not venturing upon more than an apologetic | occupied by the regent's soldiers, was open disapproval. With the most unaccountable to them to come and go. Taking advantage perversity they leave out of sight, or in the of this opportunity, Knox was often with shade, the crimes of Beaton; and seeing his boys in the church, and used to lecture only that he was put to death by men who and examine them there. It attracted the had no legal authority to execute him, they notice of the townspeople, who wished to can see in their action nothing but an outhear more of the words of such a man. break of ferocity. We cannot waste our The castle party themselves, too, finding time in arguing the question. The estates that they had no common person among of Scotland not only passed an amnesty for them, joined in the same desire: and asall parties concerned, but declared that they being a priest-there could be no technical had deserved well of their country in being objection to his preaching, by a general contrue to the laws of it, when the legitimate sent he was pressed to come forward in the guardians of the laws forgot their duty; pulpit. The modern associations with the and, surely, any judgment which will con- idea of preaching will hardly give us an idea sider the matter without temper, will arrive of what it was when the probable end of it at the same conclusion. As to Mr. Hume's was the stake or the gibbet; and although "horror and amusement" at Knox's narra- the fear of stake or gibbet was not likely to tive: if we ask ourselves what a clear-eyed have influenced Knox, yet the responsibility sound-hearted man ought to have felt on of the office in his eyes was, at least, as such an occasion, we shall feel neither one great as the danger of it, and he declined to nor the other. Is the irony so out of place?"thrust himself where he had no vocation." If such a man, living such a life, and calling himself a priest and a cardinal, be not an object of irony, we do not know what irony is for. Nor can we tell where a man who believes in a just God, could find fitter matter for exultation, than in the punishment which struck down a powerful criminal, whose position appeared to secure him from it. The regent, who had been careless for Wishart, was eager to revenge Beaton. The little "forlorn hope of the Reformation" was blockaded in the castle; and Knox, who, as Wishart's nearest friend, was open to suspicion, and who is not likely to have concealed his opinion of what had been done, although he had not been made privy to the intention, was before long induced to join them. His life was in danger, and he had thought of retiring into Germany; but the Lord of Ormiston, whose sons were under his care, and who was personally connected with the party in the castle, persuaded him to take refuge there, carrying his pupils with him. Up to this time he had never preached, nor had he thought of preaching; but cast in the front of the battle as he was now, the time was come when he was to know his place, and was to take it. The siege was indefinitely protracted. The castle was strong, and supplies were sent by sea from England. The garrison was strengthened by adventurers, who, for one motive or another, gathered in there, and the regent could make no progress towards reducing them. The town of St. Andrews was generally on their side, and, except when it was On which there followed a very singular scene in the chapel of the castle. In the eyes of others his power was his vocation, and it was necessary to bring him to a consciousness of what was evident to every one but himself. On Sunday, after the sermon, John Rough, the chaplain, turned to him as he was sitting in the body of the chapel, and calling him by his name, addressed him thus: "Brother, ye shall not be offended, albeit, that I speak unto you that which I have in charge, even from all these that are here present, which is this. In the name of God, and of his son Jesus Christ, and in the name of those that presently call you by my mouth, I charge you that ye refuse not this holy vocation; but as ye tender the glory of God, the increase of Christ's kingdom, the edification of your brethren, that ye take upon you the public office and charge of preaching, even as ye look to avoid God's heavy displeasure, and desire that he shall multiply his grace with you." Then, turning to the rest of the assembly, he asked whether he had spoken well. They all answered that he had, and that they approved. "Whereat, the said John, abashed, burst forth in the most abundant tears, and withdrew himself to his chamber. His countenance and behavior from that day till the day that he was compelled to present himself to the public place and trouble of his heart, for no man saw any of preaching, did sufficiently declare the grief signs of mirth in him, neither yet had he pleasure to accompany any man many days together." Again, we ask, is this the ambitious dema- | gleaming in the early sunlight, and all which gogue-the stirrer-up of sedition-the enemy was left