THE CRISIS: SINGLE OR TWO-FOLD?
On this dark background Knox for the first time appears in history. But
we catch sight of him merely as an attendant on the attractive figure of
George Wishart. At Cambridge Wishart had been 'courteous, lowly, lovely,
glad to teach, and desirous to learn'; when he returned to Scotland,
Knox and others found him 'a man of such graces as before him were never
heard within this realm.' He had preached in several parts of Scotland,
and was brought in the spring of 1546 by certain gentlemen of East
Lothian, 'who then were earnest professors of Christ Jesus,' to the
neighbourhood of Haddington. On the morning of his last sermon in that
town he had received (in the mansion-house of Lethington, 'the laird
whereof,' father of the famous William Maitland, 'was ever civil, albeit
not persuaded in religion') a letter, 'which received and read, he
called for John Knox, who had waited upon him carefully from the time he
came to Lothian.' And the same evening, with a presentiment of his
coming arrest, he 'took his good-night, as it were for ever,' of all his
acquaintance, and
'John Knox pressing to have gone with the said Master George, he
said, "Nay, return to your bairns, and God bless you! One is
sufficient for one sacrifice." And so he caused a two-handed
sword (which commonly was carried with the said Master George)
be taken from the said John Knox, who, although unwillingly,
obeyed, and returned with Hugh Douglas of Longniddrie.'[11]
The same night Wishart was arrested by the Earl of Bothwell, and
afterwards handed over to the Cardinal Archbishop, tried by him as a
heretic, and on 1st March 1546 burned in front of his castle of St
Andrews. Ere long this stronghold was stormed, and the Cardinal murdered
in his own chamber by a number of the gentlemen of Fife, whose raid was
partly in revenge for Wishart's death. They shut themselves up in the
castle for protection, and we hear no more of John Knox till the
following year. Then we are told that, 'wearied of removing from place
to place, by reason of the persecution that came upon him by the Bishop
of St Andrews,' he joined Leslie's band in their hold in St Andrews, in
consequence of the desire of his pupils' parents 'that himself might
have the benefit of the castle, and their children the benefit of his
doctrine [teaching].' It is plain that by this time what Knox taught was
the doctrine of Wishart. Indeed he had not been long in St Andrews when,
urged by the congregation there, he consented to become its preacher.
And his very first sermon in this capacity rang out the full note of the
coming reform or rather revolution in the religion of Scotland.
Now, this is a startlingly sudden transition. The change from the
position of a nameless notary under Papal authority, who is in addition
a minister of the altar of the Catholic Church, to that of a preacher in
the whole armour of the Puritan Reformation, is great. Was the
transition a public and official one only? Was it a change merely
ecclesiastical or political? Or was it preceded by a more private change
and a personal crisis? And was that private and personal crisis merely
intellectual? Was it, that is, the adoption of a new dogma only, or
perhaps the acceptance of a new system? Or if there was something
besides these, was it nothing more than the resolve of a very powerful
will--such a will as we must all ascribe to Knox? Was this all? Or was
there here rather, perhaps, the sort of change which determines the will
instead of being determined by it--a personal change, in the sense of
being emotional and inward as well as deep and permanent--a new _set_ of
the whole man, and so the beginning of an inner as well as of an outer
and public life?
The question is of the highest interest, but as we have said, there is
no direct answer. It would be easy for each reader to supply the void by
reasoning out, according to his own prepossessions, what must have been,
or what ought to have been, the experience of such a man at such a time.
It would be easy--but unprofitable. Far better would it be could we
adduce from his own utterances evidence--indirect evidence even--that
the crisis which he declines to record really took place; and that the
great outward career was founded on a new personal life within. Now
there is such an utterance, which has been hitherto by no means
sufficiently recognised. It is 'a meditation or prayer, thrown forth of
my sorrowful heart and pronounced by my half-dead tongue,' on 12th
March, 1566, at a moment when Knox's cause was in extremity of danger.
Mary had joined the Catholic League and driven the Protestant Lords into
England, and their attempted counter-plot had failed by the defection of
Darnley. Knox had now before him certain exile and possible death, and
on the eve of leaving Edinburgh he sat down and wrote privately the
following personal confession. Five years later, when publishing his
last book, after the national victory but amid great public troubles, he
prefixed a preface explaining that he had already 'taken good-night at
the world and at all the fasherie of the same,' and henceforward wished
his brethren only to pray that God would 'put an end to my long and
painful battle.' And with this preface he now printed the old meditation
or confession of 1566. It is therefore autobiographical by a double
title. And it is made even more interesting by the striking rubric with
which the writer heads it.
