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 BX 9223 .C9 1906 
 Crook, Isaac, 1833-1916 
 John Knox: the reformer 
 
mdtn of tht Kingticnt 
 
 John Knox: The Reformer 
 
 Isaac Crook, LL. D. 
 
 Author of " Jonathan Edwards" and 
 " The Earnest Expectation." 
 
 CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
 NEW YORK, EATON AND MAINS 
 
COPYRIGHTED, I906, BY 
 JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
 
^citttaitjttt 
 
 S^jt JJk« ixtjf e jr J mg gxttrflj^ 
 Dearer as the years go by, whose skillful care 
 
 HAS preserved MY HEALTH, WHOSE INTELLIGENT 
 HELP IN RESEARCH, AND WHOSE FINE DIS- 
 CRIMINATION, HAS GREATLY AS- 
 SISTED IN THIS BOOK. 
 
Sentiments from Knox 
 
 " Above all things, preserve the kirk from the uni- 
 versities." 
 
 " If princes exceed their bounds, no doubt they may be 
 resisted even by power." 
 
 " God subjects people under princes, and causes obe- 
 dience to be given under them." 
 
 " God forbid that I ever take upon me to set subjects at 
 liberty to do whatever pleases them." 
 
 " I have learned plainly and boldly to call wickedness 
 by its own name — a fig a fig, and a spade a spade." 
 
 " Man always thinks he can derive a more perfect hon- 
 oring of God than that which He Himself hath commanded." 
 
 " There has been and shall be, even to the coming of the 
 Lord Jesus, a Church which is holy and universal ; to wit, 
 The Communion of Saints." 
 
 " What I have been to my country, albeit this unthank- 
 fnl age will not know, yet the ages to come will be com- 
 pelled to bear witness to the truth." 
 
 " I see the steeple of that place where God first in public 
 opened my mouth to His glory, and I am fully persuaded 
 that I shall not depart this life till that my tongue shall 
 glorify His name in the same place." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 part I 
 
 THE MAN AND HIS COUNTRY 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. A Man-child was Born, - - - - 15 
 n. Caledonia, 23 
 
 part n 
 
 HIS ERA 
 
 I. Reformer, ------ 39 
 
 II. The Two-edged Sword, - - - 52 
 
 III. Scholarship, - 64 
 
 part m 
 
 MONUMENTS 
 
 I. His Monuments, 91 
 
 II. Bonnie Scotland, - - - - 109 
 
 part IV 
 
 SHAMROCK AND THISTLE 
 
 I. Shamrock and Thistle, - - - - 125 
 
 II. Our Hero, 139 
 
 III. Elements of Character, - - - - 145 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 "Biographies are dull." So is much of history, 
 cyclopedia, and lexicon. The difference is in the 
 method. 
 
 This book was started by two sentiments, — one 
 spoken at the grave of Knox by Earl Morton; the 
 other attributed to Knox, which I can not verify. 
 Both will appear toward the end of this volume. 
 
 The task of Knox was the most difficult of the 
 famous Reformers, and completest done. Icono- 
 clast, of necessity ; but chiefly Reformer. 
 
 Knox is the most conspicuous character in Scot- 
 tish history. The facts will appear in this book. 
 
 What is he to us in America? His people and 
 principles, like live wires, penetrate life all about us. 
 
 Most histories and biographies "lippen" so hard 
 to favorite men, nations, and forms of faith, as to 
 depreciate those contrasted. This is a sure way to 
 be unreliable, do injustice, and present false views, 
 not only of those criticised, but also of the subject 
 
 9 
 
lo Introductory. 
 
 of eulogy. Much of the writings concerning Knox 
 and his times is thus vitiated. Difficult as is this 
 task, we hope to have succeeded fairly well, 
 
 Protestants are not all good ; neither are Roman 
 Catholics all bad. 
 
 It were bigotry to despise men like John Henry 
 Newman, leading the world in singing "Lead, 
 Kindly Light," or Bernard of Clairvaux, author of 
 such songs as "Jesus, the very thought of Thee ;" 
 or Bernard of Cluny, singing "Jerusalem the 
 Golden;" or saints like Fenelon, with his intense 
 love of moral duty ; Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic 
 Doctor;" or Thomas a Kempis, with his "Imitation 
 of Christ." It has remained to our day for Protes- 
 tant lecturers to exalt the moral hero Savonarola. 
 We pity, while admiring, the late Archbishop Elder, 
 appealing to Mary in his dying breath. 
 
 There is an archbishop in the Northwest, and a 
 cardinal in the East, a brilliant patriotic pair, who, 
 though hampered, stand for righteousness. 
 
 Books are usually written for the author's fel- 
 low-countrymen. This is scon in the many assump- 
 tions and implications leaving to the reader who 
 lives in other lands the task of interpretation. This 
 is troublesome if he has a large library; and if not, 
 he is helpless. 
 
Introductory. i i 
 
 Foreign writers leave untranslated their phrases, 
 currency, revolutions, order of sovereigns, greatly 
 to the dissatisfaction of readers of a different na- 
 tionality. This may account for some of the sim- 
 plifications attempted in this book. 
 
 We hope to be fair when we enter the storm- 
 center of the Scotch Reformation as it swirled 
 round Mary, Queen of Scots. Many historians 
 have acted simply as her apologists, discounting, 
 and even denouncing, all who assisted in rescuing 
 Scotland from the ruin certain to have come had 
 she prevailed. She was not to blame for her hot 
 blood, great cunning, intense selfishness, nor for 
 having been thrust before the world as a child of 
 six, and placed under the training of Catherine de' 
 Medici. Neither can her faults be condoned with- 
 out sympathy with sin. She broke away, and in 
 two years dashed through a sluice of moral corrup- 
 tion from Darnley to Bothwell, and into a twenty 
 years' imprisonment, ended by being beheaded. 
 
 In the preparation of this book I have sought 
 information in history, biography, theology, and 
 fiction, ancient and modern, written by men of dif- 
 ferent nationalities, friendly and unfriendly toward 
 Knox, as well as what the Reformer himself wrote. 
 
 I have corresponded with a wide circle of the 
 
12 Introductory. 
 
 best informed of Scotch and American readers and 
 writers; have looked about among the Scotch and 
 Scotch-Irish Americans, drawing on their tradi- 
 tions, very rich and surprising; have read the pro- 
 ceedings of Scotch-Irish Congresses, being privi- 
 leged to attend one held in Louisville, Kentucky. 
 While acknowledging my indebtedness to their en- 
 lightening and eloquent addresses, I have, in a few 
 instances, returned the "Scotch verdict" on some 
 of their claims to men and measures. I hope, how- 
 ever, to have drawn the Reformer out of a cloudy 
 past into clear modern vision. 
 
PART I 
 
 THE MAN AND HIS COUNTRY 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 "A MAN-CHILD WAS BORN." 
 
 Four hundred and one years ago, February 28th, 
 seventeen miles northeast of Edinburgh, in a plain 
 Scotch home at Haddington, a child was born and 
 they named him John; a fashionable name at that 
 time, as well as through all the Christian centuries. 
 When this child became a man, and one of the 
 greatest tasks of his life was assigned him, he was 
 placed on a committee of six, every man named 
 John, but his was the dominant mind. Out of that 
 committee, in 1560, came the Scottish nation, with 
 its Kirk, its Confession, and civil liberty. Nor was 
 its Confession Johannean, but rather Pauline. 
 
 The father of John Knox was of the upper-mid- 
 dle class, being a somewhat thrifty tenant of the 
 Earl of Bothwell. As this name was but a title, 
 not indicating blood relation, it saves us from sup- 
 posing that he was like in character to the talented 
 
 15 
 
i6 John Knox: Tiiu Reformicr. 
 
 wretch, James Hepburn, who figured later, in the 
 history of Mary, Queen of Scots, as Earl Bothwell. 
 
 The Scotch pine, like its species all about the 
 world, grows on high places, often on heights of 
 2,700 feet ; then it shoots skyward for one hundred 
 and fifty feet more. It will live for four hundred 
 years. One would like to find some tree in the Pent- 
 land hills yet living climbed or prayed under by 
 the boy Knox. 
 
 The tall tree catches the eye, but mere conspicu- 
 ousness and merit are not identical. Some, like 
 Guitcau and Judas Iscariot, are conspicuous be- 
 cause bad ; others like Beau Nash and Darnley, were 
 prominent, but fools. Men like our hero are promi- 
 nent in spite of themselves. 
 
 Hamilton, the martyr; Sir William Hamilton, 
 the philosopher ; Wishart, the tutor of Knox, 
 Buchanan, and Andrew Melville, who carried on 
 the reform against prelacy, were jewels as fine or 
 even finer than Knox, but were not so conspicuous. 
 
 The inconspicuous man may be so from lack of 
 gifts, graces, or usefulness; or, possessing all these 
 even more than many who are conspicuous, may 
 belong to the least of the kingdom who arc its great- 
 est. The world needs more attention to God's 
 jewels after the ideals of George Macdonald in 
 
Ths Man and His Country. 17 
 
 "Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood," or Legh Rich- 
 mond with his "Dairyman's Daughter." The rar- 
 est fossils and the brightest diamonds are not in the 
 coarse granite peaks on the mountain-top. The 
 two mites of the widow outshine the ostentatious 
 gilt of the millionaire. Not so much for himself, 
 but for what he stood, we try to bring Knox out of 
 the shadows of four hundred years. As we shall 
 see, he became conspicuous against his choice. 
 
 "The: Outward Man." 
 
 There are half a dozen uncertain, inferior pic- 
 tures of him, sufficiently contradictory to prove 
 them unreliable. But these are helped out in a 
 written description by Sir Peter Young, tutor of 
 James VI, and sent to Theodore Beza in 1579. By 
 aid of this description, the pictures, and what we 
 know of Scottish habits at that date, there comes 
 before the mind the vision of a man with a Scotch 
 bonnet, covering a head of black hair ; with heavy, 
 jutting eyebrows ; deepset, large eyes, bluish-gray, 
 bright and penetrating, with a twinkle of humor; a 
 nose prominent, long, somewhat aquiline ; a mouth 
 of generous size, and a beard over a foot long. Full 
 beards were then fashionable. He never ate with 
 a fork so as to be embarrassed with that beard, for 
 
 2 
 
i8 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 forks were not in use. His shoulders were broad 
 and his frame was well knit and vigorous before 
 his terrible sufferings as a slave in French galleys, 
 with the added drain of his strenuous life. But he 
 was under size, contrary to what we might imagine 
 from the Scotch type, which no doubt misled the 
 author of the "Queen's Quare," to describe him 
 as a man of large and powerful frame. In stature 
 he reminds us of other great heroes of small frame. 
 Such was Ignatius Loyola, whose zeal sent him 
 about the world to propagate virulent, violent, cruel 
 fanaticism. John Calvin, the leader of the most 
 persistent doctrinal reform of any age, was also 
 small in stature. John Wesley, leader of the great- 
 est revival up to his time, was less than one hun- 
 dred and twenty-five pounds weight. 
 
 These men had much in common, — self- forgetful 
 zeal, fearless aggressiveness, and unconquerable 
 efficiency. Loyola, as a young soldier steeped in 
 vice, being wounded at Pampcluna by a cannon 
 ball, was converted to Romanism antl undertook to 
 check the Reformation. Calvin turned away from 
 law and literature to Protestant Cliristianity. 
 Knox, bred to the Catholic priesthood, was con- 
 verted, and "cast anchor" in Christ's prayer re- 
 corded in John's seventeenth chapter. 
 
The; Man and His Country. 19 
 
 The face of Knox appeals to one, both on ac- 
 count of what it is and because of its reflection of 
 his lack-luster life, shadowed, it may be, by some- 
 thing from his ancestors, with a thousand years of 
 feudal strife. It strongly hints a Swiss or French 
 rather than a Scotch face. 
 
 It is doubtful whether we should be drawn 
 closely to the wearer of it, reflecting so somber a 
 spirit. Luther might have repelled by a brusque 
 self-assertiveness running over into jollity, while 
 Knox would form but very few friendships like 
 that of Jonathan and David, or that with his own 
 beloved leader, George Wishart, whom he desired 
 to follow to martyrdom at the stake. Though small 
 of stature, it was forgotten as he rose in command- 
 ing moral grandeur before crowds, over whom his 
 eloquence swept like the floods from beneath the 
 snows of his native land. 
 
 Biography. 
 
 This is the soul of history. Let its outline be 
 brief. Knox spent his first seventeen years at home 
 and at school in Haddington ; the next eight years 
 in Glasgow University. He spent sixteen years ob- 
 scurely as tutor in the families of Douglas and 
 Cockburn, also partly employed in the work of a 
 
20 John Knox : Tiiii Reformer. 
 
 priest. At the age of forty he became a follower 
 of George Wishart, who was burnt by the order of 
 Cardinal Beaton. At forty-one he was called to 
 preach the Reform doctrines. For two years nearly 
 he was a galley slave on the "Notre Dame" — trav- 
 esty on the name ! — navigating the French rivers 
 Seine and Loire. He was very silent about that ex- 
 perience, like the victims of Andersonville prison 
 in our Civil War. It was too horrible to recall. 
 For four years after his liberation he preached in 
 England. Five years he» spent, partly in Frank- 
 f ort-on-the-Main ; then three years in Geneva as 
 pastor of a congregation. The last thirteen years 
 of his life he was in Scotland, finishing the com- 
 pletest Reformation of any in Europe. 
 
 He died at the age of sixty-seven. Calvin died 
 at the age of fifty-five ; Luther at the age of sixty- 
 three ; Loyola at the age of sixty-six ; but it would 
 have been disgraceful to die at any such age in 
 "Drumtochty." He was the father of two sons in 
 union with Mary Bowes, Nathaniel and Eliezar. 
 Both were well cared for and liberally educated, but 
 died early, and loft no children. One became a 
 clergyman of the Church of England. There wore 
 three daughters born of the second marriage; they 
 became remarkable women. Through them have 
 
The Man and His Country. 21 
 
 descended many of Knox's living posterity, some 
 of whom are found in America. 
 
 "The Whimpering Schooeboy/' 
 
 Knox's father was sufficiently thrifty and wise 
 to afford the lad ample education ; first at Hadding- 
 ton, the shire town of the county in which he was 
 born. Some biographies say he went thence to the 
 University of St. Andrews ; but most agree in send- 
 ing him to Glasgow, where he took his Bachelor's 
 degree. One says he took his Master's degree at 
 St. Andrews, where for a time he served as tutor. 
 The disagreement suggests, — 
 
 " Seven cities now contend for Homer dead, 
 Through which the living Homer begged his bread." 
 
 In his education he was devoted to the Romish 
 priesthood, then the Church in Scotland. One of 
 his teachers was John Major, a remarkable man, 
 who acquainted young Knox with the learning of 
 the Renaissance. This learning was inimical to the 
 papacy, being a reversal to an earlier independence 
 of thought. It not only awakened a love of litera- 
 ture, but also of logic. It involved the spirit 
 of democracy. Knox was an apt learner, and com- 
 peted in ability as a dialectician with Major himself. 
 
22 John Knox: Thr Reformer. 
 
 Both little dreamed of the harvest to come out of 
 this seed-sowing. 
 
 After his ordination to the priesthood, which 
 had a secular side, conferring the privileges of civil 
 notary, he entered upon his work as tutor. The 
 families in which he served were Protestant in their 
 leanings. The leaven was quietly at work, until 
 he became a devoted follower of George Wishart, 
 who, on his way to the stake, turned Knox back to 
 his "bairns" — his pupils. It has been a question 
 whether Knox was a great scholar ; whether he ^^ 
 could rank with Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, or 
 Zwingli. We shall return to this question further 
 en. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 "C A L E D O N I A." 
 
 To UNDERSTAND a man we must consider his na- 
 tive country. Scotland is small. "From Maiden 
 Kirk to John o' Groat's," south to north, it is less than 
 three hundred miles ; from east to west, in places 
 thirty, and in others a hundred and forty ; from 
 Aberdeen east on the German Ocean to the Isle of 
 Skye on the west, one hundred and fifty. Its thirty 
 thousand square miles could lie down on Ohio with 
 eleven thousand square miles as a spare margin. So 
 are other great countries small. Greece is five thou- 
 sand square miles less than Scotland, and yet has 
 been felt in the history of the world. The Nether- 
 lands conquered by the tireless Dutch, from swamp 
 and sea, the scene for the battle of Puritanism for 
 eighty years, is but thirteen thousand square miles ; 
 while Palestine, the pivot of the world's history, is 
 
 23 
 
24 John Knox: The; Reformer. 
 
 not half as large as Scotland, being only ten thou- 
 sand square miles. Humanly speaking, it produced 
 the Son of man. 
 
 From an airship a sail across Scotland \vould 
 reveal a wonderful land with a marvelous history. 
 It is surrounded w'ith eight hundred islands and a 
 multitude of deep bays, many firths, entering the 
 German Ocean on the east and the Atlantic Ocean 
 on the west. These rivers spring from wild gorges 
 in the Grampians, dashing through into lakelets 
 and great lochs, drawing to their shores wondering 
 visitors from all lands; around which lakes are 
 trimmings of evergreens, and over which hangs a 
 charm of history, poetry, and romance. The air- 
 voyager would behold the Grampian Hills, in 
 two chains winding mainly from the east, 
 northward and westward, dividing the whole 
 country into two glorious valleys, and them- 
 selves terminating in such great captain? as 
 Ben Lomond and Ben Nevis. Below him 
 would be much of the time a murky sky, discharg- 
 ing mist and rain, and heavy snows in winter. 
 Above him would be the marvelous blue heavens, so 
 exhilarating to Scotland when the clouds roll away. 
 And still below the mists lie long stretches of plains, 
 reaching from the rivers' brink by way of peat bogs. 
 
The Man and His Country. 25 
 
 upward through barren-looking heather-plains, 
 where herds of Highland cattle and flocks of black- 
 faced sheep graze. The rocks are numerous in 
 kind and great in quantity, including paleozoic 
 schist, quartz, gneiss, granite, volcanic rock, coal, 
 iron, and gold, formerly in paying quantities. The 
 voyager would catch glimpses of many old historic 
 castles, monuments of centuries of strife, rapine, 
 luxury, and growth. 
 
 Though so far north, lying between near 54" 
 and 58°, the climate is more equal than many simi- 
 lar latitudes. The thermometer is rarely down to 
 zero and seldom up to 80°, with a mean of forty- 
 seven degrees. 
 
 It is such a country as to develop a people like 
 the Scotch, and bring out the Wallace, the Bruce, 
 and the grander hero, John Knox. 
 
 " The thistle's purple bonnet, 
 And the bonnie heather-bell," 
 
 Before we study the task of John Knox, let us 
 look further at the man. 
 
 Had this serious-faced hero any sense of humor ? 
 Unfortunate the man with heroic work on hands 
 destitute of it. It may be excessive and imperti- 
 nent and thus weaken a man's power. But Knox 
 
26 John Knox: Tiir Reformer. 
 
 would not have been an all-around Scotchman with 
 no humorous side. In this the Scotch people differ 
 somewhat from other nations. The Irish run 
 strongly to a sparkling wit, which snaps and 
 startles, but seldom hurts. The German is a little 
 slow-footed in his humor, and expends it largely 
 within domestic circles. The American, though in 
 some sense a combination of all, runs to burlesque 
 through a race of men extending from Sam Slick, 
 the clock peddler, to "Innocents Abroad," while 
 there are those living whose sweet, pure, brilliant 
 books promise that the race of American humorists 
 will not soon die out. With the Scotch it resembles 
 very much their national emblem, the thistle. — sly 
 and keen without, but sweet and beautiful within. 
 
 When Sir Walter Scott grimly tells us that Old 
 Mortality, during his eighty-six years, grew merry 
 twice in his life, one would like to have caught the 
 gleam in the eye of Sir Walter. "Scotch-Irish 
 John" was asked, by Charles the Bald, the differ- 
 ence between a Scot and a sot. "Nothing, please 
 your Majesty, except the table." Crockett, in his 
 description of the session of the Marrow Kirk 
 Synod, "the only true witnessing and faithful Kirk 
 of Scotland," pictures the assembly as consisting of 
 
The: Man and His Country. 27 
 
 moderator, clerk, and officer. Charges are to be 
 preferred against Ralph Peden ; the session is to be 
 private ; the officer is commanded to remove all vis- 
 itors, whereupon said officer removes himself very 
 reluctantly from the hall. The clerk is ordered to 
 call upon himself to present the complaints against 
 Ralph Peden. It is solemnly done. He sits down, 
 and then arises as complainant to read the charges. 
 For some lack of severity, he is reprimanded, and 
 finally expelled from the assembly by the moderator. 
 The clerk in turn assumes to be the assembly itself, 
 and unanimously votes to expel the moderator, and 
 the eavesdropping officer goes wailing down the 
 street, proclaiming that the Marrow Kirk of Scot- 
 land is no more. As a specimen of humor in prac- 
 tice, what is better than that of Professor Blackie 
 with his class? On the bulletin board of the uni- 
 versity was written the statement, "Professor 
 Blackie will meet his classes to-day." Some stu- 
 dent erased the initial "c." ' The professor, about 
 to pass into the lecture-room, observed that he was 
 to lecture to lasses. He promptly amended the mat- 
 ter by erasing the letter "1," and the students fol- 
 lowed in that character. The Scotch-Irish of this 
 country claim Abraham Lincoln as of their blood. 
 