standing of the Castle of St. Andrews. of order and authority? Men have strange "I know it," he answered; "yes, I know it. ways of accounting for what prerlexes them. I see the steeple of that place where God first This was the call of Knox. It may seem a opened my mouth in public to his glory, and light matter to us, who have learnt to look on I shall not depart this life till my tongue again preaching as a routine operation in which only glorify his Name in that place.' Most touchby an effort of thought we are able to stimu- ing, and most beautiful. We need not belate an interest in ourselves, To him, as his lieve, as some enthusiastic people believed, after history showed, it implied a life-battle that there was anything preternatural in such with the powers of evil, a stormy tempestu- a conviction. Love, faith, and hope, the great ous career, with no prospect of rest before Christian virtues, will account for it. Love the long rest of the grave. kept faith and hope alive in him, and he was sure that the right would prosper, and he hoped that he would live to see it. It is but a poor philosophy which, by comparison of dates and labored evidence that the words were spoken in one year and fulfilled so many years after, would materialize so fine a piece of nature into a barren miracle. The remainder of this St. Andrews business is briefly told:-At the end of fifteen months the castle was taken by the French in the name of the regent; and the garrison, with John Knox among them, carried off as prisoners to the galleys, thenceforward the greater number of them to disappear from history. Let us look once more at them before they take their leave. They were very young men, some of them under twenty; but in them, and in that action of theirs, lay the germ of the after Reformation. It was not, as we said, a difference in speculative opinion, like that which now separates sect from sect, which lay at the heart of that great movement; the Scotch intellect was little given to subtlety, and there was nothing of sect or sectarianism in the matter. But as Cardinal Beaton was the embodiment of everything which was most wicked, tyrannical, and evil in the dominant Catholicism, so the conspiracy of these young men to punish him was the antecedent of the revolt of the entire nation against it, when the pollution of its presence could no longer be borne. They had done their part, and for their reward they were swept away into exile, with prospects sufficiently cheerless. They bore their fortune with something more than fortitude, yet again with no stoic grimness or fierceness; but, as far as we can follow them, with an easy, resolute cheerfulness. Attempts were made to force them to hear mass, but with poor effect, for their tongues were saucy, and could not be restrained. When the Salve Regina was sung on board the galley, the Scotch prisoners clapt on their bonnets. The story of the painted Regina which Knox, or one of them, pitched overboard is well-known. Another story of which we hear less, is still more striking. They had been at sea all night, and Knox, who was weak and ill, was fainting over his oar in the gray of the morning, when James Balfour, as the sun rose, touched his arm, and pointing over the water, asked him if he knew where he was. There was the white church-tower, and the white houses, Such were the conspirators of St. Andrews, of whom we now take our leave to follow the fortunes of Knox. He remained in the galleys between three and four years, and was then released at the intercession of the English Government. At that time he was, of course, only known to them as one of the party who had been at the castle; but he was no sooner in England than his value was at once perceived, and employment was found for him. By Edward's own desire he was appointed one of the preachers before the court; and a London rectory was offered to him, which, however, he was obliged to refuse. England, after all, was not the place for him; nor the Church of England, such as, for political reasons, it was necessary to constitute that Church. Indeed he never properly understood the English character. A Church which should seem to have authority, and yet which should be a powerless instrument of the State; a rule of faith apparently decisive and consistent, and yet so little decisive, and so little consistent, that, to Protestants it could speak as Protestant, and to Catholics as Catholic; which should at once be vague, and yet definite; diffident, and yet peremptory; and yet which should satisfy the religious necessities of a serious and earnest people; such a midge-madge as this (as Cecil described it, when, a few years later, it was in the process of reconstruction under his own eye), suited the genius of the English, but to the reformers of other countries it was a hopeless perplexity. John Knox could never find himself at home in it. The "tolerabiles ineptiæ" at which Calvin smiled, to him were not tolerable; and he shrank from identifying himself with so seemingly unreal a system, by