"1

restrained the more zealous of the Protestants who sought by force to suppress the celebration, sounded a note of warning from the pulpit of St. Giles's. He preached on the sin of idolatry, "showing what terrible plagues God had taken upon realms and nations for the same;" and added, "One mass is more fearful to me than if 10,000 armed enemies were landed in any part of the realm, of purpose to suppress the whole religion." We are apt at this day to think that the alarm expressed was greater than its cause warranted. So thought the queen's guards at the time, who said openly in the church that "such fear was no point of their faith." But, we may ask, had mass no more significance in the Scotland of the sixteenth century than it would have in the Scotland of the nineteenth? Mary had not yet ratified the Act of Parliament establishing the Protestant faith, and alienating the national revenues from the Romish Church. Her refusal implied that what the Estates had done in changing the national faith was illegal, and that the Reformation was rebellion. What construction then could her subjects put upon this mass, but that it was the first step towards the overthrow of the Protestant Church, and the restoration of the Romish ritual and hierarchy? Nor did they do their sovereign injustice in so construing it. To compel her subjects to abjure their Protestantism, and to embrace again the creed they had renounced, by soft methods if possible, and if not by the stake and the cord, was Mary's settled purpose. In Italy, in Spain, in France, and in the Netherlands, piles were at that moment blazing in support of the mass. The same baleful fires were but newly extinguished in England and in Scotland; and were they to be lighted before they had well ceased to burn, or the ashes of the noble men who had perished in them had grown cold? Had not all their past experience told them that the stake followed the mass as invariably as the shadow followed the substance; that the written law of the Popish system, and its ineradicable instincts, made it at all times and in all places a persecutor? The Scots would have shown themselves incapable of reading the past, and forecasting the future, had they failed in these circumstances to take alarm. It was the alarm not of timidity, but of wisdom; not of bigotry, but of patriotism.

It is probable that the substance of the Reformer's sermon was reported to the queen, for in a few days after its delivery she sent a message to Knox, commanding his attendance at the palace. This interview has gathered round it great historic

1 Laing, Knox, vol. ii., p. 276,

grandeur, mainly from the sentiments avowed by Knox before his sovereign, which made it one of the turning-points in the history of the man and of the country, and partly also from the charge which the flatterers of despotic princes have founded upon it, that Knox was on that occasion lacking in courtesy to Mary as a woman, and in loyalty to her as his sovereign; as if it were a crime to defend, in words of truth and soberness, the religion and liberties of a country in the presence of one bent on ruining both. The queen opened the conference, at which only her brother, Lord James Stuart, and two ladies in waiting were present, with a reference to the Reformer's book on the " Regiment of Women," and the "necromancy" by which he accomplished his ends; but departing from the grave charge of magic, she came to what was uppermost in her mind, and what was the head and front of Knox's offending.

"You have taught the people," remarked the queen, "to receive another religion than that which their princes allow; but God commands subjects to obey their prince;" ergo, "you have taught the people to disobey both God and their prince." Mary doubtless thought this syllogism unanswerable, till Knox, with a little plain sense, brushed it away completely.

"Madam," replied the Reformer, "as right religion received neither its origin nor its authority from princes, but from the eternal God alone, so are not subjects bound to frame their religion according to the tastes of their princes. For oft it is that princes, of all others, are the most ignorant of God's true religion. If all the seed of Abraham had been of the religion of Pharaoh, whose subjects they long were, I pray you, madam, what religion would there have been in the world? And if all in the days of the apostles had been of the religion of the Roman emperors, I pray you, madam, what religion would there have been now upon the earth? . . And so, madam, you may perceive that subjects are not bound to the religion of their princes, although they are commanded to give them reverence."

"Yea," replied the queen, "but none of these men raised the sword against their princes."

"Yet, madam," rejoined Knox, "they resisted, for they who obey not the commandment given them, do in some sort resist."

"But," argued the queen, "they resisted not with the sword."

"God, madam," answered the Reformer, "had not given them the power and the means."

"Think ye," said the queen, "that subjects having the power may resist their princes?"

"If princes exceed their bounds, madam, and do that which they ought not, they may doubtless be resisted even by power. For neither is greater honour nor greater obedience to be given to kings and princes, than God has commanded to be given to father and mother. But, madam, the father may be struck with a frenzy, in which he would slay his own children. Now, madam, if the children arise, join together, apprehend him, take the sword from him, bind his hands, and keep him in prison till the frenzy be over, think ye, madam, that the children do any wrong? Even so is it, madam, with princes who would murder the children of God who are subject unto them. Their blind zeal is nothing but a mad frenzy; and, therefore, to take the sword from them, to bind their hands, and to cast them into prison till they be brought to a sober mind, is no disobedience against princes, but a just obedience, because it agreeth with the will of God."

503

At last Lord James Stuart, feeling the silence insupportable, or fearing that his sister had been seized with sudden illness, began to entreat her and to ask, "What has offended you, madam?" But she made him no answer. The tempest of her pride and self-will at length spent itself. Her composure returned, and she resumed the argument.

"Well then," said she, "I clearly perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me; and shall do what they list, and not what I command; and so must I be subject to them, and not they to me."

"God forbid," promptly rejoined the Reformer, "that ever I take upon me to command any to obey me, or to set subjects at liberty to do whatever pleases them." Is then Knox to concede the "right Divine?" Yes; but he lodges it where alone it is safe; not in any throne on earth. "My travail," adds he, "is that both subjects and princes may obey God. And think not, madam, that wrong is done you when you are required to be subject unto God; for he it is who subjects peoples unto princes, and causes obedience to be given unto them. He craves of kings that they be as it were foster-fathers to his Church, and commands queens to be nurses to his people."

