master came tothe rescue Mary would have to throw herself away on her Englishrelative. There was no response, and between the 7th and 10th of April, Mary of Scots and Henry Lord Darnley were privately married in Rizzio'sapartment in Holyrood. No one knew it; and nearly two months after, theArchbishop again urges the King of Spain to consent, for his Queen isnot yet married, and there is still time for the greater alliance. Seven weeks more passed, and on the 29th June the public marriage tookplace, and Mary gave her husband the title of king. 

It was the downfall of Moray, and, as Knox points out, of the wholetemporising Protestant policy since the Queen came to Scotland. Moraysaw that clearly enough, and confederating with a number of the otherLords to protest against the marriage and the proposed kingship, thewhole party were within three months driven out of Scotland by theenergy of the Queen. In the field, Knox confesses, 'her courageincreased manlike so much, that she was ever with the foremost. ' And inher proclamation she frankly made it her case against the recalcitrantnobility

 'that the establishment of Religion will not content them, but we must be forced to govern by Council, such as it shall please them to appoint us; a thing so far beyond all measure, that we think the only mention of so unreasonable a demand is sufficient ... For what other thing is this but to dissolve the whole policy, and in a manner to invert the very order of nature, to make the Prince obey and subjects command?'

For now the triumph of absolutism and of Rizzio, as the Papal agent, wascomplete--more so than Moray or Knox knew. France and Spain, longdivided, seemed at last to be working together for the faith. And thegreatest of European monarchs, though he declined to wed his heir inScotland, had by no means abandoned the cause there. On the contrary, inthis very spring of 1565, while the Darnley-marriage was preparing, thesavage Alva and Granvelle were laying down at Bayonne, by Philip'sauthority, the first lines of the plan for sending an Armada againstProtestant England, in order to place Mary on its throne: and theassurance to that effect, given by Alva's own lips to Mary's envoy, wascarried by him to Scotland in time to swell the exultation of hernuptials. [112]

One man was left in Scotland, and he now had at least the people ofEdinburgh with him. Darnley, though a Catholic, thought it prudent tocome to Knox's preaching on a Sunday very soon after the marriage, butwas so unfortunate as to hear a sermon on the text--'Other lords thanThou have had dominion over us. ' The preacher explained that in very badcases of ingratitude of the people, God permitted such lords to be 'boysand women, ' and the weakness of Ahab was specially dwelt upon in notrestraining his strong-minded wife. Worse than all, the service was anhour longer than he had expected; and the king, characteristically, 'would not dine, and with great fury passed to the hawking. ' Knox wassummoned to the Council, and ordered not to preach while the Courtremained in town. He gave the particularly cautious answer that '_if theChurch_ would command him either to speak or abstain, he would obey, _sofar_ as the Word of God would permit him'; but times were changed, andin this matter the Church had now to obey the Authority. The Lords ofthe Congregation, for four years the Queen of Scots' nominal advisers, were very soon in exile in England; and Queen Elizabeth, in mortal dreadof the apprehended union of France and Spain in a Catholic crusadeagainst her own crown, received 'her sister's rebels' with upbraidingand almost menace. Knox and the General Assembly maintained a defensivewarfare all through the year 1565-6. But they had no representation inthe Court, and Rizzio succeeded so far that Mary herself tells[113] howshe had arranged for the counter-revolution being commenced by aParliament in April 1566, 'the spiritual estate being placed therein inthe ancient manner, tending to have done some good anent restoring theold religion. ' Two things prevented this smooth programme being carriedout. Mary's rather weak fancy for Darnley seems to have only lasted fora few weeks after her marriage. He turned out to be a fool; and his wifeand the nobility declined to promise him the Crown-matrimonial, _i. E. _, to make him successor to her in case there were no children. Darnley nowcourted the banished lords, and made a 'Band' with them according to theold Scots fashion, a fashion which was to break out nearer home in moresavage survival still. For Mary's imprudent favouritism of Rizzio hadroused the deadly jealousy both of her husband and of the nobles whoremained at home. And on the 9th of March a band of men headed by Mortonand Ruthven dragged the Italian out from her supper-table at Holyrood, and stabbed him to death in the ante-chamber; Darnley and the lordsremaining in order to make terms with their Queen. The outrage wasunavailing; in two days Mary had talked over her husband, escaped withhim from Holyrood to Dunbar, and summoned her new favourite, LordBothwell, to her aid. Years before, when fighting the Earl of Huntly inthe far North, she had expressed to Randolph her regret 'that she wasnot a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or towalk on the causeway, with a jack and knapschalle, a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword. ' And now, as before, her energy swept the field clearof her enemies, and she returned to Edinburgh victorious. Knox may nothave known of the formal Band; but he was even more opposed to his Queenthan were those who signed it, and on 17th March 1566 he 'departed ofthe Burgh at two hours afternoon, with a great mourning of the godly ofreligion. ' Five days before, on the very day, indeed, after Mary hadridden away through the night from Holyrood, he had penned, 'withdeliberate mind to his God, ' his retrospective confession, [114]prefixing to it the prayer--

 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit, and put an end, at thy good pleasure, to this my miserable life; for justice and truth are not to be found among the sons of men!'

