Born, at Haddington, 1505. Educated at Haddington School. To Glasgow University, 25 Oct. 1522. Practiced as a notary in Haddington. Probably ordained Deacon. Private tutor, 1544(?)–47. Received “call” as preacher at St. Andrews, 1547; preached Reformed doctrine. Prisoner in French galleys, July 1547 to Feb. 1549. Returned to England, 1549. Preached at Berwick, 1549–51. Prosecuted by Catholics, 1550; but prosecution abandoned. Preached at Newcastle, 1550–51. Chaplain to King, 1551–53. Preached in Buckinghamshire and Kent, June to Oct. 1553. Married Marjory Bowes, July (?) 1553. To Newcastle, Dec. 1553. At Dieppe, Jan. to Feb., 1554. Travelled in France and Switzerland, March to Nov. 1554. Intimacy with Calvin begun. English pastor at Frankfort-on-Maine, Nov. 1554 to March 1555. At Geneva, March to Aug. 1555. Returned to Berwick, Aug. 1555. Returned to Geneva, July 1556. Received Freedom of City of Geneva, 1559. Left Geneva, Jan. 1559. Returned to Scotland, April 1559. His preaching at Perth resulted in insurrection. Formal establishment of Reformed Church in Scotland, Aug. 1560. Active in spread of Reformation doctrine. Prosecuted for treason, and acquitted, Dec. 1563. Visit to England, Dec. 1566 to June 1567. Died, in Edinburgh, 24 Nov. 1572. Buried in St. Giles’s Churchyard. Works: Tract on the Sacrament (1549?); “A Declaration what true Prayer is,” 1554; “A Confession and Declaration of Prayer,” 1554; “An Exposition of the Sixth Psalm,” 1554; “A Godly Letter,” 1554; “A Faythfull Admonition,” 1554; “The Order of Geneva” (liturgy; compiled by Knox, Whittingham, and others), 1556; Letter to the Queen Dowager, 1556 (enlarged edn., 1558); “Apology for the Protestants in Prison in Paris,” 1557; “The First Blast of the Trumpet” (anon.), 1558; “The Appellation of John Knox … from the cruell Sentence pronounced by the Bishops and Clergy,” 1558; “A Letter addressed to the Commonalty of Scotland,” 1558; “The First Book of Discipline” (compiled by Knox and others), 1560; “An Answer to a great number of Blasphemous Cavillations written by an … Adversarie to God’s Eternal Predestination,” 1560; “The Ordoure and Doctrine of the General Faste” (compiled by Knox and John Craig), 1560; “A Sermon preached … in the Publique audience, etc.,” 1566. Posthumous: “A Fort for the Afflicted,” 1580; “History of the Reformation,” bks. i.–iii., 1584; bks. iv., v., 1644. Collected Works: ed. by D. Laing (6 vols.), 1846–64.

Personal

  Of all others, Knoxces name, if it be not Goodman’s, is most odiouse here, and therefore I wish no mention of hym hither.

  On this manner departed this man of God, the light of Scotland, the comfort of the Kirk within the same, the mirror of godliness, and patron and example to all true ministers in purity of life, soundness in doctrine, and in boldness of reproving of wickedness; and one that cared not the favor of men, how great soever they were, to reprove their abuses and sins. In him was such a mighty spirit of judgment and wisdom, that the trouble never came to the Kirk sin his entering on pulpit-preaching but he foresaw the end thereof, so that he had ever ready a new counsel and a faithful to teach men that would be taught to take the best and leave the worst; so that he that followed his counsel, in the end had ever occasion never to repent him; and contrarie, such as have rejected the same have casten themselves in most shameful wickedness, and have come in a part, and daily more and more are like to come and fall to a most miserable ruin, both of soul and bodie—whilk undoubtedly shall come upon them if repentance prevent not God’s judgments—as may be well verified this day in the Hamiltons, the Laird of Grange, and William Maitland, whose end behauld when it comes.

  The opening of his mouth, was drawn out to such a length of deformity, that his face resembled that of a dog, as his voice also did the barking of that animal. The voice failed from that tongue, which had been the cause of so much mischief, and his death, most grateful to his country, soon followed. In his last sickness, he was occupied not so much in meditating upon death, as in thinking upon civil and worldly affairs.

