THE INNER LIFE: HIS WOMEN FRIENDS
Before the age with which we are dealing there was, throughout Europe, a
certain barrier between the religious life on the one hand and the
domestic and private life--the ordinary _vie intime_--on the other.
Among the men and women of the new era that barrier was broken down. The
religious was no longer a recognised class: religion was no longer a
luxury for the few, or to be partaken of in sacred places and at fixed
days and hours. The common man, if a Christian man at all, was to be so
now in his common and daily life, living it out from day to day on the
deepest principles and from the highest motives. And the Christian
woman, having a similar and an equal vocation, undertook the like
responsibilities. But her responsibilities were in that age of
transition very perplexing, and more than ever invited friendly counsel
and pastoral care. Now what was John Knox's private life? He was twice
married, and we know from his correspondence that even before his first
marriage there were women of high position and character to whom he
sustained what may be called personal and pastoral relations. Have we
any documents from that time by which to illustrate, and perhaps to
test, the principles of his inward and personal life, before we go on to
find these written large in the scroll of his country's history?
Norham Castle, near Berwick, is still a very striking pile, especially
to those who come upon it, as the writer did, after four days leisurely
walking down the banks of the great border river. Every curve of the
stream had its natural beauty intertwined with some association of
history or the poets, from the first morning on Neidpath Fell, to the
fourth evening when
'Day set on Norham's castled steep,
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone.
The battled towers, the donjon keep,
The loophole grates where captives weep,
The flanking walls that round it sweep'--
are all still there, though the inmates are no longer captives. Norham
is, indeed, best known as the scene of the whole of the first canto of
'Marmion.' In that poem Sir Hugh the Heron is supposed to have been Lord
of it, while his wife is away in Scotland, prepared to sing ballads of
Lochinvar to the ill-fated King on his last evening in Holyrood. But
when Knox, delivered from the galleys, preached in Berwick in 1549, the
Captain of the Hold of Norham, only six miles off, was Richard Bowes.
And his lady, born Elizabeth Aske, and co-heiress of Aske in Yorkshire
(already an elderly woman and mother of _fifteen children_), became
Knox's chief friend, and after he left Berwick for Newcastle his
correspondent, chiefly as to her religious troubles. Most of the letters
of Knox to her which are preserved are in the year 1553, and one of the
earliest of these acknowledges a communication 'from you and my dearest
spouse.' This means that Marjory Bowes, the fifth daughter in that large
household, had already been _sponsa_ or betrothed, with her mother's
consent, to the Scottish preacher. Knox, now forty-eight years old, had
recently declined an English bishopric, offered him through the Duke of
Northumberland, but was still chaplain to the King. A letter to
Marjory, undated, follows, in which he explains to his 'dearly beloved
sister' some passages of Scripture, and adds--'The Spirit of God shall
instruct your heart what is most comfortable to the troubled conscience
of your mother.' This communication ends with the subdued or sly
postscript, 'I think this be the first letter that ever I wrote to
you.'[32] In July, while Knox was in London, Mary Tudor ascended the
throne, and everything began to look threatening. In September Knox
acknowledges the 'boldness and constancy' of Mrs Bowes in pushing his
cause with her husband, who was as yet 'unconvinced in religion,' but he
urges her not to trouble herself too much in the matter. He would
himself press for the betrothal being changed into marriage, or at least
acknowledged. 'It becomes me now to jeopard my life for the comfort and
deliverance of my own flesh, as that I will do by God's grace; both fear
and friendship of all earthly creature laid aside.'[33] Mrs Bowes
suggested that, in addition to writing her husband, he should lay his
case before an elder brother, Sir Robert Bowes, Warden of the Marches,
who seems to have acted as head of the family. Sir Robert turned out to
be more hostile to the perilous alliance proposed for his niece than
even her father; and Knox wrote that 'his disdainful, yea, despiteful
words have so pierced my heart that my life is bitter unto me.' When
Knox was about to have 'declared his heart' in the whole matter, Sir
Robert interrupted him with, 'Away with your rhetorical reasons! for I
will not be persuaded with them.' Knox, indignant, predicted to the
mother of his betrothed that 'the days should be few that England should
give me bread,'[34] but adds again, 'Be sure I will not forget you and
your company so long as mortal man may remember any earthly
creature.'[35] He escaped from England very soon, and not till September
1555 did he return, and that on Mrs Bowes' invitation; and with the
result that he brought off to Geneva, where he was now pastor of a
distinguished English colony, not only his wife Marjory, but his wife's
mother too. Here his two sons, Nathaniel and Eleazar, afterwards
students at Cambridge and ministers of the Church of England, were born.
