CHAPTER IV.
KNOX AND THE ENGLISH BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, 1551-1553.
From Berwick Knox was removed, in the early summer of 1551, to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he laboured, with occasional absences, for nearly two years. Already, in the spring of 1550, he had made a public discourse of great importance there, and perhaps the impression produced by his words then, may have led to his being ultimately transferred thither. There is extant among his writings "A Vindication of the Doctrine that the Sacrifice of the Mass is Idolatry," to which this note is prefixed: "The fourth of April, in the year 1550, was appointed to John Knox, preacher of the Holy Evangel of Jesus Christ, to give his confession why he affirmed the mass idolatry; which day, in presence of the Council, and congregation, amongst whom was also present the Bishop of Durham, in this manner he beginneth." This has been supposed by some to indicate that he was under accusation of heresy, and had been called to Newcastle to make his defence. But though it is not unlikely that his doctrine had been objected to by Tunstall, yet the Council of the North was not an ecclesiastical tribunal, and there is nothing in the whole address to imply that the speaker was upon his trial. The truth seems rather to have been that the members of the Council invited him to declare and enforce his opinions concerning the mass before an audience which filled the great church of St. Nicholas.
The argument of his discourse on this occasion was an amplification of the following syllogism: "all worshipping, honouring, or service, invented by the brain of man, in the religion of God, without His express commandment is idolatry: the mass is invented by the brain of man without any commandment of God; therefore, the mass is idolatry." The ground here taken was identical with that which he had defended against Arbuckle, and is distinctively different from the position which, in the very same year, was taken by Cranmer in his "Defence of the true Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament." The Anglican primate meant by idolatry the substitution of a false God for the true, as in the adoration of the host, for the real body, blood, soul and divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. But by the same term, as his major premise makes abundantly evident, Knox designated that which we should call now constructive idolatry, namely, "the invention of strange worshippings of God, introduced without any warrant from His word;" or what the Westminster divines meant, when in their Shorter Catechism in answer to the question, "What is forbidden in the second commandment?" they reply, "The worshipping of God by images, or any other way not appointed in His word." With Cranmer the word meant the worshipping as God of that which is no God; with Knox it denoted the worshipping of God in a manner invented by men and unauthorized by God. Cranmer was the father of the Anglican churchmen; Knox was the earliest, and by no means the least noteworthy, of the Puritans, for the principle which he advocated was one which he was as ready to apply to ceremonies in the reformed churches as to the idolatries of the Romish worship. The utterance of these sentiments by him at this time marks the beginning of that movement which has continued even until now, and which in its progress, among other less conspicuous results, called into existence the various nonconforming churches of England; inspired the covenanters of Scotland to begin and carry through their long and painful struggle with the second Charles; widened the civil liberties of Great Britain; and planted the seed from which the American Republic has grown into stateliness and strength.
Its more immediate personal effect, as we have conjectured, was the transference of Knox from Berwick to Newcastle, where he continued to administer word and sacraments in the same manner as he had been accustomed to follow. On the banks of the Tyne he was as faithful and fearless in his pulpit utterances, and as simple in his ritual observances, as he had been on the banks of the Tweed. "God is witness," said he in a letter to his Newcastle friends, written by him from the continent in 1558; "and I refuse not your own judgments, how simply and uprightly I conversed and walked among you, that neither for fear did I spare to speak the simple truth unto you; neither for hope of worldly promotion, dignity, or honour, did I wittingly adulterate any part of God's Scriptures, whether it were in exposition, in preaching, contention, or writing; but that simply and plainly, as it pleased the merciful goodness of my God to give unto me the utterance, understanding, and spirit, I did distribute the bread of life, as of Christ Jesus I had received it;"[[1]] and again, "How oft have ye assisted to baptism? How oft have ye been partakers of the Lord's Table prepared, and used, and ministered, in all simplicity, not as a man had devised, neither as the king's proceedings did allow, but as Christ Jesus did institute, and as it is evident that Saint Paul did practise?"[[2]] How it came that he was permitted to administer the sacrament in that manner does not appear; but the fact that he did so is incontrovertible, and that he did not stand quite alone in taking such a course is evident from these words in Becon's "Displaying of the Mass," written in the reign of Queen Mary: "How oft have I seen here, in England, people sitting at the Lord's Table!" It is well known also that the opinions of Hooper, on this subject, were in full accord with those of Knox; and though we have not been able to find any distinct statement that he had actually reduced them to practice, yet it is all but certain that he did so.
