They were all met to the preaching upon a certain day, the date of which is not given, but which was presumably in the summer of 1547, Knox having arrived with his pupils in St. Andrews in the Easter of that year. The principal persons present were aware of what was coming, and probably the mass of the congregation knew that some event more than ordinary was preparing, which would quicken the eagerness of their attention. The sermon was upon the right of the congregation to the services of "any man in whom they espied the gifts of God," and the risk on his part of refusing their call. Mair, sitting by in his doctor's gown, though he had committed himself to no religious heresy, had discoursed much to his students upon the rights of the people as the source of power—a doctrine, indeed, which Knox did not hold in that naked form, though most probably he had been influenced by these teachings towards the still more tremendous form of doctrine which sets forth the voice of the Christian people as representing the voice of God. And no doubt up to this point he gave his adhesion to the words of the preacher. But when Rough had reached the crown of his argument he suddenly turned to where Knox sat and addressed him individually, while the people held their breath.
"Brother," he said, "ye shall not be offended albeit that I speak unto you that which I have in charge even from all those that are here present: which is this. In the name of God and of His Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of those that presently call you by my mouth, I charge you that ye refuse not this holy vocation, but that as you tender the glory of God, the increase of Christ His kingdom, the edification of your brethren, and the comfort of me, whom ye understand well enough to be oppressed by the multitude of labours, that you take upon you the public office and charge of preaching even as ye look to avoid God's heavy displeasure and desire that He shall multiply His grace with you." And in the end he said to those present, "Was not this your charge to me? and do ye not approve this vocation?" They answered, "It was, and we approve it." "Whereat the said John, abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears and withdrew himself to his chamber."
It would be difficult to find a more striking scene. Any sudden incident of an individual character thus occurring in a public assembly calls forth a thrill of interest, and gives at once to the most disconnected crowd a pictorial unity. The interest and excitement in those roused and eager eyes, the crowd all turned towards the astonished subject of this appeal, the soft young faces making a little circle round him, half terrified, half flattered by the sudden consciousness that all eyes were turned towards them, would make a fine theme for a historical painter. And "the said John, abashed," finding no refuge in the great excitement and surprise of the moment, he so stern and so strong, but in tears! It was thus that the ministry of the great Reformer began.
It is unnecessary to follow in detail a career so well known. Every particular of it, and even the sermons with all their heads, may be found in the Historie of the Reformation in Scotland, which yields in interest, in picturesqueness and the most living and graphic power of narrative, to none of the primitive chronicles. No professional word-painter has ever put a dramatic scene, a contention, a battle, such as those which were everyday occurrences in Scotland at that time, upon paper with more pictorial force, or with half the fervour of life and reality. The writer goes through all the gamut of popular passion. He exults sometimes fiercely, laughs sometimes coarsely, throws in "a merry jest," which is often grim with savage humour; but throughout all is always real, always genuine, writing not impartially, but with the strong conviction and sentiment of a man elucidating matters in which he has been himself a prominent actor. The arguments of his adversaries when he enters upon a public controversy are unaccountably feeble, which perhaps may be explained by the fact that the friars were not much accustomed to controversy, perhaps by the natural bias of a controversialist to lessen the force of his antagonists' arguments; and he does not pretend to contemplate his adversaries, either spiritual or political, with any tolerance, or permit any possibility that they too might perhaps mean well and have a righteous intention, even though it was entirely opposed to that of John Knox: such ideas had no currency in his day. That Mary of Guise might really mean and wish to avoid bloodshed, to strike no blow that was not inevitable, to keep the breach from being widened by actual civil war; and that the policy of temporising as long as that was possible was anything but wicked wiles and intentions of betrayal, was an idea which he would seem to have been incapable of conceiving. This is a drawback perhaps common to every struggle so important and fundamental as was the strife which began to rage in Scotland. Had we a history compiled by the spectators to whom we have referred it would probably, unless nature gave them an exceptional keenness of vision, be wanting in those qualities of animation and force which he who is confident of having every good influence on his side, and nothing but the powers of evil against him, is likely to possess. Major indeed was a historian, but he did not meddle with the history of his own time; and Buchanan, while separated from the reader by the bonds and cerements of his Latin, and therefore shut out from a popular audience, is as great a partisan as Knox.