28 John Knox: Tiik Reformer. 
 
 One should like to believe it, for that humor of his 
 which played among the clouds of that saddest, 
 greatest conPict of time is of the same strain with 
 Scottish humor. 
 
 Had John Knox any of this? He needed it to 
 illuminate the storm-clouds that hung over his 
 career. He did not run much to qualities aside from, 
 those needed for his one work, and he was, there- 
 fore, no: rounded out to the fullest measure of his 
 capabilities; but we see flashes occasionally of this 
 very serviceable and very human quality. 
 
 When chained to the oar of the French galley, 
 a painted image of the Virgin Mary was presented 
 to him to be kissed. This he declined to do, but 
 seizing it remarked, "Lat aur Ladie now save her- 
 sel' ; she is lycht enoughe, lat her learn to swyme ;" 
 and he tossed it into the river. After preaching in 
 Perth against the idolatry of the mass, there fol- 
 lowed a riot which resulted in destroying the deco- 
 rations of the cathedral, and of many other Roman 
 Catholic buildings. Knox blamed it on the "rascal 
 multitude ;" he also remarked that they had "de- 
 stroyed the rookeries lest the rooks might return." 
 
 At one of his interviews with Mary, Queen of 
 Scots, she grew angry, and he was obliged to wait 
 in the hall without, in the presence of her four 
 
Thk Man and His Country. 29 
 
 maids. He pleasantly remarked to them, "O, fair 
 ladies, how pleasing- were this life of yours if it 
 should abide, and then in the end that we might 
 pass to heaven with all this gay gear ; but fie 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 tender, and the silly soul, I fear, shall be 
 so feeble that it can neither carry with it gold, gar- 
 nishing, targeting, pearl, nor precious stones !" 
 When retiring on another occasion from Mary's 
 presence, he overheard men in waiting say, "He is 
 not affrayed." His reply was : "Why should the 
 pleasing face of a gentle woman affray me ? I have 
 looked into the face of angry men, and yet have 
 not been affrayed above measure." This was not 
 brag, but the welling up of sub-acid Scotch humor. 
 Dr. Hume Brown says : "From the Meary 
 bourds with which he enlivens his narrative, we 
 may infer that his daily conversation was not al- 
 ways of justification and predestination, but that he 
 could tell his story and exchange his jest at any 
 time or place where fitting. What distinguished 
 him from men like Calvin and Savonarola is pre- 
 cisely that sense of a humorous side of things which 
 made him at once a great writer and a great leader 
 
30 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 of men. Of the value of this quahty in the conduct 
 of human affairs he was himself perfectly conscious, 
 and deliberately employed it, both in his writings 
 and in his dealings with his fellows." 
 
 "Melancholius ressours," he said in one of h's 
 debates with Lethington, "wald haif sum myrth in- 
 termixed." Studied anticlimax, grim irony, humor- 
 ous exaggeration, are as distinctly his characteris- 
 tics as they are those of Carlyle, in whom also these 
 are relieving qualities from narrow intensity and an 
 overbearing temper. 
 
 With humor is usually found pity and the power 
 of pathos ; and in Knox more than once his harsh 
 austerity softens into a mood, the more impressive 
 that it comes so seldom. 
 
 Take an extract from Knox's history describ- 
 ing a religious row. 
 
 "If we interlace merriness with earnest matters, 
 pardon us, good reader; for the fact is so notable 
 that it deserveth long memory. The cardinal was 
 known proud ; and Dunbar, Archbishop of Glasgow, 
 was known a glorious fool ; and yet, because he was 
 called sometimes the king's master, he was chan- 
 cellor of Scotland. The cardinal comes even this 
 same year in the end of harvest before, to Glas- 
 gow ; upon what purpose we omit. Coming forth 
 
The Man and His Country. 31 
 
 (or going in, all is one) at the choir door of Glas- 
 gow Kirk, begins striving for state between the two 
 cross bearers, so that from glooming they come to 
 shouldering; from shouldering they go to buffets, 
 and from dry blows to fists and fisticuffs ; and then 
 for charity's sake, they cry, 'Disperse it, dcdit pan- 
 perihus,' and essay which of the crosses was finest 
 metal, which staff the strongest, and which bearer 
 could best defend his master's pre-eminence ; and, 
 that there should be no superiority on that behalf, 
 to the ground go both crosses. And then began no 
 little fray, but yet a merry game ; for rockets were 
 rent, tippets were torn, crowns were knapped, and 
 side-gowns might have been seen wantonly wag 
 from one wall to the other. Many of them lacked 
 beards, and that was the more pity, and therefore 
 could not buckle other by the hair as bold men 
 would have done. 
 
 "But fie on the jackmen, that did not their duty ; 
 for, had the one part of them re-encountered the 
 other, then had all gone right! But the sanctuary, 
 we suppose, saved the lives of many. How merrily 
 that ever this be written, it was bitter mirth to the 
 cardinal and his court. It was more than irregu- 
 larity ; yea, it might well have been judged 'lesc 
 majeste' to the son of perdition, the pope's own 
 
32 John Knox: The; Reformer. 
 
 person ; and yet the other, in his folly as proud as a 
 peacock, would let the cardinal know that he was a 
 bishop, when the other was but Beaton, before he 
 got Aberbrothock, This annuity was judged mor- 
 tal and without all hope of reconciliation." 
 
 " Go watch the foremost ranks of danger's dark career. 
 Be sure the hand most daring there has wiped away a tear." 
 
 Had this great Scotchman that tender nature 
 which would move him "to lead about a wife, a sis- 
 ter?" If so, he was endowed with that rich ele- 
 ment of Scotch nature, tenderness of sentiment. In 
 this the Scotch are somewhat different from other 
 nationalities. The Italian is open and excessive in 
 his expression of sentiment after the manner of his 
 native sky, flowers, and fruit. The Frenchman is 
 impulsive, exaggeratt:d, and impassioned. In the 
 Scot sentiment swells strong and deep from be- 
 neath a cool exterior, after the manner of mountain 
 streams from under the snows and ice of his native 
 land. There is a purity and depth of touch in 
 Scotch song, scarcely matched. It breaks, binds, 
 and blesses the heart. I Tad Rums been as clean 
 and sober as he was brilliant and tender, he might 
 have eclipsed the poets of the human race with his 
 rare gifts. TIad he been as religious as Knox, he 
 
The Man and His Country. 33 
 
 might have rivaled Charles Wesley as a writer of 
 hymns. But in that case it is doubtful whether his 
 anniversary had been celebrated yearly. 
 
 That wizard of fine English, President Edward 
 Thomson, afterward bishop, wrote in a letter from 
 Europe : 
 
 "One says, 'I wish to take advice about a serious 
 matter that weighs on my mind.' 'What is it?' 'Get- 
 ting married. Is it best?' 'Well, whom have you 
 in view? Is she young, handsome, and virtuous? 
 The sooner you get her, the better. Who is she?' 
 'O, nobody in particular; it is marrying in the ab- 
 stract that I am thinking about.' That is young 
 Germany. 
 
 " 'Zounds ! I love her, and will have her if I 
 have to swim the river for her!' Young America. 
 
 " 'No use to deny me or run from me. Where 
 you go, I will go ; where you stop, I will stop ; 
 where you live, I will live ; where you die, I will die ; 
 and where you are buried, there will I be buried.' 
 Young Ireland. 
 
 " 'She is worth three thousand one hundred and 
 thirty-seven pounds, six shillings, fourpence and 
 half-penny, which, under the circumstances, is not 
 quite sufficient.' Young England." 
 
 For the Scotch let me add. She is fairer than a 
 3 
 
34 John Knox: Tim RicroRMER. 
 
 daisy, more beauteous than the bhiebeU, purer tlian 
 snow, brighter than Bonnie Doon, satisfying as the 
 morning, gentler than twilight ; I love her with my 
 whole heart ; for her "I 'd gladly lay me doun and 
 dee." 
 
 What possibilities of glorious, tender sentiment 
 were beclouded in Thomas Carlyle by his discovery 
 during college days of what he calls, "That villain- 
 ous thing called a stomach !" A touch of dyspepsia 
 seems to have invaded his moral and intellectual 
 nature. Pure and deep are the streams flowing 
 bright and clear through sunny days and divine 
 beauty from the soul of George Macdonald. Who 
 that has ever made acquaintance with "Rab and 
 His Friends," by Dr. John Brown, but has been 
 compelled to pay the tribute of a tear? Where can 
 be found a more touching story than "Beside the 
 Bonnie Brier-bush," and that glorious "Doctor of 
 the Old School?" This Scotch quality in Knox 
 was mostly spent in impassioned oratory in his at- 
 tacks on popery and his efforts to save Scotland. 
 
 He has been assailed for unfeeling sternness 
 toward women. A book has been written on the 
 subject, and pages of history have been wasted by 
 slurring misrepresentation. There was in his blood 
 something of his Gaelic or Pictish ancestors, who 
 
The Man and His Country. 35 
 
 were polygamists, and lived in the dim light of an- 
 cient paganism. He lived at a time when much 
 was left for Christianity to do in lifting woman to 
 the level where Jesus placed her. He was doubt- 
 less tinctured with the supposed "Pauline" view, 
 and tinged his teaching by ancient rather than mod- 
 ern social conditions. This absurdity lingers yet in 
 some of the Churches. Such was Knox the dog- 
 matic Reformer; but Knox the man was true and 
 tender. 
 
 He met woman in four distinct spheres. First, 
 his wrath was aroused against such as ]\Iary 
 of Lorraine ; Bloody Mary, with her three hundred 
 murders ; Elizabeth, with her talent and duplicity ; 
 and with Mary, Queen of Scots, a very Eris of dis- 
 cord. Against such he launched thunderbolts of 
 just wrath, specially in his first blast of the trumpet 
 against "The monstrous regiment [rule] of 
 women." 
 
 Another class of women was represented by 
 those converted to Protestantism, harried, and 
 abused by their persecutors. His letters to a group 
 of these, and left to posterity, show him a most 
 tender and sympathizing shepherd and a man who 
 venerated womanhood. 
 
 A third test. It is a trite untruth that a mother- 
 
36 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 in-law is more unendurable than other women. 
 Knox had one with whom to deal. She was a mel- 
 ancholy, repining soul, with morbid conscience. His 
 letters to her show a tenderness and forbearance of 
 the most delicate fondness. As fine a tribute to the 
 Reformer's gentleness as need be found. 
 
 A fourth proof of his chivalry is seen in that he 
 was twice married. Nor did his first wife, Mary 
 Bowes when dead, nor her children, fall away from 
 tcnderest memories, and the two sons received his 
 unchanging, generous care. His second wife, very 
 young (it was joining sixteen to fifty-nine), was 
 high born, and related to the house of Stewart. It 
 was this wife with whom he communed most in- 
 timately during the last week of his life, requesting 
 her frequently to read, and especially the Scripture 
 most sacred to him. 
 
 With such an undertone of tender sentiment, 
 he is all the more admirable for having withstood 
 the well-nigh' resistless influence of Mary, Queen 
 of Scots. Without rudeness or coarseness, he stood 
 amid the swirling influences about him, like a 
 Scotch granite mountain amid the flood. In the de- 
 velopment of our hero we shall trace some of these 
 elements later on. 
 
PART II. 
 
 HIS ERA. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 REFORMER. 
 
 H^ was one of the world's few conspicuous Re- 
 formers. To understand him we must glance at 
 the condition in the world which he confronted and 
 the men he encountered. Of these there were two 
 kinds, favorable and unfavorable. 
 
 Yonder in Spain was Philip 11. Charles V, 
 weary and sick, had abdicated in favor of Philip. 
 This vain, ambitious, cruel monarch tainted all he 
 touched. Even the Philippine Islands bear not only 
 his name, but his blight. He married Bloody Mary, 
 of England, for the purpose of uniting that country 
 to the scheme of crushing Protestantism from the 
 world. It was his purpose to subjugate France, 
 with the same end in view. Later he sent the Duke 
 of Alva, intending to tear out the heart of brave 
 Holland. 
 
 39 
 
40 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 In the time of Knox, France was under those 
 arch-murderers, the Guises, by whose order seventy 
 thousand Protestant French were slaughtered 
 within a week. To this day one looks with horror 
 on the old church-tower of Saint Germaine in 
 Paris, whence the signal for this work of blood rang 
 out. For this slaughter the pope in Rome gave 
 thanks. 
 
 Nearer Knox's home. Bloody Mary's work went 
 on in England until she had destroyed more than 
 three hundred martyrs. Succeeding her was the 
 no less incorrigible Elizabeth, willful, cunning, 
 treacherous, unreliable. These Tudor half sisters 
 were daughters of Henry VIII, divorce chieftain of 
 England, characterized by Dickens as a blotch of 
 grease and blood on the page of English history. 
 
 Yonder at Rome was Leo X, succeeded by eight 
 more popes in rapid succession during the life of 
 Knox, each with his long finger reaching out to con- 
 trol all the world, Scotland included. 
 
 In Scotland he encountered a seemingly hope- 
 less task. The papal Church having universal sway 
 is doubtless well described by the penetrating, wide- 
 eyed Sir Walter Scott, in his romance "The Mon- 
 astery." He pictures Abbot Boniface as about to 
 
His Era. 41 
 
 surrender his office to his successor. He consoled 
 himself over his fidelity by a review of "Indulg-- 
 ences," "Drinks," "Boiled Almonds," "Improve- 
 ment of Revenues," "A Curious Screen to Secure 
 from the Northeast Wind." "It cost me no little 
 thought, no common toil, to keep these mighty mat- 
 ters in order." "Barn and bin to be kept full," 
 "Dormitory," "Guest Hall," "Refectory," "Proces- 
 sions," "Confessions ;" "I have lain awake for a full 
 hour by the clock thinking how these matters might 
 be ordered." 
 
 Though fiction, this was true to life. 
 
 It suggests Cardinal Beaton — no fiction — enjoy- 
 ing from his castle window at St. Andrews, a view 
 of the burning of a talented, heroic young man, who 
 had been Knox's spiritual teacher. 
 
 McCrea, in his life of Knox, says of the state 
 of the Church in Scotland: "The corruption had 
 grown to a greater height in Scotland than in any 
 ether nation within the pale of the Western Church. 
 Superstition and imposition existed in their gross- 
 est forms. The clergy obtained exorbitant opulence 
 and power, accompanied with corruption. One- 
 half of the wealth of the nation belonged to the 
 clergy. Bishops and abbots rivaled the nobility in 
 magnificence. They long engrossed the powerful 
 
 'A 
 
42 John Knox: The; Reformer. 
 
 offices of state. Bishops never preached ; they kept 
 harlots, and bestowed benefices on their sons. The 
 hvcs of the clergy were a scandal. Nunneries and 
 monasteries were the haunts of lewdness and de- 
 bauchery. The kingdom swarmed witli idle, luxur- 
 ious monks, who, like locusts, devoured the fruits 
 of the earth." 
 
 In undertaking his work as Reformer, there was 
 a swarm of nobles to be dealt with, half Protestant, 
 but mercenary in their dealings with civil and re- 
 ligious affairs. They were land-grabbers. 
 
 Martyrdom was the reward of dissent in Scot- 
 land, and had been so for many a year. Knox's an- 
 cestors in the Dark Ages, as Druids, would, of 
 course, use the argument of torture and fire to se- 
 cure conformity. In 1407, James Risley was burned 
 at Glasgow. In 143 1 Paul Carew was burned at 
 St. Andrews — save the saint ! In 1494, the Lollards 
 were scattered and broken. About 1525. Patrick 
 Hamilton was burned at St. Andrews. Then fol- 
 lowed ten more victims. Nineteen years after Ham- 
 ilton, George Wishart went up through fire. The 
 last of this illustrious line, John Hill, when over 
 eighty years of age, was burned. Knox was sen- 
 tenced to die, but, being absent from the country, 
 
His Era. 43 
 
 was burned in effigy. In the "John Knox House" 
 in Edinburgh is seen the room where a bullet 
 whizzed past his head. He took his life in his hand 
 when he entered the ranks of the glorious apostles 
 and martyrs. 
 
 It may throw a side light upon the situation to 
 remember that when Knox was growing up, so were 
 the cathedrals. For two or three centuries these 
 had sprung up in Italy, at Florence and Milan, and 
 then the largest of all, St. Peter's. Thence they in- 
 vaded Holland ; then to England, where arose Can- 
 terbury, Ely, Westminster; while St, Paul's, Lon- 
 don, came a century later. This beautiful menace to 
 popular, spiritual life had also invaded Scotland. 
 The now ruined cathedral of St. Andrews was fin- 
 ished nearly three and a half centuries before the 
 birth of Knox. Another one is yet found in Perth, 
 recalling the riot that swept it bare of decoration, 
 after Knox's sermon. There is one at Glasgow, 
 nearly two centuries in building, completed sixty- 
 five years before Knox was born. There is St. 
 Magnus, at Kirkwall, capital of Orkney, twenty- 
 six miles north of John o' Groat's. It was founded 
 in 1 137, before the second Crusade. What means 
 it away there ofif the main land, looking out almost 
 
44 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 nine centuries over the North Sea? Knox and 
 cathedrals did not harmonize well. Where his views 
 prevailed, cathedrals did not flourish. Far more 
 credit is it that schools and universities have ever 
 followed in his footsteps. 
 
 "We are not careful to answer thee, O king!" 
 said the unbending heroes to Nebuchadnezzar. So, 
 in effect, spoke Knox to Mary Queen of Scots 
 and her secretary, who meant his destruction. 
 He had called friends to stand by two citizens 
 arrested in a disturbance concerning the serv- 
 ice of mass, which had been outlawed by the 
 Scotch Assembly. The call issued by Knox 
 was regarded by Mary as treason. When, in 
 answer to her summons, she saw him, she laughed, 
 saying, "Yon man made me weep, I will see whether 
 I can make him cry." The Reformer was cool and 
 clear. He proved that he had a right to summon 
 the friends of the Church. The Privy Council be- 
 fore which he stood were seized with a stupor of 
 admiration, and unanimously acquitted him. The 
 queen left the chamber. Lelhington, her secretary, 
 was so angry he recalled her. and had the vote 
 taken over. The nobles gave the same vote of ac- 
 quittal with indignation. That robbed Knox of the 
 martvr's crown. 
 
His Era. 45 
 
 "The Lion Rampant." 
 
 This Scottish symbol, with its motto, "Nemo me 
 impune lacessit," is truly descriptive of the people 
 to be reformed. Who were these Scotchmen ? One 
 line of ancestry runs back into the dim past more 
 than a thousand years. They were Picts, pagans, 
 polygamists, and fighters as savage and more gifted 
 than the North American Indians. Another line 
 runs back across the channel to Ireland. A thou- 
 sand years before Knox, these who were the real 
 Scots invaded Caledonia, and gave it the name Scot- 
 land. Flodden field, celebrated by Sir Walter Scott 
 in his "Marmion," suggests this stream of history 
 affecting Knox and his times. While he was a boy 
 of eight, the crushing calamity of this battle befell 
 the nation. This, and the death of James IV, turned 
 over the kingdom to his foolish widow, Mary of 
 Lorraine. There were in all six kings of Scotland 
 called James ; in them mingled the blood of Robert 
 Bruce and the Stewarts. Marjorie Bruce had mar- 
 ried the Lord High Steward of Scotland. The 
 spelling was changed when it became royal, from 
 "Steward" to Stewart — by some branches modified 
 to Steuart, or the French-born Stuarts. Thence 
 sprang this gifted, unfortunate race. 
 