JOHN KNOX, WITH DELIBERATE MIND, TO HIS GOD.
'Be merciful unto me, O Lord, and call not into judgment my
manifold sins; and chiefly those whereof the world is not able
to accuse me. In youth, mid age, and now after many battles, I
find nothing in me but vanity and corruption. For, in quietness
I am negligent; in trouble impatient, tending to desperation;
and in the mean [middle] state I am so carried away with vain
fantasies, that alas! O Lord, they withdraw me from the presence
of thy Majesty. Pride and ambition assault me on the one part,
covetousness and malice trouble me on the other; briefly, O
Lord, the affections of the flesh do almost suppress the
operation of Thy Spirit. I take Thee, O Lord, who only knowest
the secrets of hearts, to record, that in none of the foresaid
do I delight; but that with them I am troubled, and that sore
against the desire of my inward man, which sobs for my
corruption, and would repose in Thy mercy alone. To the which I
clame [cry] in the promise that Thou hast made to all penitent
sinners (of whose number I profess myself to be one), in the
obedience and death of my only Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ.
In whom, by Thy mere grace, I doubt not myself to be elected to
eternal salvation, whereof Thou hast given unto me (unto me, O
Lord, most wretched and unthankful creature) most assured signs.
For being drowned in ignorance Thou hast given to me knowledge
above the common sort of my brethren; my tongue hast Thou used
to set forth Thy glory, to oppugne idolatry, errors, and false
doctrine. Thou hast compelled me to forespeak, as well
deliverance to the afflicted, as destruction to certain
inobedient, the performance whereof, not I alone, but the very
blind world has already seen. But above all, O Lord, Thou, by
the power of Thy Holy Spirit, hast sealed unto my heart
remission of my sins, which I acknowledge and confess myself to
have received by the precious blood of Jesus Christ once shed;
in whose perfect obedience I am assured my manifold rebellions
are defaced, my grievous sins purged, and my soul made the
tabernacle of Thy Godly Majesty--Thou, O Father of mercies, Thy
Son our Lord Jesus, my only Saviour, Mediator, and Advocate, and
Thy Holy Spirit, remaining in the same by true faith, which is
the only victory that overcometh the world.'[12]
This window into the heart of a great man is not less transparent
because it opens upwards. Its revelation of an inner life, with the
alternations proper to it of struggle and victory, will receive
confirmation as we go on. As we go on too we shall be arrested by the
intense personal sympathy which Knox showed in helping those around him
who were still weaker and more tempted than himself--a sympathy in which
many will find a surer proof of the existence of a life within, than
even in this record of his deliberate and devotional mind. What this
record now suggests to us is that the personal life which it reveals had
a foundation in some personal and moral crisis. The truth and light came
to him when he was 'drowned in ignorance,' and the change cannot have
_originated_ in any fancy as to his own predestination, or in any
foresight by himself of his own public services. The foundation, as it
is put by Knox, was deeper, and was, in his view, common to him with all
Christian men. It is a transaction of the individual with the Divine, in
which the man comes to God by 'true faith.' And this faith is, or ought
to be, absolute and assured, simply because it is faith in the offer
and promise of God himself in his Evangel. This was the teaching of
Wishart, as it had been of Patrick Hamilton before him. It was the
teaching which Hamilton had derived from Luther, and Wishart from both
Luther and the Reformers of Switzerland. Later on, when the minor
differences between the two schools of Protestantism had declared
themselves, it might fairly be said that Knox, and with him Scotland,
founded their religion not so much (with Luther) on the central doctrine
of immediate access to God through his promise, as (with Calvin) on the
more general doctrine of the immediate authority of God through his
word. But the former--the Evangel--was the original life and light of
the Reformation everywhere, and its glow as of 'glad confident morning'
now flushed the whole sky of Western Europe.[13] Knox himself always
preached it, and on the day before his death he let fall an expression
which indicates that his acceptance of it had rescued him at this very
date from the tossings of an inward sea. 'Go, read where I cast my first
anchor!' he said to his wife. 'And so she read the seventeenth of John's
Gospel.' Now the 'Evangel of John' was what Knox tells us he taught
from day to day in the chapel, within the Castle of St Andrews, at a
certain hour; and when on entering the city he took up this book of the
New Testament, he took it up at the point 'where he left at his
departure from Longniddry where before his residence was,' and whither
Wishart had sent him back to his pupils a year before. And of all parts
of this Evangel the rock-built anchorage of the seventeenth chapter may
surely best claim to be that commemorated in Knox's stately and
deliberate words.