  I heard him preach the prophecies of Daniel…. I had my pen and my little buik and took away sic things as I could comprehend. In the opening of the text he was moderate the space of half an hour; but when he enterit to application he made me so to grew and tremble that I could not hold a pen to write…. He was very weak. I saw him every day of his doctrine go hulie and fear with a furring of marticks about his neck, a staff in the ane hand, and gude godly Richard Ballandene, his servant, holding up the other oxter, from the Abbey to the Parish Kirk, and by the said Richard and another servant lifted up to the pulpit, whare he behoved to lean at his first entrie, but ere he had done with his sermon he was sae active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit in blads and flie out of it.

  Zeal, intrepidity, disinterestedness, were virtues which he possessed in an eminent degree. He was acquainted too with the learning cultivated among divines in that age; and excelled in that species of eloquence which is calculated to rouse and to inflame. His maxims, however, were often too severe, and the impetuosity of his temper excessive. Rigid and uncomplying himself, he showed no indulgence to the infirmities of others. Regardless of the distinctions of rank and character, he uttered his admonitions with an acrimony and vehemence, more apt to irritate than to reclaim. This often betrayed him into indecent and undutiful expressions with respect to the queen’s person and conduct. Those very qualities, however, which now render his character less amiable, fitted him to be the instrument of providence for advancing the reformation among a fierce people, and enabled him to face dangers, and to surmount opposition, from which a person of a more gentle spirit would have been apt to shrink back. By an unwearied application to study and to business, as well as by the frequency and fervour of his public discourses, he had worn out a constitution naturally robust. During a lingering illness he discovered the utmost fortitude; and met the approaches of death with a magnanimity inseparable from his character.

  The ringleader in all these insults on majesty was John Knox; who possessed an uncontrolled authority in the church, and even in the civil affairs of the nation, and who triumphed in the contumelious usage of his sovereign. His usual appellation for the queen was Jezebel; and though she endeavoured, by the most gracious condescension, to win his favour, all her insinuations could gain nothing on his obdurate heart…. The political principles of the man, which he communicated to his brethern, were as full of sedition as his theological were of rage and bigotry.

  A fanatical incendiary, a holy savage, the son of violence and barbarism, the religious sachem of religious Mohawks.

  With his brethren in the ministry he lived in the utmost cordiality. We never read of the slightest variance between him and any of his colleagues…. In private life he was beloved and revered by his friends and domestics. He was subject to the illapses of melancholy and depression of spirits, arising partly from natural constitution, and partly from the maladies which had long preyed upon his health; which made him (to use his own expression) churlish, and less capable of pleasing and gratifying his friends than he was otherwise disposed to be. This he confessed, and requested them to excuse; but his friendship was sincere, affectionate, and steady. When free from this morose affection, he relished the pleasures of society, and, among his acquaintances, was accustomed to unbend his mind, by indulging in innocent recreation, and in the sallies of wit and humour, to which he had a strong propensity, notwithstanding the graveness of his general deportment…. Most of his faults may be traced to his natural temperament, and to the character of the age and country in which he lived. His passions were strong; he felt with the utmost keenness on every subject which interested him; and as he felt he expressed himself, without disguise and without affectation. The warmth of his zeal was apt to betray him into intemperate language; his inflexible adherence to his opinions inclined to obstinacy; and his independence of mind occasionally assumed the appearance of haughtiness and disdain…. He was austere, not unfeeling; stern, not savage; vehement, not vindictive.

  A man of stern unbending nature, actuated by principle alone, far above all sordid selfish considerations, but narrow in mind and only moderately learned, had adopted in their utmost extent the rigid principles of Calvin, the apostle of Geneva. Gospel truth (in his own sense of the term) he held to be paramount to all considerations, and all the laws of society should yield before it.

  Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, applies emphatically to Knox…. An honest-hearted, brotherly man; brother to the high, brother also to the low; sincere in his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bordeaux too, we find, in that old Edinburgh house of his; a cheery social man, with faces that loved him! 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 we assign to the Scotch at present: a certain sardonic taciturnity is in him; insight enough; and a stouter heart than he himself knows of…. This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man!—He had a sore fight of an existence; wrestling with Popes and Principalities; in defeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight, but he won it. “Have you hope?” they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, “pointed upwards with his finger,” and so died. Honour to him! His works have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men’s; but the spirit of it never.

  To say that he was fearless and incorruptible, that he advocated with unflinching zeal what he believed to be the truth, and that he devoted himself with untiring energy to what he deemed the highest of all objects, is only to render common justice to the many noble attributes which he undoubtedly possessed. But, on the other hand, he was stern, unrelenting, and frequently brutal; he was not only callous to human suffering, but he could turn it into a jest, and employ on it the resources of his coarse, though exhuberant, humour; and he loved power so inordinately, that, unable to brook the slightest opposition, he trampled on all who crossed his path, or stood even for a moment in the way of his ulterior designs.