It was the old sigh, which has been breathed from the most heroic heartsin times of crisis and failure; 'Let me now die, for I am not betterthan my fathers!' And here once again it was premature. For the Queen, now awakened to the whole situation, saw how rash had been her recentaggressive policy. After the birth of her son in June 1566, instead offraming Parliamentary enactments against the new religion, she vaguelyproposed to make some provision for the ministers, and allowed thebanished lords, one by one, to come back. And though they now foundtheir unfortunate confederate, Darnley, in neglect and disgrace, theyfound also their sovereign passing rapidly under a new and morecontrolling influence; and the Earl of Bothwell was a nominalProtestant. Knox at first was forbidden to return to his pulpit, and hevisited the Churches in Ayrshire and Fife, occupying himself among otherthings in revising the first four books of his history--the only partwhich is finished by his trenchant pen. But in December the GeneralAssembly met in Edinburgh, and Knox was with them. We have already seenthe striking answer sent by this Assembly[115] as to the proposed giftsof the Queen. But their attention was arrested at this moment by anotherand very inconsistent order of the Crown restoring the Archbishop of StAndrews, the head of the old hierarchy, to his consistorialjurisdiction, contrary to the law of 1560. It was either a very absurd, or a very alarming, step; and Knox, at the request of the Assembly, prepared a powerful manifesto on the subject. He then went away, withtheir approval, on a long-meditated visit to England, to visit his sonsin Northumberland or Yorkshire, and to strengthen his friends on themore Puritan side of the English Church in their new troubles underElizabeth. Little is known of his proceedings there; though he remainedin England during the whole time between the Assembly of December 1566and another which sat on 25th June 1567. 

But between these dates, and in Knox's absence, the most amazing tragedyin the history of Scotland had unrolled itself in Edinburgh. Week byweek, the increasing power of Lord Bothwell over the Queen, and herincreasing dislike of her husband, had attracted the attention of men. But before February there was a sudden reconciliation between her andDarnley. She brought him to a house in Kirk of Field, near Edinburgh, and at midnight of the 9th it was blown up with gunpowder by theservants of Bothwell, the body of the King being found in the garden. On21st April Bothwell waylaid and carried off Mary to Dunbar. But he wasstill a married man, having wedded Lord Huntly's sister fourteen monthsbefore. And now in May, came in the new consistorial jurisdiction of theArchbishop, for the only act which that prelate ever performed under itwas to confirm a sentence of nullity of this very marriage, and that onthe ground that Bothwell and his wife being too nearly related, had notprocured a Papal dispensation (the Papal dispensation having not onlybeen procured before the marriage, but having been granted by the handsof the Archbishop himself as Legate). Ten days after this divorce, andin spite of dissuasions from her friends at home and abroad, theill-fated Queen publicly married the murderer of her husband, and thestrong shudder of disgust that passed through the commons of Scotlandshook her throne to the ground. So upon Mary's half-compulsoryabdication, Moray became Regent for the infant King, who was crowned atStirling, Knox preaching the coronation sermon. (There were men presenton this triumphal occasion before whom he had preached once before inthe same place, when sunk in despair after that 'dark and dolorous'flight from Edinburgh. ) And now came that great winding up alreadydiscussed in our last chapter, the Protestant legislative settlement ofChurch matters in 1567. 

It was the second great climax of Knox's life; and now his public workwas done. We shall not find it necessary to follow his later years indetail. They were troubled by ineffectual attempts to reverse theverdict of the people already given. For Mary had a majority of thenobles still with her, and Elizabeth of England resented the claim of anation to judge its sovereign. An appeal to arms followed: the Regentwas victorious at Langside, and the Queen of Scots fled to a longcaptivity in England. But her claims threw Scotland into civil warduring most of the remaining life of Knox. Moray was assassinated in1570 by one of the Hamiltons whose life he had spared upon Knox'sintercession; and next Sunday Knox, who had long since returned intofriendship with him, preached on 'Blessed are the dead, ' and 'movedthree thousand persons to shed tears for the loss of such a good andgodly governor. ' But Lethington had now gone over to the exiled Queen, and took with him even Kirkaldy, who had fought with Moray at Langside. Henceforth the Castle, where they resided, was a danger to Edinburgh, and in July, 1571, Knox, by agreement of both parties there, was sentfor a twelvemonth to St Andrews to be out of harm's way. He had leftEdinburgh in wholly broken health, after a fit of apoplexy: he returnedfeebler still, and had a colleague at once appointed. Yet when the newscame from Paris, in September, 1572, of the great massacre of StBartholomew, Knox himself took charge of organising the protest ofScotland against the gigantic crime. But that crime of France savedScotland, and the voice of Scotland's leader was no longer needed. Theend was now near, and while 'so feeble as scarce can he stand alone' hesends a farewell message to 'Mr Secretary Cecil' through Killigrew, thenew English envoy. 

 'John Knox doth reverence your Lordship much, and willed me once again to send you word, that he thanked God he had obtained at His hands, that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is truly and simply preached throughout Scotland, which doth so comfort him as he now desireth to be out of this miserable life. '[116]

And with an explosion, equally characteristic, against one who hadanonymously accused Knox of 'seeking support against his nativecountry, ' we may close our notices of this great public life. 

 'I give him a lie in his throat!... What I have been to my country, although this unthankful age will not know, yet the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth.... To me it seems a thing most unreasonable, that, in this my decrepit age, I should be compelled to fight against shadows and howlets, that dare not abide the light!'[117]

[102] 'Works, ' ii. 126. 

