Andrew Lang

“ Suppose, for a moment, that in deference to the teaching of the Gospel, Knox had never called for a Jehu, but had ever denounced, by voice and pen, those murderous deeds of his own party which he celebrates as “godly facts,” he would have raised Protestantism to a moral pre-eminence. Dark pages of Scottish history might never have been written: the consciences of men might have been touched, and the cruelties of the religious conflict might have been abated. Many of them sprang from the fear of assassination. ”

“ To Knox’s opponent in controversy, Quentin Kennedy, the mass was “the blessed Sacrament of the Altar . . . which is one of the chief Sacraments whereby our Saviour, for the salvation of mankind, has appointed the fruit of His death and passion to be daily renewed and applied.” In this traditional view there is nothing unedifying, nothing injurious to the Christian life. But to Knox the wafer is an idol, a god “of water and meal,” “but a feeble and miserable god,” that can be destroyed “by a bold and puissant mouse.” “Rats and mice will desire no better dinner than white round gods enough.” ”

“ The perfections of Genevan Church discipline delighted him. “Manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any other place.” The genius of Calvin had made Geneva a kind of Protestant city state κατ' ευχην; a Calvinistic Utopia—everywhere the vigilant eyes of the preachers and magistrates were upon every detail of daily life. Monthly and weekly the magistrates and ministers met to point out each other’s little failings. Knox felt as if he were indeed in the City of God, and later he introduced into Scotland, and vehemently abjured England to adopt, the Genevan “discipline.” ”

“ A passage in the message to the nobility displays the intense ardour of the convictions that were to be potent in the later history of the Kirk. That priests, by the prescription of fifteen centuries, should have persuaded themselves of their own power to damn men’s souls to hell, cut them off from the Christian community, and hand them over to the devil, is a painful circumstance. But Knox, from Perth, asserts that the same awful privilege is vested in the six or seven preachers of the nascent Kirk with the fire-new doctrine! ”

“ To some Catholics, Elizabeth: to Knox, Mary was as Jezebel, and might laudably be assassinated. In idolaters nothing can surprise us; when persecuted they, in their unchristian fashion, may retort with the dagger or the bowl. But that Knox should have frequently maintained the doctrine of death to religious opponents is a strange and deplorable circumstance. ”

“ Then he awoke to a passionate horror and hatred of his old routine of “mumbled masses,” of “rites of human invention,” whereof he had never known the poetry and the mystic charm. Had he known them, he could not have so denied and detested them. On the other hand, when once he had embraced the new ideas, Knox’s faith in them, or in his own form of them, was firm as the round world, made so fast that it cannot be moved. He had now a pou sto, whence he could, and did, move the world of human affairs. ”

“ The Mass was not “idolatry.” The analogy halts, like all analogies, but so, of course, and to fatal results, does Knox’s analogy between the foreign worships of Israel and the Mass. “She thinks not that idolatry, but good religion,” said Lethington to Knox once, speaking of Queen Mary’s Mass. “So thought they that offered their children unto Moloch,” retorted the reformer. Manifestly the Mass is, of the two, much more on a level with the “offering” of St. Paul than with human sacrifices to Moloch! ”

“ To us it may seem that the sudden denunciation of a Christian ceremony, even what may be deemed a perverted Christian ceremony, as sheer “idolatry,” equivalent to the worship of serpents, bulls, or of a foreign Baal in ancient Israel—was a step calculated to confuse the real issues and to provoke a religious war of massacre. Knox, we know, regarded extermination of idolaters as a counsel of perfection, though in the Christian scriptures not one word could be found to justify his position. He relied on texts about massacring Amalekites and about Elijah’s slaughter of the prophets of Baal. ”

“ The attempt of Charles I. to let “every man have his own tithes,” and to provide the preachers with a living wage, was one of the causes of the distrust of the King which culminated in the great Civil War. But Knox could not “recover for the Church her liberty and freedom, and that only for relief of the poor.” “We speak not for ourselves” the Book says, “but in favour of the poor, and the labourers defrauded . . . The Church is only bound to sustain and nourish her charges . . . to wit the Ministers of the Kirk, the Poor, and the teachers of youth.” ”

“ A faith not to be shaken, and enormous energy were the essential attributes of the Reformer. It is almost impossible to find an instance in which Knox allows that he may have been mistaken: d’avoir toujours raison was his claim. If he admits an error in details, it is usually an error of insufficient severity. He did not attack Northumberland or Mary Stuart with adequate violence; he did not disapprove enough of our prayer book; he did not hand a heretic over to the magistrates. ”

“ Doubt we nothing but that our church, and the true ministers of the same, have the power which our Master, Jesus Christ, granted to His apostles in these words, ‘Whose sins ye shall forgive, shall be forgiven, and whose sins ye shall retain, shall be retained’ . . . ” Men were to be finally judged by Omnipotence on the faith of what Willock, Knox, Harlaw, poor Paul Methuen, and the apostate Friar Christison, “trew ministeris,” thought good to decide! With such bugbears did Guthrie and his companions think, a century later, to daunt “the clear spirit of Montrose.” ”