The little garrison of St. Andrews was taken, as everybody knows, by the French, and carried away to prison and the galleys; but no blood was shed to avenge the blood of Beatoun, a point which ought to be put to their credit. John Knox suffered all these misfortunes with a steadfast soul, still declaring to all who surrounded him, in the extremity of suffering, hardship, and sickness, that he should again preach in that Church of St. Andrews from which he had been taken. This is the first of the many prophecies completely verified afterwards with which he is credited. He escaped after about three years of captivity and misery in France, during which he would seem to have been actually employed in the galleys, and came to England, where it is to be supposed the story of his influence and power with the Scotch Reformers had preceded him, otherwise the advancement to which he reached, and which might have been greater but for his dissatisfaction with the imperfectly Reformed Church there, and the bondage of ceremonials and traditions still left in it, would have been still more extraordinary. He was one of the chaplains to the boy-king Edward, for whom he had the amiable prejudice common to those who secure the favour of very young princes, expecting from him everything that was great and good. At the death of the young King, however, Knox removed hurriedly to the Continent with many others, knowing that under the reign of Mary there would be little acceptance for men of his views. During his stay in England he had met with a pair of ladies who were henceforward to be very closely connected with his life—Marjory Bowes, his future wife, and to all appearance still more important her mother, Mrs. Bowes, to whom, contrary to the ordinary idea of that relationship, he seems to have given much regard and affection, notwithstanding that she was a melancholy woman, depressed and despondent, sometimes overwhelmed with religious terrors, and requiring continued support and encouragement in the faith. One cannot help feeling a sort of compassion for the silent Marjory, of whom nothing is ever heard, between her solemn lover of fifty and her sad mother. But she is voiceless, and though there are letters of religious counsel addressed to her under the title of "weill belovit sister," there is not among them all, so strange is the abstract effect of religious exhortation thus applied, one gleam of anything like individual character, or which can throw any light upon what she was; which, considering the marked individuality of the writer, is curious exceedingly. We must hope that on other occasions, notwithstanding his mature years, there were letters calculated to give more satisfaction to a young woman than these expositions and addresses.
For the next two years Knox, now it is evident universally known wherever the Reformation had penetrated, filled the place of minister to a congregation of exiles assembled at Geneva, most of them refugees from England, who had fled, as he himself had done, at the accession of Mary. But his heart was in his own land, where in the meantime the progress of the new Reformed faith was arrested, and silence and discouragement had fallen over the country. The leaders were dispersed or destroyed, the preachers silenced, and there was no one to gather together the many groups of believers all over the country in whose hearts the seed had sprung up strongly, but who as yet had made no public profession. In 1555 Knox suddenly reappeared in Scotland, brought thither at once by urgent letters and by the eagerness of his own heart. When he arrived in Edinburgh he found that many who "had a zeal to godliness" still attended mass, probably finding it more difficult to break the continual habit of their lives than the bonds of doctrine—and that the outer structure of the Church remained much as it had been, without any such shattering and falling asunder as had taken place in regions more advanced. That this arose from no want of zeal was proved as soon as the preacher appeared: for his arrival was no sooner known than the house in which he had alighted from his journey was filled by a stream of inquirers, whom he "began to exhort secretly." One night he was called to supper with the Laird of Dun, the well-known John Erskine, who was one of the most earnest of the Reforming party, and in the grave company he found there—among whom were one or two ministers and the young but already promising and eminent William Maitland of Lethington—the question was fully discussed, Was it lawful to conform while holding a faith not only different but hostile? was it permissible to bow down in the house of Rimmon? To this Knox answered No, with all the uncompromising and stern sincerity of his soul. "Nowise was it lawful." The question was very fully defended from the other point of view. "Nothing was omitted that might make for the temporiser"; even the example of Paul, who went up into the Temple to pay his vow by the advice of the Apostle James, which step, however, Knox pronounced at once, notwithstanding his absolute reverence for Holy Writ, to have been wrong, and not of God—a mistake of both the Apostles, and manifestly bringing no blessing with it. His bold and assured argument cut the ground from under the feet of the hesitating Reformers, to whom no doubt it was very difficult thus to break away from all the traditions of their lives.
This scene throws a strange and in some respects new light upon the more human side of the great movement. It is easier perhaps to us who are acquainted with all that followed to understand the fiery zeal which flamed against every accessory of what they conceived to be idolatry—the saintly image, which was nothing but a painted board, and the "round clipped god" upon the altar which was blasphemously asserted to be the very Lord Himself—than to remember that these men had also many links of use and wont, of attachment and habit, to the churches in which they had been christened, and the position, with all its needs and simple duties, to which they had been born. To see them standing there for a moment reluctant, with the tremendous breach that must be made in life gaping before them, and the sense of universal disruption and tearing asunder which must follow, is to me more touching than the stern conviction which never pauses nor fears. They were so thoroughly convinced, however, of the necessity which he reasoned out with such remorseless logic, that Erskine first, and after him many gentlemen through Scotland, craved the help of the preacher to put the crown upon their convictions, and spread in their halls and private chambers, no church being attainable, what was now for the first time called the Table of the Lord. Knox went to Dun in Forfarshire across the great firths of Forth and Tay, and to Calder, the house of Sir James Sandilands, afterwards Lord Torphichen, in Lothian, where many gathered to hear him. But it would seem to have been in the West, always the most strenuous in doctrine, that he first celebrated the new rite, the holy feast as yet unknown in Scotland. During the eventful winter of 1555-56 he pervaded the country thus, setting forth the special bond of evangelical religion, uniting those different groups by the sacred seal of the bread and wine—who can doubt received with a profound and tremulous awe by lips to which the wafer had been hitherto the only symbol of that act of closest communion?