ac fully, but we cannot think that it was for the interest of England that Knox, who had formed his notions of Catholicism from his experience of Scotland, should determine how much or how little of it should be retained in the English polity. Sooner or later it would have involved the country in a civil war, the issue of which, in the critical temper of the rest of Europe, could not have been other than doubtful; and it has been at all times the instinctive tendency of English statesmen to preserve the very utmost of the past which admits of preservation. The Via Media Anglicana was a masterpiece of statesmanship, when we consider the emergencies which it was constructed to meet; the very features in it which constitute its imbecility as an enduring establishment, being whatespecially adapted it to the exigencies of a peculiar crisis. A better scene for Knox's labors was found at Berwick, where he could keep up his communication with Scotland, and where the character of the English more nearly resembled that of his own people. Here he remained two years, and appealed afterwards, with no little pride, to what he had done in reining in the fierce and lawless border-thieves, and the soldiers of the English garrison, whose wild life made them almost as rough as the borderers themselves. For the time that he was there, he says himself, there was neither outrage nor license in Berwick. But he had no easy work of it, and whenever in his letters he speaks of his life, he calls it his "battle." cepting any of its higher offices. The force | of his character, however, brought him into constant contact with the ruling powers; and here the extraordinary faculty which he possessed of seeing into men's characters becomes first conspicuous. At no time of his life, as far as we have means of knowing, was he ever mistaken in the nature of the persons with whom he had to deal; and he was not less remarkable for the fearlessness with which he would say what he thought of them. If we wish to find the best account of Edward's ministers, we must go to the surviving fragments of Knox's sermons for it, which were preached in their own presence. His duty as a preacher he supposed to consist, not in delivering homilies against sin in general, but in speaking to this man and to that man, to kings, and queens, and dukes, and earls, of their own sinful acts as they sate below him; and they all quailed before him. We hear much of his power in the pulpit, and this was the secret of it. Never, we suppose, before or since, have the ears of great men grown so hot upon them, or such words been heard in the courts of princes. "I am greatly afraid," he said once, " that Ahitophel is counsellor; and Shebnah is scribe, controller, and treasurer." And Ahitophel and Shebnah were both listening to his judgment of them : the first in the person of the then omnipotent Duke of Northumberland; and the second in that of Lord Treasurer Paulet Marquis of Winchester. The force which then must have been in him to have carried such a practice through, he, a poor homeless, friendless exile, without stay or strength, but what was in his own heart, must have been enormous. Nor is it less remarkable that the men whom he so roughly handled were forced to bear with him. Indeed they more than bore with him, for the Duke of Northumberland proposed to make him Bishop of Rochester, and had an interview with him on the subject, which, however, led to no conclusion; the duke having to complain that "he had found Mr. Knox neither grateful nor pleaseable:" the meaning of which was, that Knox, knowing that he was a bad, hollow-hearted man, had very uncourteously told But upheld as he was by the personal regard of the young king, his influence was every day increasing, and it was probably in consequence of this that the further developments of Protestantism, which we know to have been in contemplation at the close of Edward's reign, were resolved upon. It is impossible to say how far such measures could have been carried out success him so. At Berwick, nevertheless, he found but a brief resting-place, and on the death of Edward, and the re-establishment of Catholicism, he had to choose whether he would fly again, or remain and die. He was a man too marked and too dangerous to hope for escape, while as an alien he had no relations in England to be offended by his death. In such a state of things we can scarcely wonder that he hesitated. Life was no pleasant place for him. He saw the whole body of the noblemen and gentlemen of England apostatize without an effort; and the Reformation gone, as it seemed, like a dream-Scotland was wholly French-the Queen in Paris, and betrothed to the Dauphin; with the persecution of Protestantism in full progress under the Archbishop of St. Andrews. And though his faith never failed him, the world appeared, for a time, to be given over to evil; martyrs, he thought, were wanted, "and he could never die in a more noble quarrel;" it was better that he should stay where he was, and 66 end his