But these conjectures must not make us forget the fact that Knox himself
places an undoubted and great crisis at the threshold of his public
life. His teaching in 1547 of John's Gospel, and of a certain
'catechism,' though carried on within the walls, sometimes of the
chapel, and sometimes of the parish kirk, of St Andrews, was supposed to
be private or tutorial. Soon, however, the more influential men there
urged him 'that he would take the preaching place upon him. But he
utterly refused, alleging that he would not run where God had not called
him.... Whereupon, they privily among themselves advising, having with
them in council Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, they concluded that they
would give a charge to the said John, and that publicly by the mouth of
their preacher.' And so, after a sermon turning on the power of the
church or congregation to call men to the ministry,
'The said John Rough, preacher, directed his words to the said
John Knox, saying, "Brother, ye shall not be offended, albeit
that I speak unto you that which I have in charge, even from all
those that are here present, which is this: In the name of God,
and of His Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of these that
presently call you by my mouth, I charge you that you refuse not
this holy vocation, but ... that you take upon you the public
office and charge of preaching, even as you look to avoid God's
heavy displeasure, and desire that He shall multiply His graces
with you." And in the end, he said to those that were present,
"Was not this your charge to me? And do ye not approve this
vocation?" They answered, "It was: and we approve it." Whereat
the said John, abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears, and
withdrew himself to his chamber. His countenance and behaviour,
from that day till the day that he was compelled to present
himself to the public place of preaching, did sufficiently
declare the grief and trouble of his heart; for no man saw any
sign of mirth in him, neither yet had he pleasure to accompany
any man, many days together.'[14]
There is no reason to think that Knox exaggerates the importance of this
scene in his own history. A man has but one life, and the choosing even
of his secular work in it is sometimes so difficult as to make him
welcome any external compulsion. But the necessity of an external and
even a divine vocation, in order to justify a man's devoting his life to
handling things divine, has long been a tradition of the Christian
Church--and especially of the Scottish church, which in its parts, and
as a whole, has been repeatedly convulsed by this question of 'The
Call.' And in Knox's time, as in the earliest age of Christianity, what
is now a tradition was a very stern fact. The men who were thus calling
him knew well, and Knox himself, more clear of vision than any of them,
knew better, that what they were inviting him to was in all probability
a violent death. Rough himself perished in the flames at Smithfield; and
four months after this vocation Knox was sitting chained and half-naked
in the galleys at Rouen, under the lash of a French slave-driver. He did
not perhaps himself always remember how the future then appeared to him.
Old men looking back upon their past are apt 'to see in their life the
story of their life,' and the Reformer, after his later amazing
victories, sometimes speaks as if these had been his in hope, or even in
promise, from the outset of his career. But it is plain to us now, as we
study his letters in those early years, that he was repeatedly brought
to accept what we know to have been the real probability--viz., that,
while the ultimate triumph of the Evangel would be secure, it might be
brought about only after his own failure and ruin. Such were the
alternatives which Knox--a man of undoubted sensitiveness and
tenderness, and who describes himself as naturally 'fearful'[15]--had to
ponder during those days of seclusion at St Andrews. Of one thing he had
no doubt. The call, if once he accepted it, was irrevocable;[16] and he
must thenceforward go straight on, abandoning the many resources of
silence and of flight which might still be open to a private man.
But this was not all. It would be doing injustice to Knox, and to our
materials, to suppose that personal considerations were the only ones
which pressed upon him in this crisis. He never, in any circumstances,
could have been a man of 'a private spirit,' and his present call was
expressly to bear the public burden. But the burden so proposed was
overwhelming. Was it by his mouth that his countrymen were to be urged
to expose themselves, individually, to certain danger and possible ruin?
Was it upon his initiative that his country was to be divided,
distracted, and probably destroyed--deprived of its old faith, severed
from its old alliances, and hurled into revolt from its five hundred
years of Christian peace?[17] The risk to his country was extreme. And
if, by some marvellous conspiration of providences, Scotland passed
through all this without ruin, was Knox prepared to face the more
tremendous responsibilities of success? Did he hear in that hour the
voice by which leaders of Movements in later days have been chilled,
'Thou couldst a people raise, but couldst not rule?' For if we assume
that he felt entitled to back this weight of leadership upon God and
Evangel, the question still remained, Was even the Evangel strong enough
to bear this burden of a nation's future? That it was able to guide and
save the individual man, through all changes and chances of this life
and the life beyond, Knox may have been assured. But the questions which
rose behind were those of Church organisation and social reconstruction.