46 John Knox: Tiiic Reformer. 
 
 Except the sixth, who became James I of Eng- 
 land, all these Scotch kings died of violence, either 
 by assassination or in battle. The fourth James 
 crossed the Southern border into England with an 
 army. The Scots were entrapped on a height, and 
 Flodden-field battle strewed the ground with the 
 dead of nearly all the distinguished houses of Scot- 
 land. The king fell amidst the fight. With the 
 stories of such battles the boy Knox was familiar. 
 To this day, when the Highland regiments are or- 
 dered out, it means a Balaklava, a relief for Luck- 
 now, or a Magersfontein. The skirl of the bagpipe 
 sounding "The Campbells are Coming" sends a 
 shiver through the army. Such material, hard to 
 mold, furnished for Knox his task. 
 
 This quality distinguishing them as hard fight- 
 ers they transferred into the realm of religious war- 
 fare. It characterized them during their long his- 
 tory as pagans, afterwards as Roman Catholics, and 
 then as Presbyterian Protestants. After the estab- 
 lishment of the national Kirk of Scotland in 1560, 
 about one hundred years, there came a split among 
 themselves. From this time they divided fre- 
 quently, mostly to get awa}- from some form of 
 secularism involved in the connection between polit- 
 ical and religious matters within the Kirk. Of this 
 
His Era. 47 
 
 cleavage we have a comical illustration in what is 
 now known as the "Wee Kirk," a fragment stand- 
 ing out against the religious spirit of this age tend- 
 ing to union rather than separation. So far it holds 
 on to some fifty millions of property in the name of 
 about thirty ministers and a few hundred members 
 against multiplied thousands of their former broth- 
 erhood. Like our hickory, the Scottish Kirk splits 
 easily, but is hard to break. With such timber 
 Knox had to deal. 
 
 The most difficult influence within the realm of 
 Scotland which our Reformer confronted was that 
 of Mary, Queen of Scots. It may not be insignifi- 
 cant to note how much this beautiful name, Mary, 
 was then in use. There was Mary of Lorraine, 
 Bloody Mary, Mary, Queen of Scots, with four 
 waiting maids each named Mary. A serpent may 
 have a shining skin. 
 
 Knox, coming in contact with Mary's court, had 
 to deal with Bothwell, a cruel, dominating libertine, 
 a very bull of Bashan, and with Darnley, six foot of 
 fool, vain and licentious. 
 
 The young queen still spreads discord through 
 history, biography, and fiction. She had the blood 
 of Robert Bruce directly on the maternal side, and 
 that of the house of Stewart in the father's line, and, 
 
48 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 added to that, her mother was Mary of Lorraine, 
 of the family of Guise. Is it any wonder that, with 
 this triple nature, she could play woman, warrior, 
 and vixen? She was a diplomat, fascinating, cruel, 
 and cunning; educated in France, and thus far an 
 exotic transplanted to Scotland. Her life-work be- 
 came one of diplomacy, before which all men bent 
 with one exception, and that man stood amid temp- 
 est and tide until the day broke — and his name was 
 Knox. 
 
 An Open Door. 
 
 His task as a Reformer may also be understood 
 by the openings and helpers as well as the obstacles. 
 
 Columbus discovered America thirteen years be- 
 fore the birth of Knox. It was well for this conti- 
 nent and the far reach of his mission that he was 
 born so soon after the discovery. This will be 
 clearer later on. When his forerunner, Luther, was 
 entering a monastery in Germany instead of a law 
 office, Knox was a child of two years at home in 
 Haddington. When Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, 
 first printed the New Testament in Greek, thus 
 "laying the egg which Luther hatched," Knox 
 was a lad of eleven years in school at Had- 
 dington. When Luther was nailing his Ninety- 
 
His Era. 49 
 
 five Theses to the church-door in Witten- 
 berg, Knox was a boy of twelve. When 
 Henry VHI chose to play pope in England, Knox 
 was twenty-six years of age, engaged in study. 
 When Ignatius Loyola organized a company of nine 
 persons at Rome for the Jesuit movement, Knox 
 was thirty-two years of age, still in obscurity. When 
 Coverdale translated the Bible into English, Knox, 
 who was to use it as his sword of battle, was thirty- 
 three years of age, yet in papal darkness. When 
 George W^ishart returned from the influence of the 
 Reformation in Germany, Knox had reached his 
 fortieth year, and was, by this scholarly leader, 
 brought into the light of Reformation. When 
 Charles V turned the empire over to Philip H, 
 Knox had been out into the light some ten years, 
 nearly two of which had been spent chained to the 
 oars as a galley slave. When the famous '"beggars" 
 received their nickname in Holland, Knox was six- 
 t}'-one years of age, and sixty-two when Alva the 
 butcher arrived in Holland. When St. Barthol- 
 omew's massacre took place, the painful news 
 roused Knox to one more tremendous denunciation 
 of papal crime in the year when he died at the age 
 of sixty-seven. Thus by friend and foe, by events 
 4 
 
50 JouN Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 favorable and adverse, the door was opened to him 
 in accomplishing the most successful reform of any 
 during' the sixteenth century. 
 
 Some John the Baptists. 
 
 There were Reformers before Knox. Luther 
 preceded Calvin. Both were anticipated by Zwingli ; 
 he was enlightened by Wyttenbach ; Savonarola 
 was before both by a quarter of a century. Jerome 
 and Huss were before Luther's day by a hundred 
 years, their bodies burned and their ashes thrown 
 into the Rhine. Wyclif, though he escaped martyr- 
 dom, was, thirty years after his death, honored by 
 having his body burned, the ashes thrown into the 
 Swift, which runs into the Avon, thence into the 
 Severn, and on to the sea. The Albigenses of 
 Southern France were two centuries before Huss 
 and three centuries before Luther. The Waldenses 
 amid the Alps anticipated the Albigenses by half a 
 century. Looking more widely over human history, 
 we are amazed at the persistence of human back- 
 sliding. Divine patience, and Reform. They swing 
 back and forth through the centuries like the flow 
 and cl)b of the tide. God lost his grip on Adam. 
 Abel was a Reformer. Again, "the heart of man 
 was fully set in him to do evil." Then Noah tried to 
 
His Era. 51 
 
 lead the world back to God. Abraham came out of 
 Chaldea to start a Reform of faith toward Jehovah. 
 Moses led another, to substitute for the Canaanite 
 backsliders a people whose God should be the Lord. 
 The history of the Judges is a repetition of Ref- 
 ormations. The kings and their kingdoms show a 
 series of backslidings and abortive Reformations. 
 The prophets were Reformers. John the Baptist 
 in this was the greatest of them all. The personal 
 ministry of Jesus Christ was a failure as a Jewish 
 Reformation, but the inauguration of a Reform 
 without end. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 "THE TWO-EDGED SWORD." 
 
 Preacher. 
 
 By preaching mainly Knox accomplished his 
 work as Reformer. We shall notice his qualification 
 for this office later on. While yet a Roman Catholic 
 student, he quietly spoke against papal abuses at St. 
 Andrews, and was driven out. As private tutor in 
 the families of two noblemen he was accustomed to 
 hear objections to Church abuses, and gave his con- 
 sent; but not till the late age of forty-one was he 
 called out as Protestant preacher. The place where 
 this occurred is full of interest. Cross the river 
 Forth from Edinl)urgh, go thirty-one miles north- 
 easterly, and you will find a promontory looking out 
 on the German Ocean. There is an old city of near 
 seven thousand people, with not nuich happening, 
 except golf-playing in summer-time. There is a 
 
 52 
 
His Era. 53 
 
 university with two hundred students ; Tulloch was 
 but one of its illustrious professors. There are a 
 couple of impressive ruins, the cathedral, which was 
 one hundred and fifty years in building, and a castle, 
 now a desolated old pile. In the cathedral church 
 John Rough, somewhat resembling his own name, 
 officiated as Protestant preacher. Knox was ac- 
 customed to attend ; as is often the case when the 
 Church is alive, a conviction got abroad among the 
 worshipers that John Knox ought to devote himself 
 to the work of preaching. It was agreed that Rough, 
 during a public service, should declare this convic- 
 tion and summon Knox to undertake the work. At 
 the close of his sermon, to the astonishment of 
 Knox, he announced the conviction and the sum- 
 mons. Knox was overwhelmed, hesitated, trem- 
 bled, broke into tears, and retired in confusion to 
 deliberate and pray; for he well knew the tremen- 
 dous responsibility and the risk involved. In this 
 he reminds us of another prophet who exclaimed, 
 "I am a man of unclean lips ;" but in both cases the 
 fire from off the altar touched the lips. Great lead- 
 ers are reluctant. It is well for the Church and the 
 world if this distinctness of call, in which the 
 Church and Divine providence blend, shall ever con- 
 tinue. 
 
54 John Knox: Thr Reformer. 
 
 In a few days the Reformer entered the pulpit, 
 and selected for his text the seventh chapter of Dan- 
 iel, and proceeded to arraign the papacy as the beast 
 described by the prophet. This formed the keynote 
 of the earlier part of his subsequent ministry. Paul's 
 "man of sin" was to Knox, without doubt, the pope. 
 Having thus begun his appeal to the Scripture, he 
 continued relying upon it as the sword of the Spirit. 
 In this he was a model for the pulpit in all time. An 
 ethical gospel is inevitably essential ; so must it be 
 educational and reformatory; but Athens went to 
 moral perdition when her art, literature, and logic 
 were at their highest. So Roman law was as the 
 withes on Samson to iDind human depravity, and 
 must be so in any age. It was Peter's use of the 
 Scripture, as of the other apostles, that led to the 
 Pentecost. The Dark Ages were dispelled by 
 Wyclif, Luther, and Knox wielding this same sword. 
 It is true that up to the later years of his life he was 
 mainly a prophet of the Old Testament, but denun- 
 ciation of wrong is far from lacking in the sermons 
 of Peter and of John, the loving disciple. It is the 
 latter who portrays men calling "for rocks and 
 mountains to fall on them and hide them from the 
 wrath of the Lamb and the face of Him who sitteth 
 on the throne." The modern pulpit will never sue- 
 
His Era. 55 
 
 ceed without a sword with two edges, both law and 
 gospel. The preaching of Knox and other Reformers 
 of the sixteenth century, though Scriptural, ex- 
 pended its force very largely in the realm of theor^'^, 
 and very little in that of personal experience. Tlie 
 former quality belongs essentially to the Reformer's 
 calling, the latter to that of the revivalist. 
 
 In the Pulpit. 
 
 His style of preaching was a combination of In- 
 tellectual reasoning and powerful oratory. Being 
 a trained dialectician and logician, he took time in 
 preparing the way for application and appeal. It 
 was a day of long sermons, and the people were 
 willing to have it so. As late as the middle of the 
 seventeenth century the Westminster Assembly in 
 London had single prayers lasting two hours, and 
 sermons even longer. They stand for final perse- 
 verance. 
 
 After Knox had deliberately laid the foundation 
 of his sermon, then came application and appeal, 
 sweeping all before him, James Melville, his de- 
 voted student and follower, gives his own experi- 
 ence as a listener at St. Andrews, whither Knox 
 retired from Edinburgh for a time for safety. 
 He says he began at the first of the ser- 
 
56 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 men to take notes, but after awhile was so 
 thrilled and carried away as to be unable to pro- 
 ceed with the writing. There is an oft-quoted sen- 
 tence of Randolph, English ambassador, who, in 
 writing to Cecil, Lord Secretary of England, de- 
 clares, ''This man puts more life into us in one hour 
 than six hundred trumpets blustering in our ears." 
 After Knox's return from Geneva he preached a 
 sermon in Perth on the idolatry of the mass, which 
 swept all before him like a storm. An unfortunate 
 aflfair followed, in a measure deplored by Knox. A 
 priest on his way to offer mass jostled against a boy, 
 who in anger threw a stone. This was followed by a 
 wild riot ; and such was the excited condition of the 
 great crowd that it stripped the church of its images 
 and ornaments; nor did this excitement stop at 
 Perth, but extended to a number of places, and 
 notably to St. Andrews. In commenting on this, 
 Knox called the crowd a "rascall multitude," and 
 remarked that they "destroyed the rookeries that 
 the rooks might not return." 
 
 When the Earl of Murray, to whom Knox was 
 much attached, had been assassinated, the Re- 
 former's funeral discourse was so moving as to 
 bring three thousand hardy Scotchmen to tears. 
 When in later life he became too feeble to enter the 
 
His Era. 57 
 
 pulpit without help, he would become, during the 
 sermon, so aroused by the sweep of his own earnest- 
 ness as to look as though he would "ding the pulpit 
 into blads and flee out of it." When his strength 
 was apparently too far gone ever to preach again, 
 the news of the St. Bartholomew massacre reached 
 Scotland. Knox was carried to the pulpit in Edin- 
 burgh, whither he had returned from St. Andrews, 
 and again preached an overwhelming discourse, dur- 
 ing which he portended the doom awaiting Charles 
 IX, King of France, who had looked on the scene 
 rejoicing. The French ambassador being present in 
 the congregation, Knox personally charged him to 
 bear this judgment to his master. The world is in- 
 formed of the agony in which the guilty king died, 
 it is said, with the blood exuding from his pores, in 
 fulfillment of the prediction of Knox. 
 
 His ability to preach to the more courtly and 
 cultured, if not more intellectual, was proven dur- 
 ing his residence in England, after he had been de- 
 livered from the French galleys. This was before 
 he unwillingly fled to Geneva from the persecutions 
 of Mary. He was one of the six chaplains to James 
 VI, and was in his turn competent preacher to the 
 most distinguished audience in England. 
 
 Knox was a six-sided preacher. When install- 
 
58 John Kxox: The Reformer. 
 
 ing his successor he could look back and conscien- 
 tiously say : "I have preached with a mind void of 
 hatred against men; my object was to gain them 
 to the Lord. I never made merchandise of God's 
 \\'ord, never studied to please men, nor indulged my 
 own or others' private passions ; I sought the edifi- 
 cation of the Church." These six things he did 
 as we have seen, with a final appeal to the Word of 
 God. This weapon he used as the sword of the 
 Spirit with as much vigor as Peter used his carnal 
 weapon at the gate of Gethsemane, but with more 
 discretion. 
 
 The Kingdom of He.wen Suffereth Violence. 
 
 In studying the work of Knox and the Reform- 
 ers, the question suggests itself, why might not there 
 have been less of assault and denunciation and more 
 of personal appeal, thus bringing Reformation 
 through indi\'idual action rather than breaking down 
 institutions followed by hostilities, often emanating 
 in war and bloodshed ? John Wesley acknowledged 
 the usefulness of Knox, but deprecated his spirit. 
 "A calm, even spirit goes through rough work bet- 
 ter than a furious one," said he. It is often sug- 
 gested by Roman Catholics that the Reformation 
 was on its way, and would have come of itself 
 
His Er-\. 59 
 
 within the Church. Over ag-ainst this stands the 
 fact that reforms and revivals seldom, if ever, come 
 through Councils, with their edicts and plans of 
 campaign. 
 
 The histor}^ of Catholicism is punctuated with 
 a chain of Councils that have but increased the e%-ils 
 they imdertook to correct by decrees, even to the 
 last Ecumenical under Pius IX, which perpetrated 
 the farce of Papal Infallibility. If the way to re- 
 form is to ignore the evils of ecclesiastical tAxanny, 
 tlien why are South America, Mexico, and Italy so 
 desperately degenerated after long centuries of un- 
 challenged priestcraft? Had John Knox omitted 
 his denunciations of the papacy, the Reformation 
 would never have come. Standing up against that 
 daric wall encirchng him, his method may have been 
 the only one to break through. We are too prone to 
 forget that Jesus, the Lover of tlie world, used the 
 most terrible language of exposure and denuncia- 
 tion of any prophet of the Old or the New Testa- 
 ment In this our Reformer walked in the footsteps 
 of Christ. There are abundant samples of tliis on 
 record, WTien "Bloody Marj^'s" marriage was pend- 
 ing, Knox was at Dieppe, where he was sojourning 
 awaiting news from England. He spoke of Mar\' 
 as "under an English name she beareth a Spanish 
 
6o John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 heart." He personally addressed Gardiner, the 
 Bishop of Winchester, in no very oily terms thus: 
 "O, thou beast, more cruel than any tiger, art thou 
 not ashamed, bloody beast, to betray thy native 
 country? Fearest thou not to open such a door to 
 all iniquity, that the whole of England shall be made 
 a common stew for Spaniards? So wilt thou gratify 
 thy father the devil, and his lieutenant the pope, 
 whom, with all his baggage, thou laborest with 
 tooth and nail to flourish again in England. Why 
 seekest thou the blood of Thomas, Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, of good Father Hugh Latimer, and of 
 that most earnest and discreet man, Dr. Ridley, true 
 Bishop of London ?" And much more of this sort, 
 revealing the kind of fearless soul and the gift of 
 plain, scathing vituperation in this Scotch fighter. 
 
 He had been in close fellowsliip and official re- 
 lation with the rare trio above named. They were 
 men of unusual scholarship, piety, and gentleness. 
 They went to the tower, that grim old castle, to- 
 gether; thence to the common prison in Oxford; 
 thence to the stake in front of Balliol College, and 
 perished in the flames. One can there see their 
 names carved on the same marble shaft, one of Eng- 
 land's milestones on her march from savagery 
 toward a loftv Christianity. 
 
His Era. 6i 
 
 It is a mistake to regard Knox in the light of an 
 Old Testament prophet exclusively. As is often the 
 case with strenuous warriors, he mellowed toward 
 the end. His last series of sermons preached in St. 
 Giles, Edinburgh, was on the crucifixion. He in- 
 tended to follow it with a sermon on the resurrec- 
 tion. His own death came before the sermon, so 
 that he must illustrate the event in his own experi- 
 ence. "At eve it shall be light." 
 
 Destructive and Constructive; Reformation. 
 
 Reformers are prone to the work of destruction, 
 leaving to others mainly the work of reconstruction. 
 Knox was both, with the emphasis at first upon de- 
 struction. Had it not been so, Scotland would have 
 been other than it is. He was not wholly destruct- 
 ive. It was mainly under his influence that in 1560 
 Scotland was born as a nation ; its civil polity es- 
 tablished ; a confession of faith drawn up and pro- 
 mulgated ; public education provided for every Scot- 
 tish child, with university privileges for every one 
 who would avail himself of them. It was he who 
 sowed the seed of democracy which made the work 
 of Cromwell, eighty years afterwards, possible, out 
 of which came the British House of Commons and 
 
62 John Knox : Tiir; Reformer. 
 
 before which fled forever the tyrannical assump- 
 tions of the Stewarts. 
 
 There is often an intimate relation between Ref- 
 ormation and Revolution. This arises largely from 
 the long-lived misunion of civil and religious affairs. 
 It was over a hundred years after Knox before what 
 is known as the Revolution of 1688 occurred. James 
 II, from whom the Jacobite party and name orig- 
 inated, undertook the restoration of the papacy in 
 Great Britain, but under the pretext of toleration. 
 The people rose in revolt, and called his son-in-law, 
 William of Orange, a foreigner, to the throne. In- 
 telligent readers need not be reminded that this was 
 not William the Silent wearing the name of Orange. 
 That splendid hero was assassinated a hundred years 
 before, fighting the battle of Protestantism in Hol- 
 land. The American Revolution of '76 came eighty- 
 eight years later than that of England, but was its 
 natural offspring. Both of these trace back to the 
 work of John Knox, and both left the worUl better. 
 In contrast with such Revolutions came later that 
 civil horror known as the French Revolution, whicii 
 only wrought ruin because destitute of the spirit of 
 true Reformation. It broke down the Inquisition, 
 but put nothing good in its place. In 1906 dises- 
 tablishment comes as a bloodless revolution. 
 
His Era. 63 
 
 As I write these pages, there breaks on the 
 startled world the thunder of Revolution in the Rus- 
 sian Empire. It seems to presage the fulfillment of 
 the teaching of Knox concerning the rights of man ; 
 nor can Turkey, China, or Persia escape. The drag- 
 on's power is broken in far Thibet, while the Cres- 
 cent of the cruel Moslem fades out. Does it not 
 signify a fulfillment of the Scripture, "The remov- 
 ing of those things that are shaken that those things 
 that are not shaken may remain ?" 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 SCHOLARSHIP. 
 
 ThU question has been raised whether Knox was 
 as great a scholar as Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, 
 or Zwingli. The mere comparison is not very im- 
 portant, except as the question may bear upon the 
 equipment of our Reformer for his own work. It is 
 certain he could not have been the mighty preacher 
 he was whereby he did his chief reforming work 
 had he not been a man of high scholarship as well 
 as intellectual endowments. There is a style of 
 scholarship that might have divided his power and 
 detracted from his success. He was too great a 
 man for theological hairsplitting and trivial iliscus- 
 sion of linguistic roots or hermeneutical trifling. 
 Such men are useful, but very tiresome unless they 
 rise above it. In the higher sense of learning, he 
 reminds one of St. Paul, who certainly might have 
 been a very great and learned rabbi, or brilliant 
 
 64 
 
His Era. 65 
 
 scribe, or renowned orator, had he developed in 
 either direction ; but with his motto, "This one thing 
 I do," he gave up any development in multiform 
 ways or an exhibition of all-round scholarship. 
 