But in 1559 wife and mother-in-law accompanied or followed him from the
Continent to Edinburgh. During the anxious and critical winter which
followed, Mrs Knox seems to have acted as her husband's amanuensis, but
'the rest of my wife hath been so unrestful since her arriving here,
that scarcely could she tell upon the morrow what she wrote at
night.'[36] Next year brought victory and peace, but too late for her;
for in December 1560, about the time when the first General Assembly was
sitting in Edinburgh, Knox's wife died. We learn this from the 'History
of the Reformation,' in which Knox records a meeting of that date
between himself and the two foremost nobles of Scotland, Chatelherault
and Moray, upon public affairs, 'he upon the one part comforting them,
and they upon the other part comforting him, for he was in no small
heaviness by reason of the late death of his dear bedfellow, Marjorie
Bowes.'[37] And of her we have no further record, except Calvin's
epithet of _suavissima_,[38] and her husband's repetition years after,
in his Last Will, of the 'benediction that their dearest mother left' to
her two sons, 'whereto, now as then, I from my troubled heart say,
Amen.'[39]
Four years passed, and Knox, still minister of Edinburgh, and now in his
fifty-ninth year, was seen riding home with a second wife, 'not like a
prophet or old decrepit priest as he was,' said his Catholic
adversaries, 'but with his bands of taffetie fastened with golden
rings.' The lady for whom he put on this state was Margaret Stewart, the
daughter of his friend Lord Ochiltree, and the same critics assure us
that 'by sorcery and witchcraft he did so allure that poor gentlewoman,
that she could not live without him.' Queen Mary was angry when she
heard of it, because the bride 'was of the blood,' _i.e._ related to the
Royal house; and even Knox's friends did not like his union at that age
with a girl of seventeen. Young Mrs Knox seems, however, to have played
her part well, especially as mother of three daughters; she tended their
father carefully in his last illness; and no one will regret that two
years after his death she made a more suitable marriage as to years with
Andrew Ker of Faudonside, one of the fierce band whose daggers had
clashed ten years before in the body of David Rizzio.
Knox's liking for feminine society, and his suspicion that he had more
qualifications for it than the world has believed, come out sometimes in
a casual way. After one of his famous interviews with Queen Mary, he was
ordered to wait her pleasure in the ante-room.
'The said John stood in the chamber, as one whom men had never
seen (so were all afraid), except that the Lord Ochiltree bare
him company; and therefore began he to _forge_ talking of the
ladies who were there sitting in all their gorgeous apparel;
which espied, he merrily said, "O fair ladies, how pleasing were
this life of yours if it should ever abide, and then in the end
that we might pass to heaven with all this gay gear. But fye
upon that knave Death, that will come whether we will or not!
And when he has laid on his arrest, the foul worms will be busy
with this flesh, be it never so fair and so tender; and the
silly soul, I fear, shall be so feeble, that it can neither
carry with it gold, garnassing, targetting, pearl, nor precious
stones." And by such means _procured he the company of women_.'