This would seem to have been the chief work of Knox during the visit which, in the midst of his Geneva ministry, he paid to his native land: and it is easy to perceive that it was of supreme importance as identifying and separating the converts into a definite community, bound together by that sacrament of fealty, an oath more binding than any expressed only in words. Hitherto the preaching and teaching of the Word, which was itself a discovery, and came with all the freshness of a new revelation, had been the only sacred office carried on by the Reformers. The Sacraments were all in the hands of ecclesiastics, who had been for generations past losing the confidence and respect of the nation—though one cannot but believe there must still have been here and there a humble curate, a parish priest like Chaucer's Parsoune, to strengthen the hold of the accustomed ordinances upon men's minds, who, however strongly they might turn against the miracle of transubstantiation, could not cast aside the only means of partaking in the great mystery of the body and blood of Christ. To all such here was now the answer set forth, and the hope—the holy Table, the communion of saints, the bread and wine of the great and ceaseless commemoration. It would be doing the greatest wrong to these small devout assemblies, and to the fervent preacher, devoured with eagerness to make them all, not almost but altogether such men as himself, to call this an act of policy. Yet that it was so, and that a bond was thus established to consolidate the party, more sacred, more binding than any other, there can be no reasonable doubt.
While travelling on this solemn mission from place to place and house to house of the religious gentry of Scotland, Knox would seem to have made Edinburgh his headquarters, and preached there from time to time, not always secretly. He had here "a greater audience than ever before" in "the Bishop of Dunkeld's great lodging," that ancient habitation from which Gawin Douglas, the poet-bishop, had watched and waited while the fight went on within the gates of the Nether Bow, and from which he rushed out to rescue the other prelate whose corslet rang under his rochet. Strange association, yet not inappropriate; for the mild Bishop of Dunkeld had also found many potent words to say against the abuses of the Church, though the new presbyter who now took his place was rather of Beatoun's warlike mettle than of Douglas's. The nobles who came thither to hear the preacher were so "weill contented" with his doctrine—which is his own moderate version of what was no doubt an enthusiasm of grave approbation—that they seem to have imagined, in that solemn simplicity which belongs to fresh conviction, that he might perchance, could she but hear him, move the Regent Queen herself, Mary of Guise, an unlikely convert no doubt. He was accordingly exhorted by three gentlemen, specified as the Earl of Glencairn, the Earl Marischal, and Harye Drummond, to write a letter to the Queen, which Knox, always eager for the pen, and full of matter boiling to have utterance, immediately did. It is difficult not to think of the sancta simpilicitas, which rarely belongs to such a group of men, when we think of the grave trio of advisers, and the still graver but fiery prophet-preacher, making this wonderful appeal. It was less wonderful in him who loved nothing so much as to write when he could not be preaching, to set forth those high-handed arraignments before the visionary tribunal of the one true and only faith, of whomsoever he could address, queen or peasant; but it is strange that men of the world, and of the society of their time, should have thus thought it possible to convert a lady so full of policy and cares of government, so entirely occupied with the most important matters of statesmanship, not to say so determined a Catholic, as the daughter of the Guises, the sister of the Cardinal.
The attempt, as was natural, failed completely. "Which letter," resumes Knox, "when she had read within a day or two she delivered it to the proud prelate, Beatoun, Bishop of Glasgow, and said in mockage, 'Please you, my lord, to read a pasquill?'" It is against the perfection of the prophet, but not the character of the man, that this scorn stung him as no persecution could have done. He made certain additions to the letter, and published it in Geneva on his return there. We are not told which part of the letter these additions are, but what he tells us seems to indicate that the threatening prophesies, of which he says in his Historie, "lett those very flatterers see what hath failed," had been added to the original text. We forgive him his ready wrath, and even the "threatenings" which he always considered himself at liberty to launch at those who, in his own language, "withstood the truth": but we could have wished that Knox had been more magnanimous, and could have forgotten the offence after the passage of years. Mary's careless speech would have been but "ane merry boord" had it been directed against one of his enemies.