 As with most men of great usefulness, much of 
 Knox's preparation for his career came unawares. 
 While he was a pupil under John Major, acquiring 
 the scholarship of the Renaissance, he was unwit- 
 tingly imbibing Protestant ideas. That learning not 
 only dealt in logic and literature, but sowed the 
 seeds of democracy. This germinated into fruit as 
 he confronted Mary, Queen of Scots, and took the 
 position that if rulers became unrighteous, their peo- 
 ple might call them to account. This his civics was 
 in turn propagated in the civil government of Scot- 
 land, and later in the American colonies. 
 
 He was an earnest student of the Church 
 Fathers, specially of Jerome and Augustine. He 
 was also something of a linguist. His preaching, as 
 well as his five volumes of history of the Scotch 
 Reformation and his voluminous correspondence, 
 shows that he uses the colloquial, mongrel English 
 with great effect. A few samples of this may bring 
 out the man and his times more definitely. 
 
 In his celebrated "First Blast of the Trumpet 
 against the Monstrous Regiment of Women," he 
 5 
 
66 John Knox: Tiiii Rkfor.mer. 
 
 says, "To promote a woman to bear rule, superior- 
 ity, dominion, or empire, is a thing most contrarious 
 to His revealed well." From his "Ilistorie:" "Sum 
 said Uthcris hucd the branches of papistry, hot he 
 straiketh at the rute to destroy the whole. Utherls 
 said gif the magistri nostri defend not now the pope 
 and his authoritie, which is impugnit, the devill have 
 my part of him and his lawes. Thairfoir we wald 
 counsail yow and thame to provyde better defenses 
 than fyre and sword." When Knox was yet a gal- 
 ley slave he wrote: "I mene not that any man in 
 extremitie of trubill can without dolour and with- 
 out feer of trubill to follow. Trubill and feir are 
 the verie spurris to prayer." 
 
 "I the wryter hereof (lat it be said to the laude 
 and prais of God allone), in angusche of mynd and 
 vehement tribulatioun and afflictioun, called to the 
 Lord when not only the ungodlic but even my faith- 
 ful brethren, ye and my awn self, judgcit my cause 
 to be irremedeable, and yit my greatest calamitie, 
 and when my panis wer most cruell wold His eter- 
 nal wisdome that my handis suld wryt far contrarie 
 to the judgment of Carnall reasone, whilk His mer- 
 cie hath pruved trew. Blcssit be His lialie name." 
 
 This vigorous, idiomatic mongrel speech would 
 enable him to lead his countrymen far more effect- 
 
His Era. 67 
 
 ively than would the elegant English of Shakes- 
 peare or the present pure speech of Edinburgh. 
 
 It is a matter of regret to find the Scotch dialect 
 fading out. The world is indebted to such as Sir 
 Walter Scott, George Macdonald, Crockett, "Ian 
 Maclaren," and Barrie for embalming this beautiful 
 patois in fiction of a high order. There seems so 
 much heartsomeness in words like "dour" for bold, 
 "speer" for ask, "byre" for cow-house, "hemmel" 
 for muley-cow, "ain" for own, "auld" for old, 
 "bairns" for children, "blat" for bashful, "braes" 
 for hillsides, "chiel" for stripling, "ding" for beat, 
 "fash" for trouble, "ken" for know, "syne" for since, 
 "lippen" for lean. "The broomy knowl over the 
 Grannoch water." 
 
 He wrote "The History of the Reformation in 
 Scotland" in five books, besides papers and letters, 
 public and private, all marked by keen insight, 
 wealth of thought, clearness of expression. Amid 
 all his writings he published but one sermon. 
 
 He acquired other tongues. He would converse 
 with Mary, Queen of Scots, in French, and preached 
 in that language as fluently as in English. It was 
 necessary for him, in order to be ordained as a Cath- 
 olic priest, to understand Latin, the language used 
 in their forms of worship. Greek was regarded 
 
68 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 with suspicion, but he acquired it before he was of 
 middle age. His love of learning was all the more 
 emphasized in taking up the study of Hebrew at his 
 earliest opportunity when fifty years of age. While 
 pastor of his congregation at Geneva, there was a 
 cluster of scholars eminent enough to send forth 
 the Geneva Bible, which became so popular and 
 held on so well that it w^as carried in the pockets of 
 Cromwell's soldiers eighty years later, and for a 
 long time competed with King James's version, in 
 the production of which it furnished great assist- 
 ance. In this Knox was a helper and director. 
 Measured by his literary monuments, he was scholar 
 up to the needs of his task, the completcst Rcform.v 
 tion of the sixteenth century. 
 
 Blunderer. 
 
 Knox blundered, for he was human. In his 
 "Trumpet Blast against the Regiment of Women," 
 issued from Geneva, where he was in exile, he was 
 premature and too sweeping. This he afterwards 
 conceded, thus exhibiting a moral courage greater 
 than had he refused to make the concession. In 
 this he was like Luther, who hastily attempted to 
 bridge the chasm from papal idolatry to freedom 
 with his fiction of consubstantiation. Both remind 
 
His Era. 69 
 
 one of the Apostle Paul, who conceded to the coun- 
 cil his own mistake in rebuking the high priest, say- 
 ing, "I wist not, brethren, that he was the high 
 priest." Only an inspired prophet is warranted in 
 being as personal as Knox while preaching. 
 
 Many a mistake has been made in quoting "Thou 
 art the man." Plainness of speech when imperti- 
 nent or insolent may do great harm; when kind 
 and personal it may be as beneficial as sunlight. 
 Nathan rebuked the King in private and won him 
 over to repentance. In public he might have mis- 
 erably failed. A John the Baptist may cry out *'0 
 generation of vipers." None but a prophet such as 
 Nathan and the great Forerunner are sure of their 
 charges. Gladstone was a great man, but when 
 making his maiden speech in Parliament he de- 
 fended his father in slave-holding; he began as a 
 Tory in politics ; he expressed sympathy witk the 
 Southern Confederacy in the day of our distress, 
 but he was great enough to yield to conviction and 
 recant in all three of these mistakes. 
 
 John Knox did apologize to Elizabeth. Judge 
 from his own language to her whether he made 
 amends for his "trumpet blast." 
 
 "Nothing in my book contained is or can be 
 prejudicial to your Grace's just regiment, pro- 
 
70 John Knox: Tiik Reformer. 
 
 vided that you be not found ungrateful unto God. 
 Ungrate you shall be proved in presence of His 
 throne, howsoever the flatterers justify your acts, 
 if you transfer the glory of that in which you now 
 stand to any other thing than to the dispensation of 
 His mercies, which only maketh that truthful to 
 your Grace which nature and law denieth to all 
 women. Neither would I that your Grace should 
 fear that this your humiliation before God should, 
 in any case, infirm and weaken your just and lawful 
 authority before men. Nay, Madam, such un- 
 feigned confession of God's benefits received shall 
 be the establishment of the same, not only to your- 
 self but also to your seed and posterity; where, 
 contrariwise, a proud conceit and elevation of your- 
 self shall be the occasion that your reign shall be 
 unstable, troublesome and short. God is witness 
 that unfeignedly I both reverence and love your 
 Grace ; yea, I pray that your reign may be long, 
 prosperous, and quiet; and that for the quietness 
 which Christ's members, before persecuted, have 
 received under you. Yet, if I should flatter your 
 Grace, I were no friend, but a deceitful traitor ; 
 and, therefore, of conscience I am compelled to 
 say, that neither the consent of people, process of 
 time, nor multitude of men can establish a law 
 
His Era. 71 
 
 which God shall approve ; but, whatsoever He ap- 
 proveth by His eternal Word that shall be approved, 
 and whatsoever He damneth that shall be con- 
 demned, though all men on earth should hazard the 
 justification of the same. And therefore, Madam, 
 the only way to retain and keep these benefits of 
 God, abundantly poured out of late days upon you 
 and your realm, is unfeignedly to render unto God's 
 mercy and undeserved grace the whole glory of this 
 your exaltation. Forget your birth and all title 
 which thereupon doth hang, and consider deeply 
 how for fear of your life you did decline from God 
 and bow in idolatry. Let it not appear a small 
 offence in your eyes that you have declined from 
 Christ Jesus in the day of His battle. Neither yet 
 would I that you should esteem the mercy to be 
 vulgar and common which you have received, to- 
 wit, that God hath covered your former offences, 
 hath preserved }0u when you were most unthankful, 
 and in the end hath exalted and raised you up not 
 only from the dust but also from the ports of 
 death to rule over His people for the comfort of 
 His Kirk. It appertaineth to you, therefore, to 
 ground the justness of your authority not upon 
 that law which from year to year doth change, but 
 upon the eternal providence of Him who, contrary 
 
72 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 to nature and without your deserving, hath thus 
 exalted your head. If thus in God's presence you 
 humble yourself, as in my heart I glorify God for 
 that rest granted to His afllictcd flock within Eng- 
 land under you, a weak instrument, so will I with 
 my tongue and pen justify your authority and regi- 
 ment as the Holy Ghost hath justified the same in 
 Deborah, that blessed mother in Israel. But, if 
 these premises (as God forbid) be neglected, and 
 you shall begin to brag of your birth and build 
 your authority upon your law, flatter you whoso 
 list, your felicity shall be short. Interpret my 
 words in the best part, as written by him who is 
 no enemy to your Grace." 
 
 We also find him involved in a ruse. He en- 
 couraged Elizabeth to send troops to the aid of the 
 Scotch, suggesting thjft England might send them 
 and then escape reproach from France by disown- 
 ing them as rebels. \\'hile not apologizing for this 
 duplicity, how very slight and innocent it seems 
 compared with the theory, "All things are fair in 
 war!" 
 
 He further blundered by accepting the theory, 
 prevalent in his day, uniting things civil and relig- 
 ious. It was the case with Rome, with France, with 
 
His Era. 73 
 
 Spain, with the English Episcopacy, and in this 
 John Calvin at Geneva blundered with all the rest 
 of them. It remains the embarrassment and bane 
 of the English Establishment, and we yet hear 
 echoes of a "National Church of America." This 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury disowns. 
 
 We break away from the past reluctantly. Old 
 habits, like unbroken cords, may be hard to dis- 
 cover and sever. Too wild a dash into the un- 
 known may be perilous for the future while it for- 
 feits the good already gained. The reforms of the 
 sixteenth century did not entirely sever Church 
 and State nor allow freedom of opinion. Some- 
 times the reformers seized upon the rod of their 
 own oppressors and in turn used it to compel faith. 
 Calvin approved of the execution of Servetus. Beza, 
 the accomplished scholar, by an elaborate argu- 
 inent, full of honest fallacy, justified it. That ar- 
 gument in brief was "Heresy is disturbing to the 
 Church and should be prevented. The civil power 
 and not the ecclesiastical should see to it. Caesar 
 beareth not the sword in vain, therefore Servetus 
 should have been executed." While Knox did not 
 spoil his career by executing an opponent, he did 
 not disapprove, but seemed to favor the conduct 
 
74 John Knox: Thk Reformer. 
 
 of Calvin in this. He would have applied this logic 
 to Bothwell and Mary Queen of Scots, but fortu- 
 nately could not. The same disability would have 
 been a great good fortune to our Puritan ancestors 
 in America. 
 
 The Savior of the world held up a beacon-light 
 whereby all this folly might have been avoided. 
 Jesus alone never made mistakes. It was Tie 
 who said, "Who made me a judge or divider 
 over you?" "My kingdom is not of this w'orld :" 
 "Render unto Caesar the things that are Ciesar's, 
 and unto God the things that are God's;" "Put up 
 thy sword ; they that take the sword shall perish by 
 the sword." 
 
 Knox, with the rest of them, blundered in trans- 
 ferring the theocracy of the Old Testament into the 
 polity of the Christian dispensation. 
 
 In spite of this mistake, we find his theory, as 
 incorporated in the organization of the new govern- 
 ment of Scotland in 1560, an adjustment out of 
 which has come the American government with 
 separation of Church and State. In that organiza- 
 tion it was distinctly provided that the civil power 
 should be secondary to the Kirk, and yet be require \ 
 to support it. Here was unfortunately left a lin- 
 gering tie of embarrassment, out of which came the 
 
His Era. 75 
 
 "Established Kirk of Scotland," and, on account of 
 this lingering bond of union, most of the splits in 
 that Kirk. 
 
 We Americans have not reached perfection in 
 this separation of Church and State. We have 
 rather gone beyond it. So nearly have we divorced 
 the secular from the religious as to imperil both. 
 
 The Roman Catholic theory, if successful, would 
 endanger our public schools and threaten our na- 
 tion. Though the practice of the papal Church has 
 changed, its theory has not. It should not be al- 
 lowed to dominate and so destroy our system of 
 popular education. That system, as we shall show, 
 started from Knox. But, so far as the Bible has be- 
 come a banished book, we go against its Author 
 and His heir the child. 
 
 The recent attempts to restore it as literature and 
 ethics show signs of sanity. In so far as Roman 
 Catholics claim that education is character-building, 
 and religion an essential element and the State in- 
 competent for that, they are right. Protestant 
 Americans relegate that to the Church and the 
 home. This is also right, but does not go far enough. 
 
 To admit Minerva and OEdipus, Shakespeare and 
 Horace, Darwin and Froebel, and expel Moses and 
 
76 John Knox: Thk Reformer. 
 
 Jesus, is a revolt, which tends to Atheism in our 
 schools. 
 
 The eflforts to place the name of God in the Con- 
 stitution would seem superfluous since He is there 
 recognized. We have our chaplaincies in army, con- 
 gress, and court-room. The government protects 
 all people in their rights to worship God as con- 
 science shall dictate. We are the freest people on 
 earth and the best governed, but it remains to con- 
 vert our art, commerce, politics, and social life back 
 to where they each started at the beginning, bring- 
 ing them again under the inspiration of religion. 
 
 It may indicate the growing necessity of this to 
 note that time was, in this country, when the min- 
 ister was the dominating man in community. Later 
 on the teacher divided with him that ascendency. 
 The editor came along, and captured another large 
 segment of the clergj'men's control. The one now 
 in the saddle is the commercial man. This man, 
 when he becomes a plutocrat, often invades the edi- 
 torial realm, directing the policy of journalism. He 
 enters the common school and the secular university 
 to direct what they shall be. 
 
 In the denominational university he is apt to be- 
 come dictator to the Board of Trustees, director as 
 to who shall be president, and practically chooses 
 
His Era. 77 
 
 the professors in the various departments, himself 
 unacquainted with the genius and progress neces- 
 sary to their truest work. He can, and sometimes 
 does, become arbiter of the poHcy of the Church, 
 deciding whether it shall have an adequate house of 
 worship and when, greatly influencing the choice of 
 ministry. There is danger that the civil govern- 
 ment, the newspaper world, the university, and the 
 Church will be found bowing down at the feet of 
 the Dagon of wealth. 
 
 Hard after this man in the saddle rides the pur- 
 suer after amusement, pleasure, and indulgence. 
 Here is a loud call for the Edwardses, the Einneys, 
 the Moodys, and the hundred and forty thousand 
 Christian ministers, with the millions of earnest peo- 
 ple, whose life is consecrated to the doctrine of Him 
 who commanded, "Seek first the kingdom of God." 
 All the great elements of human society, art, litera- 
 ture, law, agriculture, and trade took their origin 
 in religion, whether pagan, Jewish, or Christian. 
 This excessive tendency in our country to divorce 
 them must be reversed, and its accomplishment lies 
 upon the Church. Knox was right in so far as he 
 placed civil and secular affairs subordinate to re- 
 ligion. What they need is regeneration rather than 
 subjugation. 
 
78 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 Was Knox a Hyper-Cai.vixist? 
 
 Here is a partial portrait of Calvin drawn by 
 Dr. Philip Schaff: 
 
 "He kindled the religious fire which roused the 
 moral and intellectual strength of Holland, and con- 
 sumed the dungeons of the Inquisition and the fet- 
 ters of the political despotism of Spain. His genius 
 left a stronger mark on the national character of 
 the Anglo-Saxon race and the Churches of Great 
 Britain than their native Reformers. His theology 
 and piety raised Scotland from a semi-barbarous 
 condition, made it the classical soil of Presbyterian 
 Christianity, and one of the most enlightened, ener- 
 getic, and virtuous countries on the face of the 
 globe. His spirit stirred up the Puritan Revolu- 
 tion of the seventeenth century, and his blood ran 
 in the veins of Hampden and Cromwell as well as 
 Baxter and Owen, He may be called, in some 
 sense, the spiritual Father of New England and 
 the American Republic." 
 
 Dr. Schaff was a Switzer ; he pays a fine trib- 
 ute, but, like some of the Swiss water-powers, tosses 
 the spray wider than the channel and appropriates 
 some of the work of Knox and other Reformers 
 to Calvin. 
 
His Era. 79 
 
 Knox was Calvinist by conviction, personal at- 
 tachment, and reverence for the man whose name 
 has overshadowed the originator of this embarrass- 
 ing scheme of religious metaphysics ; not St. Augus- 
 tine but John Calvin gives name to it. Knox, 
 though older in years, began later in life, and 
 learned much from the great Genevan besides He- 
 brew. He was assigned the task of defending Cal- 
 vinism, Like many another creed, it has needed 
 most defending at its weakest side. 
 
 Knox did it well, for he had gifts for such work. 
 But, when run back to its higher sources nearer 
 heaven, it practically meets in harmony with Ar- 
 minian views. Neither robs any man of a chance 
 for salvation, and compels no one. However in- 
 consistent in logic, fatalism is denied by most Cal- 
 vinists, whether in the Westminster Confession or 
 not. So Arminians claim the entire helplessness of 
 man to save himself, and each man doubts total de- 
 pravity in his own babe, but champions the Divine 
 sovereignty. Fatalism has its home mostly in mod- 
 ern fiction. 
 
 "It Doth Not Yijt Appear." 
 No man's full potentialities are used in what he 
 does. General Grant amazed the world by his latent 
 
8o John Knox: The; Rt:roRMt;R. 
 
 power as a writer, after a military career scarcely 
 equaled in history. John Wesley was competent to 
 have eclipsed Wellington as a military commander, 
 or Pitt as a statesman. St. Paul could have equaled 
 Aristotle in logic, or Demosthenes in oratory. Knox 
 could have been Socratic as a teacher, or a Demos- 
 thenes as orator, or a Cavour as statesman. He 
 had not time for these, but must leave them for his 
 gigantic progeny ; to the mention of whom we shall 
 recur later. 
 
 Lest I seem excessive in admiration, let me quote 
 from others. Froude, who could show up his own 
 England to her disadvantage when he saw occa- 
 sion, and who showed a doubtful fidelity in the way 
 he exposed the literary remains of Carlyle, who 
 could whitewash Julius Ca;sar into a plausible char- 
 acter, has thus expressed himself concerning Knox: 
 "He was no narrow fanatic, who, in a world in 
 which God's grace was equally visible in a thousand 
 creeds, could see truth and goodness nowhere but 
 in his own formula. He was a large, noble, gen- 
 erous man, with a shrewd perception of actual fact, 
 who found himself face to face with a system of 
 hideous iniquity. Ik- believed himself a prophet, 
 with a direct commission from heaven to overthrow 
 
His Era. 8i 
 
 it, and his return to Scotland became the signal, 
 therefore, for the renewal of the struggle." 
 
 This stands sharply over against the passionate 
 mis judgment of Hume, who showed his own in- 
 ability to fairly weigh testimony by his celebrated 
 absurdity, supposed to be an argument against 
 miracles. 
 
 Froude further says: "He taught the peasant 
 of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal 
 in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prel- 
 ate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was 
 the one antagonist whom Mary Stewart could not 
 soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was that raised 
 the poor commoners of his country into a stern and 
 rugged people. The time has come when English 
 history may do justice to one but for whom the 
 Reformation would have been overthrown among 
 ourselves ; for the spirit which Knox created saved 
 Scotland, and if Scotland had been Catholic again, 
 Elizabeth's ministers, nor the teaching of her 
 bishops, nor Elizabeth's chicaneries would have pre- 
 served England from revolution. But for him., 
 Mary Stewart would have bent Scotland to her 
 purpose, and Scotland would have been the lever 
 which France and Spain would have worked on 
 6 
 
82 John Knox: Tiiit Reformer. 
 
 England. Elizabeth would have been flung off her 
 throne, or have gone back into the Egypt to which 
 she was too often casting wistful eyes." 
 