These moralities, however merrily intended and at the time successful,
would have perhaps been more appropriate in the Forest of Arden or the
graveyard of Hamlet, than among the four Maries in Holyrood; and for
anything that is to be of autobiographical value we must go elsewhere
and go deeper. His wives contribute nothing; we may hope that they were
as happy as the countries which have no history. And if that is too much
to believe--or too little to hope--we shall find enough in the next few
pages to satisfy us that they had near them in all their trials a strong
and tender heart. But of their inward troubles, and of the sympathy
these may have drawn forth, Knox is not the historian--he refuses to be
the historian even of his own inner life. He unfolds himself in writing
only to the women who are in trouble, and at a distance. And the only
concession to domesticity is in the fact that his chief correspondent
is, if not a wife, a prospective mother-in-law.
The letters to her are the most important of all, and the following
extract is from one published among the letters of 1553 as 'The First to
Mrs Bowes.' It was by no means the first, even in that year; but it is
the one which Knox himself long afterwards selected as the first for
republication and as best illustrating the original relation between
himself and the lady recently deceased. In it he had said, writing from
London to Norham:--
'Since the first day that it pleased the providence of God to
bring you and me into familiarity, I have always delighted in
your company; and when labour would permit, you know that I have
not spared hours to talk and commune with you, the fruit whereof
I did not then fully understand nor perceive. But now absent,
and so absent that by corporal presence neither of us can
receive comfort of other, I call to mind how that ofttimes when,
with dolorous hearts, we have begun our talking, God hath sent
great comfort unto both, _which for my own part I commonly
want_. The exposition of your troubles, and acknowledging of
your infirmity, were first unto me a very mirror and glass
wherein I beheld myself so rightly painted forth, that nothing
could be more evident to my own eyes. And then the searching of
the Scriptures for God's sweet promises, and for his mercies
freely given unto miserable offenders--(for his nature
delighteth to shew mercy where most misery reigneth)--the
collection and applying of God's mercies, I say, were unto me as
the breaking and handling with my own hands of the most sweet
and delectable unguents, whereof I could not but receive some
comfort by their natural sweet odours.'[40]
The sympathy that flows through this beautiful passage comes out very
strongly in another written in bodily illness. His importunate
correspondent had proposed to call for him in Newcastle that very day.
Knox suggests to-morrow instead.
'This day ye know to be the day of my study and prayer unto God;
yet if your trouble be intolerable, or if ye think my presence
may release your pain, do as the Spirit shall move you, for you
know that I will be offended with nothing that you do in God's
name. And O, how glad would I be to feed the hungry and give
medicine to the sick! Your messenger found me in bed, after a
sore trouble and most dolorous night, and so dolour may complain
to dolour when we two meet.'[41]
Another letter, also to Mrs Bowes, is from London, and reveals a very
remarkable scene. He acknowledges receiving one letter from Marjory, and
one from her mother, the latter, as usual, full of complaint.
'The very instant hour that your letter was presented unto me,
was I talking of you, by reason that three honest poor women
were come to me, and were complaining their great infirmity, and
were showing unto me the great assaults of the enemy, and I was
opening the cause and commodities thereof, whereby all our eyes
wept at once; and I was praying unto God that ye and some others
had been there with me for the space of two hours. And even at
that instant came your letters to my hands; whereof one part I
read unto them, and one of them said, "O would to God I might
speak with that person, for I perceive that there be more
tempted than I."'[42]
The persuasive ingenuity which would suggest to the Lady of Norham that
she was a source not only of comfort but of strength to those troubled
like herself, turns out much to our advantage. For Knox puts _himself_,
first of all, in the place of those whom he would either advise or
console. And in the earliest dated letter of his which we possess there
is a vivid picture of what took place between two people who were much
in earnest, three and a half centuries ago, about this life and the
next. Knox has written fully to Mrs Bowes, and adds--
'After the writing of these preceding, your brother and mine,
Harry Wycliffe, did advertise me by writing that your adversary
took occasion to trouble you, because that _I did start back
from you_ rehearsing your infirmities. I remember myself to have
so done, and _that is my common consuetude when anything
pierceth or toucheth my heart_. Call to your mind what I did