[103] So much was this looked forward to, that two months _before thedeath_ of her husband King Francis, the English ambassador, writing fromParis to London of the King's feeble health, says: 'There is much talkof the Queen's second marriage. Some talk of the Prince of Spain, someof the Duke of Austrich, others of the Earl of Arran. 

[104] 'Works, ' ii. 277. 

[105] 'To Kings, Princes, Rulers, and Magistrates we affirm that, chiefly and most principally, the reformation and purgation of theReligion appertains, so that, not only are they appointed for civilpolicy, but also for maintenance of the true Religion, and forsuppressing of idolatry and superstition whatsoever.... And, therefore, we confess and avow that such as resist the supreme power (doing thatthing which appertains to his charge) do resist God's ordinance, andtherefore cannot be guiltless. '--'Works, ' ii. 119. 

[106] Mary may not have met a Protestant teacher before, except thosewhom she and her husband had more than once viewed suffering on thescaffold; but she had read books like the Colloquies of Erasmus withkeen appreciation, she was instructed in the great controversy from theCatholic side, and one of the youthful exercises which remain written inher girlish hand is a letter to John Calvin in defence of purgatory. 

[107] See Hume Brown, ii. 171, note. 

[108] 'Works, ' ii. 276. Her answer to the General Assembly in 1565, wasthat 'she prays all her loving subjects, seeing they have had experienceof her goodness, that she neither has in times past, nor yet meanshereafter to press the conscience of any man, but that they may worshipGod in such sort as they are persuaded to be best, that they also willnot press her to offend her own conscience. '--'Book of the UniversallKirk, ' p. 34. 

[109] The Pope had already, since her husband's death, sent her theGolden Rose, with the suggestion that in Scotland she must be a rose_among thorns_. 

[110] Labanoff's 'Lettres de Marie Stuart, ' i. 177. 

[111] Page 89. 

[112] The dates are indicated generally in Hill Burton's 'History, ' iv, 133. 

[113] Labanoffs 'Lettres de Marie Stuart, ' i. 342. 

[114] Page 28. 

[115] Page 113. 

[116] 'Works, ' vi. 633. 

[117] 'Works, ' vi. 596. 

CHAPTER VII

CLOSING YEARS AND DEATH

It is time to part from the public life of the greatest public man whomScotland has known. That side of Knox's work, attractively presented tothe world at first in the memorable biography of Dr Thomas M'Crie, hasbeen admirably restated by Dr Hume Brown for a later age and from hisown judicial standpoint. But Knox's public life was not the whole of hiswork: in bulk, it was a small part of it. When he became minister ofEdinburgh in 1560 there was only one church there; St Cuthberts andCanongate were country parishes outside. It was some years before he gota colleague; and, as sole minister of Edinburgh, he preached twice everySunday _and three times during the week_ to audiences which sometimeswere numbered by thousands. Once a week he attended a Kirk Session; oncea week he was a member of the assembly or meeting of the neighbouringelders for their 'prophesying' or 'exercise on Scripture. ' Often he wassent away to different districts of the country on preaching visitationsunder the orders of the Church. But when Knox was at home, hispreparations for the pulpit, which were regular and careful, and hisother pastoral work, challenged his whole time. And this work wascarried on in two places chiefly; in St Giles, which now became the HighChurch of Edinburgh, and in his house or lodging, which was always in ornear the Netherbow, a few hundred yards farther down the High Street. The picturesque old building 'in the throat of the Bow, ' which attractsinnumerable visitors as the traditional house where Knox died, was notthat in which he spent most part of his Edinburgh life. From 1560 downto about the time of his second marriage he lived in a 'great mansion'on the west side of Turing's or Trunk Close; and thereafter for someyears in a house on the east side of the same close. Neither of them nowexists; but the entrance into the High Street from both was under thewindows of the third or Netherbow house, which is shewn in modern times, and which was probably ready for Knox's reception, if not earlier, atleast when he came back from his latest visit to St Andrews. In these hekept his books, which constituted much the larger part of his personalproperty--('you will not always be at your book, ' Queen Mary had said, as she turned her back upon him in closing their second interview). Andwith them, and with helps from the old logic and the new learning (forwhile abroad he had added Hebrew to his previous instruments of Greekand Latin) he studied hour by hour for the sermons which hedelivered--and their delivery also lasted hour after hour--in the greatchurch. In that church there was occasionally much to draw even thevulgar eye. One day it was Huntly, the great Catholic Earl, the mostfamous man in Knox's opinion among the nobility of Scotland for threehundred years for 'both felicity and worldly wisdom, ' whose huge bulk ashe had sat opposite to the preacher (the year before he died 'withoutstroke of sword' on the field of Corrichie) was afterwards, thus vividlyrecalled. 

