[The greatest of the Scotch religious reformers, born in 1505, died 1572, distinguished for a stern fanaticism as intolerant as that of the Roman Church, against which he battled. He had suffered bitterly from persecution during his earlier life, and for lengthened periods been an exile from Scotland, but remained always the head and front of the new propaganda till the establishment of the Reformed religion in 1560, which carried with it the interdiction of Roman Catholicism. On the arrival of the young queen Mary Stuart from France, in 1561, Knox soon became the sharpest critic of her life and policy. His unsparing antagonism and influence with the Protestant lords did much to make Mary’s position a very difficult one, and to precipitate the events which finally drove her from Scotland and made her an English prisoner. Knox was known to have been an ardent advocate of Mary’s death long prior to the queen’s execution at Fotheringay.]
Our primary characteristic of a hero, that he is sincere, applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever might be his other qualities or faults, is among the truest of men. With a singular instinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truth alone is there for him, the rest a mere shadow and a deceptive nonentity. However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only can he take his stand. In the galleys of the river Loire—whither Knox and the others, after their castle of St. Andrews was taken, had been sent as galley-slaves—some officer or priest one day presented them an image of the Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics, should do it reverence. “Mother? Mother of God?” said Knox, when the turn came to him: “This is no Mother of God; this is a pented bredd—a piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for being worshiped,” added Knox, and flung the thing into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there; but come of it what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a pented bredd: worship it he would not.
He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage; the cause they had was a true one, and must and would prosper; the whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God’s making; it is alone strong. How many pented bredds, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to be worshiped! This Knox can not live but by fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man by sincerity itself becomes heroic; it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good, honest, intellectual talent, no transcendent one; a narrow, inconsiderable man as compared with Luther, but in heartfelt, instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true prophet cast. “He lies there,” said the Earl of Morton at his grave, “who never feared the face of man.” He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an old Hebrew prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid, narrow-looking adherence to God’s truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth; an old Hebrew prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh minister of the sixteenth century. We are to take him for that; not require him to be other.
Knox’s conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her own palace to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fill us with indifference. On reading the actual narrative of the business, what Knox said and what Knox meant, I must say one’s tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not so coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about as fine as the circumstances would permit. Knox was not there to do the courtier; he came on another errand. Whoever, reading these colloquies of his with the queen, thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them altogether. It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the nation and cause of Scotland.
A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth made a hunting-field for intriguing, ambitious Guises, and the cause of God trampled under foot of falsehoods, formulas, and the devil’s cause, had no method of making himself agreeable. “Better that women weep,” said Morton, “than that bearded men be forced to weep.” Knox was the constitutional opposition party in Scotland; the nobles of the country, called by their station to take that post, were not found in it; Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless queen—but still the more hapless country, if she were made happy! Mary herself was not without sharpness enough, among her other qualities. “Who are you,” said she once, “that presume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?” “Madam, a subject born within the same,” answered he. Reasonably answered! If the “subject” have truth to speak, it is not the “subject’s” footing that will fail him here.
We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is good that each of us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talk there is and has been about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance is to tolerate the unessential, and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate. We are here to resist, to control, and vanquish withal. We do not “tolerate” falsehoods, thieveries, iniquities, when they fasten on us; we say to them, Thou art false! thou art not tolerable! We are here to extinguish falsehoods, and to put an end to them in some wise way. I will not quarrel so much with the way; the doing of the thing is our great concern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant.
A man sent to row in the French galleys, and such like, for teaching the truth in his own land, can not always be in the mildest humor. I am not prepared to say that Knox had a soft temper, nor do I know that he had what we call an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind, honest affections dwell in the much-enduring, hard-worn, ever-battling man. That he could rebuke queens, and had such weight among those proud, turbulent nobles—proud enough, whatever else they were—and could maintain to the end a kind of virtual presidency and sovereignty over that wild realm, he who was only “a subject born within the same”; this of itself will prove to us that he was found, close at hand, to be no mean, acrid man, but at heart a healthful, strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind. They blame him for pulling down cathedrals, and so forth, as if he were a seditious, rioting demagogue; precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact in regard to cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine. Knox wanted no pulling down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and darkness thrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his element. It was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much in that. Every such man is the born enemy of disorder—hates to be in it; but what then? Smooth falsehood is not order. It is the general sum-total of disorder. Order is truth—each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it. Order and falsehood can not subsist together.
Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him, which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His history, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two prelates, entering Glasgow Cathedral, quarrel about precedence, march rapidly up, take to hustling one another, twitching one another’s rochets, and at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a great sight for him every way. Not mockery, scorn, bitterness alone, though there is enough of that too; but a true, loving, illuminating laugh mounts up over the earnest visage; not a loud laugh; you would say a laugh in the eyes most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man; brother to the high, brother also to the low; sincere in his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bordeaux too, we find, in that old Edinburgh house of his—a cheery, social man, with faces that loved him. They go far wrong who think this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fanatic. Not at all; he is one of the solidest of men. Practical, cautious, hopeful, patient; a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type of character we assign to the Scotch at present. A certain sardonic taciturnity is in him; insight enough, and a stouter heart than he himself knows of. He has the power of holding his peace over many things which do not vitally concern him—“They, what are they?” But the thing which does vitally concern him, that thing he will speak of, and in a tone the whole world shall be made to hear, all the more emphatic for his long silence.
This prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man. He had a sore fight of an existence; wrestling with popes and principalities; in defeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight; but he won it. “Have you hope?” they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, “pointed upward with his finger,” and so died. Honor to him. His works have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men’s, but the spirit of it never.