standing at the cupboard at Alnwick: in very deed I thought that
no creature had been tempted as I was. And when that I heard
proceed from your mouth the very words that he troubles me with,
I did wonder and from my heart lament your sore trouble, knowing
in myself the dolour thereof.'[43]
What was the temptation which Knox thought no creature shared with him,
but which he found, as he stood at the cupboard at Alnwick, had come to
Mrs Bowes in the same form, and even in the same words? As it happens,
we can answer with great certainty. It was a temptation to infidelity or
'incredulity': the adversary 'would cause you abhor that, and hate it,
wherein stands only salvation and life,' viz., the name, as well as the
whole message, of Jesus Christ. So it is put in this letter; and in
others, apparently later, we read--
'That ye are of that foolish sort of men that say in their
heart, "There is no God," I wonder that the Devil shames not to
allege that contrary [to] you; but he is a liar, and father of
the same. For if in your heart ye said there is no God, why then
should ye suffer anguish and care by reason that the enemy
troubles you with that thought? Who can be afraid, day and
night, for that which is not?'[44]
Again--
'He would persuade you that God's Word is of no effect, but that
it is a vain tale invented by man, and so all that is spoken of
Jesus, the Son of God, is but a vain fable.... He says the
Scriptures of God are but a tale, and no credit is to be given
to them....[45] Before he troubled you that there is not a
Saviour, and now he affirms that ye shall be like to Francis
Spira, who denied Christ's doctrine.'[46]
In that age, which broke through the crust of mere authority to seek
some 'foundation of belief, 'there must have been many of both sexes in
this state of mind; though each doubter might think that 'no creature'
shared it. The new doctrine of individual faith and individual
responsibility was one for women as well as men, and they had a special
claim on the sympathy of their teachers when central doubts attacked
them. Whether these doubts in the case of Mrs Bowes, _or in that of
Knox_, arose in the line of any particular enquiries does not appear. He
treats them as if they were rather moral than intellectual, and born of
the feebleness of the soul under temptation. And in this relation it
says not a little for his estimate of Mrs Bowes, whom he was leaving
behind under the Marian persecution, and with her husband and most of
her family hostile to her, that, instead of attenuating, he rather
magnifies the external difficulties she had to meet.
'Your adversary, sister, doth labour that ye should doubt
whether this be the Word of God or not. If there had never been
testimonial of the undoubted truth thereof before these our
ages, may not such things as we see daily come to pass prove the
verity thereof? Doth it not affirm that it shall be preached,
and yet contemned and lightly regarded by many; that the true
professors thereof shall be hated with [by] father, mother, and
others of the contrary religion; that the most faithful shall
cruelly be persecuted? And come not all these things to pass in
ourselves?'[47]
But sceptical or speculative doubts were not Mrs Bowes' chief trouble.
She writes Knox complaining of her temptations--even temptations of
sense. And chiefly and continually she complained of past guilt and
present sin, by reason of which she felt as if 'remission of sins in
Christ Jesus pertained nothing to her.'[48] This was not a case for the
'sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort' which the Church of England
ascribes to the doctrine of Predestination rightly used. Nor does Knox
deal with it--at least in his letters--by the simple and peremptory
preaching of the Evangel. He recognised it as a case calling for
sympathy, and he does not find the sympathy hard. Knox, indeed, like the
other Reformers, had parted for ever with the mediæval idea of salvation
by self-torture--even by self-torture for sin. Like all the wisest of
the human race, too--even before Christianity came to sanction their
surmise--he held that religion must be an objective thing, and that
salvation lies in dealing, not with ourselves, but with One outside of
us and above. Yet it is a salvation from sin, and the new life now
springing up throughout Europe was intensely a moral life. The faith,
too, on which the age laid so much stress as a 'coming' to God, involved
repentance as a 'turning' to God. And while repentance no longer meant
penance, whether of body or mind, it meant--and as Knox puts it
repeatedly--'it _contains within itself_ a dolour for sin, a hatred of
sin, and yet hope of mercy'; and it is renewed as often as the occasion
arises for renewed deliverance from the evil. Accordingly, Knox now acts
on the principle which he announced years afterwards in a letter to
another friend,[49] and again and again tears open his own heart to
comfort others by shewing that he, with hope or assurance in Christ,
still felt the burden and assault of sin.