 'Have ye not seen one greater than any of you sitting where presently ye sit, pick his nails, and pull down his bonnet over his eyes, when idolatry, witchcraft, murder, oppression, and such vices were rebuked? Was not his common talk, When the knaves have railed their fill, then will they hold their peace?'[118]

Or, again, it was the French Ambassador, Le Croc, sitting in state onthe first Sunday after the news of St Bartholomew, who heard thepreacher denounce his master, King Charles, as a 'murderer, ' from whomand from whose posterity the vengeance of God would refuse to depart. But these were incidents dramatic and political. And noble as apolitical calling may be, there have always been some to believe thatdrawing men and women up to a higher moral life, especially when thatlife is fed from an immortal hope, is nobler still. But Knox, let usremember, was throughout his early ministry the witness of a still morefascinating and indeed unexampled spectacle--a whole generation suddenlyconfronted with the moral call of primitive Christianity, and strivingto respond to it, no longer in dependence on Church tradition, but byeach man moulding himself directly upon Christian facts and Christianpromises in the very form in which these were originally delivered bythe apostolic age. He was witness of it; and more than witness, forbeyond any other man in Scotland Knox was its guide. And while theguidance of the great theological leaders of that generation tendednaturally--and quite apart from their usurped statutory ascendency--topress too heavily upon the recovered freedom of Scotland, that dangerwas but little felt in those early days of enthusiasm in the High Churchof Edinburgh. 

 * * * * *

What like was the man who was seen, almost every day during all thoseyears, pacing up and down between the Netherbow and St Giles?

Knox, as we are told by a surviving contemporary (who enclosed aportrait of him along with the description), was a man of slightly lessthan middle height, but with broadish shoulders, limbs well puttogether, and long fingers. He had a rather swarthy face, with blackhair, and a beard a span and a half long, also black, but latterlyturning grey. The face was somewhat long, the nose decidedly so, themouth large, and the lips full, so that the upper lip in particularseemed to be swollen. The chief peculiarity of his face was that hiseyes--sunk between a rather narrow forehead, with a strong ridge ofeyebrow, above, and ruddy and swelling cheeks, below--looked hollow andretreating. But those eyes were of a darkish blue colour, their glancewas keen and vivid, and the whole face was 'not unpleasing. ' We caneasily believe that 'in his settled and severe countenance there dwelt anatural dignity and majesty, which was by no means ungracious, but inanger authority sat upon his brow. '[119]

This seems to be a true portraiture of Knox in the days of his vigour;if we are to speak of vigour in the case of a man with a small and frailbody (one of his early biographers speaks of him as a mere _corpuscle_), and a man throughout his whole public life struggling with disease. Inthe last year of his prematurely 'decrepit age, ' we have anotherdescription of him; and this time it is taken in St Andrews. Edinburghand Leith were now again at war, and the quarter of Knox's house was themost unsafe in the city. The 'King's Men' outside were always attemptingto force the Netherbow Port; and their guns, planted close by on the DowCraig, [120] and a little farther off on Salisbury Crags, smote fromeither side. They were crossed and answered, not only by the great gunsof the castle, held by the Queen's Men under Kirkaldy, but by a nearerbattery on the Blackfriars' Yard, and by guns planted on the roof of StGiles (the biggest of which the soldiers of course christened 'JohnKnox'). In these circumstances Knox was safer away; and from May 1571 toAugust 1572 his residence was St Andrews. There the mild James Melville, a student at St Leonards, watched the old man with the wistful reverenceof youth. 

 'I saw him every day of his doctrine go _hulie and fear_, [121] with a furring of martricks about his neck, a staff in the one hand, and good godly Richard Ballanden, his servant, holding up the other oxter, [122] from the Abbey to the parish kirk; and by the said Richard and another servant, lifted up to the pulpit, where he behoved to lean at his first entry; but before he had done with his sermon, he was so active and vigorous that he was like to _ding that pulpit in blads_, [123] and fly out of it!'[124] And the impact on the mind of the youthful Melville was scarcely less than that on the pulpit. He had his 'pen and little book, ' and for the first half hour of Knox's sermon, took down 'such things as I could comprehend'; but when the preacher 'entered to the application of his text he made me so to _grue_[125] and tremble that I could not hold a pen to write!'[126]

But his day was rapidly moving to its close; and Knox, without waitingfor his return to Edinburgh, now wrote his Will. In it, after anunexpectedly mild address to the Papists, and a prophecy (which was notfulfilled) that his death would turn out a worse thing for them than hislife, he turns to the other side, and in one striking paragraph sums upthe work that was now to close. 

 'To the faithful I protest, that God, by my mouth, be I never so abject, has shewn to you His truth in all simplicity. None I have corrupted; none I have defrauded; merchandise have I not made (to God's glory I write) of the glorious Evangel of Jesus Christ. But according to the measure of the grace granted unto me, I have divided the sermon [word] of truth into just parts: beating down the pride of the proud in all that did declare their rebellion against God, according as God in His law gives to me yet testimony; and raising up the consciences troubled with the knowledge of their own sins, by the declaring of Jesus Christ, the strength of His death, and the mighty operation of His resurrection in the hearts of the faithful. '

When (still before leaving St Andrews) he publishes his last book, hededicates it to the faithful 'that God of His mercy shall appoint tofight after me;' and he adds, 'I heartily salute and take my good-nightof all the faithful of both realms ... For as the world is weary of me, so am I of it. ' In those darkening days, even when he is merely to writehis subscription, it is 'John Knox, with my dead hand but glad heart. 'For in this inevitable anti-climax of failing life, Knox found hiscompensations not in the world, nor even in the Church. When he returnedto Edinburgh, he had become unable for pastoral work. 'All worldlystrength, yea, even in things spiritual, ' he writes to his expectedcolleague, 'decays, and yet never shall the work of God decay.... Visitme, that we may confer together on heavenly things: for, in earth, thereis no stability, except in the Kirk of Jesus Christ, ever fighting underthe cross. Haste, ere you come too late. ' His colleague hurried fromAberdeen to Edinburgh, and at his induction Knox appeared and spoke oncemore in public. But it was the last time, and at the close of theservice the whole congregation accompanied the failing steps of theirminister down to the Netherbow. And from that 9th November 1572 he neverleft his house. 