“ Knox “wraps you all in idolatry, all in murder, all in one and the same iniquity,” except the actual Marian martyrs; those who “abstained from idolatry;” and those who “avoided the realm” or ran away. He had set one of the earliest examples of running away: to do so was easier for him than for family men and others who had “a stake in the country,” for which Knox had no relish. He is hardly generous in blaming all the persons who felt no more “ripe” for martyrdom than he did, yet stayed in England, where the majority were, and continued to be, Catholics. ”

“ Knox’s health was more or less undermined, while his spiritual temper was not mollified by nineteen months of the galleys, mitigated as they obviously were.
It is, doubtless, to his “torment” in the galleys that Knox refers when he writes: “I know how hard the battle is between the spirit and the flesh, under the heavy cross of affliction, where no worldly defence, but present death, does appear. . . . Rests only Faith, provoking us to call earnestly, and pray for assistance of God’s spirit, wherein if we continue, our most desperate calamities shall turn to gladness, and to a prosperous end. ”

“ After all their protestations, full of texts, the lords and lairds starved their preachers, but provided, by roofless aisles and unglazed windows, for the ventilation of the kirks. These men so bubbling over with gospel fervour were, in short, when it came to practice, traitors and hypocrites; nor did Knox spare their unseemly avarice. The cause of the poor, and of the preachers, lay near his heart, and no man was more insensible of the temptations of wealth.
Lethington did not address the Parliament as Speaker till August 9. Never had such a Parliament met in Scotland. ”

“ The reform of the Church of Christ could not be achieved without cruel persecution on both parts, while Knox was informing Scotland that all members of the old Faith were as much idolaters as Israelites who sacrificed their children to a foreign God, while to extirpate idolaters was the duty of a Christian prince. Lethington, as he soon showed, was as clear-sighted in regard to Knox’s logical methods as any man of to-day, but he “concluded, saying, I see perfectly that our shifts will serve nothing before God, seeing that they stand us in so small stead before man.” ”

“ The Man of Sin has been distributing the whole patrimony of the Church, so that “the trew ministers,” the schools, and the poor are kept out of their own. The actual clergy are all thieves and murderers and “rebels to the lawful authority of Emperors, Kings, and Princes.” Against these charges (murder, rebellion, profligacy) they must answer now or be so reputed. In fact, it was the nobles, rather than the Pope, who had been robbing the Kirk, education, and the poor, which they continued to do, as Knox attests. ”

“ In an “Appellation” against the condemnation of himself, in absence, by the Scottish clergy, he labours the same idea. Moreover, “no idolater can be exempted from punishment by God’s law.” Now the Queen of Scotland happened to be an idolater, and every true believer, as a private individual, has a right to punish idolaters. That right and duty are not limited to the King, or to “the chief Nobility and Estates,” whom Knox addresses. “I would your Honours should note for the first, that no idolater can be exempted from punishment by God’s Law. ”

“ Mary, according to Knox, was exciting the Duke against Argyll and Lord James, by the charge that Lord James was aiming at the crown, in which if he succeeded, he would deprive not only her daughter of the sovereignty, but the Hamiltons of the succession. Young and ambitious as Lord James then was, and heavily as he was suspected, even in England, it is most improbable that he ever thought of being king. ”

“ To the extreme Reformers no break with the past could be too abrupt and precipitous: the framers of the English Liturgy had rather adopted the principle of evolution than of development by catastrophe, and had wedded what was noblest in old Latin forms and prayers to music of the choicest English speech. To this service, for which their fellow-religionists in England were dying at the stake, the non-Frankfortian exiles were attached. ”

“ The theories of Knox regarding the duty to revenge God’s feud by the private citizen, and regarding religious massacre by the civil power, ideas which would justify the Bartholomew horrors, appear to be forgotten in modern times. His address to the Commonalty, as citizens with a voice in the State, represents the progressive and permanent element in his politics. We have shown, however, that, before Knox’s time, the individual Scot was a thoroughly independent character. “The man hath more words than the master, and will not be content unless he knows the master’s counsel.” ”

“ God wills, however, that “all creatures stoop, cover their faces, and desist from reasoning, when commandment is given to execute his judgement.” Knox, then, desists from reasoning so far as to preach that every Protestant, with a call that way, has a right to punish any Catholic, if he gets a good opportunity. This doctrine he publishes to his own countrymen. Thus any fanatic who believed in the prophet Knox, and was conscious of a “vocation,” might, and should, avenge God’s wrongs on Mary of Guise or Mary Stuart, “he had a fair opportunity, for both ladies were idolaters. ”

“ Apparently Lorne, Lord James, and the rest, in their letter of March 10, 1557, intended an armed rising: they were “ready to jeopardise lives and goods” for “the glory of God.” If no more than an appeal to “the Authority” for tolerance was meant, why did Knox consult the learned so long, on the question of conscience? Yet, in December 1557, he bids his allies first of all seek the favour of “the Authority,” for bare toleration of Protestantism. ”

“ I can see no explanation of Knox’s conduct, except that he and his friends pacified their consciences by persuading themselves that non-official words of Huntly and Chatelherault (whatever these words may have been) , spoken after “all was agreed upon,” cancelled the treaty with the Regent, became the real treaty, and were binding on the Regent! Thus Knox or Kirkcaldy, or both, by letter; and Knox later, orally in conversation with Croft, could announce false terms of treaty. So great, if I am right, is a good man’s power of self-persuasion! ”