'I can write to you by my own experience. I have sometimes been
in that security that I felt not dolour for sin, neither yet
displeasure against myself for any iniquity in that I did
offend. But rather my vain heart did thus flatter myself, (I
write the truth to my own confusion, and to the glory of my
heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ), 'Thou hast suffered
great trouble for professing of Christ's truth; God has done
great things for thee.'... O Mother! this was a subtle serpent
who thus could pour in venom, I not perceiving it; but blessed
be my God who permitted me not to sleep long in that estate. I
drank, shortly after this flattery of myself, a cup of
contra-poison, the bitterness whereof doth yet so remain in my
breast, that whatever I have suffered, or presently do, I repute
as dung, yea, and myself worthy of damnation for my ingratitude
towards my God. The like Mother, might have come to you,'
&c.[50]
Mrs Bowes lived in her famous son-in-law's house till close upon her
death. By that time he had come to recognise that her experience was an
exceptional[51] and, perhaps, a morbid one; and at a very early date he
manifestly felt the pressure of her constant applications to him for
help. Yet throughout the correspondence his unfailing attitude to her is
that of admirably tender solicitude; and when he has to go into exile in
the beginning of 1554 he first sits down and writes--still partly in the
form of letters to her--a treatise on Affliction. It is of great and
permanent value, the subject not being one which our race can as yet
claim to have outgrown: but I shall make no reference to its contents.
Even in his previous and ordinary letters, however, Knox had reached the
conclusion that her case was one of inward Affliction, rather than, as
she would have it, of sin. And the treatment of this great subject of
'desertion,' by one who was a standard-bearer of the new doctrine of
faith and assurance, is remarkably beautiful. 'It is dolorous to the
faithful,' he writes another friend, 'to lack the sensible feeling of
God's mercy and goodness (and the sensible feeling thereof he lacketh
what time he fully cannot rest and repose upon the same). And yet as
nothing more commonly cometh to God's children, so is there no exercise
more profitable for his soldiers than is the same.' But to Mrs Bowes he
points out, what she certainly would not have observed, that 'it doth
no more offend God's Majesty that the spirit sometimes lie as it were
asleep, neither having sense of great dolour nor great comfort, more
than it doth offend him that the body use the natural rest, ceasing from
all external exercise.' And again, varying the figure, 'no more is God
displeased, although that sometimes the body be sick, and subject to
diseases, and so unable to do the calling; no more is he offended,
although the soul in that case be diseased and sick. And as the natural
father will not kill the body of the child, albeit through sickness it
faint, and abhor comfortable meats, no more (and much less) will our
heavenly Father kill our souls, albeit, through spiritual infirmity and
weakness of our faith, sometimes we refuse the lively food of his
comfortable promises....[52] 'You are sick, dear sister,' he had said
elsewhere, 'and therefore,' alluding even to her confidences of
scepticism as to Christian doctrine, 'you abhor the succour of most
wholesome food.' 'Fear not,' he sums up in a subsequent letter, 'the
infirmity that you find either in flesh or spirit. Only abstain from
external iniquity'--which he supplements elsewhere with the more
positive advice, 'Be fervent in reading, fervent in prayer, and merciful
to the poor, according to your power, and God shall put an end to all
dolours, when least is thought [according] to the judgment of man.' And
in the meantime, 'Dear mother, he that is sorry for absence of virtue is
not altogether destitute of the same ... our hunger cries unto God.'