 * * * * *

We have at least two accounts of his death--one in Latin from acolleague, one in Scots by his old servitor and secretary; and thelatter seems to have the merit of admiring and indiscriminatingfaithfulness. It is often said that such death-bed narratives areworthless, unless judged by the light thrown upon them from theprevious life. It is true. Yet Death, too, is a great critic; and, atleast when that previous life has included a problem, (as we havethought to be the case here), it may be well before we volunteer averdict to listen to _his_ summing up. It may finally divide, or it mayreunite, the inward and outward elements which have co-existed in thelife. And it may at least reveal which of them was the ruling andradical characteristic. For while Knox had long been a beacon-light toScotland, we have had reason to think that the flame was first kindledin this man's own soul. But now that the fuel which fed it is withdrawn, will that flame sink into the socket? Will it flicker out, now that theairs which fanned it have become still? How will it behave in the chillthat falls from those winnowing wings?

The day after Knox sickened he gave one of his servants twenty shillingsabove his fee, with the words, 'Thou wilt never get no more from me inthis life. ' Two days after, his mind wandered; and he wished to go tochurch 'to preach on the resurrection of Christ. ' Next day he wasbetter; and when two friends called he ordered a hogshead of wine to bepierced, and urged them to partake, for their host 'would not tarryuntil it was all drunk. ' On Monday, the 17th, he asked the elders anddeacons of his church, with the ministers of Edinburgh and Leith, tomeet with him; and in solemn and affectionate words, nearly the samewith those above quoted from his will, reviewed his ministry and tookleave of them all. But here too trouble from his past awaited him. Hehad not long before accused from the pulpit Maitland of Lethington, nowin the Castle, of having said that 'Heaven and hell are things I devisedto fray bairns;' and Maitland's demand for evidence or apology wasbrought to him. Knox had never been able to bear contradiction, especially when he was somewhat in the wrong; and those who wish toacquire new virtues must not postpone them to their last hours. Hisdefence was roundabout and ineffectual; and all were glad when he partedfrom these details of his long life-struggle, so that his friends, withtears, might take their last look of his worn and wearied face. Theeffort had been too much for him, and henceforth he never spoke but withgreat pain. Yet during the rest of the week he had many visitors. Oneafter another the nobles in Edinburgh, Lords Boyd, Drumlanrig, Lindsay, Ruthven, Glencairn, and Morton (then about to be elected Regent) hadinterviews with him. Of Morton he demanded whether he had been privy tothe murder of Darnley, and receiving an evasive assurance that he hadnot, he charged him to use his wealth and high place 'better in time tocome than you have done in time past. If so ye do, God shall bless andhonour you; but if ye do it not, God shall spoil you of these benefits, and your end shall be ignominy and shame. ' When so many men pressed in, women, devout and honourable, were of course also present. One ladycommenced to praise his works for God's cause: 'Tongue! tongue! lady, 'he broke in; 'flesh of itself is overproud, and needs no means to esteemitself. ' Gradually they all left, except his true friend Fairley ofBraid. Knox turned to him: 'Every one bids me good-night; but when willyou do it? I shall never be able to recompense you; but I commit you toOne that is able to do it--to the Eternal God. ' During the days thatfollowed, his weakness reduced him to ejaculatory sentences of prayer. 'Come, Lord Jesus. Sweet Jesus, into Thy hands I commend my spirit' ButScotland was still on his heart; and as Napoleon in his last hours washeard to mutter _tête d'armée_, so Knox's attendants caught the words, 'Be merciful, O Lord, to Thy Church, which Thou hast redeemed. Givepeace to this afflicted commonwealth. Raise up faithful pastors who willtake charge of Thy Church. Grant us, Lord, the perfect hatred of sin, both by the evidences of Thy wrath and mercy. ' Sometimes he wasconscious of those around, and seemed to address them. 'O serve the Lordin fear, and death shall not be terrible to you. Nay, blessed shalldeath be to those who have felt the power of the death of the onlybegotten Son of God. '

On his last Sabbath a more remarkable scene occurred. He had been lyingquiet during the afternoon, and suddenly exclaimed, 'If any be presentlet them come and see the work of God. ' His friend, Johnston ofElphinstone, was summoned from the adjacent church, and on his arrivalKnox burst out, 'I have been these two last nights in meditation on thetroubled Church of God, the spouse of Jesus Christ, despised of theworld, but precious in His sight. I have called to God for her, and havecommitted her to her head, Jesus Christ. I have been fighting againstSatan, who is ever ready to assault. Yea, I have fought againstspiritual wickedness in heavenly things, and have prevailed. I have beenin heaven and have possession. I have tasted of the heavenly joys wherepresently I am. ' Gradually this rapture of retrospection and assurancewore itself down, with the help of recitation by the dying man of theCreed and the Lord's Prayer--Knox pausing over the clause 'Our Father, 'to ejaculate, 'Who can pronounce so holy words?'

