THE PUBLIC LIFE: TO THE PARLIAMENT OF 1560
Knox had preached only for a few months in St Andrews in 1547, when the castle capitulated to the foreign fleet, and he and his companions were flung into the French galleys. There for nineteen months he toiled at the oar under the lash, and through the cold of two winters, and the heat of the intervening summer, had leisure to count the cost of the choice so recently made. It is a tribute to his constancy that men chiefly remember this dark time by its spots of colour—as when, at Nantes, he flung Our Lady's image into the Loire—'She is light enough: let her learn to swim!' And when off St Andrews they pointed out to him the steeple of the kirk, the emaciated prisoner replied, 'Yes, I know it well: and I am fully persuaded, how weak that ever I now appear, that I shall not depart this life till that my tongue shall glorify His godly name in the same place.' But this first apprenticeship to sorrow went deep into the man. It was when he was 'in Rouen, lying in irons, and sore troubled by corporal infirmity, in a galley named Notre Dame,' that he sent a letter to his St Andrews friends. And in it he asks them to 'Consider'—his countrymen have scarcely as yet considered it sufficiently—'Consider, brethren, it is no speculative theologue which desireth to give you courage, but even your brother in affliction, which partly hath experience what Satan's wrath may do against the chosen of God.'[60] His spirit indeed was in no wise broken: on his escape from France he became again a garrison preacher, and gained over King Edward's rude soldiers in Berwick an ascendancy, even greater than he had held in St Andrews over the young lairds of Fife. But, though not broken, it was chastened. It was during the following years, and especially in 1553, that he wrote the deeply sympathetic letters from which we have already quoted. And in 1554, when he left England to escape Mary Tudor, he introduces into a short but admirable treatise on Prayer some autobiographical references, which seem to date back to the extreme suffering of his captivity, 'when not only the ungodly, but even my faithful brethren, yea, and my own self, that is, all natural understanding, judged my cause (case) to be irremediable.'
'The frail flesh, oppressed with fear and pain, desireth deliverance, ever abhorring and drawing back from obedience giving. O Christian brethren, I write by experience ... I know the grudging and murmuring complaints of the flesh; I know the anger, wrath, and indignation which it conceiveth against God, calling all his promises in doubt, and being ready every hour utterly to fall from God. Against which rests [remains] only faith.'
Knox's faith sprang readily to whatever active duty was set before it. On his escape from France he spent, as we have seen, five years in England, and at the close of that period we have his own assurance that he had become almost an Englishman.
'Sometime I have thought that impossible it had been, so to have removed my affection from the realm of Scotland, that any realm or nation could have been equally dear to me. But God I take to record in my conscience that the troubles present (and appearing to be) in the realm of England are doubly more dolorous unto my heart than ever were the troubles of Scotland.'[61]
He had laboured incessantly in many parts of England, first as licensed preacher and then as King's chaplain, and this of course brought him in contact with church politics as well as the Evangel. It was owing to Knox's remonstrances that, when King Edward's Council put kneeling at the Sacrament into the Prayer-Book, they accompanied it with the Rubric, which is still retained, and which testifies 'that thereby no adoration is intended or ought to be done.' So far his position was reasonable, and even conciliatory. But as early as 1550, when requested, perhaps by the Council of the North, to 'give his confession' in Newcastle as to the Mass, he repeated the Puritan view of his first St Andrews sermon, but now in his favourite form of a syllogism, and with its major clause dangerously enlarged.
'All worshipping, honouring, or service invented by the brain of man in the religion of God, without his own express commandment, is Idolatry.[62] The Mass is invented by the brain of man without any commandment of God, therefore it is idolatry.'
To Knox's five years in England now succeeded five years which may be said to have been spent on the Continent. He first drifted to Frankfort, and was put in charge of the English congregation there. Very soon the two parties, which have ever since divided the Church of England, made their appearance in this representative fragment of it. Knox, of course, took the Puritan side as to the form of worship; but a large part of his congregation insisted on the full service of King Edward's book. The matter was brought to a close in rather an unfortunate way by two of Knox's opponents lodging an accusation against him before the Magistrates, of treason against the Emperor, the English Queen, and her Spanish husband. Frankfort was an imperial city, and Knox was thus no longer safe there. He went to Geneva, which was then, under Calvin's influence, an illustrious centre of the reformed faith; and was at once called to be co-pastor there (along with Goodman) of the English-speaking congregation. Knox's later biographer points out the historic importance of this 'the first Puritan congregation.' It was the source of Elizabethan Non-conformity, and 'it is in the writings of Knox and Goodman that those doctrines were first unflinchingly expounded which eventually became the tradition of Puritanism.'[63] The Church Order, too, which they adopted became afterwards that of worship in Scotland; their Psalms were the model for the English and Scotch versions; and, above all, the Genevan Bible, prepared by the members of Knox's congregation at the very time he was their minister, continued for three-quarters of a century thereafter to be 'the household book of the English-speaking nations.' It is called the happiest and most peaceful time of Knox's life. But it was a time of incessant preparation for still greater things, and in this short biography we must confine ourselves to what bears either on the man himself or on his supreme work for his native country.
For during all Knox's life on the Continent he seems to have kept in view the problem of how the Evangel could be set free in Scotland. He never had any doubt as to the duty of the individual to confess it in the teeth of the Magistrate and of the law. But how could men combine together to do so, against authority otherwise lawful? On this and similar points he proposed questions on his first arrival in Switzerland to the leading theologians. Bullinger, with the approval of Calvin, gave an answer which may have suggested to Knox the idea that a people (the Armenians are specially instanced) may revolt against 'their legitimate magistrate' who persecutes the truth, provided they have an inferior magistrate to lead them.[64] And next year, 1555, Knox made a memorable visit to Scotland. There James the Fifth's widow, Mary of Lorraine, was now Regent, and so chief 'Magistrate.' She was during all those years not disposed to be intolerant, and the prospect was everywhere encouraging. From Edinburgh Knox writes to Mrs Bowes (still in Northumberland), thanking her for being