m ission :- IT appears to be as difficult to give

an impartial account of John Knox and the Scottish Reformation as to write without bias of a prominent political leader of our own time. One reason is that John Knox is still a living power. In the northern division of the United Kingdom he is regarded by many as the Moses who led them out of the Egyptian bondage of Rome ; they cannot therefore, or will not, see any blemish in their deliverer. But as Mr. Andrew Lang remarks, there is another party in the same land, the party of Cavalier and White Rose sentimentalism, to whom Queen Mary is a saintly being. To them Knox is a morose fanatic to whom Scottish life and Scottish religion owe their gloom. The historian David Hume accurately expressed their sentiments when he spoke of Knox and his allies as the beginners of "the hypocrisy and fanaticism which long infested Scotland, and which, although mollified by the lenity of the civil power, is still ready to break out on all occasions."

• John Knox and the Reformation. By Andrew Lang. With Illustrations. London: Longman' and Co. Lies. 6d. net.] teaching and the influence of Knox, there seems to be some- thing in his character which creates division, by awakening

either admiration or extreme repugnance. The admiration is by no means confined to his own co-religionists. Carlyle and Froude, whom Knox would certainly have classed as atheists along with Maitland of Lethington, were never tired of eulogising the strong man who carried out his upright purposes irrespective of the complainings and the sufferings of the witless and the weak.

Knox's latest biographer, Mr. Andrew Lang, whom we are always glad to welcome whatever subject engages his versatile pen, is not an extreme partisan. He is not blind to the errors in the policy and in the conduct of the hapless Queens who had the misfortune to have Knox as one of their subjects.

As we understand him, be does not regret that the party of Knox and England triumphed, and not the party of France and Mary Stuart. But he cannot forgive the means by which the unfortunate Queens, "in an impossible position," were done to death by Knox and his associates. When he speaks of Queen Mary and of her mother there is always an under- tone of compassion not unmixed with admiration ; but when the name of Knox comes up, the gibe and the ever-ready jest show that be has small sympathy with the subject of his biography. The present writer is not disposed to quarrel with Mr. Lang for his scrutiny of the means by which the Scottish Revolution was brought about. It is an offence against morals,

as well as against the true function of history, to bestow in- discriminate praise on all the actors of a revolution of whose general results we approve. Revolutions accomplished by treachery and violence lose half of their virtue, and sow the seeds of future ills. In his later life Knox bad bitter reason

to regret that in his eagerness to destroy the old order he sometimes made use of means inconsistent with his Christian profession, and allied himself with unworthy associates. When he attempted afterwards to establish the new order, be found in the latter his worst enemies, and they were all the more formidable that they had learned his language, although they had always been out of sympathy with the higher motives by which Knox was undoubtedly animated, even when lending himself to measures which cannot be defended.

The defect of Air. Lang's interesting and amusing volume is its entirely inadequate presentation of the religious side of Knox's character. A reader with no other guide than Mr. Lang would be at a loss to understand how a low- born man, imperfectly educated, with no influential

friends, became more than the equal in authority of the high nobles of the realm and the great officers of State.

Until he was forty years of age (if we accept Mr. Hay Fleming's chronology, he was ten years younger) Knox was a person of no distinction and of small promise. He was in Holy Orders, but acted as a notary and as the tutor of boys. The teaching of Wishart transformed the faith and the character of this commonplace ecclesiastic. The central truth of that teaching was the doctrine of justification by faith. By it he was emancipated from the bondage which had hitherto paralysed each effort after a true union with God. Having been himself delivered from that bondage, he felt that God had called him to preach to others "Christ's Holy Evangell." He believed also that God had endowed him with the spirit of prophecy. In the preface to the only sermon that was published by himself he thus describes his

mission :- "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 of that vocation, whereunto I found myself especially called. I dare not deny (lest that in doing so I should be injurious to the giver), but that God hath revealed unto me secrets unknown to the world; and also that He 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 was 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."