Was it possible, and was it lawful, to accept the existing Church
system, in whole or in part, and to build upon that? And if this was
impossible, if Christ's Church must go back to the Divine foundation in
His new-discovered Word, was that Word sufficient, not for foundation
merely, but for all superstructure--for doctrine, discipline, and
worship alike? Or would the Church be entitled to impose its own wise
and reasonable additions to the recovered statute-book of Scripture?
Lastly, if such a new Church shone already in 'devout imagination'
before Knox, he must have also had some forecast of its new relations to
feudal and royal Scotland. Was he to plead merely for freedom, under a
neutral civil authority? Or in the event of the chiefs of the nation, or
some of them, individually adopting the new faith, were they to adopt it
for themselves alone; or for subjects and vassals too, as under the
former regime? And were they to enforce it, by feudal or royal or even
legislative authority, on unwilling subjects and unwilling vassals too?
I think it clear that all these questions must have passed before the
mind of Knox during that week of agitated seclusion within the castle
walls. Not only so. There is evidence in his own writings that when at
the close of that time he came forth to take up the public work, he
had already formed his conclusions as to all the main principles on
which it was to proceed. And from these he never afterwards varied.
Thirteen years were still to elapse before they resulted in Scotland
in a religious revolution; and during those years of wandering and
exile Knox learned much from the wisest and best of the new
leaders--much from them; and much, too, from his own experience, which
he was in the future to reduce to details of practice. But his
principles were the same from the first. He believed fundamentally in
the gracious Word of God revealed to man, as overriding and
over-ruling all other authorities. His first sermon denounced the
whole existing church system as an Anti-Christian substitute,
interposed between man and that original message. But, strange to say,
the part of the discourse which at once aroused controversy was his
sweeping denial of the Church's right to institute ceremonies, the
ground of denial being that 'man may neither make nor devise a
religion that is acceptable to God.' He was thus Protestant and
Puritan[18] from the first, as his master Wishart was before him, and
his choice had now to be made according to his convictions. We,
looking back upon the past at our ease, may recognise that on some of
these matters he was too hasty in his conclusions--especially in his
conclusions as to his opponents, and the duty towards them which the
party now oppressed would have, in the unlikely event of its coming
into power. But we are bound to remember--Knox himself insists upon
it--that he did not take up the function of guide to his people at his
own hand, or accept it at his own leisure. He was suddenly called upon
in God's name to accept or refuse an almost hopeless task, but one in
which success and failure involved the greatest alternatives to him.
That preaching the Gospel to which he was called, if it meant on the
one hand, in the event of failure, exile or death, meant on the other,
in case of success, the salvation of a whole people now sitting in
darkness. But he had to accept the task as a whole or to refuse it;
and his conclusions as to what that task involved were fused into
unity--in some respects into premature unity--in the glow of a supreme
moral trial. For the week of deliberation before he emerged as the
teacher of the Congregation was certainly not spent upon detailed
difficulties either of future legislation or present consistency. It
prolonged itself rather in poise and struggle against the more obvious
and tremendous obstacles, reinforced no doubt by a thousand more
remote behind them. But the ultimate question was whether the gigantic
strain of all of these combined would be too much for an anchor
dropped by one strong hand into the depths of the Evangel.
And so that week saved a nation--perhaps a man.
For I think it quite a possible thing that this crisis in St Andrews,
the only one recorded or even suggested by Knox himself, may have been
the one personal crisis of his life. I cannot indeed say with Carlyle,
that before this Knox 'seemed well content to guide his own steps by the
light of the Reformation, nowise unduly intruding it on others ...
resolute he to walk by the truth, and speak the truth when called to do
it; not ambitious of more, not fancying himself capable of more.'[19]
Of all men living or dead, this is the one whom it is most impossible to
think of as acquiescing in such an easy relation to those around him, or
even as attempting so to acquiesce--at least without inward
self-question and torture. We must remember that Knox had undoubtedly
before this time embraced the doctrinal system of the Reformation, no
doubt in the form taught by Wishart. And a catechism of that doctrine,
perhaps founded upon or identical with that which Wishart brought from
Basel, he gave to his East Lothian pupils. Long before his external
'call' at St Andrews, the inward impulse to preach the message to his
fellow-men, and to champion their right to receive it, must have pressed
upon his conscience. Was this pearl worth the price of selling all to
buy it? And was such a price demanded of him individually? If these
questions were still unanswered--for that they had been put, and put
incessantly, I have no doubt--then the Knox whom we know was still
waiting to be born, and the representative of Scotland was like Scotland
itself, 'as yet without a soul.'[20] He had carried a sword before
Wishart, and he and the gentlemen of East Lothian would have defended
their saintly guest at the peril of their lives. He had been followed
thereafter by the persecution of his bishop, until he made up his mind
for exile in Germany (rather than in England, where he heard that the
Romish doctrine flourished under Royal Supremacy). And after the
'slaughter of the Cardinal,' he took refuge within the strong walls of
the vacant castle, like other men whose sympathies made them, in the
quaint words of the chronicler[21], 'suspect themselves guilty of the
death' of Beaton, though they might not have known of it before the
fact. But all this Knox might conceivably have done, and still have
borne about with him a troubled and divided mind, until the address of
Rough flashed out upon his conscience his true vocation, and sent him in
tears and solitude to make proof of the Evangel--and of the Evangel in
that form which takes hold of both eternities. This final crisis may
thus have been the only one. And if it were so, Knox would not be the
first man who has found in self-consecration a new birth; nor the first
prophet whose 'Here am I' has been answered by fire from the altar and
the assurance that iniquity is purged.