Next day, Monday, 24 November, 1572, was his last on earth. His threemost intimate friends sat by his bedside. Campbell of Kinyeancleughasked him if he had any pain. 'It is no painful pain, ' he said; 'butsuch a pain as shall soon, I trust, put an end to the battle. ' To thisfriend he left in charge his wife, whom later of the day he asked toread him the fifteenth chapter to the Corinthians. When it was finished, 'Now for the last [time], ' he said, 'I commend my soul, spirit, andbody' (and as he spoke he touched three of his fingers) 'into Thy hands, O Lord. ' Later of the day he called to his wife again, 'Go read where Icast my first anchor!' She turned to the seventeenth chapter of John, and followed it up with part of a sermon of Calvin on the Epistle to theEphesians. It seems to have been after this that he fell into a moaningslumber. All watched around him. Suddenly he woke, and being asked whyhe sighed, said that he had been sustaining a last 'assault of Satan. 'Often before had he tempted him with allurements, and urged him todespair. Now he had sought to make him feel as if he had merited heavenby his faithful ministry. 'But what have I that I have not received?Wherefore, [127] I give thanks to my God, through Jesus Christ, who hathbeen pleased to give me the victory; and I am persuaded that the temptershall not again attack me, but that within a short time I shall, withoutany great pain of body or anguish of mind, exchange this mortal andmiserable life for a blessed immortality through Jesus Christ. ' Duringthe hours which followed he lay quite still, and they delayed readingthe evening prayer till past ten o'clock, thinking he was asleep. Whenit was finished, his physician asked him if he had heard the prayers. 'Would to God, ' he answered, 'that you and all men had heard them as Ihave heard them; I praise God for that heavenly sound. ' As eleveno'clock drew on he gave a deep sigh, and they heard the words, 'Now itis come. ' His servant, Richard Bannatyne, drew near, and called upon himto think upon the comfortable promises of Christ which he had so oftendeclared to others. Knox was already speechless, but his servant pleadedfor one sign that he heard the words of peace. As if collecting hiswhole strength, he lifted up his right hand heavenwards, and sighingtwice, peacefully expired. 

 * * * * *

Such a life had such a close. 

[118] 'Works, ' ii. 362. 

[119] Sir Peter Young's letter to Beza, 13th Nov. 1579. --'Life of Knox, 'by Hume Brown, ii. 323. 

[120] That is, the Craig Dhu or Black Rock. So the Calton Crags werecalled, which now look green amid surrounding buildings, but which thenwere a dark and frowning patch in a semicircle of green hill thatstretched from St Cuthberts to Holyrood. 

[121] Slowly and warily. 

[122] Armpit. 

[123] Smite it into shivers. 

[124] 'Autobiography and Diary, ' p. 33. 

[125] To grue = to thrill and shudder. 

[126] 'Autobiography and Diary, ' p. 26. 

[127] It will be recognised that this sentence is translated from theLatin. 

INDEX

Acts of Parliament, 24, 80, 99, 100, 114. 

Affliction, Treatise on, 59. 

Alnwick, Cupboard at, 55. 

Alva, 137. 

Anabaptists, 72, 102. 

Anchor, Knox's first, 30, 37, 39, 47, 153. 

Apostolic Order of Worship, 72. 

Appellation, 77. 

Appropriations, 21, 22. 

Archbishop of St Andrews, 140, 141. 

Argyll, Earl of, 130. 

Aristocracy, Scottish, 20-22, 73, 77, 115. 

Armenians, 68. 

Arran, Earl of, 119. 

Assembly, General, 107, 115, 140. 

Assurance, 28, 29, 30. 

Auditors bound to support, 112, 113. 

Autobiography, 9, 12, 13, 28, 31, 53. 

Balnaves, 36. 

Band, 73, 74, 90, 139. 

Bannatyne, Richard, 153. 

Bartholomew, St, 146. 

Beaton, David (Cardinal), 18, 24, 26, 38. 

Beaton, James (Archbishop), 17. 

Beggars' Warning, 82, 108. 

Benefices, 107, 112. 

Berwick, 49, 66. 

Beza, 10. 

Bible, 24, 30, 33, 72, 125. 

Bishopric offered Knox, 49. 

Bishops, The R. C. , 93. 

'Bishops and Kings, ' 71. 

Blast (against Women's Regimen), 120. 

Books in Knox's Library, 145. 

Borgia, 12. 

Bothwell, 139, 140, 141. 

Bothwellhaugh, Bowes, Mrs, 53-61. 

Bowes, Marjory, (Mrs Knox, ) 49-51. 

Bowes, Sir R. , 50. 

Brown, Dr Hume, 10, 21, 39, 68, 110, 144. 

Browning, 57. 

Buchanan, George, 19, 24. 

Bullinger, 68. 

Bunyan in Bedford, 55. 

Burghs, 75. 

Burton, J. Hill, 45. 

Calvin, 30, 43, 51, 67, 68. 

Campbell of Kinyeancleugh, 152. 

Cannon-ball, 63. 

Carlyle, 37, 38, 39, 46, 94. 

Catechism Palatinate, 30. 

Catholic system, 14-24, 23. 