Knox himself, he assured his troubled friend, never ceased to pray for
her; but 'although I would cease, and yourself would cease, and all
other creature, yet your dolour continually cryeth and returneth not
void from the presence of our God.'[53]
Mrs Bowes was not the only 'mirror and glass' in whom Knox allows us to
see his inner self 'painted,' though the woman-hearted warrior is limned
in the letters to her more nearly at full length. Two ladies in
Edinburgh, one the wife of the Lord Clerk Register, and the other of the
City Clerk, were his friends and correspondents, at a later date, but
while he was still in exile. And in a letter 'to his sisters' in that
town, he unbosoms himself as usual as to the principles of his inner
life, but adds--
Alas! as the wounded man, be he never so expert in physic or
surgery, cannot suddenly mitigate his own pain and dolour, no
more can I the fear and grief of my heart, although I am not
altogether ignorant what is to be done.'[54]
The same sentiment is expanded in one of a number of letters sent to a
group of 'merchants' wives in London,' which probably included the
'three honest poor women'[55] of whom we have already heard. Of this
group the most remarkable was Mrs Anna Locke, of the family which
afterwards yielded the famous John Locke. She, like Mrs Bowes, followed
Knox to Geneva amid the stream of exiles from London; and his letters to
her give the impression that she was not only wealthy and energetic, but
possessed of higher character and more accomplishments than the
well-born Elizabeth Bowes. The letters to the latter were written
chiefly in 1553. The following, to Mrs Locke, is sent from Scotland
after Knox's return there, and is dated on last day of 1559:--
'God make yourself participant of the same comfort which you
write unto me. And in very deed, dear sister, I have no less
need of comfort (notwithstanding that I am not altogether
ignorant) than hath the living man to be fed, although in store
he hath great substance. I have read the cares and temptations
of Moses, and sometimes I supposed myself to be well practised
in such dangerous battles. But, alas! I now perceive that all my
practice before was but mere speculation; for one day of
troubles since my last arrival in Scotland, hath more pierced my
heart than all the torments of the galleys did the space of
nineteen months; for that torment, for the most part, did touch
the body, but this pierces the soul and inward affections. Then
I was assuredly persuaded that I should not die till I had
preached Jesus Christ, even where I now am. And yet having now
my hearty desire, I am nothing satisfied, neither yet rejoice.
My God, remove my unthankfulness!'[56]
Men of this expansive and confiding temperament are attractive, and will
occasionally get into trouble, even in later life. We find Mrs Bowes ere
long complaining that she 'had not been equally made privy to Knox's
coming into the country with others,' and needing to be assured that
'none is this day within the realm of England, with whom I would more
gladly speak (only she whom God hath offered unto me, and commanded me
to love as my own flesh, excepted) than with you.'[57] Mrs Locke, later
on, points out that she has not had a letter for a whole year. And this
elicits not only the assurance that it is not the absence of one year or
two 'that can quench in my heart that familiar acquaintance in Christ
Jesus, which half a year did engender, and almost two years did nourish
and confirm,' but also the following striking general statement, which,
like many things from Knox, impresses us by a certain straightforward
and noble egotism:
'Of nature I am churlish, and in conditions[58] different from
many: yet one thing I ashame not to affirm, that familiarity
once thoroughly contracted was never yet broken on my default.
The cause may be that I have rather need of all, than that any
have need of me.'[59]
It may be true that Knox never broke a friendship with either sex. But
his friendships with men were masculine and very reserved in tone; and
we may be quite sure that the memorable concluding sentence of the above
paragraph would never have been written except to a woman. Most people
will be delighted to see already fallen under the 'regimen of women' the
very man who was to set the trumpet to his lips against it. But those
who study Knox's life are indebted to his familiar correspondence, and
especially to the earlier part of it, for far more than the
gratification of this not unkindly malice. For these letters, I think,
prove to all--what the finer ear might have gathered with certainty from
many things even in his public writings--that the main source of that
outward and active career was an inner life.