battle." assaulted, yea, infected and corrupted with more gross sins-that is, my wicked nature desired the favor, the estimation, the praise of men. Against which albeit that some time the Spirit of God did move me to fight, and earnestly did stir me-God knoweth I lie not-to sob and lament for those imperfections, yet never ceased they to trouble me, and so privily and craftily that I could not perceive myself to be wounded till vainglory had almost gotten the upper hand." And again, with still more searching selfreproof: In this purpose, however, he was overruled | pressly by his name, thou shalt die the death; for by his friends, who, "partly by admonition, I find Jeremiah the prophet to have done so, and partly by tears, constrained him to obey, and not only he, but also Elijah, Elisha, Micah, Amos, give place to the fury and rage of Satan." Daniel, Christ Jesus himself. I accuse none but He escaped into France, and thence into myself; the love that I did bear to this my wicked carcase, was the chief cause that I was not faithGermany; and after various adventures, and ful or fervent enough in that behalf. I had no persecuted from place to place, he found a will to provoke the hatred of men. I would not welcome and a home at last with Calvin, at be seen to proclaim manifest war against the maGeneva. While in England he had been ennifest wicked, whereof unfeignedly I ask my God mercy." gaged to the daughter of a Mr. Bowes, a "And besides this, I was gentleman of family in the north, and with Mrs. Bowes, the mother, he now kept up a constant correspondence. These letters are the most complete exhibition of the real nature of Knox which remain to us. We cannot say what general readers will think of them. It will depend upon their notions of what human life is, and what the meaning is of their being placed in this world. It might be thought that, flying for his life into a strange country, without friends and without money, he would say something, in writing to the mother of his intended wife, of the way in which he had fared She, too, we might fancy, would be glad to know that he was not starving; or, if he was, to know even that, in order that she might contrive some means of helping him. And afterwards, when he had found employment and a home at Geneva, we look for something about his prospects in life, his probable means of maintaining a family, and so on. To any one of ourselves in such a position, these things would be at least of some importance; but they were of none either to him or to his correspondent. The business of life, as they understood it, was to overcome the evil which they found in themselves; and their letters are mutual confessions of shortcomings and temptations. When Knox thinks of England, it is not to regret his friends or his comforts there, but only to reproach himself for neglected opportunities : "Some will ask," he writes, "why I did flee assuredly I cannot tell-but of one thing I am sure, that the fear of death was not the cause of my fleeing. My prayer is that I may be restored to the battle again." It would not be thought that, after he had dared the anger of the Duke of Northumberland, he could be accused of want of bol iness or plainness of speech, and yet, in his own judgment of himself, he had been a mere coward: "This day my conscience accuseth me that I spake not so plainly as my duty was to have done, for I ought to have said to the wicked man ex "I have sometimes been in that security that I felt not dolor for sin, neither yet displeasure against myself for any iniquity in which I did offend; but rather my vain heart did then flatter myself (I write the truth to my own confusion)thou hast suffered great trouble for professing delivering thee from that most cruel bondage. He Christ's truth; God has done great things for thee, has placed thee in a most honorable vocation, and thy labors are not without fruit; therefore thou oughtest rejoice and give praises to God. Oh, mother, this was a subtle serpent who could thus pour in venom, I not perceiving it." God help us all, we say, if this is sin. And yet, if we think of it, is not such self-abnegation the one indispensable necessity for all men, and most of all for a reformer of the world, if his reformation is to be anything except a change of one evil for a worse. Who can judge others who has not judged himself? or who can judge for others while his own small self remains at the bottom of his heart, as the object for which he is mainly concerned? For a reformer there is no sin more fatal; and unless, like St. Paul, he can be glad, if necessary, to be made even "anathema for his brethren," he had better leave reforming alone. The years which Knox spent at Geneva were, probably, the happiest in his life. Essentially a peace-loving man, as all good men are, he found himself, for the first time, in a sound and wholesome atmosphere. Mrs. Bowes and her daughter, after a time, were able to join him there; and, with a quiet congregation to attend to, and with Calvin for a friend, there was nothing