Call, Knox's, 28, 31, 32, Chap. II. (25-47). 

Cecil, 87, 92, 143. 

Ceremonies, 36. 

Charities, 104. 

Chatelherault, Duke of, 51. 

Comfort, Knox's lack of, 53. 

Commonalty, Letter to, 77, 78. 

'Common Man, The, ' 43, 48, 78, 94. 

Compensations, 149. 

'Conditions, ' Knox's, 63. 

Confession of 1560, 92-97, 117, 123. 

Confession of Wishart (First Helvetic), 30, 36, 38, 97, 102, 103, 109. 

Confession, Knox's personal, 28, 140. 

Confessions, Change in, 97. 

Confessions of Protestantism, 95, 101. 

'Congregation, The, ' 74. 

Conscience, 86, 90, 124, 126, 135. 

Constantine, 14. 

Constitutionalism, 19, 137. 

Consuetude, 55. 

Conversion, Knox's, 9, 27, Chap. II. (25-47). 

Convocation of Lieges, 135. 

Coronation Oath, 100. 

Coronation Sermon, 142. 

Corpuscle, 147. 

Council, General Church, 15-17, 18. 

Council, Provincial Church, 84. 

'Country, What I have been to my, ' 143. 

Creed (_see_ Confession). 

Crisis in life, Chap. II. 

Crock, Le, 146. 

Darnley, 41, 136, 138-141. 

Death of Knox, 149-154. 

'Deliberate Mind, ' 27-31, 140. 

Desertion, 59. 

Dialogues with Queen Mary, 123-134. 

Discipline, Book of, 106, 108, 109-115. 

Dispensation for Bothwell's Marriage, 141. 

Donations, 104. 

Dow Craig, 147. 

Dundee, 75. 

Dyspepsia, 63. 

Edinburgh, 61, 69, 86, 88, Chapter VII. (144-154). 

Edinburgh, Treaty of, 91. 

Ejectment, Summons of, 83, 84. 

Eleazar Knox, 51. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 82, 92, 119, 120, 131, 138. 

Endowments, 20-22, 83, 104, 105, 111, 114. 

England, 20, 21, 22, 24, 38, 41, 66, 67, 86, 141. 

Establishment, 14, 23, 100. 

Evangel, 28-31, 34, 39, 43, 44, 46, 69, 94, 148. 

Excommunication, 100. 

Face, Knox's, 146. 

Fairley of Braid, 151. 

'Familiarity, ' never broken, 63. 

'Fearfulness' of Knox, 33. 

Fergus the First, 19. 

France, 82, 117, 118, 143. 

Francis II. , 118. 

Frankfort, 67. 

Friars, The, 80, 83. 

Galleys, 32, 65, 66. 

Gallicanism, 15, 16, 17. 

Geneva, 68. 

Genius, Knox's, 45. 

Gentlewoman's face, 127. 

Gerson, Chancellor, 16. 

Golden Rose, 128. 

Granvelle, Cardinal, 128, 137. 

Gravel, 63. 

Haddington, 10, 12, 14, 19, 25. 

Hamilton, Patrick, 18, 24, 29. 

Hebrew, 145. 

Helvetic (First) Confession, 30, 36, 38, 97, 102, 103, 109. 

'History of Reformation, ' 45, 140. 

Hospitals, 83. 

House, Knox's, 144, 145. 

Humanism, 16, 20, 23. 

Huntly, Earl of, 139, 145. 

Idolatry, 40, 67, 77, 102, 103, 122. 

Independence of Church, 94, 96, 98, 115. 

'Indifferency, ' 70, 71, 81, 86. 

Individualism, 43, 56. 

Induration, 126. 

Infidelity, 56, 60, 95, 133. 

Inner Life, Knox's, Chapters II. And III. 

Intolerance, 14, 23, 24, 26, 32, 99-103. 

Irrevocableness of Call, 33. 

James V. , 24. 

Jesuit (Tyrie), 96. 

Johnston of Elphinstone, 152. 

Jurisdiction, 99, 100, 114. 

Kirk of Field, 141. 

Kirkaldy of Grange, 42, 142. 

Laing, David, 26. 

Lawson, James, 10, 11. 

Leadership, Weight of, 34. 

Legislation, 14, 24, Chap. V. (95-116). 

Leith, 88, 147. 

Lethington, 42, 89, 131, 135, 142, 150. 

Letters of Knox (private), Chap, III. 

Lindsay, Sir David, 31. 

Lindsay, Lord, 93. 

Locke, Mrs, 61-63. 

Loire, 39, 65. 

Longniddry, 26, 31. 

Luther, 17, 18, 20, 36, 43. 

M'Crie, Dr Thomas, 144. 

M'Cunn, Mrs, 39. 

Macphail, Dr Jas. C, 113. 

'Magistrate, The, ' 35, 36, 67, 68, 73, 77, 97, 103, 117, 120, 124. 

Mair (_see_ Major). 

Maitland (_see_ Lethington). 

Major, John, 10, 15-19, 22. 

Maries, The Four, 52, 63. 

Marischal, The Earl, 93. 

Marmion, 49. 

'Marriage, My, ' 133. 

Marvels, 40-44. 

Mary of Lorraine, Queen Regent, 69-71, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 90, 91, 126. 

Mary, Queen of Scots, 42, 52, 80, 82, Chap. VI. (117-143). 