We must part for ever with the idea of Knox as a human cannon-ball,
endowed simply with force of will, and tearing and shattering as it
goes. The views which at a definite period gave this tremendous impulse
to a nature previously passive, are not obscure, and are perfectly
traceable. They are views upon which Knox continually insists as common
to himself with all Christian men, and which _were_ common to him with
the mass of Christian men--and women--who were the strength of that time
and the hope of the age to follow. They were views which, when received
with full conviction by any individual, led outwardly to suffering on
the one hand, or, on the other, to shattering the whole compacted system
of opposing intolerance. But they were views which, when thus translated
into convictions, not only pressed outward with explosive force, but
also, and necessarily, spread inwards in reflux and expansion to refresh
and animate the man. They might have done so--in the case of some men of
that time they did--without overflowing into the private life and into
sympathetic converse and confidence with others. But Knox was so
constituted as to need this also and to supply it. And the fragments of
his correspondence which are all that remain to us, and which probably
were all that an extraordinarily busy public work permitted, are
conclusive on some things and instructive on others. They are conclusive
as to the existence, under that breastplate of hammered iron with which
Knox confronted all outward opposition, of a private and personal
life--a life inward, secret, and deep, and a life also rich, tender, and
eminently sympathetic. They are conclusive also, I think, of this inner
life being the source and spring of the life without, instead of being
merely derived from it. And they will thus be found instructive as to
the influence of that hidden life, in its strength and its limitations
alike, on the external career which we have now to trace.
[32] 'Works,' iii. 395.
[33] 'Works,' iii. 376.
[34] 'Works,' iii. 378.
[35] 'Works,' iii. 358.
[36] 'Works,' vi. 104.
[37] 'Works,' ii. 138.
[38] 'Calvini Epistolæ,' Ep. 306.
[39] 'Works,' vi. p. lvii.
[40] 'Works,' iii. 337.
[41] 'Works,' iii. 352.
[42] 'Works,' iii. 379. Compare, or contrast, this scene of the three
poor women with another recorded by a still greater master of English.
The tinker had gone on business one day to Bedford:
'In one of the streets of that town, I came where there were
three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, and
talking about the things of God.... But they were far above, out
of my reach; for their talk was about a new birth, the work of
God on their hearts, also how they were convinced of their
miserable state.... And methought they spake as if joy did make
them speak; they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture
language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said,
that they were to me as if they had found a new world, as if
they were people that dwelt alone, and were not to be reckoned
among their neighbours.'--Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_.
[43] 'Works,' iii. 350.
[44] 'Works,' iii. 360.
[45] 'Works,' iii. 366.
[46] 'Works,' iii. 368.
[47] 'Works,' iii. 357. Browning makes his good old Pope feel, in the
later Renaissance, as if Christian heroism had been
'so possible
When in the way stood Nero's cross and stake,
So hard now'--
and, looking back almost regretfully to Nero's time, to ask--
'How could saints and martyrs _fail_ see truth
Streak the night's blackness?'
'The Ring and the Book. The Pope,' line 1827.
[48] 'Works,' vi. 514.
[49] 'The examples of God's children always complaining of their own
wretchedness serve for the penitent that _they_ slide not into
desperation.'--'Works,' vi. 85.
[50] 'Works,' iii. 386.
[51] 'Works,' vi. 513.
[52] It is of the letter from which the above is taken that Knox in
publishing it long after says apologetically, 'If it serve not for this
estate of Scotland, yet it will serve a troubled conscience, so long as
the Kirk of God remaineth in either realm.'--'Works,' vi. 617.
[53] 'Works,' iii. 362.
[54] 'Works,' iv. 252.
[55] 'Honest' in that age meant something nearly equivalent to
'honourable,' and that they were 'poor women' may refer to troubles
which they brought to him, other than want of money.
[56] 'Works,' vi. 104.
[57] 'Works,' iii. 370.
[58] 'Conditions' refers to inward nature, not outward circumstances. It
may be explained by a letter written nine years later, also to a friend
in England, in which Knox apologises for not having written him for
years, during which the Reformer had been 'tossed with many storms,' yet
might have sent a letter, 'if that this my churlish nature, _for the
most part oppressed with melancholy_, had not staid tongue and pen from
doing of their duty.'--'Works,' vi. 566. Knox in 1553 was suffering
severely from gravel and dyspepsia; one of these was already an 'old
malady'; and both seem to have clung to him during the rest of his life.
[59] 'Works,' vi. 11.