 Carlyle, in his essay on Sir Walter Scott, speaks 
 of Knox on this wise : "Honor to all the brave and 
 true, everlasting honor to bravo old Knox, one of 
 the truest of the true! That in the moment while 
 he and his cause, amid civil broils in convulsion and 
 confusion, were still but struggling for life, he sent 
 the schoolmaster forth into all corners, and said, 
 'Let the people be taught,' — this is but one, and m- 
 deed an inevitable and incomparatively inconsid- 
 erable item in his great message to men. His mes- 
 sage in its true compass was, 'Let men know that 
 they are men, created by God, responsible to God, 
 who work in any meanest moment of time what will 
 last to eternity,' — this great message Knox did do- 
 liver with a man's voice and strength, and found a 
 people to believe him. The Scotch national charac- 
 ter originates in many circumstances ; first of all, 
 in the Saxon stuff there v/as to work on, but next, 
 and beyond all else except that, in the Presbyterian 
 gospel of John Knox." 
 
 In his "Heroes and Horn Worship" he speaks 
 thus: "This that Knox diil for his nation wo may 
 really call a resurrection as from death. It was 
 
His Era. 83 
 
 not a smooth business, but it was welcome surely, 
 and cheap at that price had it been far rougher. The 
 people began to live. Scotch literature and thought, 
 Scotch industry, James Watt, David Hume, Walter 
 Scott, Robert Burns, — I find Knox and the reforma- 
 tion acting in the heart's core of every one of these 
 persons. It seems to me hard measure that this 
 Scottish man, after three hundred years, should have 
 to plead like a culprit before the world ; intrinsically 
 for having been in such a way as it was then possi- 
 ble to be, the greatest of all Scotchmen. Had he 
 been a poor half-and-half, he could have crouched 
 into the corner like so many others ; Scotland had 
 not been delivered, and Knox had been without 
 blame. He bared his breast to battle, had to row in 
 French galleys, wander forlorn in exile, in clouds 
 and storms ; was censured, shot at through his win- 
 dows; had a right 'sore fighting life. If this world 
 were his place of recompense, he had made but a 
 bad venture of it. I can not apologize for Knox. 
 For one I will remark that this post of prophet to his 
 nation was not of his seeking. 
 
 "Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh 
 visits he used to make in her own palace to reprove 
 her there have been much commented on. On read- 
 ing the actual narrative of what Knox said and what 
 
84 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 he meant, I must say one's tragic feeling is rather 
 disappointed. They are not so coarse, these 
 speeches ; they seem to me about as fine as the cir- 
 cumstances would permit. Knox was not there to 
 act as courtier. He came on another errand. Knox 
 was the constitutional opposition party in Scotland ; 
 the nobles of the country, called by their station to 
 take that post, were not found in it. Knox had to 
 go or no one. Withal unexpectedly enough, this 
 Knox has a vein of drollery. He has a true eye for 
 the ridiculous. His history, with its rough earnest- 
 ness, is curiously enlivened with this. A true, lov- 
 ing, illuminating laugh mounts up over the earnest 
 visions; not a loud laugh you would say, a laugh in 
 the eyes most of all. They go far wrong who think 
 this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking 
 fanatic. Not at all. He is one of the solidest of 
 men, practical, cautious, hopeful, patient. A most 
 shrewd, observing, quietly discerning man ; in fact, 
 he has very much the type of character they assign 
 to the Scotch at present. A sore fight. l)ut he won 
 it. 'Have you hope?' he was asked in his last mo- 
 ment when he could no longer speak. He lifted his 
 finger, pointed upwards, and so died. Honor to 
 him. His works have not died." 
 
 The Scotchman is highly endowed. Among his 
 
His Bra. 85 
 
 gifts is his susceptibility to superstition. While 
 this quality may lead to darkness and disaster, with- 
 out it the soul were shorn of its wings and rendered 
 incapable of art, poetry, and religion. It is doubt- 
 ful whether the Wesley family could have produced 
 its great hymn writer and his brother, the great 
 religious leader, had they been destitute of that 
 quality which haunted the Epworth rectory with 
 ghosts. 
 
 The German with his spooks and "man of the 
 Hartz Mountains" makes pietism possible and opens 
 the door for the Moravian and German Methodism, 
 the chief hope of emancipation from rationalism 
 and beer. 
 
 The quality which peopled the "Heilands" with 
 "bogies" and the meddlesome "diel" which holds 
 on through Sir Walter's stories and yet pervades 
 the American descendants, these qualities made 
 possible the orators, poets, writers of romance, 
 leaders in philosophy and missionary heroes, yet 
 leading mankind. 
 
 Reform and Revival. 
 
 The sixteenth century and the twentieth century 
 may mutually illustrate each other. There are yet 
 New Englanders who call a revival a "Reforma- 
 
86 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 tion," and they are right. A revival without refor- 
 mation, and a Reformation without a revival, boih 
 breed death. "Faith without works is dead." Which 
 should precede the other were hard to tell. They 
 are inseparable. One leads legitimately to the 
 other. Did Knox emphasize reform excessively to 
 the neglect of the revival ? The opportunity opened 
 by him for the Wesleyan movement near two hun- 
 dred years later was improved so as to effect much 
 reform, but was chiefly the most gracious revival 
 after Pentecost to that time. 
 
 In 1858 a remarkable revival spread all over 
 America and swept across the world to London, and 
 thence to Edinburgh and Glasgow and Aberdeen, 
 returning something of Knox's seed-sowing in a 
 rich harvest. Later on, in the year 1873, Moody 
 and Sankey, under a Divine impulse, invaded Scot- 
 land with a revival, which brought the learning of 
 the foremost universities of the English-speaking 
 world to unite with the unlettered Moody in bow- 
 ing at the feet of Jesus. It was a fair spectacle be- 
 fore angels and men, when these seats of meta- 
 physics, philosophy, and most enlightened Biblical 
 criticism came in childlike simplicity to the cross 
 of Christ with the lay preacher. They in turn now 
 
His Kra. 87 
 
 lead the learned world in clustering nearer to 
 Christ. 
 
 There has been a lull and a time of waiting for 
 the outbreak of the next great revival. For a decade 
 there have been men on the outlook throughout 
 Christendom, and that means as never before in the 
 round world. These watchmen have seemed to 
 catch notes as of the sound of a mighty wind from 
 heaven. There have also been cautions against 
 prophesying a great awakening, lest we presume to 
 know in advance the mind of God, but this expec- 
 tation has steadily increased and spread abroad. 
 
 In 1903, in India, Bishop Thoburn baptized in 
 one week 1,747 people, and has repeatedly declared 
 that ten millions more are possible within ten years. 
 These raw heathen are transformed into witnessing 
 martyrs, both in spirit and in practice. 
 
 Wales has surpassed the days of Griffith Jones, 
 Howell Harris, and Whitefield, with a revival that 
 has moved men of all grades, from the strongest 
 characters down to the workers in the pits. The 
 beasts of burden could not understand their con- 
 verted drivers because of the absence of former pro- 
 fanity. 
 
 The sturdy Presbyterian Church anticipated the 
 
88 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 aggressive Methodist denomination in a nation- 
 wide, organized, irresistible, and contagious revival 
 movement. 
 
 The Methodist Episcopal Church, with the most 
 thorough organization of any, except the Roman 
 Catholic, has resolved to utilize her machinery, but 
 not to depend upon it. There is a rapidly growing 
 "World League of Prayer." She is evidently draw- 
 ing near the spirit of him who said, "I will not let 
 thee go," and also close to the heart of Him who 
 seems to say, "Can you not discern signs and 
 times?" 
 
 Ere this is in print the greatest revival of all the 
 past will be here, or again Jesus will have cause to 
 cry, "O that thou hadst known in this day the things 
 that belong unto peace ! but now they arc hid from 
 thine eyes 1" 
 
PART III. 
 
 MONUMENTS. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 HIS MONUMENTS. 
 
 Whirrs are they? Those of marble and brass 
 are ever comparatively insignificant. At the Amer- 
 ican Capital is a very lofty pillar to the memory 
 of Washington, five hundred and fifty-five feet 
 high ; but there is far more eloquence in the modest 
 tomb at Mt. Vernon, 
 
 Where are those of Emerson, Hawthorne, Al- 
 cott, Thoreau, modest little headstones at Concord? 
 Their thoughts are as prolific as the grapes from 
 the old mother vine hard by. The brewer, how- 
 ever, saw to it while yet alive that marble splendor 
 in that same cemetery should screen his name from 
 the infamy and the sorrows produced by the beer 
 mug. Where sleep Holmes, Longfellow, and 
 Lowell? It is hard to find their monuments in 
 Mount Auburn, but the Atlantic Monthly, founded 
 by them, is only one of the shafts keeping their 
 memory green. 
 
 Go to Geneva ; the lofty equestrian statue of the 
 91 
 
92 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 Duke of Brunswick mounts high above the city of 
 the dead. By the mouth of the Rhone you will find 
 the Island of Rousseau and a statue in bronze of the 
 "wild, self-torturing sophist;" but find the tomb of 
 John Calvin if you can. 
 
 Go to London, and you may find Sir David 
 Wilkie's picture of Knox in his pulpit, preaching to 
 his Edinburgh congregation. But we look in vain 
 for any memorial of him in Westminster Abbey, 
 that mausoleum of England's greatness. In Glas- 
 gow is a modest pillar to his memory. 
 
 Go to Edinburgh, and you can not avoid seeing 
 the great and beautiful monument of Sir Walter 
 Scott. It could scarcely be too fine for his tran- 
 scendent genius. I am literary heretic enough to 
 say that, if Shakespeare or Sir Walter must be 
 spared, leave me the Scotch Wizard. 
 
 There is a modest statue of Knox preaching, 
 
 also a stone-marker of the supposed burial place of 
 
 John Knox behind the wall by St. Giles's Church. 
 
 On the flat taljlet is the simple inscription, 
 
 I K 
 
 1572 
 
 How appropriate the lines: 
 
 " Let the sound of those he wrought for, 
 Let the feet ol those he fought for, 
 Echo round his bones for evermore." 
 
Monuments. 93 
 
 There is his house in Edinburgh, a queer old 
 building which he occupied. It came so near fall- 
 ing down and so obstructed the street that the city 
 authorities were about to remove it. The memory of 
 Knox was too strong for the tide of time and mod- 
 ern life. Those who revered his memory rallied to 
 preserve and renew the old house as near as possi- 
 ble after its former plans. Into this has been gath 
 ered a large number of relics, while mottoes taken 
 from the sayings of Knox as well as others com- 
 memorate much of his life and the history of the 
 Reformation. 
 
 But there is one relic not included among those 
 collected there. That one escaped to America, down 
 the line of his posterity, and is in possession of a 
 lineal descendant somewhere in the State of Penn- 
 sylvania. It is an old clock, once the property of 
 Knox. There is a Presbyterian Academy in South 
 Salem, Ohio. One of the first two girl students to 
 enter that school was named Susan Knox Stinson, a 
 direct descendant from John Knox. If that old 
 clock yonder, possibly at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 
 were still running, it would have ticked out the life 
 of John Knox and Susan ICnox Stinson; for both 
 have gone. 
 
94 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 The Stone of Scone Suggests Him. 
 
 For a long time it was at lona, one of the Heb- 
 rides, on the west coast of Scotland. This island 
 was the home of a pure Christianity according to 
 the Gospel. The teachers and preachers were called 
 Culdees. It was not a monastery, but a seminary. 
 It survived amid monastic tyranny and licentious- 
 ness for centuries. It was the morning star of the 
 day of Knox, which came on eight hundred years 
 later. That stone was used as the coronation seat 
 until, about 1296, Edward I, after a battle, carried 
 it to London. It now rests beneath the coronation 
 chair in Westminster Abbey. It remained a captive 
 .of war for over four centuries. 
 
 Now it symbolizes the mighty support of the 
 British throne furnished by the rugged Scottish na- 
 tion. Were it a diamond, brilliant as the Koh-i- 
 noor, it could not vie in worth with that character 
 which it symbolizes. That character had nut been 
 but for Knox. The stone is therefore his memorial. 
 
 "Hold Fast Our Confession." 
 
 One of the tallest, most comprehensive monu- 
 ments is the Confession of Faith, which he. more 
 than any other man, provided for the Convention 
 
Monuments. 95 
 
 of 1560, and out of which afterwards sprang a suc- 
 cession of confessions and covenants down to one 
 hundred years later, the Westminster Confession 
 and Catechism, around which Presbyterianism 
 throughout the world still gathers, and, though it is 
 slowly hewn away in some of its sharper angles, 
 promises to abide as a magnificent expression of 
 catholic Christianity for ages yet to come. 
 
 This is one of the monuments of John Knox, 
 looming far above all symbols of marble or bronze. 
 
 This may be as favorable a time as any to call 
 attention to some of the essentials of catholic unity 
 between other great religious denominations and 
 Presbyterians. Why should Baptist, Congrega- 
 tional, Lutheran, or Methodist antagonize the Pres- 
 byterian as though he were a heretic? That folly 
 was rebuked long ago by Paul when the Corinthians 
 were saying, "I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I of 
 Cephas, and I of Christ." 
 
 Knox made Brown and Congregationalism pos- 
 sible ; he set the pace for John Bunyan with his 
 "Pilgrim" written in jail, and Roger Williams, a 
 Pilgrim to Rhode Island under compulsion, and 
 hence the Baptist Church in the United States. But 
 (for Knox, the dissenting iconoclast, it is doubtful 
 whether John Wesley would have found his way 
 
96 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 so readily, one hundred and seventy-nine years 
 later, into the greatest revival up to that time. 
 
 Distinctness of view is helped by comparing', es- 
 pecially when we can so strike the merits as to see 
 with more clearness and charity the differences and 
 mutual defects. Thus we learn from others how to 
 improve ourselves and how to avoid conformity in 
 outward modes that degenerate, and seize upon mat- 
 ters that are vital in other than our own denomina- 
 tion. 
 
 With this purpose let us compare two of the 
 mightiest Christian Protestant religions on earth, 
 the followers of Knox and of Wesley. One launched 
 in Edinburgh in 1560, the other in London one hun- 
 dred and seventy-nine years after; the one pur- 
 posely opposed to prelacy, the other so in spite of 
 itself. Both are Presbyterial, believing that Epis- 
 copos and Presbutcros are identical so far as they 
 signify ecclesiastical rank. Both are opposed to the 
 union of Church and State. The Scotch Presby- 
 terians were slow in attaining this liberty, while 
 Methodism was never recognized by the State in 
 England. In this country both were born free. As 
 to doctrine, the Presbyterians are Calvinists, but 
 in practice deny the fatalism of that system. The 
 Methodists arc Arminians, but iii a greatly modified 
 
Monuments. 97 
 
 form, so as to avoid its Antinomian features and 
 acknowledge the Divine sovereignty. Presbyterians 
 believe in the "assurance of faith." Methodists em- 
 phasize the "witness of the Spirit." Both believe 
 in total depravity and the sinner's inability to con- 
 vert himself. Both are advancing in their earnest 
 appeals to men on the basis of free will, power to 
 repent, believe, and be saved. Both are growing 
 powers in the world. Their appeal to Scripture is 
 striking, as seen in the language of both Johns, 
 Presbyterian and Methodist. "If any man shall 
 note, in this our Confession, any article or sentence 
 repugnant to God's Holy Word, may it please him 
 of his gentleness and for charity's sake to admonish 
 us, and we do promise satisfaction from the mouth 
 of God, or reformation of that which he shall prove 
 to be amiss." (Knox in the Confession.) 
 
 "The Holy Scripture contains all things neces- 
 sary to salvation ; so that whatsoever is not read 
 therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be re- 
 quired of any man that it should be required as an 
 article of faith." (Article of Faith incorporated 
 from the Church of England by John Wesley into 
 the Methodist Discipline.) 
 
 The Presbyterians have always insisted on a 
 highly educated ministry, and have even crippled 
 7 
 
98 John Knox: Tiir, Ri; former. 
 
 their power by the exclusive application of school 
 requirements at the door of entry into the ministry. 
 Methodism, born in Oxford University, has never 
 as a denomination favored illiteracy, but has seized 
 upon available material for immediate necessities, 
 and so outrun Presbyterianism in both city and 
 country. 
 
 In pushing forward the founding of institutions 
 of learning the "Log College," now Princeton Uni- 
 versity, is followed in America with fifty-five others, 
 while in Scotland all the world may bow to Glas- 
 gow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. The wish of Knox 
 that the Kirk might "be preserved from the bondage 
 of the universities" has been fulfilled. 
 
 Methodism, with lavish hand, scattered the seeds 
 of university life across America from ocean to 
 ocean, until there are 225 of all grades in 
 spite of multitudes of abortive plants which should 
 have died. These have been wisely co-ordinated in 
 a high standard of admission and graduation, until 
 the founding of the American university at the Cap- 
 ital of the country promises to stimulate the whole 
 system. Nor has the Wesleyan Methodism of Eng- 
 land neglected to establish institutions of learning 
 of very high grade. 
 
Monuments. 99 
 
 In form of government these two great Churches 
 are nearly identical. The Presbyterian has in local 
 Churches the session; the Methodist has the 
 Official Board. The Presbytery in the one is 
 answered by the Quarterly Conference in Meth- 
 odism. The Presbyterian Synod, a combination of 
 equal lay and clerical members, is answered in 
 ]\Iethodism by the Annual Conference, exclusively 
 clerical, except as influenced by a powerful non- 
 membership laity. 
 
 The highest governing body of Presbyterianism 
 is the General Assembly, equally lay and clerical. 
 The Methodists are governed by the General Con- 
 ference, also equally divided between laymen and 
 clergymen. 
 
 The presiding officer of the highest Presbyterlal 
 body is elective from time to time, and called "mod- 
 erator." The Methodist bishops are no more than 
 moderators, presiding in turn without power of 
 speech or vote, and amenable to the General Con- 
 ference for fidelity in the administration of office. 
 
 A striking difference between the two is in the 
 mode of supervising the pastoral relation. Theoret- 
 ically, and in large measure practically, Methodist 
 pastors are appointed to their work by a bishop, as- 
 
loo John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 sisted by a council of presiding elders. These pre- 
 siding elders, appointed by the bishop, each has 
 supervision of the pastors within his district, during 
 the Conference year. He may not be presiding 
 elder longer than six years at a time, while at pres- 
 ent there is no time limit to the pastorate. This pre- 
 siding eldership provides as far as practicable that 
 there shall be no congregation left without minis- 
 terial supply. The District Conference of Meth- 
 odism, composed of laymen and clergymen, has no 
 parallel in the sister Church. 
 
 The founder of Methodism said, "I seek an al- 
 liance, offensive and defensive, with all who love 
 our Lord Jesus Christ." Tardily at first, but now 
 with increasing warmth, the Presbyterian Church 
 is accepting the alliance. 
 
 On the question of episcopacy there has been 
 much ado about nothing. A Methodist Presiding 
 Elder is a Bishop; a Methodist General Superin- 
 tendent is also a Bishop ; a Presbyter is a Bishop ; 
 none of them belong to a separate order. Prelacy 
 is a fiction and injurious only when lording it over 
 God's heritage. John Knox prepared a book of 
 Discipline. In it were these provisions: The diffi- 
 culties created by the greatness of the field and the 
 
Monuments. ioi 
 
 paucity of the laborers required two extra offices, 
 neither of which has maintained its place in the 
 Presbyterian system. 
 
 The first was that of readers, who are to read 
 prayers and the Scriptures but were unable to ex- 
 hort. They were encouraged to attempt a few 
 words of exhortation and instruction and if these 
 efforts succeeded, they might look forward to pro- 
 motion to the superior office. The other was that 
 of superintendents. Areas were allotted to them 
 severally. Not unlike to the sees of bishops within 
 which they were to erect the fabric of the Reformed 
 Church. They were not only to plant new charges 
 but to examine the life, diligence, and behavior of 
 ministers, and also the order of their Churches and 
 the manners of the people. "Provision must be made 
 not only for the sustentation of the ministers them- 
 selves during their lives, but also for their wives and 
 children after them, for we consider it a thing most 
 contrarious to reason, godliness, and equity that 
 the widow and children of him who in his life did 
 faithfully serve the kirk of God and for that cause 
 did not carefully make provision for his family, 
 should, after his death, be left comfortless of all 
 provision." An ideal to be better followed in our 
 
I02 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 day. The Church may be shamed by the railways 
 and the State in providing for retired employees. 
 In this, at least, Carnegie is a follower of Knox. 
 
 We have not lost sight of the monuments of 
 Knox in this comparison. 
 