  The rigid Sabbatarianism of modern times received no sanction either from his practice or his teaching. He supped with Randolph on one Sunday evening, and visited Calvin during a game of bowls on another. The austere theology of Andrew Melville was tempered by an interest in classical and academical literature, the very reverse of a hard and narrow Puritanism.

  Women, he has said in his “First Blast,” are “weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish;” and yet it does not appear that he was himself any less dependent than other men upon the sympathy and affection of these weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish creatures; it seems even as if he had been rather more dependent than most…. Here was this great-voiced, bearded man of God, who might be seen beating the solid pulpit every Sunday, and casting abroad his clamorous denunciations to the terror of all, and who on the Monday would sit in their parlours by the hour, and weep with them over their manifold trials and temptations.

  His special vocation was that of the preacher rather than of the author. The pulpit was the throne of his peculiar and pre-eminent power. Other men might equal or surpass him elsewhere, but there he was supreme. Different excellencies might come out in himself on different occasions; but in the pulpit all his abilities were conspicuous, and they were always at their best. It was the glass which focussed all his powers into a point, and quickened their exercise into a burning intensity which kindled everything it touched. It brightened his intellect, enlivened his imagination, clarified his judgment, inflamed his courage, and gave fiery energy to his utterance. He was never elsewhere so great in any one of these particulars, as he was, when in the pulpit, in them all; for there, over and above the “præfervidum ingenium,” which he had in common with so many of his countrymen, and the glow of animation which fills the soul of the orator when he looks upon an audience, he had the feeling that he was called of God to be faithful, and that made him almost like another Paul. Behind him was the cross of his Lord; before him was the throne at which he was to be accountable, and between these two he stood “watching for souls as one that must give account.”

  On the singular figure of Knox himself—the undoubted leader of the religious movement in Scotland—men will continue to look, as his contemporaries looked, with mingled feelings of admiration and aversion. In the case of so unique a personality, the temptation to burn or to adore becomes wellnigh irresistible. The flaws in a character of exceptional force and masterfulness are of course accentuated by its virility; and in Knox especially, it cannot be denied, there was much that was not admirable. Such words as charity, chivalry, magnanimity, were not to be found in his dictionary, and the ideas which they represented he would have laughed to scorn. The coarse strain in his nature is most noticeable, perhaps, in his estimate of, and in his intercourse with, women: there are allusions to his first wife in his letters which no man of natural delicacy could have committed to paper. Marjory Bowes died when he was almost an old man, and then he married the daughter of Lord Ochiltree, a girl in her teens…. It is needless to repeat that Knox was intensely superstitious. The changes of wind and weather were spiritual portents which the Almighty permitted him to interpret. His disciples believed, indeed, that the gift of prophecy had been given to their master, as it had been given to Isaiah and Ezekiel.

  He lies, it is thought, if not within the walls of St. Giles’s under the flags between the Cathedral and the Parliament House, with all the busy life of modern Edinburgh, the feet of generations of men treading out the hours and years over his head; a more appropriate bed for him than green mound or marble monument. That stony square is consecrated ground blessed near a thousand years ago by ancient priests who cared little more for Rome than do their modern successors now. But little heeded Knox for priestly blessing or consecrated soil. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof” was the only consecration of which he thought.

  Between John Wyclif and John Knox there is a curious and striking resemblance, in more points than one—such a resemblance as occurs not infrequently between two historical characters who from similar beginnings have pursued a somewhat similar course in life. No one who has made himself familiar with the various portraits and engravings which preserve for us at any rate the traditional features of Wyclif can fail to be arrested when he sees the face of Knox, as Wilkie has reproduced it from earlier pictures. It is not so much that the exact lineaments correspond in such a way as to catch the attention of a casual observer, though even in this sense the parallel is sufficiently remarkable. The type and character of the two heads are the same; you cannot look at one without thinking of the other. The keen intelligent eyes, the drawn features with their ascetic cast, the resolute lips which bespeak an absolutely fearless heart, are present in all the pictures; and a grizzled patriarchal beard serves to deepen the similarity.

  The strong, crafty, unmerciful shrewd, victorious Reformer.

First Blast of the Trumpet, 1558

  He was too proud either to recant the tenets of this book, or even to apologize for them; and his conduct showed, that he thought no more civility than loyalty due to any of the female sex.

