TWO LIVES OF JOHN KNOX.*
THE most unlettered of great Reformers of the sixteenth century has become of recent years the special favourite of literary men. The vindication to which Knox confidently looked forward, has been accomplished ; for after what has been written of him by Carlyle, Froude, and Louis Stevenson, in pages which will live in English literature, it is not likely that the old caricatures will be reproduced, except for use in circles from which historical evidence is strictly ex- cluded. There is however, perhaps we should rather say there was, some danger of the penitential reaction in favour of Knox passing reasonable bounds under the influence of a school to whom sincerity and strength were the sole human virtues. We are glad, therefore, to observe that Knox's latest biographers write in a spirit of discriminating admiration which does not blind them to his faults. The time had come for a new biography. Dr. M'Crie wrote before the publication of Laing's indispensable edition of Knox's works; and since Laing, considerable additions have been made to our knowledge of the Scottish Reformation. Mr. Hume Brown, whose name is favourably known by his Life of George Buchanan, has produced a careful and intelligent study of Knox, which the historical student will be able to consult in the full confidence that he will find in it all that is known of the Reformer in its right place and in due proportion. Mrs. Florence Maccun writes for the general reader, who will prefer her bright pages to the graver narrative of Mr. Brown. She has a keen sense of the humorous as well as of the pathetic side of her great story ; and Knox is brought before us surrounded by friends and enemies, with a graphic power which shows that the author has a real vocation for historical portrait-painting.
Mr. Hume Brown suggests as a reason for the tardy recog- nition of Knox's greatness, that it was hard for any one but a Scotehman to understand Knox the Scotissinrus, just as it takes an Englishman to understand Samuel Johnson, or a Frenchman to appreciate Voltaire. But if this is a true account of the matter, how comes it that Knox's chief detractors were countrymen of his own ? A truer explanation of the difficulty experienced by the modern world in appreciating Knox is furnished by another remark of Mr. Brown's, that Knox alone among the Reformers was an entire stranger to the new leanning, and to the humane spirit of the Renaissance. He did not, like Calvin and Beza, pass through the outer Court of the Renaissance before entering upon his religious mission. He broke, it is true, with the mediwval system as regards Church worship and government, and also on certain doctrinal questions, more completely than any of the Reformers, with the exception of Calvin ; but in other respects he remained a medimval Churchman, interpreting Scripture in the unhistorical manner of the Schoolmen, and claiming for the Church an authority as absolute as did Gregory VII. His ideas regarding the relation of learning and thought to the Church were expressed with perfect frank- ness by him in a letter to a General Assembly in Perth. "Above all things," he wrote, "preserve the Kirk from the bondage of the Universities ; subject never the pulpit to their judgment; neither yet exempt them from your jurisdiction." The absence of the spirit of the Renaissance in Knox ren- dered him an unhesitating combatant in the battle of Reform; but it shut him out from the humanising influences amid which the modern spirit was born. It is for this reason that men cf meaner natural character often appear at an advantage
• (1.) John Knox : a Biography. By Q. Hume Brown. 2 vols. London : Adam
and Chutes Bleak. 1F65.—(2.) ion Knox. By FloreLce A. Hamlin. London : Yethnen and Co. MS.
beside him. Neither Erasmus nor Sir David Lyndsay were capable of the unselfish devotion of Knox, but they were likewise incapable of speaking of the murder of Beaton as a "godly fact," or of approving of the assassination of David Rizzio. In his hatred of the enemies of the Gospel, Knox was as much a man of the Middle Ages as St. Ber- nard. Mrs. Maccun, in spite of her admiration of him, blazes into wrath over his truculent language about the dying Queen-Regent :—
"117bere his enemies were concerned, Knox had an uncritical greed for gossip. While the tide of fortune was setting against her, Mary of Guise lay dying in the Castle of Edinburgh. The defeated chief of a failing cause, a lonely woman dying in a strange land, she had claims to the forbearance even of an enemy ; but when Knox deals with such as he considered the seed of Antichrist,' he knows neither courtesy to the women, generosity to a fallen foe, nor simple humanity to the suffering and dying. With unseemly eagerness, he records an idle malicious tale that from the Castle of Edinburgh the dying Regent gloated over the spectacle of the dead bodies of Eng- lish soldiers exposed under the walls of Leith—a fact physically
impossible at that distance ! He exults over her bodily sufferings in words too coarse to be repeated. But even the hostile narra- tive of Knox cannot conceal the gentle magnanimity shown by Mary of Guise on her death-bed. She bade farewell to Lord Tames, Glencairn, Argyle, and Lord Marischall, and admitted with sad candour that she had been mistaken and misled by evil counsel. She even consented to see the Protestant minister Willock.—an act probably more due to unchanging courtesy than to changing convictions. Knox ends his account of her death with the fervent ejaculation, God for His great mercy's sake rid us from the rest of the Guisian blood. Amen. Amen.'"