Knox's success as a preacher is one of the marvels of

religious history. People of all ranks crowded round his pulpit, as around that of Savonarola in Florence, and listened with rapt attention to the exhortations and denunciations

of the stern preacher. The authorities were moved to anger and to fear by the effect produced by his sermons. To those who accepted his message and followed his counsels he was a tender and compassionate pastor, entering into their difficulties and sympathising with their sorrows. But the charity which hopeth all things and believeth all things had been denied to Knox. To those who would not accept his message he was an unpitying enemy from whom they did not receive even common justice. The religion in which he had been educated had never touched his heart, or even his imagination. Perhaps, as he had seen it, there was little to appeal to either, for nowhere was the old Church in a condi- tion of greater degradation than in Scotland. He was not aware that the sacramental religion of Rome had been for centuries the medium of spiritual life to mankind. To him it was mummery, and worse; it was idolatry, and therefore hateful to the Almighty. He regarded it as part of his mission to destroy it, by persuasion if possible, but if per- suasion proved ineffectual, by force. He constantly taught that all who said or attended Mass deserved death, and be called upon the civil authorities to execute the sentence, especially against the "bloody beastiis," the priests of Baal. It has been said in extenuation of Knox's language that it was not quite seriously meant. Had he been per- mitted to erect a scaffold and a stake in the Grass Market for the priests of Baal, they would probably have been pardoned at the last moment. On one occasion when in England he had an opportunity of presenting an ,Anabaptist who had avowed to him his views to the Magis-

trate. He failed, as be confesses with sorrow, to perform the painful duty.

It was Knox's resolve to extirpate the old religion that brought him into acute conflict with the Queens under whose rule he lived. To them he was uniformly a disloyal subject. While be had discarded the sacramental religion of the Middle Ages, lie was in other respects a convinced mediaevalist. He had as little scruple as Gregory VII. in calling to his aid the forces of revolution against his Sovereign if she refused to obey the voice of God as proclaimed by the ministers of the Church. In his use of Scripture, also, Knox was mediaeval; for to him the laws of the Pentateuch were as binding on the Christian conscience as the counsels of our Lord.

A full and lively account is given in Mr. Lang's volume of Knox as a politician and political intriguer. His history of the Reformation is also subjected to a good deal of sharp criticism, and Mr. Lang is able to prove that as a politician and an historian be did not disdain to employ the craft which is rarely absent from the deeds and words of the ecclesiastical statesman. But when all is said that can be said against Knox and his policy, there will remain in most minds a sense of the grandeur of the character of this stern friend of the human race who was resolved to give to them, whether they would or no, a purer faith and a more righteous form of government. Mr. Hume Brown writes thus about his merits and defects in his excellent biography of the Reformer :—

" From Knox's absorption in the doctrine of justification by faith as the principle of his spiritual life, it followed that the Church of Rome should appear to him purely and simply as the negation of living Christianity. It is to be remembered that in Knox's day the historical conception of any great institution was as yet undreamt of. To Knox and his brother reformers it never seriously occurred, that but for the Church of Rome Christianity itself would never have entered into European civilization. They made no allowance for the terrible compromises which every institution is forced to make with the passions and interests of men if it is to maintain an efficient life amid the revolutions of human affairs. As little did they dream that Protestantism in its turn would have to make its own concessions to the modern spirit, and to undergo a transformation as great in its way as the change from Papal to Protestant Christianity. Had such conceptions been born in upon them, they might have been excellent philosophers, but they would never have done that work which resulted in throwing the human spirit on its own resources in facing the ultimate problems of life."

Mr. Lang remarks that the faults of Knox arose not in his heart but in his head ; they sprung from intellectual errors and from "the belief that he was always right." None of the Reformers shared so little in the Renaissance enlightenment, and to this some of his errors are to be attributed. Perhaps be had a dim consciousness of his own defects. At all events, in the Book of Discipline he sought to make provision for the better education of the Scottish clergy, who were to be taught not only to read the Scriptures in the original languages,

but to be instructed in the classics, in logic, mathematics, physics, and moral philosophy. That his educational pro- posals were not fully carried out was the fault, not of Knox, but of the covetous lords who absorbed in Scotland, as in England, the wealth of the old Church.

To awn up what we hold to be the " better opinion" in regard to Knox and the wide and deep revolution which he inspired, we cannot do better than adapt the heart-shaking phrases in which Chatham described the Great Rebellion ' There may have been sedition, there may have been ambition, there may have been oppression, but you shall never persuade me that it was not the cause of spiritual tyranny and spiritual degrada- tion on the one side, and of spiritual freedom and spiritual purification on the other.'