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THIS book needs no
introduction to the public from me, being, as well as I can judge,
an excellent piece of biographical literature — clear, compact,
impartial — which can stand securely on its own merits. Nor does the
subject of it require that any one Scotsman need vindicate any
other's right to take a share in the general tribute to the
illustrious memory of John Knox.
In Scotland at least,
and in this year which (according to general tradition) sees the
400th anniversary of his birth, none will think the tribute
undeserved or mistimed. Columba, when looking for the last time on
the humble scenes of his apostolic life and labours, foretold, with
a manly confidence in the worth of the work he had done, that "small
and mean" although Iona appeared, it yet would be held in reverence
by many races and rulers of men. The Christianity and civilisation
of the realms of Scotland, of Northumbria and of Wales, have borne
witness to his prophetic truth. The second great champion of the
Northern Church, with a like lofty consciousness of having done his
duty to his fatherland, said, ere his course was finished, "What I
have been to my country although this unthankful age will not know,
yet the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the
truth."
We are not
unthankful, and we need no compulsion to prompt us to bear our
testimony, of gratitude and veneration, to the stoutest assertor of
the religious liberties and civil rights of the people of Scotland.
But yet one is tempted to ponder whether his honoured name is as
familiar to us as it was to our forefathers: whether his words,
"half battles of the free," ring with as clear a challenge as of
yore to "the help of the Lord against the mighty": whether the
example of his high-hearted patriotism is still felt to be as
inspiring as it was in the old time before us. If, in answering this
question, our mind is in any way clouded with a doubt, it is high
time we examined ourselves on our relation to the memory of John
Knox. Why should his memory appeal to our sentiments of patriotism,
of religion, of love of liberty, as that of no other Scotsman does?
I think we find convincing answer in the records of his life, as set
forth in these pages.
The story of that
life has been often told, both by friend and foe. It has also been
rehearsed by writers who sometimes almost appear to be moved by a
personal ill-will, or a distorting fanaticism, which forbade their
seeing clearly or interpreting candidly his principles and actions.
But it is remarkable that the general consent of impartial students
of history has always awarded to Knox a place second to none in the
Scots' Valhalla of the great and good—"the one Scotsman," says
Carlyle, "to whom, of all others, his country and the whole world
owe a debt." It is well that this Anniversary should not be suffered
to pass into the silence and the darkness, wherewith our life is
bound, without some record of our loyalty to the name, which is more
inseparably associated than any other with the establishment of
Scottish Protestantism and the assertion of Scottish Nationality.
The two causes are of a unity so absolute that the one cannot be
severed from the other without loss of life to both, any more than
the bleeding half of a dismembered body can survive its wound.
Knox's well-known
belief in a policy of Union between Scotland and England may seen to
discredit this assertion—but only to the superficial observer. When
he came in 1560 from Geneva to take the lead in the social,
political, and religious revolution that was then hastening to its
crisis in his native country, he found the Kingdom weltering in a
chaos of discordant elements. The Crown was in the hands of a
foreign regent, and the nobles, who should have been its strength
and stay, were for the most part a selfish gang, greedy of place and
power, seeking in the general turmoil whatever spoil they could lay
their hands on. The politicians were men of shifty principles, now
intriguing for the good-will of England, now for the friendship of
France. The middle class of burghers and traders, men of sounder
morals and better education than the lairds, had not yet gained the
firm hold, which their intelligence and wealth afterwards won for
them, on the mind of their compatriots and on the course of public
affairs. Everywhere the body politic was infected with disorder,
discontent, unrest, and suspicion. The Church, by its own
acknowledgment, was flagrantly corrupt—the lives of the Clergy, from
the Archbishop to the Deacon, shamelessly immoral and scandalously
depraved: the seculars ignorant, rude, and flagitious; the regulars
wasting their substance in riotous living, or in luxurious sloth, in
their magnificent monasteries. The keen eye of the Reformer saw,
through the gloom and confusion, one clear ray of hope which might
brighten into a perfect day when Scotland should be orderly, united,
educated, delivered from superstition, and blessed with freedom: and
that hope was to be realised through English help. There was no
desire to surrender Scottish Nationality. On the contrary, there was
the desire for the salvation of all that, was worth saving in the
National life of Scotland. For a time the nominal Nationality might
appear to lose or veil its rugged features, but the real
Nationality—the stubbornness, the fidelity to the highest and the
best, the honesty, the bravery, the patient loyalty, which had
survived all the malign influences of generations of misrule—these,
which lay near the roots of the Scottish character, would remain and
would assert themselves in a free and friendly alliance with the
sister power of England. To gain that alliance, and to maintain it,
Knox saw was the truest patriotism: but absolutely irreconcilable
with this was the continued supremacy of the Roman Church, which
from the days of Margaret had held Scotland in a bitter spiritual
bondage.