But even if we assume, what is more probable, that the crisis in St
Andrews was not the first, but the second, in Knox's religious life, the
result for the purposes of critical biography is the same. For the later
crisis resumed and gathered up into itself, on a higher plane, and with
more intensity, the elements of the change which went before. It was, on
this assumption, a new call; and a call to higher and public work. But
it was a call in the same name, and to the same man, to do new work on
the strength of principles and motives to which he had already committed
himself. It was, in short, a greater strain, but upon the first anchor.
This point has acquired more importance since Carlyle, and so many of us
who follow him as admirers of Knox, have adopted the modern trick of
speech of calling him a Prophet to his time. It is assumed that Knox
took the same view,[22] and that he held himself to have had, if not a
prophet's supernatural endowment and vocation, at least a special
mission and an extraordinary call. The question is complicated by other
things than the special and extraordinary work which he, in point of
fact, achieved. We find that, in the course of that work, Knox, a man of
piercing intuitions in personal and public matters, repeatedly committed
himself to judgments, and even predictions, which were unexpectedly
verified. And some of these he himself regarded, as we have seen already
in his deliberate Meditation, as not intuitions merely, but private
intimations given by God to his own heart and mind. Naturally, too, a
man of Knox's devout and yet passionate temper was disposed to lay as
much stress upon these incidents as they would bear; while the
marvel-mongers around him, and in the next generation, went farther
still. But the main fact to remember is, that Knox all his life insisted
that such incidents, whatever their occasional value, were no part of
his original mission, and were outside the bounds of his life-long
vocation. The passage in which he is disposed to make most of them is
the following; and it is worth quoting also, because of the striking
terms in which he incidentally describes his real work and permanent
call. He is explaining why, after twenty years' preaching, he has never
published even a sermon, and now publishes one with nothing but
wholesome admonitions for the time. (This wholesome sermon was the one
which so much offended Darnley.)
'Considering myself rather called of my God to instruct the
ignorant, comfort the sorrowful, confirm the weak, and rebuke
the proud, by tongue and lively voice in these most corrupt
days, than to compose books for the age to come: seeing that so
much is written (and that by men of most singular condition),
and yet so little well observed; I decreed to contain myself
within the bonds [bounds?] of that vocation, whereunto I found
myself specially called. I dare not deny (lest that in so doing
I should be injurious to the giver), but that God hath revealed
to me secrets unknown to the world; and also that he hath made
my tongue a trumpet, to forewarn realms and nations, yea,
certain great personages, of translations and changes, when no
such things were feared, nor yet were appearing; a portion
whereof cannot the world deny (be it never so blind) to be
fulfilled, and the rest, alas! I fear shall follow with greater
expedition, and in more full perfection, than my sorrowful heart
desireth. Those revelations and assurances notwithstanding, I
did ever abstain to commit anything to writ, contented only to
have obeyed the charge of Him who commanded me to cry.'[23]
And when he did 'cry,' from the pulpit or elsewhere, he was careful to
found his claim to be heard, not on private intimations, but on God's
open word. As early as 1554 he denounces judgment to come upon England
(which, by the way, was not fulfilled in the sense which he expected),
but he adds immediately--
'This my affirmation proceedeth, not from any conjecture of
man's fantasy, but from the ordinary course of God's judgments
against manifest contemners of his precepts from the
beginning;'[24]
and more fully in another contemporary document--
'But ye would know the grounds of my certitude: God grant that
hearing them ye may understand and steadfastly believe the same.