 Coming back to covenants three years before 
 that of 1560, when Scotland was really born as a 
 nation, there had been a partial movement toward 
 the same end, and this habit of entering into cove- 
 nants and confessions of faith swept on down 
 through three hundred years. 
 
 Charles I undertook to foist prelacy on Scotland 
 sixty-five years after the death of Knox. As an out- 
 come of this, Charles lost his head twelve years 
 afterwards. A better head than Puritans are apt to 
 concede. It may be as well to give here some ac- 
 count of how it happened. At the time (1637) Laud 
 was the archbishop. Inspired by Charles in his 
 movements, he appeared in St. Giles Cathedral 
 Church in Edinburgh with pompous regalia. Jen- 
 nie Geddes, whose identity has been challenged by 
 some trivial criticisms, was seated on a stool in the 
 audience. As the archbishop proceeded with the 
 collects, she mistook the word for "colic" and 
 shouted, "Villain, dost thou say mass at my lug?" 
 and seizing her stool, hurled it at Laud. The people 
 
Monuments. 103 
 
 took up the cry against popery, and the riot ex- 
 tended through the country into a revolution, de- 
 feating Charles's purpose. He had intended to im- 
 pose prelacy first on Scotland, and afterward on the 
 American Colonies, so that the club which was 
 broken by the stool of Jennie Geddes never fell 
 upon the head of young America. 
 
 What great things from small beginnings ! A 
 boy threw a stone at a priest in Perth, and the cathe- 
 drals and monasteries were stripped of their works 
 of art. Peter the Great spoke a word, and millions 
 of serfs were emancipated. The bell rang out of 
 the tower of Old South Church in Boston, and Paul 
 Revere mounted and rode. His successors still ride 
 on. At Lexington they "fired the shot heard round 
 the world." April 12, 1861, a man touched the fuse 
 .to fire on Fort Sumter. That knocked the shackles 
 from three million slaves, as well as the coming 
 millions of whites. A rioter flung an epithet at a 
 Russian officer in the palace yard at St. Petersburg, 
 Sunday, January 22, 1905, and a collision followed, 
 shaking the empire. So the stool of Jennie Geddes, 
 keeper of a vegetable store, knocked the club from 
 the hand of tyranny, aimed at posterity. For all 
 these great results from apparently small causes, the 
 
I04 Joiix Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 conditions were ripe. It needed but the match to set 
 the world on fire. 
 
 The Scotch were a covenanting people. Let the 
 world look out for such. 
 
 The year following the Revolution started by 
 that stool, the National Covenant was renewed at 
 Gray Friars, Edinburgh. Sixty thousand people 
 came from all parts of Scotland, filling the Church 
 and even the graveyard. They listened solemnly 
 to the reading of the Covenant. Then, with trem- 
 bling hand, the Earl of Sutherland first signed the 
 parchment roll ; then a stream of people came sign- 
 ing amid weeping and shouting, "some adding to 
 their names, "Till death;" others drew blood from 
 their own veins with which to write their names, 
 till at last there was but room for initials, and the 
 parchment was entirely covered. This was sixty- 
 six years after the death of Knox. Covenanting is 
 well as far as it goes, but all human history shows 
 that it is easy to forget. Tn five years after the Na- 
 tional Covenant came another, called "The Solemn 
 T^eague and Covenant." This was to cover the 
 three kingdoms, England, Ireland, and Scotland; 
 but it was vitiated by the mixture of civil and relig- 
 ious elements. It was, however, entered upon with 
 intense enthusiasm bv all three of the kingdoms. It 
 
Monume;nts. 105 
 
 was destined to short life, and was finally burned 
 eighteen years afterwards by the hangman in West- 
 minster Abbey. 
 
 The; We;stminste;r Con^ejssign. 
 
 This came also in the time of Charles I. The 
 Assembly w^as called against the wishes of the king 
 by the Long Parliament. It was composed of Eng- 
 lish and Scotch. Three Americans — John Cotton, 
 Thomas Hooker, and John Davenport — were invited, 
 but could not attend. The Churches were repre- 
 sented by Episcopalians, twelve Independents, some 
 Erastians, and some Presbyterians — in all one hun- 
 dred and twenty-one men. Unitedly the Assembly 
 was composed of men of talent and learning unsur- 
 passed in their time. The Independents and the 
 scholarly Erastians withdrew before the end of the 
 Assembly, while the Presbyterians continually in- 
 creased, and became the controlling power. Their 
 work was deliberately done, requiring five and a 
 half years and 1,163 sessions before it went forth 
 from that Jerusalem chamber. There was much 
 fasting and prayer; some of the prayers were even 
 two hours long. No wonder the Confession en- 
 dures. The Assembly came under the Long Parlia- 
 ment. Both passed away together, but left the great 
 
io6 John Knox: The; Reformer. 
 
 Confession an abiding shaft to the memory of Knox. 
 He wrote that of 1560, its forerunner, in four days. 
 
 The Kirk a Monument. 
 
 In pointing out the creeds and covenants, have 
 we gotten away from Knox? That were impossi- 
 ble, just as it would be to get away from Ben Nevis 
 until we could escape the waters flowing from his 
 sides into the Sound of Mull or i\Ioray Forth, or 
 just as Mount Shasta follows one all the way of the 
 Sacramento through the Golden Gate. 
 
 In addition to the covenants was the Scottish 
 Kirk. 
 
 Emerson visited Carlyle in Scotland. Standing 
 on a hill, Carlyle pointed to a church-spire in the 
 valley, and said : "Eighteen hundred years ago 
 Christ died on the cross in Palestine. That built the 
 church in the valley yonder. That brought you 
 and me together from the ends of the earth. See 
 how all things work together." 
 
 Coming down only fifteen centuries from the 
 crucifixion, we may add. had not Knox protested 
 and stood through stress and storm, neither church- 
 spire, nor Carlyle and Emerson, nor reader or 
 writer, would have enjoyed our religious liberty. 
 
monumijnts. ^ 107 
 
 Ths Schoolhouse;. 
 
 John Knox outlined a system of general educa- 
 tion open for all children, coupled with university 
 privileges. This was in 1560. There was a special 
 act passed promoting the same great enterprise in 
 1695. That movement toward popular education 
 was not received with favor in England. It has 
 taken all the time till now for the mother country 
 to become thoroughly aroused to the necessity of an 
 educated peasantry. 
 
 Governor Berkeley, of the Virginia Colony, about 
 1650, reported that there was no common school in 
 existence in Virginia, and he hoped there would not 
 be for the next hundred years. His lordship be- 
 longed to the Cavaliers, and reflected their distrust 
 of education for the common people. They believed 
 
 "A little learning is a dangerous thing, — 
 Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." 
 
 Knox's ideal reached America during her Colo- 
 nial period. It found prolific soil until to-day there 
 is "a church in every valley and a schoolhouse on 
 every hillside." Thirty millions of worshipers, the 
 very salt of the earth, pass in and out of these church 
 
io8 , John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 doors, while about eighteen milUons of school 
 pupils pass in and out of the "little red 
 school" under the American flag. The entire 
 population of Spain is but ten millions, a little over 
 half the number of our school-children, while that of 
 Scotland is about five millions, or not one-third of 
 these intellectual heirs of John Knox. Face the 
 church or the schoolhouse in either case, take off 
 your hat and bow reverently to the memory of 
 Knox. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 BONNIE SCOTLAND. 
 
 This is one of the monuments of Knox, with a 
 dark seam or two in its pure marble. It is with no 
 pleasure we point them out, nor with invidious com- 
 parison, forgetful of similar as well as other 
 shadowy lines attaching to all English-speaking na- 
 tions. There was looseness in the marital relations 
 of the ancient Scottish clansmen ; this did not pass 
 away in the later times of priest, abbot, and 
 noble. It was shockingly prominent in court life 
 during our Reformer's era; even to this day the 
 ratio of illegitimates is so almost unbelievable that 
 we abstain from statistics. May the pure spirit of 
 Knox soon prevail so as no longer to entail such sor- 
 row upon innocent children, not to speak of the 
 horrors in the life of those sinning ! The Reformer 
 deemed adultery worthy of death. 
 
 There is also what is known as Scotch whisky. 
 Would that the name might be cut in twain, robbing 
 109 
 
no John Knox: The Ruformer. 
 
 it of the honored name of "Scotch !" There are in 
 our country flamingo placards advertising cigars and 
 drinks that are insulting to the memory of such 
 men as Henry George and President Garfield. One 
 would imagine their bones to stir in their graves 
 could they read the advertisements beneath their 
 pictures on the face of our city walls. Why must 
 death-bed scenes of illustrious statesmen, Presidents, 
 and governors be made offensive with descriptions 
 of the death-dealing cigar? Scotch whisky st'll 
 poisons the noble blood of Scotland. Lately a fire 
 destroyed a storage of seven hundred thousand gal- 
 lons in Aberdeen, which released, broke away down 
 the streets of the city into the river Dee, and on like 
 a river of fire to the German Ocean. Let Carlyle 
 boast of Knox as a "cheery, social man, having his 
 pipe of Bordeaux in that old Edinburgh house of 
 his." Had Knox been alive to look on that fire 
 rolling down the streets of Aberdeen, doubtless his 
 serious face would have lighted up with gladness. 
 Our grandsires called "old rye" God's good creature, 
 and served it to their ministers ; nor has the habit 
 f^ed entirely from among English preachers, who 
 lone up for the pulpit with this devil's stimulus 
 called by John Wesley "liquid fire and distilled 
 damnation." With hundreds of thousands of men 
 
Monuments. hi 
 
 of Knox's fiber the liquor curse will pass out of our 
 nation, soon to be followed, let us hope, by its twin 
 curse, nicotine poison. 
 
 Over against these reluctant impeachments, I 
 quote Dr. Philip Schaff: "Scotland is an uncon- 
 querable fort of orthodox Protestantism. In no 
 other country and Church do we find such fidelity 
 and tenacity; such unswerving devotion to the 
 genius of the Reformation ; such union of metaphys- 
 ical subtlety with religious fervor and impetuosity; 
 such general interest in ecclesiastical councils and 
 enterprises; such jealousy for the rights and the 
 self-government of the Church ; such loyalty to a 
 particular denomination, combined with a generous 
 interest in Christ's kingdom at large; such rever- 
 ence for God's Holy Word and holy day that, after 
 the hard and honest toil of the week, lights up the 
 poorest man's cottage on Saturday night." 
 
 Lofty tribute from a native Switzer to sons of 
 Scotia ; but both are mountain lands, famous for 
 Protestant heroes. 
 
 Other Monuments. 
 
 Scotland has a large number of fine cities. We 
 mention a few with over a hundred thousand popu- 
 lation. Edinburgh, the capital, overhung with a 
 
112 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 cloud of historic interest and decorated with very 
 fine modern architecture, wears as her brightest 
 jewel the famous university. It occupies the ground 
 of the "Kirk o' Field" and the murder of Darnley ; 
 a nobler substitute than the obelisk of Luxor on the 
 blood spot of the guillotine in Paris. 
 
 Another great monument is Dundee, astride the 
 Tay, eight miles from the German Ocean, wonder- 
 ful for its docks, its jute, its Baltic commerce, and 
 its trade with Canada and India. It has a cathedral 
 about old St. Mary's Tower and a university of 
 renown. 
 
 Further north is Aberdeen, by the Dee, and fac- 
 ing the German Ocean with its mighty pier, its 
 granite bridge, its woollens and Marischal College. 
 
 There is, on both banks of the Clyde, Glasgow, 
 next London in population, greatest in Scotland in 
 variety of marnifactures and shipments. It has a 
 Gothic cathedral of great beauty, but its university 
 rises greater than all. the Alma Mater of Knox. 
 
 The Scotch Sabbath as a Monument. 
 
 Scotchmen excel us. Knox set tlu' pace. The 
 Pharisees overdid the benign law of the Sabbath, 
 so did they the law of the tithe, fasting, and prayer. 
 It is easy to make a yoke. There is much foolish 
 
Monuments. 113 
 
 sneering at the Puritan Sunday among us, promoted 
 mostly by men who despise all law, excepting greed 
 and appetite. When Carl Schurz, as a fugitive, 
 landed in Edinburgh, he sought an interview with 
 a man of large business interests and was aston- 
 ished to find that no business houses were open on 
 the Lord's Day. His description of his experiences 
 that day are comically eloquent, when one remem- 
 bers the beer-garden habit of his native Germany. 
 In our capital at Washington all government build- 
 ings are closed on the Sabbath-day, except the Li- 
 brary, and it were better for that to be closed. Go 
 to Edinburgh and you will find that the divine law, 
 "Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy," was 
 no mistake on the part of the Almighty. 
 
 RoIvIv-Call. 
 
 Omitting for the present any analysis of callings, 
 let us run the eye down the alphabet and find the 
 descendants of John Knox, who but for his work 
 could not have been. 
 
 A. There were the Abercrombies, about the mid- 
 dle of the eighteenth century, very eminent in mili- 
 tary service, literature, and science, both medical 
 and moral. 
 
 B. Far back in the centuries, amid the shadows, 
 8 
 
114 John Knox: The: Reformer. 
 
 were the Bruces, mighty chieftains, celebrated in 
 song and fiction. Of them came, after the Reformer, 
 singers and explorers, also Barbour, poet, contem- 
 porary of Chaucer. There was Bell, who though 
 born in Edinburgh, rang out the telephone from 
 Boston ; and Black, writer of romance ; and Blackie, 
 masterful molder of mind ; and Blair, founder of 
 William and Mary College, Virginia ; and Browns to 
 furnish martyr, physician, metaphysician, and to 
 leave us "Rab and Plis Friends." And there were 
 the Balfours, and Lord Brougham, a marvel of ora- 
 tory and statecraft, down to his ninetieth year; and 
 George Buchanan of classic learning, writing poems 
 in Latin ; and one of the few hymn-writers of high 
 order in our day, the late lioratius Bonar. The 
 blood of Browning was tinged on the maternal side 
 with Scotch. Sir Campbell-Bannerman, English 
 premier, comes of the stock. 
 
 C. The Campbells were a gifted race, furnish- 
 ing such a poet as could give the world "Lord L'l- 
 lin's Daughter" and "llohcnlindon." How can we 
 praise Chalmers, Carlyle, Caldcrwood. Carnegie, 
 divines, orators, metaphysicians, and benefactors? 
 
 D. Come we to Douglas, family that furnished 
 eight leaders slain in battle by the middle of the 
 fifteenth century, and before Knox's time. "They 
 
Monuments. 115 
 
 that take the sword shall perish by the sword." But 
 the name Douglas lives honored by lovers of peace. 
 William Drummond was a rival of Ben Jonson. 
 Dunbar was a courtly singer. Dalrymples, four of 
 them, are noted for statecraft, law, war, and history. 
 
 E. The name of Erskine suggests a constellation 
 in law, jurisprudence, and religion, who made the 
 latter part of Scotland's eighteenth century bril- 
 liant. 
 
 F. Name Forbes, and you suggest high literary 
 talent. 
 
 G. Grant means arts and sciences as well as 
 military ability ; one strand of which ended at Mount 
 McGregor when our Ulysses died. Gladstone, peer- 
 less in his day, was of Scotch ancestry. 
 
 H. The Hamiltons were borderers, swinging to 
 either side as best suited them through the long 
 years of strife, but furnishing further down, the 
 great, if not the greatest, metaphysician of his race, 
 Sir William Hamilton. And there is Hog^g, whose 
 poetry deserves a better name. Hood breaks the 
 heart with his "Song of the Shirt." 
 
 I. Irving was a brilliant, troublesome, fanatical, 
 religious leader. 
 
 J. James, for the most part, but a titular name. 
 There were six of them in a line ; five of whom lost 
 
ii6 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 life in battle or by assassination. The fifth died of 
 a broken heart on account of failure in battle ; this 
 was the father of Mary, Queen of Scots. 
 
 K. We come to the Keiths, gifted, martial, 
 scholarly ; one of them was the confidant of Fred- 
 erick the Great, and died on the field of Hohenkirch. 
 Another gave Marischal College and University to 
 Scotland. 
 
 L. Sir David Lindsay, first of Scotch laureates ; 
 and Leyden, cosmopolitan, scholar, and traveler. 
 The Leightons were an able and genial family. 
 There were four Leslies, two great generals, one 
 a diplomatist, one a physicist. Lockhart gave the 
 Edinburgh Quarterly Rcviczv to the world as well 
 as the "Life of Sir Walter Scott." When we say 
 Livingstone, there emerges Africa and the sources 
 of the Nile. 
 
 M. Many are the Macs. Macgregor, the "Rob 
 Roy" of Sir Walter; George Macdonald, who threw 
 floods of sunshine over Scottish hills and life; and 
 Hector Archibald Macdonald, of Egypt, India, then 
 South Africa, Major-General of Highlanders. The 
 Montgomeries, three of them poets. The Moorcs, 
 one physician and writer ; and Sir John, whom we 
 remember "with his martial cloak around him, left 
 alone in his glory;" and the Morays, too distin- 
 
Monuments. 117 
 
 guished to describe; the Muirs, one a Sanscrit 
 scholar and one Arabic. John Muir, fosterer of our 
 national parks, and whose monument is the Muir 
 Glacier. 
 
 M. Murchison was the dominant geologist in his 
 time. And there was Murdock who improved the 
 steam-engine of Watt, and in 1792 produced illumi- 
 nating gas and coal. And there is McAuley and 
 McCosh lent to us for Princeton, and the Macken- 
 zies and the McPhersons. The name of Hugh Mil- 
 ler suggests "Old Red Sandstone." To name Mc- 
 Crie is to mention the most thorough biographer, as 
 well as the fairest, of Knox and Melville, and 
 Matheson, whose physical blindness enhanced his 
 spiritual vision, and McLaren, for fifty years 
 preacher and expositor, growing richer each year. 
 
 N. Napier was the inventor of logarithms. The 
 Nasmyths, father and son, were painters; while 
 Patrick Nasmyth gave the steam-hammer to the 
 world. Nichols, father and son, are noted in as- 
 tronomy and literature. Nicol was the painter of 
 "Irish Life ;" Lady Nairne, "Imitator of Burns." 
 
 O. Mrs. Oliphant was a prolific novelist, at first 
 a bit lonesome in Scotch leadership, being a woman. 
 But her kind has come to the front. Drop the 
 alphabet and group the women. Fanny Wright 
 
ii8 John Knox: The Rei^ormer. 
 
 became our first woman lecturer. Three great lady 
 travelers, Miss North, Darwinized, melancholy, 
 widely traveled, a gifted artist; Mrs. Ella Bird 
 Bishop, the conquerless cripple, wit, and orator, 
 traveling amid the Asiatic nations, opening the way 
 for the support of mission work an honor to Bonnie 
 Scotland; Miss Constance E. Gordon Gumming, a 
 descendant of Red Gomyn, the touch of her wealth 
 and genius diffusing itself over Christian Europe 
 and unchristian China, where by her support Hill 
 Murray teaches the blind to read and open their eyes 
 on two worlds. 
 
 P. Playfair was philosopher and mathematician : 
 Pinkerton, antiquarian and litterateur. Paterson 
 rose from the rank of peddler to become the founder 
 of the London Bank ; he was so far-sighted as to be 
 promoter of the first Panama or Darien enterprise 
 in the seventeenth century ; the colony thus founded 
 was called New Caledonia ; it was wrecked, as was 
 that of the French near two centuries later. This 
 Paterson also was a leader in the Union of Scotland 
 and England, which succeeded better than the 
 Darien enterprise. PoUok is immortal as the au- 
 thor of "The Course of Time." 
 
 R. Alexander Ross is famed as the author of 
 "The Fortunate vShophcrdcss." There were four 
 Ramsays, each brilliant; one started a circulating 
 
MONUMEJNTS. 119 
 
 library, one was a geologist, one a chevalier, an- 
 other a clergyman and writer. Reid, a great philos- 
 opher, who by his philosophy o£ common sense, off- 
 set the folly of Hume and Berkeley. He was fol- 
 lowed by Stewart, Sir William Hamilton, and in our 
 day by Calderwood. The Rennies, three of them, 
 left their monuments, one at Sebastopol, one in Lon- 
 don Bridge, and one at London Docks. To men- 
 tion Roberts and Robertson is to suggest painting, 
 military craft, antiquarian research, and history. 
 
