bly in the summer of 1565 presented a petition to her requiring that "the Papistical and blasphemous Mass" "be universally suppressed and abolished throughout the realm, not only in the subjects but also in the Queen's Majesty's own person." Mary returned a dignified answer. She could not forsake the religion in which she had been brought up, and which she believed to be well grounded,-" beseeching all her loving subjects (seeing that they have had experience of her goodness, that she neither hath in times by-past, nor yet meaneth hereafter, to press the conscience of any man, but to suffer them to worship God in such sort as they are persuaded to be best), that they will not press her to offend her own conscience."1 To Mary's ill-timed and premature plea for toleration (as such we are now taught to regard it by men who are clamorous for religious equality), Knox, from the pulpit of St Giles', replied with characteristic vigour and promptitude. Darnley had come to hear the sermon in the Protestant sanctuary on Sunday, 19th August,-three weeks after he was married. The text was taken from Isaiah: "O Lord our God, other lords than Thou have ruled over us;" and the appropriate application was duly made. God had given the government of

1 Calderwood, ii. 295.

the realm to "boys and women" to rebuke the people for their iniquity and ingratitude; and if order was not taken with "that harlot Jesabel," the vials of the divine wrath would be emptied upon the land. Knox had become so used to strong language, as the opium-eater becomes used to an immoderate quantity of his drug, that he failed to appreciate its effect upon persons who were unfamiliar with his uncourtly candour. It may have been the language, or it may have been the length, of the sermon; but Darnley at any rate, we are told, was profoundly annoyed. The author of the 'Diurnal of Occurrents' says only," Whereat the king was crabbit;" but Knox's own version supplies some amusing details. And because he had tarried an hour and more longer than the time appointed, the king, sitting in a throne made for the occasion, was so moved at this sermon that he would not dine; and being troubled, with great fury, he passed in the afternoon to the hawking."

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The vehemence of Knox, however, must not be confounded, as it has sometimes been, with deliberate rudeness or boorish disrespect; an entire absence of sound judgment, charity, and tact is the worst that can be laid to his charge. His missionary zeal was untempered by apostolic discretion. Yet the effect was the same,-had he desired to confirm Mary in her mistaken

opinions, he could not have followed a more successful method than he adopted. We must remember, however, that the phrase "mistaken opinions," as used by us, was incomprehensible to Knox. The Mass was idolatry, idolatry was crime, and the people and rulers who refused to inflict the punishments which God had attached to crime, would themselves be punished. "In the northland where the autumn before the Queen had travelled, there was ane extreme famine, in the quhilk many died in that country. The dearth was great over all, but the famine was principally there. And so all things appertaining to the sustentation of man, in triple and more, exceeded their accustomed prices. And so did God, according to the threatening of His law, punish the idolatry of our wicked Queen. For the riotous feasting and excessive banqueting wheresoever that wicked woman repaired, provoked God to strike the staff of bread, and to give His malediction upon the fruits of the earth.' "God from heaven and upon the face of the earth gave declaration that He was offended at the iniquity that was committed even within this realm; for upon the 20th day of Januare there fell weit in great abundance, quhilk in the falling freizit so vehemently that the earth was

1 Knox, ii. 367.

but ane sheet of ice. And in that same month the sea stood still, and neither flowed nor ebbit the space of 24 hours. These things were not only observed," Knox adds, "but also spoken and constantly affirmed by men of judgment and credit." The effect of this fantastical fanaticism upon a proud and high-spirited woman may be easily guessed. Knox was the foremost of the Reformers; yet Mary had found that Knox was narrow-minded, superstitious, and fiercely intolerant, so narrow-minded, intolerant, and superstitious that he had no difficulty in believing that the orderly course of nature was interrupted because the Queen dined on wild fowl and danced till midnight. If this was Protestantism, she would have none of it. Nor can we blame her much. The ecclesiastical dictator at Edinburgh was as violent and irrational (it might well appear to her) as the ecclesiastical dictator at Rome. Was it worth her while to exchange the infallible Pope of the Vatican for the infallible Pope of the High Street?

4. In a theocratic society the Church and the State are one; and the prophet of the Israelitish records is a lawgiver, a magistrate, and a politician, as well as a preacher. Knox's notions of government were taken from the Old Testament.

VOL. II.

1 Knox, ii. 417.

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Maitland, on the other hand, was a secular statesman, who steadily resisted the intrusion of the Church into civil affairs. We have already had a sample of the wares in Knox's wallet; and the briefest narrative of his controversies with Maitland will serve to show that the Hebrew prophet is an unmanageable element in modern society, and that the application of the principles which Knox asserted and Maitland resisted must lead directly to anarchy.

We have seen that from the day the new religious society was instituted Maitland openly opposed the inordinate pretensions of the preachers. He had said "in mockage," when Knox's special and vehement application of the prophet Haggeus was being addressed to the Parliament of 1560, "We mon now forget ourselves, and beir the barrow to build the houses of God." He had declared again with his usual verbal felicitythat the Book of Discipline was "a devout imagination," meaning probably that such a code of exact and salutary discipline might suit the Civitas Dei when it came to be established, but was ill adapted for any existing society. Knox was anxious that the treatise should be ratified by the Estates; Maitland, on the other hand, was resolved that no parliamentary sanction should be given. It had been signed informally in 1560, Knox being urgent, by some of the