My assurances are not the marvels of Merlin, nor yet the dark
sentences of profane prophesies; but, 1. the plain truth of
God's word, 2. the invincible justice of the everlasting God,
and 3. the ordinary course of his punishments and plagues from
the beginning, are my assurance and grounds.'[25]
This was early in his career. At its close Knox, now very frail, was
deeply aggrieved by the troubles caused by Lethington and Kirkaldy, who
held the castle of Edinburgh. His verbal predictions of their coming
end, as reported (after the event however) by those around his
death-bed, and his assurance at the same time of 'mercy to the soul' of
the chivalrous Kirkaldy, are among the most striking incidents of this
kind in his life. But in his Will, written contemporaneously on 13th May
1572, he says,
'I am not ignorant that many would that I should enter into
particular determination of these present troubles; to whom I
plainly and simply answer, that, as I never exceeded the bounds
of God's Scriptures, so will I not do, in this part, by God's
grace.'[26]
This did not prevent him from freely describing his old friends in the
Castle as murderers, and predicting their destruction, especially as
they seemed now to be planning a counter-revolution in the interest of
the exiled Queen of Scots. They retorted by accusing him, among other
things, of prejudging her and 'entering into God's secret counsel.' Knox
roused himself to answer the charges in detail. But there remained, he
adds,
'One thing that is most bitter to me, and most fearful, if that
my accusers were able to prove their accusation, to wit, that I
proudly and arrogantly entered into God's secret counsel, as if
I were called thereto. God be merciful to my accusators, of
their rash and ungodly judgment! If they understood how fearful
my conscience is, and ever has been, to exceed the bounds of my
vocation, they would not so boldly have accused me. I am not
ignorant that the secrets of God appertain to Himself alone: but
things revealed in His law appertain to us and our children for
ever. What I have spoken against the adultery, against the
murder, against the pride, and against the idolatry of that
wicked woman, I spake not as one that entered into God's secret
counsel, but being one (of God's great mercy) called to preach
according to His blessed will, revealed in His most holy
word.'[27]
The old man's irritation was most natural. For, on the one hand, his
accusers had hit a blot. He was sometimes extremely dogmatic, imperious,
and rash in his application of 'God's revealed will' both to persons and
things. But the form in which they put it--that he posed as a prophet,
as one having a special message from God's secret counsel, instead of a
general commission to proclaim that revealed will--was not only false,
but struck at the roots of his whole life and work. It is demonstrable
that from Knox's first teaching in East Lothian and first preaching in
St Andrews onwards, the meaning of both teaching and preaching was a
call to the common Scottish man, and to every man, to go to God direct
without any intermediation except God's open word.[28] And I think it
plain that this direct and divine call _to all_ was not only the meaning
but the strength of the message in Scotland as elsewhere. It seems to us
now as if the burden which it laid on the individual--on frail and
feeble women, for example, in that time of persecution--was
overwhelming. It is most pathetic to find Knox, when sitting down to
write tender and consoling messages to those in such circumstances,
pre-occupied with urging the obligation of each one of them individually
to hold fast, against possible torture or death, that which each one had
individually received. But he never shrank from it, or from pointing out
that such relation to God himself was the noblest privilege. And the
evidence is plain that all over the Europe of that age this reception of
a Divine message direct to the individual, in the newly opened
Scriptures, was, not a burden, but a source of incomparable energy and
exhilaration--alike to men and women, to the simple and the learned, to
the young and--stranger still--to the old. Knox knew it; and he knew
that his claiming a special message or ambassadorship would be, not so
much 'exceeding the bounds' of his vocation, as denying it altogether.
He was imperious and dogmatic by nature; and he took these natural
qualities with him into his new work. But he would have shuddered at the
idea of formally interposing his own personality between the hearers of
that time and the message which they received. And he would have
regarded the office of a mere prophet--the bearer, that is, of a special
message, even though that message be divine--as a degradation, if, in
order to attain it, he had to lay down the preaching of 'that doctrine
and that heavenly religion, whereof it hath pleased His merciful
providence to make _me, among others, a simple soldier and
witness-bearer unto men_.'[29]
Does it follow that Knox--who thus rejected strongly the idea of being a
prophet to his time, and insisted instead upon his merely receiving and
transmitting the one message which was common to all--that this man was
therefore little more to his age than any other might be? By no means.