  Whatever opinion may be taken on the main question, however,—and the very existence of the Salic law in some states still proves that there are two sides to it, there can be no doubt that Knox’s treatment of it at all, not to speak of the sort of treatment which he gave it, was at this time impolitic and imprudent.

  Has the force which never failed its author, and a degree of polish which in subsequent more distracted days he was seldom able to give to his writings. Its boldness, its dramatic fitness for the time (or unfitness as it might with equal truth be phrased), arrested and held the attention of men. It is now by far the best known of its author’s works.

  The “First Blast” was published in the spring of 1558, and in the following autumn Mary Tudor died, and Elizabeth, the hope and the mainstay of the Protestants, ascended the English throne. This fact is the completest and the most ironical comment upon Knox’s arguments against the “Regiment of Women.” The echoes of that ill-timed “Blast” were to ring in his ears all his life.

History of the Reformation

  It is a racy, vigorous narrative, crowded with pictures in rich and powerful colouring—like a gallery of historical paintings by Rubens. What chiefly, however, fascinates the reader, is the unrivalled potency of its vituperative rhetoric. His scolding is sublime and awful. But throughout there is a sort of noble fairness in it. Of course, all who withstood him and called forth his wrath were in some form or other knaves and ruffians. How could it be otherwise with those who had set themselves against him, the Deity’s representative on earth—the head of the theocracy! But he was not given to the practice so common in his day of assassinating reputations by those vile imputations, the touch of which leaves a taint which all the perfumes of Arabia are insufficient to sweeten out. The tenor of his wrath was ever for a fair stand-up fight; and in his wordy battles he was a champion few would care to join issue with.

  John Knox, the Reformer, was a glorious egotist. In his chronicle he speaks of himself always in the third person, as if he were writing the biography of some great man whose deeds he had had the good fortune to witness. John Knox’s figure is ever the conspicuous figure in John Knox’s book.

  His “History” is written throughout in the spirit of a censor. The other side is not allowed to possess a shred of honesty. Its supporters are “perfect hypocrites,” “bloody worms,” or worse. There is something ignoble in the sense of almost personal triumph which he exhibits in recounting the death of Cardinal Beaton, or the last days of Mary of Guise. One may doubt if, in the whole range of literature, there are to be found more dramatic illustrations of the gulf which difference of character and training can create between two human minds than the celebrated dialogues with Mary Queen of Scots, which fill the most picturesque pages in the “History.”

  Knox’s first intention was to tell of the work of Reformation from the year 1558 to the coming of Queen Mary from France, in August, 1561. But he prefixed afterwards, as a general introduction, what is now the First Book, chiefly written in 1566, with a sketch of events concerning Church Reformation from the burning of Patrick Hamilton in 1527 to 1558, and some preceding detail of articles set forth in 1494 by reformers who were known as the Lollards of Kyle. This he took from the records of Glasgow. Knox was led also, in 1566, to continue his narrative in a Fourth Book, as far as the year 1564. The Third Book had been followed by a full copy of the Reformer’s “Buke of Discipline,” inserted, says Knox, “to the end that the Posterities to come may juge alsweill quhat the warldlingis refused, as quhat Policie the godlie Ministeris requyred.” Knox wrote the whole of his Fourth Book in 1566. There was added afterwards, by another writer, a Fifth Book, of which no manuscript is known, and which was first published in 1644 by David Buchanan, added in a folio to the authentic four. David Buchanan said that all was “gathered out of Knox’s Papers and Manuscripts.” Probably the Fifth Book does contain gatherings from Knox, but it was put together after Knox’s death; and for what part of it we are indebted to Knox, for what part to David Buchanan or some unknown writer, it is not possible to say. It continues Knox’s narrative from September, 1564, to August, 1567, when the Earl of Moray became regent.

  Written in his busiest years, and often uncouth in style and disjointed from want of revision, it yet displays qualities far higher and more varied than anything else that ever came from his pen. Its position among histories is remarkable, in truth not much short of unique. An original authority written with the fullest knowledge by a man of genius and incomparable force, who himself made the history he narrates, is clearly a precious possession—at once the richest storehouse of facts and the most vivid picture of the age…. “The History of the Reformation” professedly leaves out of account many of the elements in the life of the nation. It is the work of a contemporary, subject to the errors inseparable from nearness to the events narrated. It is the work also of a partisan deeply committed to a particular view of the central controversy, and incapable of sympathy with the other side. Nevertheless it is incomparably the best account of the time. The limitation to matters of religion is less cramping than it might seem; for in that age above all others the question of religion included everything; and the undoubted prejudice of the writer is balanced by his transparent truthfulness, and the courage and intense conviction which disdains, or rather never dreams of concealment. The history is therefore a trustworthy record of the knowledge of the man who knew most about the most important questions of his time. How far it towers above all other annals of the age can only be seen by comparison.