But in any case his nonconformity in the matter of kneeling did not keep Knox from attaining a prominent place among the leaders of his time, for in December, 1551, six months after he had been stationed at Newcastle, he was appointed one of King Edward the Sixth's chaplains, who were six in number, and all of whom were selected because they were "accounted the most zealous and ready preachers of that time." This preferment was a recognition of the ability which Knox had shown. It added much to his consideration and weight in the social scale, while it gave him an opportunity of making his influence felt in ecclesiastical affairs in a manner which has left its mark on the English Prayer-Book even until the present day. To understand how this came about, it is needful to bear in mind that the Second or Revised Book of Common Prayer was completed at the press in August, 1552, and had been appointed by the Parliament of that year to come into use in the churches on the first day of November. Into that book had been reintroduced from the "order of communion," published in 1548,[[3]] the injunction that the people should receive the bread and wine "kneeling." That had, indeed, been the accustomed posture before, but no instruction for its observance had been contained in the First Prayer-Book published in 1549. There the directions are thus given: "Then shall the priest first receive the communion in both kinds himself, and next deliver it to other ministers, if any be there present (that they may be ready to help the chief minister), and after to the people." But in the two years immediately following the publication of that First Prayer-Book, discussion on the posture at the Lord's Table had been brought up, and as Cranmer, Ridley, and the most of the other Reforming Bishops were opposed to the views and practices of Knox, Hooper, and others, they deemed it advisable to foreclose debate and put an end to diversity of order by an authoritative injunction. For this purpose, in the Prayer-Book in 1552 the rubric was made to read thus: "Then shall the minister first receive the communion in both kinds himself, and next deliver it to the other ministers, if any be there present (that they may help the chief minister), and after to the people, in their hands, kneeling." Thus it came about that what had been left undefined in the former book was expressly limited in the new one; and, therefore, though in other respects the latter was much more in harmony with the sentiments of Knox, it was in this less tolerant than the former. When, therefore, Knox was appointed to preach before the king in the autumn of that year, having probably seen one of the first-issued copies of the book, he took occasion to enter fully into the discussion of the mode of administering the communion, and his discourse was not without immediate effect, for in a letter of John Utenhovius to Henry Bullinger, dated October 12, 1552, the writer says:[[4]] "Some disputes have arisen among the bishops, within these few days, in consequence of a sermon by a pious preacher, chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland, preached by him, before the king and Council, in which he inveighed with great freedom against kneeling at the Lord's Supper, which is still retained here in England. This good man, however, a Scotsman by nation, has so wrought upon the minds of many that we may hope some good to the church will at length arise from it, which I earnestly implore the Lord to grant." Now there can be no doubt that the preacher here referred to was Knox, who as having been in contact with Northumberland as Warden-General of the border counties, might easily be mistaken by a foreigner for the chaplain of that nobleman. Other facts to be taken in connection with the information furnished by Utenhovius are the following:[[5]] In the Record of the Privy Council, under date 26th September, 1552, there is an order to Grafton, the printer, forbidding him to issue any copies of the new Prayer-Book; and commanding that if any had been already distributed to his fellow-publishers they should "not be put abroad until certain faults therein had been corrected." Clearly therefore, as copies of the book had been sold, it was possible for Knox to have obtained one, and as Lorimer says, "none would be more eager purchasers than those ministers of the Church who were most zealous for reform." Meetings of the Council were held on October 4th and 6th, at one or other of which objections to the rubric seem to have been made, probably as the result of Knox's sermon, and to have been referred to Cranmer for his review. On October 7th, Cranmer wrote to the Council in vindication of the rubric on kneeling, a letter which purports to be a reply to certain objections against it which had been forwarded to him by its members. On the agenda paper of the business to be transacted at the meeting of the Council on the 20th of October, and which still exists in the handwriting of Cecil, there is a line to this effect: "Mr. Knocks—b of Catrb—ye book in ye B of Durhm," and at that very meeting, as we learn from the Record, "a letter was directed to Messrs. Harley, Bill, Horn, Grindal, Pern, and Knox, to consider certain articles exhibited to the King's Majesty, to be subscribed by all such as shall be admitted to be preachers or ministers in any part of the realm, and to make report of their opinions touching the same." These articles, therefore, must have come at this time into Knox's hands, and, though many of them must have received his cordial endorsement, there was one of them which he could not have approved; that, namely, which contained this clause: "and as to the character of the ceremonies, they are repugnant in nothing to the wholesome liberty of the gospel, if they are judged from their