We must carry ourselves three centuries back, and think of the slavish doctrines then prevalent all over Christendom-that it was taught as infallibly true in theological canons and juridical codes, and echoed back from university chairs, that kings reigned by Divine right, and that the understandings and consciences of their subjects were in their keeping; and we must think too of the high-handed way in which these demoralising and enslaving doctrines were being carried out in Europe -that in every Popish country a scaffold or a stake was the certain fate of every man who dared to maintain the right of one's thinking for oneself— we must transport ourselves into the midst of these times, we say, before we can fully estimate the courage of Knox in avowing these sentiments in the presence of Mary Stuart. These plain bold words, so different from the glozing terms in which she had been accustomed to be addressed in France, fell upon her ear like a thunder-peal. She was stunned and amazed, and for a quarter of an hour stood speechless. If her passion found not vent in words, it showed itself in the pallor of her face. "Her countenance altered." The past age of feudalism and the coming age of liberty stood confronting each other under the roof of Holyrood. We wait with intense anxiety during that quarter of an hour's silence, to see what the next move in this great battle shall be, and whether it is to be maintained or abandoned by Knox. Vast issues hang upon the words by which the silence is to be broken! If Knox yield, not only will Scotland fall with him, but Christendom also; for it is Philip of Spain, and Pius IV. of Rome, who are confronting him in the person of Mary Stuart.

"Yes," replied the queen; "but ye are not the Kirk that I will nourish. I will defend the Kirk of Rome, for it is, I think, the true Kirk of God."

"Your will, madam," said Knox, "is no reason; neither doth it make that Roman harlot to be the true and immaculate spouse of Jesus Christ. I offer myself, madam, to prove that the Church of the Jews which crucified Christ Jesus was not so far degenerate from the ordinances and statutes given it of God, as the Church of Rome is declined, and more than 500 years hath declined, from the purity of that religion which the apostles taught and planted."

"My conscience," said Mary, "is not so." "Conscience, madam," said Knox, "requires knowledge, and I fear that right knowledge ye have

none."

"But," said she, "I have both heard and read." "Have you," inquired Knox, "heard any teach but such as the Pope and cardinals have allowed? You may be assured that such will speak nothing to offend their own estate."

"You interpret the Scripture in one way, and they interpret it in another," said Mary: "whom shall I believe, and who shall be judge?"

"You shall believe God, who plainly speaketh in his Word," was the Reformer's answer, "and farther than the Word teaches you, ye shall believe neither the one nor the other. The Word of God is plain in itself, and if in any one place there be obscurity,

In the room of a sacerdotal hierarchy there had been planted in Scotland a body of teaching pastors. The change had been accomplished with the sanction of Parliament, but no provision was made for the temporal support of the new ecclesiastical establishment. This was a point on which Knox was not unnaturally anxious, but on which he was doomed to experience a bitter disappointment. The Romish Church in Scotland had possessed a boundless affluence of houses, valuables, and lands. Her abbacies dotted the country, mountain and meadow, forest and corn-field, were hers; and all this wealth had been set free by the suppression of the priesthood, and ought to have been transferred, so far as it was needed, to the Protestant Church. But the nobles rushed in and appropriated nearly the whole of this vast spoil. Knox lifted up his voice to denounce a transaction which was alike damaging to the highest interests of the country, and the characters of those concerned in it: but he failed to warn off the covetous hands that were clutching this rich booty; and the only arrangement he succeeded in effecting was, that the revenues of the Popish Church should be divided into three parts, and that two of these should be given to the former incumbents, to revert at their death to the nobility, and that the third part should be divided between the court and the Protestant ministers. The latter had till now been entirely dependent upon the benevolence of their hearers, or the hospitality of the noblemen in whose houses some of them continued to reside. When Knox beheld the revenues which would have sufficed to plant Scotland with churches, colleges, and schools, and suitably provide for the poor, thus swallowed up, he could not refrain from expressing his mortification and disgust. "Well," exclaimed he, "if the end of this order be happy, my judgment fails me. I see two parts freely given to the devil, and the third must be divided between God and the devil. Who would have thought that when Joseph ruled in Egypt his brethren would have travelled for

victuals, and would have returned with empty sacks to their families?" It was concern for his brethren's interest that drew from the Reformer this stern denunciation, for his own stipend, appointed by the magistrates of Edinburgh, was an adequate one.

The same cause occasioned to Knox his second great disappointment. He had received from the Privy Council a commission, along with Winram, Spottiswood, Douglas, and Row, to draft a plan of ecclesiastical government. Comprehensive in outline and perfect in detail, incalculable, we have already seen, would have been the moral and literary benefits this plan would have conferred upon Scotland had it been fully carried out. But the nobles liked neither the moral rules it prescribed, nor the pecuniary burdens it imposed, and Knox failed to procure for it the ratification of the Privy Council. Many of the members of Council, however, subscribed it, and being approved by the first General Assembly, which met on the 20th of December, 1560,' it has, under the name of the "First Book of Discipline," always held the rank of a standard in the Protestant Church of Scotland."

A third and still more grievous disappointment awaited the Reformer. The Parliament of 1560, which had abolished the Papal jurisdiction, and accepted Protestantism as the national religion, had been held when the queen was absent from the kingdom, and the royal assent kad never been given to its enactments. Not only did Mary, under various pretexts, refuse to ratify its deeds while she resided in France, but even after her return to Scotland she still withheld her ratification, and repeatedly declared the Parliament of 1560 to be illegal. If so, the Protestant establishment it had set

1 It consisted of forty members, only six of whom were ministers. It met in the Magdalene Chapel, Cowgate. This chapel still exists, and is the property of the Protestant Institute of Scotland.

2 Dunlop, Collect. of Confessions, vol. ii., p. 436. Mr Crie, Life of Knox, vol. ii., pp. 4, 5.