Mary, Queen of England, 82. 

Mass, The, 67, 69, 99, 122, 127, 129. 

'Meditation or Prayer, ' 27-31. 

Melancholy, Knox's, 63. 

Melville, James, 148. 

Mitchell, Dr A. F. , 109. 

Moray, Earl of, 51, 122, 131, 132, 137, 142. 

Morton, Earl of, 33, 139, 151. 

Movements, Leadership of, 34. 

Nathaniel Knox, 51. 

National Churches, 15-18. 

'Need of all, ' of Knox, 63. 

Netherbow, 145, 147, 149. 

Norham Castle, 48, 49. 

Notary, 11. 

Ochiltree, Lord, 52. 

Organisation of Church, 35, 110, 115, 116. 

Palatinate Catechism, 30. 

Parentage of Knox, 10. 

Paris, University of, 15-18. 

Parishes, 20-22. 

Parliament, 92, 94, 98, 138. 

Pasquil, 70. 

Patrimony of the Church, 106, 114, 115. 

Patrimony of the Poor, 83, 107. 

Persecution, 14, 23, 24, 26, 32, 35, 43, 57, 74, 76, 99-103. 

Perth, 85. 

Poor, The, 83, 106-108, 111, 115. 

Pope, The, 11, 12, 15, 18, 22, 23, 99, 128. 

Portraits, 10, 11. 

Prayer-Book, English, 67. 

Prayer, Treatise on, 66. 

Preaching, 20, 41, 75, 86, 89, 94, 110, 132, 138, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148. 

Predictions, 40-44. 

Priest, Knox as, 11, 12, 13. 

Principles, Fundamental, of Knox, 35, 36, 146. 

Private Life, Chap. III. 

'Prophesyings, ' 110, 144. 

Prophet, Knox as, 39-44. 

'Proud Mind, ' 126. 

Puritanism of Knox, 26, 35, 36, 67, 68, 96. 

Radicalism, 19, 103, 105, 110, 115, 124, 133, 135, 137. 

Randolph (English Ambassador), 90, 92, 93, 103, 127, 128. 

Ratification of Creed, 117. 

'Reconciliation, Articles of, ' 75. 

Regimen of Women, 63, 120. 

Regular Priests, 21, 22. 

Renaissance, 20, 23. 

Repentance, 58. 

Reticence of Knox, 11, 12, 13. 

Risks of the Reformation, 34, 35. 

Rizzio, 136, 137, 139. 

Rouen, 65. 

Rough, John, 31, 32. 

Ruthven, Lord, 130, 139. 

Sacerdotalism, 14. 

Sandilands, Sir James, 117. 

Scholasticism, 14, 16, 18. 

Schools in Scotland, 110, 111. 

Scriptures, The, 24, 30, 35, 72, 125. 

Secrets of God's Counsel, 42. 

Self-torture, 58. 

Shakespeare, Priests in, 11. 

Simony, 22. 

Sir John Knox, 11 (_Note_). 

Spain, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137. 

St Andrews, 10, 26, 31, 65, 85, 142, 148. 

St Giles, 144. 

Statesman, Knox as, 45, 46, 110, 111, 114, 115. 

Statutes, 24, 80, 99, 100, 114. 

Stewart, Lord James (_see_ Moray). 

Stewart, Margaret (Mrs Knox), 52. 

Stirling, 89, 142. 

Sustentation, 112, 113. 

Sword, The Civil, 124, 129. 

Syllogism, 67, 103. 

Sympathy of Knox, 13, 26, 53-64. 

Testamentary Charities, 104. 

Thomassin, 107. 

Teinds, 21, 22, 105-108, 112-115. 

Tithes (_see_ Teinds). 

Toleration, 14, 18, 23, 24, 35, 74, 76, 79, 80, 81, 86, 90, 91, 98-103, 112, 113, 114, 121, 126, 129. 

Trent, Council of, 131. 

Turing, or Trunk Close, 145. 

'Use themselves Godly, ' 75, 81, 129. 

Vocation, Knox's, 28, 31, 32, Chap. II. 

Wallace, Sir William, 19. 

'Wholesome Counsel, ' Letter of, 71, 72. 

Will, Knox's, 42, 51, 148. 

Willock, 91. 

Window, 29, 47. 

Wishart, George, 25, 26, 30, 36, 38, 97, 102, 109. 

Women Friends, Chap. III. 

Young, Sir Peter, 10, 146. 

 * * * * *

Transcriber's notes:

 Obvious typographical and other printer errors and misspellings have been corrected. Archaic spellings have been retained. 

 Footnotes are placed at the end of the chapter in which they appear. 

 In the Index, page 1 as a reference for "Reticence of Knox" has been changed to page 11 since there is no page 1, but page 11 does refer to the subject of Knox's reticence. 

 Page 141, omitted in the Index as a reference for "Kirk of Field", has been added. 

 Omission in the Index of a page reference for "Bothwellhaugh" has been retained as there is no mention of "Bothwellhaugh" in the text. 

 The date 1563 on page 47 is a best guess since the final number of the date is completely unreadable due to an ink blot. 

 The names Campbell of Kinzencleuch and Kirkcaldy of Grange have been changed to Campbell of Kinyeancleugh and Kirkaldy of Grange in the Index to agree with spelling in the text.