General

  God is my witness, whom I have served in the spirit in the gospel of his Son, that I have taught nothing but the true and solid doctrine of the gospel of the Son of God, and have had it for my only object to instruct the ignorant, to confirm the faithful, to comfort the weak, the fearful, and the distressed, by the promises of grace, and to fight against the proud and rebellious by the Divine threatenings. I know that many have frequently complained, and do still complain, of my too great severity; but God knows that my mind was always void of hatred to the persons of those against whom I thundered the severest judgments.

  If ever God shall vouchsafe the Church so greate a benefite; when his infinite letters, and sundry other treatises shall be gathered together, it shall appear what an excellent man he was, and what a wonderful losse that Church of Scotland susteined when that worthie man was taken from them. If, by yourselfe or others, you can procure any other his writings or letters here at home, or abroad in Scotland, be a meane that we may receive them. It were great pittie that any the least of his writinges should be lost; for he ever more wrote both godly and diligently, in questions of divinitie, and also of church policie; and his letters being had togeather, would togeather set out an whole historie of the churches where he lived.

  The firebrand of his country.

  Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any deceased author, though never so famous in his lifetime, and even to this day, comes to their hands for licence to be printed, or reprinted, if there be found in his book one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the height of zeal, (and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine spirit?) yet, not suiting with every low decrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself, the Reformer of a kingdom, that spake it, they will not pardon him their dash.

  About this time Mr. John Knox came from Geneva, and was chosen by the congregation of Frankfort for their constant minister. Let none account it incongruous, that, among so many able and eminent English divines, a Scotchman should be made pastor of the English church, seeing Mr. Knox’s reputed merit did naturalize him (though a foreigner) for any protestant congregation.

  Of him it may be said, that if Shakespeare was the most giant-like man, and the highest of poets, John Knox seems, if one knew him rightly, to have been as entirely destitute of immorality as Shakespeare was of prose. I cannot, however, think that he is to be compared with Luther, as some of the Germans in these days have done, who have set him even above Luther; struck with the great veracity of Knox. Luther would have been a great man in other things besides the Reformation; a great, substantial, happy man, who must have excelled in whatever matter he undertook. Knox had not that faculty, but simply this, of standing entirely upon truth; it is not that his sincerity is known to him to be sincerity, but it arises from a sense of the impossibility of any other procedure.

  The secret history of toleration among certain parties has been disclosed to us by a curious document, from that religious Machiavel, the fierce ascetic republican John Knox, a calvinistical Pope…. Knox the reformer possessed an extraordinary portion of this awful prophetic confidence: he appears to have predicted several remarkable events, and the fates of some persons. We are told, that, condemned to a galley at Rochelle, he predicted that “within two or three years he should preach the gospel at Saint Giles’s in Edinburgh;” an improbable event, which happened. Of Mary and Darnley, he pronounced, that “as the king, for the queen’s pleasure, had gone to mass, the Lord, in his justice, would make her the instrument of his overthrow.” Other striking predictions of the deaths of Thomas Maitland, and of Kirkaldy of Grange, and the warning he solemnly gave to the Regent Murray not to go to Linlithgow, where he was assassinated, occasioned a barbarous people to imagine that the prophet Knox had received an immediate communication from Heaven…. Knox exercised that deep sagacity which took in the most enlarged views of the future, as appears by his Machiavelian foresight on the barbarous destruction of the monasteries and the cathedrals.

  Morton spoke only of what he knew: the full measure of Knox’s greatness neither he nor any man could then estimate. It is as we look back over that stormy time, and weigh the actors in it one against the other, that he stands out in his full proportions. No grander figure can be found, in the entire history of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox. Cromwell and Burghley rank beside him for the work which they effected, but, as politicians and statesmen, they had to labour with instruments which they soiled their hands in touching. In purity, in uprightness, in courage, truth, and stainless honour, the Regent Murray and our English Latimer were perhaps his equals; but Murray was intellectually far below him, and the sphere of Latimer’s influence was on a smaller scale. 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, neither the wisdom of Elizabeth’s Ministers, nor the teaching of her Bishops, nor her own chicaneries, would have preserved England from revolution. His was the voice which taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was the one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive; he it was that raised the poor Commons of his country into a stern and rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious, and fanatical, but who, nevertheless, were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could force again to submit to tyranny. And his reward has been the ingratitude of those who should most have done honour to his memory.