The first essential
for reformation — in every department of life, domestic, social,
industrial, political—was a Revolution in Religion. Without that no
reform was possible, or even conceivable. The paralysing hand of the
Church must be unclasped, its ruthless interference with all liberty
of thought and action must be defied, its irrational dogmas
dislodged from their high places, its idolatries and superstitions
dragged into the light of day and trampled in the dust. There was
nothing else for it; no via media, no temporising readjustments
would serve the cruel need. The Revolution must be complete, in
doctrine, in practice, in ritual, in government. As is evident from
his History, Knox took the weapons with which he was to lead it to
victory from the armoury of Geneva, whence Calvin guided and
inspired the campaign of freedom against tyranny. We may mark, with
some regret, how far Calvin's mind dominated his, and Calvinistic
doctrine reproduced itself in his theology. But in the revolt from
Rome, and in the suspicion of even the modified sacramentarianism of
Luther, no system less thorough-going than Calvin's could satisfy a
man like Knox, with his inveterate hatred of idolatry and passionate
devotion to what he believed to be the Divine and righteous will
:—passionate devotion of this sort, and passionate conviction of the
inherent right of every human creature to have its own immediate
access to the very throne of God, by the "new and living way,"
unaided, or unhindered, by any services or devices or mediations of
men or churches.
As far as help from
outside—from England or elsewhere—went, Knox for long owed it but
little. The Tudor Autocrat could not forget or forgive the obloquy
he had poured on "the Monstrous," the "Monstruous," the "Monstriferous"
Regiment of Women; and she watched Knox's career with a
vindictiveness which would, if she could, have hampered every e$ort
her advisers made to lend English aid to the Scots Reformers: but
the battle was practically won, speedily and essentially without
external succours.
Knox spoke his
prophet's message to the Scots, and the Nation rallied to his call.
They had never forgotten him, all the time he had been away in the
accursed French galleys, in England, in Dieppe, in Frankfort and
Geneva, with but brief returns to the North; and they recognised
their Leader now. The Man needed for the time had come, his voice
putting more heart into them than "five hundred trumpets blustering
in their ears"; a sermon from him worth a squadron of cavalry, the
man of their own blood and class, yet not ashamed to stand before
kings, and to tell the honest truth to any man; not afraid to say to
the Privy Councillors who had his life in their hands, "I am in the
place where I am demanded by conscience to speak the truth, and
therefore the truth I speak, impugn it whoso list." He never
paltered with the truth, or sought fine phrases to mislead his
hearers or veil his meaning. "I call," said he, "a fig a fig and a
spade a spade." His language was plain and strong, homely and racy,
yet now and again soaring to flights of impassioned eloquence or
pathetic pleading that swayed all hearts like a wheat-field before a
gale. His sarcasm, his humour, his invective, were biting and
brilliant, but no written record can convey the vivid impression his
speech produced. It was the impetuous force and burning conviction
which urged his words, joined to the commanding personality of the
man, that bore all before him.
Some disorder and
violence accompanied a few of his earlier denunciations and appeals;
but he gave this no encouragement or approval. The popular hatred
and contempt spent themselves chiefly on the Monastic
establishments, whose hoarded wealth and idle luxury had long
provoked the jealousy and resentment of the unruly populace, ever
ready to make a pernicious profit out of sources of religious or
secular unrest. But Knox was incapable of playing on the passions of
"the rascal multitude." On the occasions when he appeared before the
Court or the Privy Council, he spoke with a gravity, a weight, a
self-respect which compelled respect in its turn. "Who are you,"
asked Mary, "that interfere with my government within this Realm?"
"Madam," he replied, "a subject born within the same." The whole
claims of the rights of religion and of personal liberty were summed
up in the words, lifting, as they did, the matter in hand out of all
meaner relations to the broad platform of public right and
justice,—from the question of what was due to the Crown from the
subject, to the larger one of what was due to the subject from the
Crown.