own nature, but very well agree with it, and in very many respects further the same in a high degree." How could Knox, after his recent sermon on kneeling in the Lord's Supper, give his sanction to that article? Manifestly he would feel that he must protest against such an assertion as it contained; and then, as Lorimer says, "the thought would seem to have flashed upon him that he had now another and quite an unexpected opportunity of making a fresh appeal to the king and Council on that very question of the rubric on kneeling, which was still apparently in dependence. There was still time to make one more attempt. In addition to his judgment upon the articles at large, which need not go to the Council so quickly, what if he should single out this 38th Article and make it the subject of a separate representation, and distinguishing between the ceremony of kneeling and all the rest; what if he should confine the bulk of his representations to this single point, which was now the only one in which it was feasible to look for any immediate alteration?" That at least was done by the memorial, which by its authors is called their confession in regard to the 38th Article, and which Lorimer has printed for the first time in his appendix. No names are subscribed to the document, but the first portion of it bears strong internal evidence of having been the production of Knox; and though in other parts there are traces, as the painstaking editor thinks, of the hands of Thomas Becon and Roger Hutchinson, we agree with him in believing that every one who examines the whole statement with care will conclude "that whatever Englishman may have joined him in the memorial, and whatever they may have contributed to its substance of thought, it was Knox himself who held the pen." This memorial could have been of no use after the final action of the Council on the matter of "kneeling;" and it was evidently called forth by the reference of the articles to the royal chaplains, therefore it must have been prepared between the 20th and 27th October, and must have been presented to the meeting of the Council on the latter of these two dates, on which also, and we may conclude as the result of the arguments contained in the memorial, the "Declaration on Kneeling," which has all the marks of the style of Cranmer, and which therefore had probably been sent by him to the Council as a suggested compromise, was adopted, and ordered to be inserted in the forthcoming book. This accounts for the circumstance mentioned by the editor of "The Two Liturgies" in a note, that the paragraph in question "is printed on a separate leaf in some copies, and as is evident from the signatures, was added afterwards." In one copy, "the leaf is pasted in after the copy was bound, and several copies are without it." Now putting all these things together, the conclusion is not only legitimate but inevitable, that the insertion of the declaration on kneeling in the Prayer-Book was due to the agency of Knox, more probably than to that of any other man. As Lorimer writes (p. 121), "The compromise prevailed, but apparently there would not have been so much as a compromise obtained if the 'confession' had not been thrown into the scale at the very last moment.... His last blow had the effect of overcoming the resistance to all further change which a majority of the Council had hitherto maintained." Hence, though we may not approve of the spirit in which Weston uttered the words, or accept either his description of Knox or his designation of the doctrine on which he insisted, yet he was correct as to the matter of fact when he said, "a renegade Scot did take away the adoration and worshipping of Christ in the sacrament, by whose procurement that heresy was put into the last communion book; so much prevailed that one man's authority at that time."
The Declaration itself was in the following words:—"Although no order can be so perfectly devised, but it may be of some, either for their ignorance and infirmity, or else of malice and obstinacy, misconstrued, depraved, and interpreted in a wrong part: And yet, because brotherly charity willeth, that so much as conveniently may be, offences should be taken away; therefore we willing to do the same: Whereas it is ordained in the Book of Common Prayer, in the administration of the Lord's Supper, that the communicants kneeling should receive the Holy Communion: which thing being well meant, for a signification of the humble and grateful acknowledging of the benefits of Christ, given unto the worthy receiver, and to avoid the profanation and disorder, which about the Holy Communion might else ensue: lest yet the same kneeling might be thought or taken otherwise, we do declare that it is not meant thereby, that any adoration is done, or ought to be done, either unto the sacramental bread and wine there bodily received, or to any real and essential presence there being of Christ's natural flesh and blood. For as concerning the sacramental bread and wine, they remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored, for that were Idolatry to be abhorred of all faithful Christians. And as concerning the natural body and blood of our Saviour Christ they are in heaven and not here. For it is against the truth of Christ's true natural body, to be in more places than in one at one time." Opinions will of course differ as to whether in this matter the influence of Knox was beneficial or the reverse. We are writing biography, not a treatise on theology, and what we have been seeking to show is the share that Knox had in the English Reformation. Sacramentarians generally will agree in styling the Declaration which we have quoted "the black rubric," but for ourselves we have no hesitation in avowing our agreement with Lorimer that "there is nothing in the