  The inner character of the man, as made up of the motives on which he acted, has been so torn between contending zealots, that to set it apart in peaceful composure, and contemplate it with perfect candour, is such a task as it would be hopeless to perform with satisfaction. In fact it is out of that great contest which has for centuries raged around his name that his great fame has grown. In his day he was an all-important man in Scotland, and of some consequence in England on account of his influence in his own country. But he was little known elsewhere. While the name of his quiet neighbour Buchanan spread over all literature, and was repeated in every university and cluster of learned men, the contemporary notices of Knox are extremely scanty, and, from uncertainty in spelling, not easily identified. When contemporary foreign writers name him, it is generally to commend his services in a branch of that contest in which Calvin and Beza were the commanders. Nor was this an entirely false appreciation of his place, for he did implicitly the work which they had planned. He was no deviser of creeds and organisations; he had nothing original about him but his individuality of character and his power over his native tongue.

  Is often wordy, sometimes tedious, now and then narrow as a village gossip, always supremely and absolutely dogmatic, seeing no way but his own and acknowledging no possibility of error; and the extreme and perpetual movement of his ever-active mind, his high-blooded intolerance, the restless force about him which never pauses to take breath, is the chief impression produced upon the reader by his own unfolding of himself in his wonderful history. Though he is too great and important to be called a busybody, we still feel sympathetically something of the suppressed irritation and sense of hindrance and interruption with which the lords must have regarded this companion with his “devout imaginations,” whom they dared not neglect, and who was sure to get the better in every argument, generally by reason, but at all events by the innate force of his persistence and daring.

  No man in England or Scotland who values liberty, national, civil, or religious, can speak of Knox without reverence and gratitude.

  It cannot be said that his writings have contributed much to his fame…. Such distinction as his writings possess is due to the sincerity and force of the writer, and not to the conscious exercise of literary art…. His gift of language, and especially of denunciation, was immense and, backed by a fearless temperament, was never known to fail him. He does not attract by the humane breadth of wisdom and simple-hearted gaiety which make of Luther such a typical Christian. An unpleasant vein of bitterness crosses most of his writings. But it is proper to remember that this man’s spiritual father, Wishart, was burnt alive; that he served a hard apprenticeship amid the horrors of the French galleys; that many of his best years were spent in exile; that he suffered much from ill-health; and that at least part of his vehement temper belongs to his time and to his country rather than to himself.

  Knox, uncompromising and dictatorial, was a Pope in Scotland.

  In the case of all men who have distinguished themselves beyond their fellows, the definitive judgment must rest with the people from whom they spring, and to whom the heritage of their labours is a permanent and vital question of the balance of good or ill. In this final court of appeal the judgment is undeniably for Knox and against all his cavillers. For the mass of his countrymen—those who have shaped the nation’s destinies in the past as they must shape them in the future—Knox is the greatest person their country has produced, and the man to whom in all that makes a people great they owe the deepest and most abiding debt.

  The greatest public man whom Scotland has known…. Knox’s public life was not the whole of his work: in bulk, it was a small part of it. When he became minister of Edinburgh in 1560 there was only one church there; St. Cuthberts and Canongate were country parishes outside. It was some years before he got a colleague; and, as sole minister of Edinburgh, he preached twice every Sunday and three times during the week to audiences which sometimes were numbered by thousands. Once a week he attended a Kirk Session; once a week he was a member of the assembly or meeting of the neighbouring elders for their “prophesying” or “exercise on Scripture.” Often he was sent away to different districts of the country on preaching visitations under the orders of the Church. But when Knox was at home, his preparations for the pulpit, which were regular and careful, and his other pastoral work, challenged his whole time. And this work was carried on in two places chiefly; in St. Giles, which now became the High Church of Edinburgh, and in his house or lodging, which was always in or near the Netherbow, a few hundred yards farther down the High Street.

  The great truth which he grasped with satisfying clearness was that the call of God comes to every man direct, without any intervention except the open word. This was the glory of his message—a message which quickened all Scotland and started it on its career of intellectual and spiritual achievement. Nor did Knox claim any special inspiration above other believers, or to be in any miraculous sense a prophet of God. He was not a prophet by unique revelation, but he was a witness-bearer of unique consecration.