In all his interviews
with the Queen he stands before the beautiful Mary, in his Geneva
gown, a somewhat grim but yet a stately figure, austere,
incorruptible, with a rigid persuasion of the righteousness of the
cause which he felt he was commissioned to uphold. To him that cause
was nothing less than God's, of whose immediate sovereignty over the
realm of Scotland he, John Knox, and not Mary Stuart, was the
representative. His faith in his own office as the Messenger of a
New Covenant with Scotland, which should establish God's Kingdom
there on a divine foundation never to be shaken,—foundation of a
pure evangel — of an Apostolic Church—of a free and godly
people,—was as profound as his belief in the unchangeable and
inscrutable Decree which had fixed his destiny from all Eternity. It
was a stern belief, but, to the children of the Covenant, a hopeful
one, as they saw the Lord's work prospering in their hands, and
hailed it as a sign that they were of the Elect, their righteousness
inflexible as that of God Himself. A creed less absolute in its
moral standard, less assured of its foothold within the veil, would
not have been the fortress which Knox and men like him needed in
those days of storm and stress. No doubt of his commission ever
darkened his mind. No fear of man ever unstrung his nerve or daunted
his resolution. For the Scottish Nation, wearied of falsehood and
faction, with its life degraded and its conscience demoralised, he
created a soul "under the ribs of death"; roused it to a sense of
its responsibility to God, awoke its benumbed love of liberty to a
determination to assert the sacred rights of freedom.
All this was a work
not done easily, or in a hurry. Year after year he fought his
battles and won his victories. "This that Knox did for his Nation,"
says Carlyle, "we may really call a Resurrection as from Death."
John Knox's teaching
and discipline (of which his Confession of Faith and First Book of
Discipline were the embodiments) laid down the principles, and
inspired the practices, which, in the words of an historian of the
time, changed the Scots from being "one of the rudest, most
ignorant, indigent, and turbulent of peoples, into one of the most
civilised, educated, prosperous, and upright, which our family of
Nations can show." And yet not all his noble ideas were realised. A
,just provision for the Clergy, who took the place of the former
priests and Churchmen, was pared down to a beggarly pittance; and
the wolfish rapacity of the "nobles" clutched also the wealth of the
monks and friars on its way to the support of the poor and the
endowment of colleges and schools. His wholesomest and most
statesmanlike schemes for the general welfare were thwarted and
sneered at as "devout imaginations" by those who had it in their
power to direct, for a time, the public policy, to the lasting
detriment of Church and State. We are still trying, by belated
legislations, to effect social, economical, and educational reforms
which would have been achieved four hundred years ago, if only Knox
had had full freedom to act. The great body of the people stood by
him and were thoroughly loyal to him. The aristocracy was not.
Half-hearted support, wavering allegiance to the cause, shuffling
sympathy with its Champion, disparagement of his motives, mendacious
aspersion of his character, misrepresentation and abuse — these were
common and current among the classes who loved the old Faith and the
young Queen, and those who at bottom, caring little for either,
hated Knox's discipline and hungered for the spoils of the Kirk.
The discipline no
doubt was stern (the Puritanic element showed itself distinctly in
Knox's character and ecclesiastical economy), but it was of a higher
strain at any rate than could consort with the dissolute manners of
the wanton Court. At the head of the Court, and of the political
party identified with it, was the uncompromising enemy of the
Reformed Religion, the most fascinating woman of her time; and Knox
knew, and she knew, that between her influence and his the struggle
was for life or death. In the Queen's Mass in the Chapel Royal Knox
saw nothing but rank idolatry and National downfall and disgrace. He
would have none of it. He was "intolerant," undoubtedly: but could
he be otherwise? Could he be tolerant of that ungodly power which
for four hundred years had sucked the blood of Scotland, had slain
her martyrs, had burned her witnessess of the Truth, had held down
her people in Spiritual darkness and made religion a byword in the
land?
There are some things
in the world that no free and honest man can, or ought to, tolerate.
And the Scoto-Roman Church in the reign of Mary Stuart was one of
them. If Scotland was to live, it must die. Knox dealt it its
deathblow: and with him, after a tough contest, remained the victory
of liberty and Truth. It was not an absolute triumph. Ere he was in
his grave the forces of reaction had begun to raise their noxious
heads; to rebel against the Church's "godly discipline," and seemly
order; to stumble into the crooked paths of Prelacy, and the
superstitions of Sacerdotalism and Sacramentarianism. Yet it was but
for a time. The new faith and order of the Presbyterian Kirk—a free
Church in a free State—were too firmly planted in the minds and
consciences of an enfranchised people to be shaken by the temporary
success, or failure, of ecclesiastical factions or political
parties. For four hundred years they have stood as on a rock.
And the Church of
Scotland—Apostolic, National, Reformed—will continue so to stand as
long as Scotsmen are faithful to the trust which Knox bequeathed to
them. Let them not forget or misunderstand what it is—the Custody of
the Faith once delivered to the. Saints; the unbroken Tradition of
the primitive Church; the Ideal of that city of God which is Eternal
in the Heavens.
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