takes no delight in any one's distress; that he can hardly bear to see his own boys weep when corrected for their faults; but that since he had only discharged his duty he was constrained, though unwillingly, to sustain her majesty's tears rather than hurt his conscience and betray the commonwealth through his silence.1

In all the interviews between the queen and the reformer, and there are six of them narrated by himself, there does not seem to be any real rudeness on the part of Knox. It is sheer manliness all through, and loyalty, not first to his queen to be sure, of course not, but loyalty to God and the great Scottish nation, at the head and heart of whose true interests God has placed him. Her language indeed is the more rude. "Who are you that presume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?" Madame, a subject born within the same." 2

66

There is little more that can be told within my present limits, of Knox's connection with the Scottish revolution. I must commend my readers to the quaint and racy pages of his own inimitable "History." He is the real king in Edinburgh, and in Scotland, preaching on, week after week, in old St. Giles', whose stern and unadorned grandeur, as it rises with its imperial crown high above the old town to-day, is the best illustration of his character. Crowds, three thousand at a time, press within its walls to hear his burning words, whose fire does not dim with the growing age and bodily weakness of the man. The English ambassador writes to Cecil: "Where your

1 Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland, vol. ii., 389. Wodrow Society's ed.

2 Ibid.

ST. BARTHOLOMEW.

205

honor exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is able in an hour to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets continually blustering in

With varying fortunes of some small ebb and flow the Reformation goes on, until Mary marries Bothwell and is compelled to abdicate in favor of her son, and the good Murray is made regent. At length the throne in St. Giles and the throne at Holyrood are in complete accord. It seems as if the old man were to be permitted to see the completion of his work; but suddenly Murray is assassinated, and his friend, worn out already with labors out of number and out of measure, is prostrated by this grief in a sickness from which he never recovers.

Almost his last public service is a complete vindication from all those charges of rudeness, indelicacy, and injustice which have been so liberally showered upon him for three hundred years. Over from France come those thrilling echoes of Catherine de Medicis' midnight bell, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew. This is the work of the bloody Guises. For this they have been scheming over yonder there in France. With these fiendish plotters the lovely Queen of Scots is in league until death. That tolling might have been heard from St. Giles' tower but for John Knox. And bitter and grievous as the disastrous tidings must have been to the faithful old man, we are glad that he was spared long enough to creep up the High Street and into his pulpit, to breathe out what was at once the expression of his indignation and a perfect vindication of his life-long and far too thankless conflict.

IX.

CALVIN.

A. D. 1509-1564.

WHILE laboring for the destruction of absolute power in the spiritual order, the religious revolution of the sixteenth century was not aware of the true principles of intellectual liberty. It emancipated the human mind, and yet pretended still to govern it by laws. In point of fact, it produced the prevalence of free inquiry; in point of principle, it believed that it was substituting a legitimate for an illegitimate power. It had not looked up to the primary motive, nor down to the ultimate consequences of its own work. It thus fell into a double error. On the one side, it did not know or respect all the rights of human thought; at the very moment that it was demanding these rights for itself, it was violating them towards others. On the other side, was unable to estimate the rights of authority in matters of reason. I do not speak of that coercive authority which ought to have no rights at all in such matters, but of that kind of authority which is purely moral, and acts solely by its influence upon the mind. GUIZOT, History of Civilization. Lect. xii.