whole English Liturgy which is, to say the least, more Protestant;" and it may be well, to give completeness to our reference to the subject, that we should add that author's very condensed summary of the subsequent history of this famous rubric. "At the accession of Elizabeth it was dropped out of the Prayer-Book, along with that portion of the 35th Article upon which it rested; and it remained outside the Liturgy for a hundred years. And why? Simply because its omission was judged as important by the Church's leaders then as its insertion had been at first. Elizabeth's church policy was a comprehensive policy, and neither James I. nor Charles I. had any wish to depart from it. She wished, and so did her council and first Parliament, to make it as easy as possible for the "Roman party to continue in the National Church, but she and they knew that such a comprehension was impossible as long as the "Declaration on Kneeling" remained in the Prayer-Book. Its insertion had taken place in order to "comprehend" the Puritan party, to the exclusion of the Romanists; and now its omission took place in order to comprehend the Romanists, at the risk of driving out the Puritans. But why do we now find the "Declaration" restored to its old place? What was the motive of so remarkable a rehabilitation in 1662? It is easy to discern it. The circle of church evolution and change had then returned into itself. In 1662 the old policy of conciliating and comprehending the Puritans instead of the Catholics was again in season—was again the key of the situation. To this policy the "Declaration on Kneeling" was again indispensable, and again, therefore, this most remarkable rubric was restored, in substantially the same form, to its vacant place. Nor has its history yet exhausted itself. It has retained its recovered place through all the changes of the last two centuries only to come forward into new significance and importance in our own day. The last chapter of its history was written only the other day in the long discussion and the fateful decision of the Bennett case. Its simple but trenchant language was often quoted in the pleadings, and passed into the body of the judgment itself: "As concerning the natural body and blood of our Saviour Christ they are in heaven, not here: for it is against the truth of Christ's true natural body to be in more places than in one at one time."
But the memorial to the Privy Council, which we have traced to Knox, prevailed also so far as to secure a modification of the article on ceremonies, which, originally numbered as the 38th, came out owing to some minor condensations as the 35th, and took this ultimate shape—(we give Lorimer's translation from the Latin)—"The book which of very late time was given to the Church of England by the king's authority and the Parliament, containing the manner and form of praying and ministering the sacraments in the Church of England, likewise also the book of ordering ministers of the Church set forth by the foresaid authority, are godly, and in no point repugnant to the wholesome doctrine of the gospel, but agreeable thereunto, furthering and beautifying the same not a little; and therefore of all faithful members of the Church of England, and chiefly of the ministers of the Lord, they ought to be received and allowed with all readiness of mind and thanksgiving, and to be commended to the people of God."[[6]] When this is compared with the clause formerly given it will be seen that what before was said of the "ceremonies" is here restricted to the "doctrine," and that everything to which the memorial had taken exception is omitted.
But though the insertion of the Declaration on Kneeling into the Prayer-Book satisfied one of the conditions which, in his letter to his Berwick friends, Knox had laid down as essential to his conforming to "common Order": it did not meet the others, and so he steadily refused to accept a formal charge in the Church of England. At the very time when the Council was engaged in the discussions which we have just mentioned, the Duke of Northumberland wrote from Chelsea, under date October 27th, 1552, to Secretary Cecil, in these words:[[7]] "I would to God it might please the King's majesty to appoint Mr. Knox to the office of Rochester bishopric, which for three reasons would be very well. First: he would not only be a whetstone to quicken and sharp the Bishop of Canterbury, whereof he hath need, but also would be a great confounder of the Anabaptists lately sprung up in Kent. Secondly, he should not continue the ministration in the north, contrary to this set forth here" (meaning to the usual form prescribed at this time). "Thirdly, the family of the Scots now inhabiting in Newcastle, chiefly for his fellowship, would not continue there, wherein many resort to them out of Scotland, which is not requisite." These are certainly rather strange reasons why Knox should be promoted to a bishopric, but they prove not only that he had acted an independent part in Newcastle, but also that his fame had gone so widely over Scotland that multitudes of his fellow-countrymen were attracted to that place for the sake of enjoying his ministrations. But he would not be made a bishop, and he must have expressed his refusal with all his wonted plainness of speech, for a few weeks later, on the 7th December, Northumberland writes to the same correspondent: "Master Knox's being here to speak with me, saying he was so willed by you; I do return him again, because I love not to have to do with men which be neither grateful nor pleasable."[[8]] So his grace is minded to put the case; but with his former letter in our hands we can see that gratitude in his vocabulary meant falling in with his individual plans, and "pleasableness" was with him a synonym for "squeezeableness."