It was the birthday of a people. For not in that assembly alone, and within the dim walls of the old Parliament House of Edinburgh, was that faith confessed and those vows made. Everywhere the Scottish burgess and the Scottish peasant felt himself called to deal, individually and immediately, with Christianity and the divine; and everywhere the contact was ennobling. 'Common man' as he was, 'the vague, shoreless universe had become for him a firm city, and a dwelling-place which he knew. Such virtue was in belief: in these words well spoken, I believe.'[83] But being a common man in Scotland, his religion could not be isolated, or his faith for himself alone. Wherever he dwelt, 'in our towns and places reformed,' he was already a member of a self-governing republic, a republic within the Scottish State but not of it, and subject to an invisible King. 'The good old cause' was already born. It kindled itself, as that son of the Burgher mason in Annandale says again, 'like a beacon set on high; high as heaven, yet attainable from earth, whereby the meanest man becomes not a citizen only, but a member of Christ's visible Church; a veritable hero, if he prove a true man.'
Day by day at this critical epoch Knox preached in St Giles from the 'prophet Haggeus,' on what he called The Building of the House. In one sense the foundation was laid already. In another, Parliament might be called upon to supply one. What foundation was Parliament to lay, and what structure was promised for the days to come?
FOOTNOTES
[60] 'Works,' iii. 10.
[61] 'Works,' iii. 133.
[62] 'Works,' iii. 34. The rashness of the general proposition here can only be appreciated when we remember Knox's view that it was the duty of the Magistrate not only to suppress idolatry, but to punish it with death.
[63] Hume Brown, i. 203.
[64] 'Works,' iii. 224.