The same message comes to all men in an age, and is received by many,
but it is received by each in a different way.[30] And the way in which
this message was then received by one man in East Lothian made all the
difference to Scotland, and perhaps to Europe. It must not be forgotten,
indeed, that the result of it upon Knox himself was to transform him. So
certain is this that some have felt as if this were the case of one
who, up to about his fortieth year, was an ordinary, commonplace, and
representative Scotsman, and was thereafter changed utterly, but only by
being filled with the sacred fire of conviction. This is only about half
the truth, though it is an important half--to Knox himself by far the
more important. But it is not the whole, and it is far from the whole
_for us_. The author who has enabled us to see his own confused and
changing age under 'the broad clear light of that wonderful book'[31]
the 'History of the Reformation in Scotland,' and who outside that book
was the utterer of many an armed and winged word which pursues and
smites us to this day, must have been born with nothing less than
genius--genius to observe, to narrate, and to judge. Even had he written
as a mere recluse and critic, looking out upon his world from a monk's
cell or from the corner of a housetop, the vividness, the tenderness,
the sarcasm and the humour would still have been there. But Knox's
genius was predominantly practical; and the difference between the
transformation which befell him, and that which changed so many other
men in his time, was that in Knox's case it changed one who was born to
be a statesman. He probably never would have become one, but for the
light which for him as for the others made all things new. But in the
others it resulted in a self-consecration whose outlook was chiefly upon
the next world, and in the present was doubtfully bounded by possible
martyrdom and possible evasion or escape. In the case of Knox the
instinctive outlook was not for himself only, but for others and for his
country. And while he saw from the first, far more clearly than they,
the embattled strength of the forces with which they all had to
contend, the unbending will of this man rejected all idea of concession
or compromise, evasion or escape. And his native sagacity (made keener
as well as more comprehensive now that it looked down from that remote
and stormless anchorage), revealed to him that there was at least the
possibility of the mightiest earthly fabric breaking up before him in
unexpected collapse.
Our conclusion then must be that the call which Knox received was one
common to him with every man and woman of that time--to accept the
Evangel--and common to him with every preacher of that time--to preach
the Evangel; but that this man's large conception of what such a call
practically meant, not for himself alone, but for all around him and for
his country, made it from the first for him a public call, and compelled
him to hear in the invitation of the St Andrews congregation the divine
commission for his life-long work. From the first, and in conception as
well as execution, that work was great and revolutionary. And from the
first, and in its very plan, it involved serious errors. But Knox
himself, in this and every stage of his career, claimed to be judged by
no lower tribunal than that Authority whose dread and strait command he
at the first accepted. And if there are some things in that career which
his country has simply to forgive, we shall not reckon among these the
original resolve of that day in St Andrews--a resolve which has made
Knox more to Scotland 'than any million of unblameable Scotchmen who
need no forgiveness.'
* * * * *
But there are few who will doubt the sincerity, or the strength, of the
impulse which launched Knox upon his public career. There are many
however who, recognising that he was a great public man, doubt
persistently whether he was anything more. They are not satisfied with
the evidence of trumpet-tones from the pulpit, or of solemn and
passionate prayer at some crisis of a career. These are part of the
furniture of the orator, the statesman, and the prophet. Was there a
private life at all, as distinguished from the inner side of that which
was public? And was that private life genuine and tender and strong?
Have we another window into this man's breast--opening in this case, not
upwards and Godwards, but towards the men--or women--around him? We
have: and it is fortunate that the evidence on this subject is found,
not at a late date in Knox's life, as is the Meditation of 1563, but
close to the threshold of his career.
[11] The quotations are from Knox himself--in the first book of his
'History of the Reformation in Scotland.'
When quoting from any part of Knox's 'Works' (David Laing's edition in
six volumes), I propose to modernise the spelling, but in other respects
to retain Knox's English. It will be found surprisingly modern.
[12] 'Works,' vi. 483
[13] 'The end and intent of the Scripture,' according to the translation
by George Wishart, Knox's earliest master, of the First Helvetic or
Swiss Confession, is, 'to declare that God is benevolent and
friendly-minded to mankind; and that he hath declared that kindness in
and through Jesu Christ, his only Son; the which kindness is received by
faith; but this faith is effectuous through charity, and expressed in an
innocent life.' And even more strikingly, the very first question of the
famous Palatinate Catechism for Churches and Schools, though that
catechism is Calvinistic in its conception rather than Lutheran, and
came out so late as 1563, bursts out as follows:--
'What is thy only comfort in life and death?
'_Ans._ That I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my
own, but belong to my faithful Saviour, Jesus Christ, who with his
precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me from
all the power of the Devil.'
[14] 'Works,' i. 187.
[15] On his death-bed. The Regent Morton's famous epitaph spoken by
Knox's grave, is an imperfect echo of what the Reformer ten days before,
in bidding farewell to the Kirk (Session) of Edinburgh, had said of his
own past career:--'In respect that he bore God's message, to whom he
must make account for the same, he (albeit he was weak and an unworthy
creature, _and a fearful man_) feared not the faces of men.'--'Works,'
vi. 637.