left for him to de sire which such a man as he could expect life their differences with the regent on the spot, to yield. "The Geneva Church," he said, and Knox was summoned before the Bishops' "is the most perfect school of Christ that Court at Edinburgh to answer for himself. ever was on earth since the days of the apos- It was just ten years since they had caught tles." And let us observe his reason for sayWishart and burned him; but things were ing so. "In other places," he adds, "I con- changed now, and when Knox appeared in fess Christ to be truly preached, but manners Edinburgh he was followed by a retinue of and religion so sincerely reformed I have not hundreds of armed gentlemen and noblemen. yet seen in any other place besides." He The bishops shrank from a collision, and did could have been well contented to have lived not prefer their charge; and, on the day out his life at Geneva; as, long after, he which had been fixed for his trial, he looked wistfully back to it, and longed to re- preached in Edinburgh to the largest Proturn and die there. But news from Scotland testant concourse which had ever assembled soon disturbed what was but a short breath- there. He was not courting rebellion, but ing time. The Marian persecution had filled so large a majority of the population of Scotthe Lowlands with preachers, and the shift- land were now on the reforming side, that he ing politics of the time had induced the court felt-and who does not feel with him?to connive at, if not to encourage them. The that, in a free country, the lawful rights of queen-mother had manoeuvred the regency the people in a matter touching what they into her own hand, but, in doing so, had ofconceived to be their most sacred duty were fended the Hamiltons, who were the most not to be set aside and trampled upon any powerful of the Catholic families; and, at the more by an illegal and tyrannical power. In same time, the union of England and Spain the name of the people he now drew up his had obliged the French court to temporize celebrated petition to the queen regent, begwith the Huguenots. The Catholic vehe- ging to be heard in his defence, protesting mence of the Guises was neutralized by the against the existing ecclesiastical system, and broader sympathies of Henry the Second, the wickedness which had been engendered who, it was said, "would shake hands with by it. It was written firmly but respectfully, the devil, if he could gain a purpose by it;" and the regent would have acted more wiseand thus, in France and in Scotland, which ly if she had considered longer the answer was now wholly governed by French influwhich she made to it. She ran her eye over ence, the Protestants found everywhere a the pages, and turning to the Archbishop of temporary respite from ill usage. It was a Glasgow, who was standing near her, she shortlived anomaly; but in Scotland it lasted tossed it into his hands, saying, "Will it long enough to turn the scale, and give them please you, my lord, to read a pasquil ?" an advantage which was never lost again. At the end of 1555, John Knox ventured to reappear there; and the seed which had been scattered eight years before, he found growing over all the Lowlands. The noble lords now came about him; the old Earl of Argyle, Lord James Stuart, better known after as Earl of Murray, Lord Glencairn, the Erskines, and many others. It was no longer the poor commons and the townspeople; the whole nation appeared to be moving; much latent skepticism, no doubt, being quickened into conversion by the prospect of a share in the abbey-lands; but with abundance of real earnestness as well, which taught Knox what might really be hoped for. Knox himself, to whom, with an unconscious unanimity, they all looked for guidance, proceeded at once to organize them into form, and, as a first step, proposed that an oath should be taken by all who called themselves Protestants, never any more to attend the mass. So serious a step could not be taken without provoking notice; the Hamiltons patched up "Madam," wrote Knox, when he heard of it, "if ye no more esteem the admonition of God, nor the cardinals do the scoffing of pasquils, then He shall shortly send you messengers with whom ye shall not be able in that manner to jest." It is the constant misfortune of governments that they are never able to distinguish the movements of just national anger from the stir of superficial discontent. The sailor knows what to look for when the air is moaning in the shrouds; the fisherman sees the coming tempest in the heaving of the underroll; but governments can never read the signs of the times, though they are written in fire before their eyes. For the present it was thought better that Knox should leave Scotland while his friends in the meantime organized themselves more firmly. grave and serious people civil war is the most desperate of remedies, and by his remaining at this moment it would have been inevitably precipitated. He was no sooner gone than the Archbishop of St. Andrews again sum To a |