 S. John Skinner, of "Tullochgorum." To name 
 Scott is to speak of the painter, the philosopher, and 
 Sir Walter. There were Shairp and Sharp, like their 
 own names. Out of the great throngs of Smiths we 
 need mention but two, Adam the political economist, 
 and Robertson Smith, the Biblical scholar, Ste- 
 phenson calls to mind a great engineer and the pa- 
 thetic Robert Louis, with his "Jekyll and Hyde.'* 
 To name the Stewarts suggests Sir Donald, military 
 hero, and Dugald, the philosopher. Sterling stands 
 for medicine and literature ; Syme, the great sur- 
 geon ; and Alexander Selkirk, who set the boy world 
 in pursuit of Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 T. There were the Taits, one Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, the other physicist and mathematician. 
 Tannahill and Tennant. Thomas Telford was a 
 great civil engineer. There were seven Thomsons, 
 
t2o John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 a naturalist, two poets, one painter, an explorer, a 
 chemist, and an antiquary. Tyler left the bar for 
 literature. 
 
 W. Sir William Wallace is traced so far back 
 in the shadows of history as to appear somewhat 
 dim, though there is a monumental tower more than 
 two hundred feet high at Abbey Craig, establishing 
 him firmly in Scottish history, for it is a sort of Val- 
 halla for Scotland. Sir David \Mlkie, a great 
 painter with a poetic soul ; it was he who gave the 
 world the painting of "John Knox Preaching Be- 
 fore His Congregation in Edinburgh," now in the 
 British Museum. To say Wilson is to name the dis- 
 tinguished archaeologist, and "Sir Christopher 
 North," and another great linguist missionary ; and 
 Wilson, who fell heir to the sword of Cameron when 
 his hands were cut off. George Wishart, who led 
 Knox into the light, was burned at St. Andrews. 
 
 Y. James Young, chemist, early in the nine- 
 teenth century, whose experiments led to the petro- 
 leum industry. Colonel Sir Henry Yule, a distin- 
 guished soldier in India, and an author of literary 
 skill equal to his military talent. Possibly the letter 
 Z is too angular to be at home in Scotland, unless 
 softened to S, where it sits on the Shetland Isles 
 and their hardy ponies. 
 
MoNUME'NTS. 121 
 
 To read the above list bestirs one's blood some- 
 thing after the sound of the pibroch. 
 
 A more rapid summary may show the marvelous 
 intellectual and moral force of the men made pos- 
 sible by the life of our Reformer. 
 
 Poets. — Drummond, Ramsay, Burns, Thomson, 
 Beattie, Scott, Campbell, Pollok, Lockhart, Mont- 
 gomery, Wilson, Aytoun. 
 
 Historians. — Buchanan, Burnet, Hume, Rob- 
 ertson, Russell, Watson, Alison, Carlyle. 
 
 Philosophers. — Adam Smith, Reid, Karnes, 
 Stewart, Brown, Sir William Hamilton. 
 
 Science. — Napier, Ferguson, Watt, Playfair, 
 Maclaurin, Leslie, David Brewster, Hugh Miller, 
 Sir Charles Lyell, Sir Roderick Murchison. 
 
 Take the Scotch out of the British Scientific As- 
 sociation to-day, and but a small fragment is left. 
 
 Writers. — Boswell, Smollett, Mackenzie, Blair, 
 McCrie, Chalmers, Jeffrey, Brougham. 
 
 Travelers. — Bruce, Park, Ross, Livingstone. 
 
 Biblical Scholars. — Too many to mention, 
 while to-day the bodyguard and advanced column 
 toward the very core of the Christian faith is 
 Scotch. 
 
 Has there broken forth such a stream of mission- 
 ary enthusiasm from any other part of the world? 
 
122 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 Only to mention Alexander Duff, whose little school 
 in Calcutta grew in thirty-six years to three thou- 
 sand. And Robert Morrison who captured the lan- 
 guage of the Chinaman and taught it to speak the 
 language of the Bible. John Kenneth McKenzie, 
 the Scotch Canadian, and James Gilmore, the apostle 
 to Mongolia; George Leslie Mackay of Highland 
 ancestry, the conqueror of Formosa. To mention 
 Livingstone is to see Africa emerge on the eyes of 
 the world. Melville B. Cox, the first missionary of 
 the Methodist Episcopal Church to Africa, with a 
 name of Scotch fiber, said, "Though a thousand fall 
 let Africa be redeemed." Bishop William Taylor 
 was thoroughly of the same mold, one of the most 
 picturesque and successful missionaries in history. 
 We all can join Sir Walter Scott in his patriotic 
 lines : 
 
 " O Caledonia, stern and wild, 
 Meet nurse for a gifted child; 
 Land of brown heath and shaggy' wood. 
 Land of the mountain and the flood; 
 Land of my sires ! what mortal hand 
 Can e'er untie the filial band 
 That knits me to thy rugged strand?" 
 
 Where are the monuments of Knox? Where 
 are they not? 
 
PART IV. 
 
 SHAMROCK AND THISTLE. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 SHAMROCK AND THISTLE. 
 
 Thk Scotch-Irish, whence are they? In the 
 north of Ireland is the province of Ulster, equal to 
 about one-fifth of the State of Ohio. A thousand 
 years before Knox's time the Irish went over to 
 Caledonia, and so far subdued its people as to leave 
 their own name, Scotch, upon the land. About 
 thirty years after Knox died, the Scotch, in return, 
 went to Ireland, and planted in Ulster an irrepressi- 
 ble Presbyterian Protestantism, sons of Knox. 
 
 Thence came to the American colonies, a hun- 
 dred years after the settlement of the Puritans in 
 New England and the Cavaliers in Virginia, a flood 
 of immigration, which, entering New England, 
 Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas, broke through the 
 Alleghanies into all the West. Following the "An- 
 trim evacuations" in 1704, thirty thousand emi- 
 grated to America in two years. 
 125 
 
126 John Knox: The; Reformer. 
 
 For a long time they were busy in the work of 
 settlement and subjugation of the soil. They helped 
 in the Revolutionary War and the founding of the 
 American Government, silent as to their nationality ; 
 but in later years, largely through the organization 
 of the Scotch-Irish Congress in 1889, they have 
 spoken out, made themselves known, and asserted 
 their claims. In this they have resembled very much 
 the floods that break from the mountains of Scot- 
 land beneath their snow and ice. It takes time to 
 thaw, but when they break forth, they sweep all be- 
 fore them. 
 
 Puritanism is very loosely defined. It was per- 
 vasive, and included Protestantism in England, 
 Scotland, Ireland, Holland, and their successors in 
 America. "In England it produced statesmen like 
 Hampden, soldiers like Cromwell, poets like Milton, 
 preachers like Howe, theologians like Owen, dream- 
 ers like Bunyan, hymnists like Watts, and saints 
 like Baxter;" in America, Bradford, Cotton, Endi- 
 cott, Winthrop, Williams. 
 
 There is some risk of these Scotch-Irish dis- 
 counting Yankee Puritanism in their sweeping 
 claims for having accomplished almost all in bring- 
 ing the country to its present achievements. How- 
 ever, Puritans, having first had their say, can well 
 
Shamrock and Thisti^e. 127 
 
 afford to listen to this broad-shouldered, big- 
 brained, hardy race of Scotch-Irish. In their re- 
 volt they dropped the English Rose from the triple 
 emblem, leaving only the Thistle and the Shamrock. 
 
 The Declaration oe American Independence 
 IS a Memorial. 
 
 In Wooster County, Massachusetts, as early as 
 1773, there were fifty families from Scotland who 
 declared against the domination of the mother coun- 
 try, while the Mechlenburg Declaration in North 
 Carolina came in 1775. When in Independence 
 Hall, July 4, 1776, there was hesitancy about sign- 
 ing the Declaration, Dr. Witherspoon, a lineal de- 
 scendant of John Knox, said, "To hesitate at this 
 moment is to consent to our slavery. That noble 
 instrument on your table should be subscribed this 
 very moment by every pen in this house. He that 
 will not respond to its accents and strain every 
 nerve to carry into effect its provisions, is unworthy 
 the name of free man, and although these gray hairs 
 must soon descend into the sepulcher, I would in- 
 finitely rather that they should descend thither by 
 the hand of the executioner than desert at this crisis 
 the sacred cause of my country." When in a day 
 or two the signing took place, down went the sig- 
 
128 John Knox: Tiie Reformer. 
 
 natures of fourteen Scotchmen. Like the stone 
 of Scone beneath the coronation chair in Westmin- 
 ster Abbey, the hardy Scot was never removed from 
 his loyalty to the British throne. Gladstone, with 
 Scotch blood in his veins, practically effected the 
 disestablishment in Ireland, and unhappy Erin has 
 come to her emancipation from a long, intolerable 
 landlordism. 
 
 When, under the new Constitution, also signed 
 by twelve Scots, Washington formed his first Cab- 
 inet, he called Alexander Hamilton to the Treasury ; 
 Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State; General 
 Knox, Secretary of War ; Randolph, Attorney-Gen- 
 eral ; Rutledge, Wilson, Blair, and Iredell, Asso- 
 ciate Justices, — Scotch blood in every one of them. 
 Half of his generals in the Revolutionary War were 
 Scotch. 
 
 In the conquest of the West, David Crockett, 
 Scotch-Irish, pushed out of Tennessee into Texas, 
 and perished at Fort Alamo. Daniel Boone, of the 
 same race, was the forerunner of civilization in 
 Kentucky, passing thence into Missouri, where he 
 died. 
 
 Simon Kenton forced his way savagely into Ohio, 
 and afterward joined George Rogers Clark. These 
 
Shamrock and Thistle. 129 
 
 were the breakers on the wave of Western civiliza- 
 tion. Then followed the ruling type of the same 
 Scotch-Irish. Into Texas went General Sam Hous- 
 ton ; into Kentucky and northward into Ohio and the 
 Northwest, pre-empting it for the American, George 
 Rogers Clark was sent by Patrick Henry. Still 
 other grades of the same people followed: in Ten- 
 nessee, Andrew Jackson; in the central parts came 
 Breckenridge, and later Benton; and north of the 
 Ohio, Arthur St. Clair, Anthony Wayne, and Mc- 
 Arthur; followed later by the McDonalds and the 
 McCooks. Francis McCormick, lay preacher, 
 planted Methodism on the Miami over a hundred 
 years ago. Still later to this heart of the Republic 
 came James K. Polk. 
 
 Again we must enter the Scotch verdict. Some 
 of their orators claim James Madison, others have 
 claimed Abraham Lincoln. We do not wonder at 
 this, he was so marked by the traits of their nation- 
 ality. But Nicolay traces him through seven gen- 
 erations of English. Another of their orators even 
 claims Governor Corwin — "Tom Corwin, the Wag- 
 oner Boy;" he was unsurpassed in the witchery of 
 his oratory; but was likely English or Hungarian, 
 or both. Should they claim the merry- faced 
 9 
 
I30 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 man of the moon, we could only reply "Not proven." 
 That stately great man who financiered the Re- 
 public through our Civil War, Salmon P. Chase, and 
 Mark Hanna, who could carry a Presidential cam- 
 paign without campaign speeches, were both 
 Scotch-Irish. There is on the maternal side a strain 
 of this blood in Theodore Roosevelt. Never was 
 there a manlier Presidential campaign than when 
 two gifted Scotch-Irish, Christian men headed the 
 Republican and the Democratic tickets in the per- 
 sons of William IMcKinley and William J. Bryan. 
 Forty colonial governors sent to this country before 
 1776, and twelve Presidents of the United States up 
 to date, have been of this blood. This book is writ- 
 ten in sight of the cemetery where lies the dust of 
 two Scotch-Irish Ohio governors, Duncan Mc- 
 Arthur and William Allen. 
 
 They II.we Been Illustrious in Law and 
 Jurisprudence. 
 
 To name John Marshall is but to suggest a line 
 of such; as, Thomas Ewing, "Salt-boiler" and 
 "Nestor;" John ^Nlclycan. Jeremiah S. Black, David 
 Davis, Allen G. Thurman ; Benjamin Harrison, dis- 
 tinguished as President, more eminent as lawyer ; 
 William C. Preston, of South Carolina, orator and 
 
Shamrock and Thistle. 131 
 
 senator ; Attorney-General Crittenden, John G. Car- 
 lisle, and Proctor Knott — all great lawyers ; Thomas 
 Scott, secretary of the first Constitutional Conven- 
 tion of Ohio, and Supreme Judge ; and William T. 
 McCIintick, a cultured, gifted lawyer, jurist, and 
 Christian, an honor to his State and to Chillicothe, 
 Ohio, where his life was spent. 
 
 Orators. 
 
 The list were too long to call. Patrick Henry, 
 by his eloquence, decided and precipitated the Revo- 
 lutionary war, Samuel Galloway, of Columbus, 
 Ohio, was by name, temperament, and electrical 
 eloquence, joined with piety and love of the 
 Scriptures, thoroughly Scotch-Irish. When Pres- 
 ident Lincoln introduced him to General Mc- 
 Clellan, he remarked, "I want to present my 
 friend, Sam Galloway ; there is but one of 
 his kind." In the face of the coming Civil War, 
 at a great anti-Nebraska Convention held in Colum- 
 bus, Galloway was making an address, during which 
 he shouted "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin!" It 
 seemed to us as though Daniel had come again to 
 judgment. More than any other man he brought 
 the school system of Ohio to order. 
 
132 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 Pulpit. 
 
 To eliminate this race from the ranks of Amer- 
 ican preachers were to rob it of much of its glory 
 in Canada and the United States. To specify were 
 a long, invidious task. Part of its emphasis may 
 be seen in its contribution to Methodism as well as 
 to Presbyterianism and the other Churches. It gave 
 such as Mackenzie, McTyeire, Maffitt, Axley, Mc- 
 Gee, Cartwright, and Lakin. It has furnished the 
 episcopacy of the Methodist Episcopal Church with 
 a Simpson and a Thoburn. Were the Fitzes and 
 Macs, with all that strain of blood, to be superan- 
 nuated an immediate election would become neces- 
 sary to repair the wreck of the episcopal wheel. 
 
 This race is capable of great religious enthu- 
 siasm, even to wildfire. A pair of Scotch-Irish 
 brothers, Presbyterian and Methodist, John and 
 William McGee, were humanly responsible for the 
 great revival which occurred in 1800, known as the 
 Canebrake Camp-meeting in Kentucky. It was at- 
 tended with convulsions, jerks, contortions, and 
 other unexplained and inexplicable phenomena, 
 while out of it originated that noble, evangelical 
 Cumberland Presbyterian Church as well as the 
 modern camp-meeting, an institution now largely 
 
Shamrock and Thistle. 133 
 
 void of its original power. Ethics and entertainment 
 have taken the place of conversion. Alexander 
 Campbell displayed his Scottish talent and tempera- 
 ment in his protest against all creeds, specially in 
 his own Presbyterian Church. He carried on his 
 battle with an aggressiveness worthy of Knox, un- 
 til to-day his followers amount to a million and a 
 quarter. This Church dislikes to be called by the 
 name of its founder, preferring that of Disciples of 
 Christ. In truth it has become more softened into 
 a Christian denomination with a fraternal spirit. 
 
 Educators. 
 
 In this the Scotch-Irish have greatly distin- 
 guished themselves. Blair founded William and 
 Mary for "the glory of Almighty God." It received 
 a land grant before Harvard. There were the 
 Tennents and Witherspoons, McCosh of Princeton, 
 and the late William R. Harper, of Chicago Uni- 
 versity. The Ohio University, though started by 
 New England Puritans, has had in the line of her 
 presidents several descendants from Ulster. The 
 portraits of Wilson and Howard are Scotchy. Mc- 
 Guffey, who did so much for the literary taste of 
 young America by his school-readers, must have 
 been Scotch-Irish. It is certain that President Wil- 
 
134 John Knox: Thk Reformer. 
 
 liam H. Scott inherited his stalwart manhood, high 
 moral tone, religious conscientiousness, and philo- 
 sophical acumen from the North of Ireland on both 
 the paternal and maternal side. Dr. George R. 
 Crooks, of Drew Seminary, scholar and biographer, 
 was of this stock. Some of the chief places in Johns 
 Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania arc 
 filled with Scotch-Irish. Asa Gray, whom I saw in 
 the Rocky Mountains vie with Sir Joseph Hooker 
 in original botany, was of this blood. 
 
 Journalism. 
 
 In journalism the race has excelled. As editors 
 of newspapers, John Campbell started the Boston 
 Nezi's Letter in 1704; the first north of the Ohio 
 River, in Cincinnati, 1792, was published by Wil- 
 liam Maxwell ; The Western Herald, by James Wil- 
 son, was begun at Steubcnville, Ohio, in 1806. 
 Horace Greeley and his successor, Whitelaw Reid, in 
 the Tribune, furnished fine specimens of talent ; and 
 we may add Grady, of the Atlanta Constitution; 
 Watterson, of the Louisville Courier Journal; James 
 Gordon Bennett, Simon Cameron, with Charles 
 Hammond, of Ohio, in 1812. After him follow the 
 McLeans, Richard Smith. Murat Halstead, Joseph 
 Medill, Samuel Medary ; James Scott m Chicago, 
 
Shamrock and Thistle. 135 
 
 editor of the Western Star at Lebanon, Ohio, and 
 author of Scott's Law taxing the hquor-traffic in 
 his State. 
 
 McClure in Philadelphia, and Cockerill; J. B. 
 McCuUagh, of the St. Louis Glohe-Demorcat; John 
 PVew, Wheeling Intelligencer ; John Russell Young, 
 General Stedman; Bonner, of the New York 
 Ledger, are noted; the writer's home, Chillicothe, 
 has one daily, that was edited by a red-hot Scotch- 
 Irishman, William H. Hunter, who has recently 
 died, and to whose courtesy the author is much in- 
 debted ; and another, G. W. C. Perry, of the stock 
 of Oliver Hazard Perry, whose great "Lake Erie 
 Victory" hangs in the rotunda of the Buckeye Cap- 
 itol as a fine painting. 
 
 When we advance to the realm of magazine lit- 
 erature, we should find that greatly depleted if we 
 take away the Macs from the list of publishers' and 
 editors' names. Daniel Curry was a giant of this 
 race. 
 
 We should prejudice our case by ignoring the 
 constellation of brilliant historians, novelists, poets, 
 theological writers, metaphysicians, and scientists, 
 which broke forth from New England Puritanism. 
 In this they led off; but we can not ignore the 
 
136 John Knox: Thk Reformer, 
 
 stream of Scotch-Irish talent. In divinity, Alexan- 
 der and Hodge are claimed by this race ; so is Mc- 
 Cosh. Dr. McClintock, of the great Cyclopedia, a 
 man of all-round talent, was Scotch-Irish. 
 
 In history, Washington Irving is a name to con- 
 jure with, and Douglas Campbell, of multitudinous 
 name, has changed the angle of vision in his "Puri- 
 tanism in Holland, England, and America." 
 
 Inventors. 
 
 As one hearkens to the puff of the engine, it 
 seems to be shouting the name of "Watt," "Watt," 
 "Watt!" If we listen to the muffled sound of the 
 steamboat, it will speak the name of another Scotch- 
 Irishman, "Robert Fulton," "Robert Fulton," "Rob- 
 ert Fulton !" 
 
 Do you hear the singing of the wires overhead? 
 Their melodious note hums the name of another of 
 this race, "Samuel Morse," "Samuel Morse," "Sam- 
 uel Morse!" 
 
 When the trolley-line carries one swinging up 
 and down our valleys, he may hear the name of a 
 man with a Dutch father and a Scotch mother, as it 
 sings "Edison," "Edison," "Edison !" 
 
 Should there come ringing on your ear the tele- 
 phone, hearken well and you will hear the name of 
 
Shamrock and Thistle. 137 
 
 a man born in Edinburgh, born again in Boston, 
 saying "Bell," "Bell," "Bell!" 
 
 Look at the harvester rolling across the fields, 
 and you will hear it singing its inventor's praise, 
 "McCormick," "McCormick," "McCormick !" 
 
 When you roll along a prepared highway in car- 
 riage or automobile, you can not forget that the 
 Macadamized way is whispering a Scotchman's 
 name, "Macadam," "Macadam," "Macadam!" 
 
 Old Scotia, too, has furnished naval heroes. 
 Jean Paul Jones, with his Bon Homme Richard, 
 ^as Scotch. His bones were lately brought from 
 France to rest under the Stars and Stripes. Oliver 
 Hazard Perry, in his conquering fleet on Lake Erie, 
 had a vessel named Caledonia. His Scotch-Irish 
 blood was from his mother, whose grandfather was 
 a Wallace. 
 
 The wonder is that these Protestants and lovers 
 of liberty could have adopted slavery. The signers 
 of the Mecklenburg Declaration sowed the Caro- 
 linas with slaves. They produced a Calhoun; then 
 pushed their armies against the Republic under 
 the Lees, Morgans, and Kilpatricks. A President of 
 the United States named Buchanan had opened the 
 way, and he was a Scotch-Irishman. One of their 
 orators said, "They kept the commandments and all 
 
138 John Knox: Thk Reformer. 
 
 they could lay their hands on besides." They first 
 acquired their own liberty and then that of their 
 neighbors. 
 