[16] One of the most eloquent documents of the time is the address in
1565 to the half-starved ministers of the Kirk (inspired and perhaps
written by Knox), urging that having put their hands to the plough, they
could not look back:--
'God hath honoured us so, that men have judged us the messengers of the
Everlasting. By us hath He disclosed idolatry, by us are the Wicked of
the world rebuked, and by us hath our God comforted the consciences of
many.... And shall we for poverty leave the flock of Jesus Christ before
that it utterly refuse us?... The price of Jesus Christ, his death and
passion, is committed to our charge, the eyes of men are bent upon us,
and we must answer before that Judge.... He preserved us in the darkness
of our mothers' bosom, He provided our food in their breasts, and
instructed us to use the same, when we knew Him not, He hath nourished
us in the time of blindness and of impiety; and will He now despise us,
when we call upon Him, and preach the glorious Gospel of His dear Son
our Lord Jesus?'--'Works,' vi. 425.
[17] Seven years after this time, Knox, writing from abroad to 'his
sisters in Edinburgh,' tells of the 'cogitations' which God permitted
Satan even at that late date to put into his mind--
'Shall Christ, the author of peace, concord, and quietness, be preached
where war is proclaimed, sedition engendered, and tumults appear to
rise? Shall not His Evangel be accused as the cause of all calamity
which is like to follow? What comfort canst thou have to see the
one-half of the people rise up against the other; yea, to jeopard the
one to murder and destroy the other? But above all, what joy shall it be
to thy heart to behold with thine eyes thy native country betrayed into
the hands of strangers, which to no man's judgment can be avoided,
because they who ought to defend it and the liberties thereof are so
blind, dull, and obstinate that they will not see their own
destruction?'--'Works,' iv. 251.
[18] The two sources which, next to his own report of this sermon, best
indicate his earliest standpoint, are (1) the (second) _Basel
Confession_--better known as the First Confession of Helvetia--which
Wishart had brought with him from the Continent, and before his death
had translated into English, and which Knox, therefore, must have known
and may have used; and (2) the treatise of his friend, the layman and
lawyer, Balnaves, written two years later, and which Knox then sent from
Rouen to St Andrews with his own approval and abridgement. The former is
distinctly 'Reformed' and Puritan, and lays down that all ceremonies,
other than the two instituted sacraments and preaching, 'as vessels,
garments, wax-lights, altars,' are unprofitable, and 'serve to subvert
the true religion'; while Balnaves repeats the more fundamental
principle of Knox's sermon (that all religion which is 'not commanded,'
or which is 'invented' with the best motives, is wrong). And both
treatises shew that Knox must have had also before him from the first
the thorny question of the relation of the Church and the private
Christian to the civil magistrate--for both solve it, like Knox himself
(but unlike Luther in his original Confession of Augsburg), by giving
the Magistrate sweeping and intolerant powers of reforming alike the
religion and the Church.
[19] 'Lectures on Heroes: The Hero as Priest.
[20] Carlyle, as above.
[21] Lindsay of Pitscottie.
[22] Thus, Mrs M'Cunn, in her charming volume on Knox as a 'Leader of
Religion,' says that he 'constantly claimed the position accorded to the
Hebrew prophets, and claimed it on the same grounds as they.' And even
Dr Hume Brown, when narrating Knox's refusal in the Galleys to kiss the
'Idol' presented to him, adds: 'It is in such passages as these that we
see how completely Knox identified his action with that of the Hebrew
prophets' (vol. i. 84), the passage founded upon being one in which Knox
points out that 'the same obedience that God required of his people
Israel,' even in idolatrous Babylon, was required by Him of the
'Scottish men' in France, and was actually given by 'that whole number
during the time of their bondage,' not merely by the one unnamed
prisoner who flung the painted 'board' into the Loire. One reason why
the prisoner is unnamed is no doubt that here, as in a hundred other
places more explicitly, Knox would impress us with the feeling that no
other or higher obedience in such matters is required of minister or
prophet or apostle, than is required of the humblest man or the youngest
child in God's people.
[23] 'Works,' vi. 230.
[24] 'Works,' iii. 245.
[25] 'Works,' iii. 169.
[26] 'Works,' vi. p. lvi.
[27] 'Works,' vi. 592.
[28] The right of every man to do so, and his duty to do so, were both
there: the only question might be whether, of the two, the right to do
it (as with Luther), or the duty to do it (as with Calvin) was first and
fundamental.
[29] 'Works,' iii. 155.
[30] Recipitur in modum recipientis.
[31] John Hill Burton's 'History of Scotland,' iii. 339. He adds, 'There
certainly is in the English language no other parallel to it in the
clearness, vigour, and picturesqueness with which it renders the history
of a stirring period.