It is vain to deny Knox's moral and intellectual limitations, or to claim that he manifested the temper of the forgiving Christian saint ; but after his limitations are acknowledged, and we know what not to expect, there remains one of the most admirable characters of the sixteenth century, with a singleness Of purpose equal to Luther's, and a practical sagacity which entitles him to a place beside Cecil, and above his brilliant antagonist, Maitland of Lethington. His work was done without the adventitious aids which many of his con- temporaries enjoyed. When he landed in England in 1549, after his release from the French galleys, he was an undis- tinguished person, without the academic rank and learning which were at the time the sole passports to high position for men of humble birth. As the Government, however, were badly in need of preachers of the reformed doctrines, he was licensed to preach ; and he preached so powerfully in Berwick and elsewhere that he was made one of the King's chaplains. By the advice of Northumberland, he was offered the Bishopric of Rochester. The offer was declined, not so much from an objection to Episcopacy, as that Knox's penetrating sagacity made him doubtful of the per- manence of the English Reformation, and distrustful of the sincerity of its political leaders. In England he left an abid- ing memorial of himself in the so-called Black-Rubric of the Prayer-Book ; for it is almost certain that the " rtmagate Scot," by whose influence it was reluctantly inserted by Cranmer, was none other than Knox. During his exile on the Continent he visited the theocratic Republic of Calvin, and held intercourse on equal terms with the Swiss Reformers ; for Knox never called any one master, with the exception of George Wishart, to whom he owed his first enlightenment in the doctrines of the Gospel.
In 1555 Knox returned to Scotland to begin the great work of his life. He was almost an old man, for men aged early in the sixteenth century, and he suffered from a torturing disease ; but although he never held a higher office than that of one of the ministers of Edinburgh, he soon became the most important personage in Scotland. He owed his influence in part to his pulpit eloquence. "As a preacher," Mr. Brown writes, "he excelled all the English-speaking Reformers in his power of fusing logic and passion, and storming the mind and heart of his audience." His sermons in St. Giles were events rather than discourses, like the speeches of Prince Bismarck ; the man behind the orator gave his hearers the assurance that what he said would come to pass. People attributed to him
the gift of prophecy, and he himself believed that he possessed it. "We see furthest into the future," writes Dr. Jowett, in
his "College Sermons "—" and that is not far—when we most carefully consider the facts of the present." Knox saw into the future because he carefully considered the facts of the present ; and he was likewise helped to his prevision by his insight into the power of moral forces to shape the destiny of men and nations. Knox's sermons were attended by men of all classes, by Catholic Lords as well as by Protestants; and though the Queen did not attend, at which Knox was some- what unreasonably offended, she was informed of what he said with great plainness of speech, regarding herself and her Government. Knox's influence in private was even more remarkable than his public utterances. The greatest per- sonages in Scotland repaired to his little study in his house in the Nether Bow, and listened patiently to his oounsels and remonstrances. He was a loyal and affectionate ally; but alone among the Reformers, he never flattered the great, how- ever much he needed their help; and when they disappointed him, he turned away like offended royalty.
It will hardly be disputed that the general policy of Knox was in the best interests of religion and of his native land. Some may regret that through his influence the Swiss type of Reformation was adopted in Scotland, as it has to some extent placed it out of religious sympathy with the sister Kingdom. But it is very doubtful if the Scotch, with their keen logical faculty and their impatient temper, would have accepted, or understood, the Reformation of compromise even if Knox had been willing for it, In the opposition which he offered to the policy of Mary of Guise and of her daughter, Knox was more than justified. Had their policy prevailed, Scotland would have become a French province ; and the Catholic powers of the Continent might through the gate of Scotland have overthrown the religion and liberties of England, or at all events desolated it as Ger- many was desolated by the Thirty Years' War. Knox was no favourite with Queen Elizabeth and her advisers, and he knew it. But be never wavered for a moment in his conviction that in union with its ancient enemy lay the true interests of Scotland. Medimval in his views regard- ing the Church, he was modern and democratic in his views of the rights of subjects, holding that it was the prerogative of the nobles to coerce the Monarch to a course of righteous government; and if they failed to do so, the people had the right to coerce both. He did not shrink from violent revolutionary measures, and was an advo- cate not only of passive, but of active resistance. But he was no Anarchist. He had too profound a knowledge of men to propose to dispense with law and order. Behind the Church, he taught, there must stand the .godly magistrate, with his sword. The order which he proposed to establish in place of the effete system is laid down in The Book of Discipline, one of the most instructive documents of Scottish history. His medimval bigotry and his large-minded statesmanship are both visible in The Book of Discipline ; for it required all Scotchmen to become Calvinistic Christians at the risk of soul and body; but it made proposals with regard to education and care for the poor which, if carried out, would have enabled Scotland to deal with the evils of popular ignorance and poverty as no European nation has yet done. Unfor- tunately, The Book of Discipline remained to a large extent the devout imagination which Maitland of Lethington termed it. The fault, however, lay not with Knox, but with Mait- land's own friends, who refused, for private reasons, to apply the revenues of the old Church to religious and national purposes.
Previous page