 If in this list omissions occur, it is because of 
 the great multitude of illustrious people of Scotch 
 descent and the impossibility of exhausting the roll. 
 What more flat than the oft-used phrase "and 
 others?" It generally falk from the flatterer's pen 
 or that of the impolite. In the present case both 
 motives are denied, and yet I hardly hope to be for- 
 given. I have not said everything about everybod) . 
 But no writer ever did, or ever will. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 OUR HERO. 
 
 " Having done all to stand." 
 " Athanasius contra mundum." 
 
 With many men this may be conviction diluted 
 with stubbornness, or it may be stubbornness forti- 
 fied by conviction. It may be the heroism of bhnd- 
 ness or enlightenment accepting all the risks. 
 
 Wellington had given an order to a subordinate. 
 With pale countenance the officer rode away to 
 execute the order. "There," said the great com- 
 mander, "is a brave man; he sees the danger and 
 faces it." Such was the heroism of our Reformer. 
 
 Impetuosity is on the border of sin. So is 
 lethargy. 
 
 Mankind admire a moral hero ; few seem ready 
 to imitate him. Most of us approve of advance- 
 ment until it disturbs us. Old usage, however, is 
 139 
 
14© John Knox: Thk Reformer. 
 
 not immortal. Even dynamite is better than eternal 
 slumber. Degeneration is easier than regeneration ; 
 it is better that great moral forces be giiided than 
 resisted. There are times when evil is so en- 
 trenched that the only thing left is to bombard the 
 fortress. 
 
 We must not discount modern heroism. There 
 is often harmful delusion in asserting that "the 
 former days were better than these." This may be 
 quoted with a whine followed by a yawn. 
 
 When the American Civil War came on, there 
 was a wail through the land declaring that there 
 were no George Washingtons or Thomas Jeffer- 
 sons, no Daniel Websters or General Scotts, but the 
 occasion found the men needed. 
 
 Our heroic forefathers did not so miserably fail 
 as to leave no heroic posterity. 
 
 Nor may we ignore the superiority of manhood 
 over material conditions whether four hundred 
 years ago or four hundred years hence, whether in 
 John Knox or the man who shall celebrate the com- 
 munion in Lhassa. 
 
 The smartness which considers itself "up to 
 date" discounting the fathers, had as well be mod- 
 est. Knox never rode an automobile. Lutiier never 
 
Shamrock and Thistle. 141 
 
 called up the Pope by telephone. JEHjah did not 
 travel to Mount Horeb on the through limited. 
 Moses never rode in an airship. Millions of moderns 
 are doing these things and yet remain Lilliputians. 
 
 By Patient Continuance. 
 
 The life of Knox might have seemed wrecked 
 by delays unavoidable. 
 
 He was forty-two, nine years beyond the age 
 at which Alexander the Great had conquered the 
 world, before he entered on his life work. Bacon 
 had written his celebrated essays at thirty-six. Sa- 
 vonarola had sent his congregations home, bewail- 
 ing their sins as they went through the streets, when 
 but thirty-eight. George Whitefield was stirring the 
 hearts of men on both continents at an age when 
 Knox was yet in obscurity. Coming out of his 
 silence at the age of forty-two, could he have seen it, 
 there were but twenty-five years left for his life 
 work. Two of those years were wrested from him 
 by the French galleys. Edward the Sixth called 
 him to England where five years due to Scotland 
 were subtracted. Banished to the continent, over a 
 year was apparently wasted amid the quibbles of a 
 temporary pastorate in Frankfort. Then Geneva 
 
142 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 took out about four years more, leaving but thirteen 
 for the direct work of the Reformation of Scotland, 
 the completest of all the reforms of that centurv. 
 
 A re-survey of this loss of time may be encour- 
 aging. His seventeen years at school in Hadding- 
 ton, his college days at Glasgow, his study of logic 
 and Plato under John Major gave time for his moral 
 and intellectual nature to take root. He learned the 
 power of prayer more perfectly while a galley-slave. 
 After that, in touch with court life and the English 
 under Edward the Sixth, he was himself in train- 
 ing. While in Dieppe ringing out his trumpet blast 
 against the iniquities in England and Scotland, 
 through all these he was forging the sword that cut 
 vScotland free. 
 
 Remoter Heroes. 
 
 View him in the light of some Reformers of an 
 earlier day. Saint Cyprian, of Carthagena. in the 
 middle of the third century, spent his force mainly 
 on the non-christian world and lost his head, Knox 
 spent his strength on both papal and secular sur- 
 roundings, but kept his head — the more is the 
 wonder. 
 
 Athanasius, of Alexandria, in the fourth cen- 
 tury spent twenty years in exile, but did more for 
 
Shamrock and Thisti^e. i43 
 
 the world with his pen during that banishment than 
 he Hkely could have done at home. He left as his 
 monument a great confession of faith. Knox left a 
 creed, a kirk, and a new born nation. 
 
 Both Cyprian and Athanasius were Bishops. 
 Knox declined that office and so stands out among 
 the rarities of mankind. 
 
 Augustine, another white African of the fourth 
 century, transferred his thought through John Cal- 
 vin into a milder fatalism taught by Knox. But he 
 fell away during his youthful days from the faith 
 taught him by his Christian mother. For John 
 Knox, one conversion was enough. 
 
 Chrysostom of the fourth century, a Greek, was 
 golden mouthed. Knox sounded a trumpet, else he 
 might have failed in his work of reform. The Greek 
 was sentenced to banishment for too much plain- 
 ness of speech, even in his mellifluous periods. A 
 revolt among his Antioch followers and a timely 
 earthquake kept him at home for a time. Queen 
 Eudoxia, however, was like Mary Queen of Scots, 
 and must be rid of the preacher or else reform. In 
 that case Chrysostom had to go. Knox did not go 
 for he would not. 
 
 Hildebrand began as a reformer within the 
 Church, but turned out to be Pope Gregory the 
 
144 John Knox: Tiie Reformer. 
 
 Seventh, reputed the most talented of the papal 
 Hne. Like all reforms within the papal Church, his 
 failed. He did succeed in excluding the nobles and 
 the German Emperor from any part in choosing or 
 investing the Pope. He thus compacted and cen- 
 tralized the power within the papacy, which over- 
 shadowed and controlled Scotland in the time of 
 Knox. Knox broke that power and brought Scot- 
 land to its feet. 
 
 Peter the Hermit, of the latter part of the 
 eleventh century, was a monk and therefore lacked 
 the advice of a wife and the influence of a home to 
 restrain him. He fired the peasant heart and the 
 adventurer's greed so as to lead as many as thirty 
 thousand people through a fatal march of starvation 
 and slaughter for the capture of the Holy Land 
 from the grasp of the Turk. 
 
 Knox inspired a crusale against vice within the 
 papal Church and among the Scotch people and 
 won his campaign with the sword of the Spirit. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER. 
 
 He: Was Born Again. 
 
 It is well for us that the Christian world is 
 never tired of turning back to the great event in a 
 Christian leader's life when he passed from death 
 unto life consciously. Though not always revealed 
 clearly to the subject himself as a sudden event, yet 
 it is of tremendous importance to all men. 
 
 Saul of Tarsus in Damascus breaking into light, 
 the conscious "warming of heart" of Wesley, and 
 the "sweet burning of heart" of Jonathan Edwards, 
 seem more directly matters of consciousness. 
 
 Martin Luther emphasizes less the inner change, 
 but hears the voice as if from heaven, "The just 
 shall live by faith." 
 
 While the experience of John Knox is largely 
 
 unrecorded as to how he passed the boundary line 
 
 from the righteousness of the confessional to that 
 
 of him whose sole confessor is Christ, we know he 
 
 lo 145 
 
146 John Kxox: The Reformer. 
 
 had that witness, "\\*e have passed from death unto 
 life because we love the brethren." His heart went 
 out to George W'ishart and all like him. Little mat- 
 ter to us now how and when it occurred, but he 
 "first cast anchor" within the ocean of Di\-ine love. 
 
 Surely he had been bom again. November 9, 
 1572, he was stricken with his last illness. He lin- 
 gered for fifteen days. Except one or two conflicts 
 with Satan, he was cheerful and happy. He greatly 
 rehshed the sixteenth chapter of i Corinthians, on 
 the Resurrection of the Dead, remarking, "Is not 
 that a comfortable chapter?" 
 
 Once he said, "Xow for the last I commend my 
 soul, spirit, and body into Thy hands, O Lord." 
 After repeating the Lord's Prayer he said, "\\T:o 
 can pronounce so holy words ?" Later he asked his 
 wife to read John xvii, "\Miere I cast my first 
 anchor." His watchers had been praying, and in- 
 quired of him, "Heard you the prayers.^" He 
 answered, "Would to God that you and all men 
 heard them as I have ; I praise God for that heav- 
 enly soimd ;" then he said, "Xow it is come." 
 
 Richard Bannat}-ne, sitting by him, said, "That 
 we may understand that you hear us, make some 
 sign." He lifted up one hand, and so fell on sleep. 
 That hand was his flag of triumph, sa}-ing, "O 
 
Shamrock and Thistle. 147 
 
 Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy 
 victory? Thanks be to God who giveth us our vic- 
 tor}- through our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
 Elijah. 
 
 Like all great, stormy natures, he had his juni- 
 per-tree when he sighed to be released from battle. 
 He was a stem self-accuser. 
 
 He belonged to those men whose greatness is 
 characterized by self-depreciation. There is danger 
 of this ruiming to excess. It is true of a chain that 
 it is only as strong as its weakest link, but this is 
 not so of a man. With him the stronger parts 
 ought to reinforce the weaker. Conscience may be 
 reinforced by knowledge. Faith will reassure the 
 other so-called links. Hope under the command of 
 will, may pull a man away from under the Juniper- 
 tree, or out of a descending basket by tlie wall of 
 Damascus or away from the depression of the 
 French galley or from the bed of a paralytic in Edin- 
 burgh. 
 
 Here are excerpts from his writings : 
 
 "The lack of fer\-ency in rep^o^•ing sin, indif- 
 ference in feeding those that were hungry-, the lack 
 of diligence in execution of mine office, deservea 
 damnation. And besides these I was assaulted — 
 
148 John Knox: The Rei^ormer. 
 
 yea, infected and corrupted — with more gross sin; 
 that is, my wicked nature desired the favors, the 
 estimation, and praise of men; and so privily and 
 crafty did they enter into my breast that I could not 
 perceive myself to be wounded till vainglory had 
 almost got the upper hand. 
 
 "Pride and ambition assault me, — on the one 
 part covetousness and malice trouble me; on the 
 other, briefly, O Lord, the afflictions of the flesh do 
 almost suppress the operation of the spirit. I take 
 Thee,0 Lord, who only knowest the secrets of hearts 
 to record in none of the aforesaid do I delight. 
 Thou hast sealed into my heart remission of sins 
 received by the blood of Jesus Christ once shed ; my 
 manifold rebellions are defaced, my grievous sins 
 purged, and my soul made the tabernacle of Th> 
 godly majesty." 
 
 He had a stroke of apoplexy near two years be- 
 fore his death. He overdrew his vitality. Did he 
 not need athletics? He wrote: "By counsel of car- 
 nal friends I spared the body, spent some time in 
 taking recreation, and pastime by exercise of body." 
 In a letter he speaks of being "weary of this old 
 carcass." He went so far during his last illness as 
 to order his coffin made. But ere the end came he 
 installed James Lawson, vice-principal of the Uni- 
 
Shamrock and Thistle 149 
 
 versity of Aberdeen, as his successor over the 
 Church of St. Giles. This gave him great satis- 
 faction. 
 
 But Elijah was as good a man under the juniper 
 as on Camiel at the sacrifice ; as sincere though mis- 
 taken as when Horeb was wrapped in the triple gar- 
 ment of storm, earthquake, and fire. 
 
 His chariot and whirlwind were ready when 
 needed, as well as when he was on his way to Her- 
 mon nine hundred years later, to a conference with 
 ]\Ioses and Jesus about the crucifixion. 
 
 Others besides Knox himself have been his de- 
 tractors ; but they knew him not personally, and 
 lived in a world so remote from him as to be inca- 
 pable of understanding him. Richard Bannatyne 
 lived with him and could not be deceived. His 
 head was too clear and his judgment too cool to be 
 swept away by grief at the death of Knox. Let 
 him speak : "The man of God ; the light of Scot- 
 land ; the comfort of the Kirk within the same ; the 
 mirror of godliness, and a pattern to all true minis- 
 ters in purity of life, soundness of doctrine, and 
 boldness in reproof of wickedness." 
 
 This becomes the honest opinion of careful stu- 
 dents of histor}' as the years go by, and such he 
 shows up the four hundredth year after he was born. 
 
150 John Knox: The Reformer. 
 
 His Courage. 
 This we have seen in all his career. One of the 
 main incentives for writing this book was to add, if 
 possible, a new emphasis to this quality. When 
 Knox had died, Earl Morton, a very talented man, 
 not religious, morally perverse, but a great leader, 
 stood by his grave and gave utterance to a eulog\' 
 which has rung on through the centuries, and shall 
 never die out : "Here lieth a man who never feare 1 
 the face of man." This is an epitaph worth while. 
 Let it be the war-cry of our country till it sweep 
 through the nations. Knox had physical courage ; 
 he only fled to Germany from Bloody Mar)- under 
 the pressure of his friends. When chained to the 
 oar as a galley-slave, he rebuked his keepers with- 
 out fear, so that in the time of storm the captain, 
 though a papist, asked for Knox's prayers. When 
 he came back from his exile to Scotland and pro- 
 posed to preach in the Cathedral of St. Andrews, 
 and the archbishop declared he would order the 
 soldiers to fire on him, his friends advised him not 
 to venture ; but he did preach there three days in 
 succession so as to rally the officers and the people 
 to set up the reform of worship in that old cathedral 
 town. It took the higher type of courage when he 
 
Shamrock and Thistlk. 151 
 
 dissented from English ritualism at Frankfort; 
 when he sounded his first blast of the trumpet 
 against Bloody IMary and others ; when he rebuked 
 Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester ; when he con- 
 fronted Mary, Queen of Scots, and rebuked her 
 from the pulpit with great courage, afterwards do- 
 ing the same to her face. At last he sent a message 
 to Charles IX by his own ambassador, then present 
 in the audience, warning him of the judgment to 
 come. And, as he himself foretold, "the ages to 
 come will be compelled to bear their witness to the 
 truth." "He never feared the face of man." 
 
 His Power in Prayi;r. 
 
 The attraction which started this book we have 
 left till the last, — the reputed prayer of Knox, 
 "Give me Scotland or I die." This is quoted in the 
 pulpit and in books on prayer, and has done great 
 service. Being of such importance, we have sought 
 to verify it, but in vain. Search has been made per- 
 sonally through a wide range of literature. Corre- 
 spondence has been had with a dozen of the most 
 expert in library research in this country, England, 
 and Scotland, but the frank acknowledgment has 
 come from every one of them, "I am unable to 
 verify the prayer." The names of these corre- 
 
152 John Knox: Tiiiv Reformer. 
 
 spondents would be astonishing. Still, the author 
 believes that Knox gave expression to it. We find 
 in his writing such similar sentiments as these : 
 "The long thirst of my wretched heart is gratified in 
 abundance above my expectation ;" "J^^^^ Christ 
 shall triumph here in tlic Xorth and the extreme 
 parts of the earth ;" "Notwithstanding the fever has 
 vexed me, yet have I traveled through most parts 
 of this realm, where men of all sorts and conditions 
 embrace the truth." In his sixty-seventh and last 
 year he wrote : "Weary of the world, and thirsting 
 to depart ;" "I thirst for an end before I be more 
 troublesome to the faithful ;" "Now, Lord, put an 
 end to my miserie ;" "As the world is wearie of me, 
 so am I of it ;" "John Knox, with my dead hand but 
 glaid heart, praising God." 
 
 I believe John Knox uttered the cry, for it was 
 in harmony with his entire career as a self- forgetful, 
 self-sacrificing reformer, to pray, "Give me Scot- 
 land or I die." T.et it fly over the world. It is the 
 heart of the great evangel. It was identical in 
 spirit with the feeling of a man whom Knox so 
 greatly resembled, who wrote, "I could wish myself 
 anathema for my brethren according to the flesh." 
 It sprang from a sublimer source heard on the cross, 
 "Father, forgive them, for they knov^r not what they 
 do." 
 
INDEX 
 
 Page 
 
 A Kempis lo 
 
 Albigenses 50 
 
 Alva 39 
 
 Baptists 95 
 
 Beaton 20, 41 
 
 Ben Nevis 24 
 
 Beza 17, 73 
 
 Blunderer 68, 72 
 
 Bothwell i5> 16, 47 
 
 Bowes 20, 36 
 
 Brown 29, 34 
 
 Bruce 45, 47 
 
 Burns 32 
 
 Caledonia 23 
 
 Calvin 18, 29, 78, 79 
 
 Cailyle 30, 34, 80, 82, 106 
 
 Catherine de Medici 11 
 
 Cathedrals 43 
 
 Cavour 80 
 
 Cecil 56 
 
 Church and State 73, 74 
 
 Charles IX 151 
 
 Covenanting 104 
 
 Cranmer, Ridley & Latimer 60 
 
 Cromwell 61, 68 
 
 Congregationalism 95 
 
 Courage 150 
 
 Darnley 16, 47, 112 
 
 Declaration of I n d e p e n- 
 
 dence 127 
 
 Dialect 67 
 
 Druids 42 
 
 Educated Ministry 98 
 
 Edwards 77, 145 
 
 Elizabeth 40, 70, 72, 81 
 
 Elijah 147 
 
 Erasmus 48 
 
 Page 
 
 Fenlon 10 
 
 Froude 80, 81 
 
 Galleys 20, 28 
 
 Gardiner 60 
 
 Geddes, Jennie 102 
 
 Geneva 68 
 
 Gladstone 69 
 
 Grampians 24 
 
 Guises 40, 48 
 
 Haddington 15, 19 
 
 Hamilton 16, 42 
 
 Hebrew 68 
 
 Henry VIII 40, 49 
 
 Holland 62 
 
 Humor 26, 37 
 
 Jacobite 62 
 
 James 17, 45, 57 
 
 John Baptists 50 
 
 John O'Groates 23, 43 
 
 Knox Delayed 141 
 
 Leo X 40 
 
 Loir 20 
 
 Loyola 18, 49 
 
 Luther i9i 20, 50 
 
 Macdonald 16, 34 
 
 McCrea 41 
 
 Major 21, 65 
 
 Martyrdom 42 
 
 Mary, Bloody.. 35, 40, 47, 59 
 Mary, Queen of Scots, 11, 
 
 28, 35. 36. 47, 143 
 
 Melville 16, 55 
 
 Melancthon 22 
 
 Mother-in-law 35 
 
 Monuments 91-122 
 
 153 
 
Index 
 
 154 
 
 Page 
 Morton 9, 150 
 
 Murray 56 
 
 Netherlands 23 
 
 Newman 10 
 
 Open Doors 48 
 
 Picts 45 
 
 Prayer 151 
 
 Parallel, M et li o d i s t and 
 
 Presbyterian 96 
 
 Preacher 55, 58 
 
 Philip II 39, 49 
 
 Reform and Revival. . . 61, 85 
 
 Richmond 17 
 
 Riot 28 
 
 Roll-Call of the Scotch... 113 
 
 Savonarola 29, 50 
 
 School-house 107 
 
 Scholarship 64, 65, 67 
 
 Schafif 78, III 
 
 Pack 
 
 Schurz 113 
 
 Scotcli Irish 125-138 
 
 Stewart 95 
 
 St. Andrews... 21, 42, 52, 58 
 
 St. Bartholomew 49 
 
 Stone of Stone 94 
 
 Superstition 85 
 
 Tenderness 32 
 
 Thompson, Edward 33 
 
 Tolloch 53 
 
 Waldenses 50 
 
 Walter Scott... 27, 40, 92, 122 
 
 Wesley i-*^, 33, 58, 80 
 
 Westminster 55, 95 
 
 William of Orange 62 
 
 Wishart 16, 19, 22, 49 
 
 Witherspoon 127 
 
 Wyclif 50, 54 
 
 Young 17 
 
 Zwingli. 50 
 
BW2141 .C94 
 
 John Knox: the reformer, 
 
 Princeton ThroloqiCAl Seminary Sperr Library 
 
 1 1012 00016 6746