France at the time, and Knox not ungenerously declined to assail his absent rival. "That man is absent for the present, madame, and therefore will I say nocht against him." Knox appears to have lodged at Kinross; for the conversation which had been carried on in the Castle the night before, was resumed next morning on the Hawking hill to the west of the town,where her attendants with horse and hawk and hound were waiting the signal to start.

As time wore on, the irritation increased. Moray, the Master of Maxwell, all those of the lay lords, except Glencairn, who had been the pillars of the infant Church, one by one deserted Knox, and went over to the faction that Maitland led. The insolent personalities in which the preachers indulged were more than the nobles could stomach. The supplications" of the General Assemblies had become thinly veiled incitements to sedition. The Queen must put away "that idol and bastard service of God, the Messe," "as well from herself as from all others within this realm; and she was plainly told that, although nothing was more odious to them than tumults and domestic discord, yet would they attempt the uttermost before they beheld with their own eyes the house of God demolished, "quhilk with travail and danger God hath within this realm erected by us. If redress was not speedily afforded, they were assured that God's hand would not long spare in His anger "to strike the head and the tail; the inobedient prince and the sinful people." Lethington, among others, having taken exception to the form as well as the substance of the address ("For who ever saw it written to a prince that God would strike the head and the tail?"),

Knox promptly rejoined, "that the prophet Esaias used such manner of speaking; and there was no doubt he was weill acquainted in the Court; for it was supposed he was of the king's stock.' His answer to the suggestion that a complaint might be preferred against any person who was guilty of a contravention of the law, was happier and more pointed. The sheep, he said, might as well complain to the wolf. "If the sheep shall complain to to the wolf that the wolves and whelps has devoured their lambs, the complainer may stand in danger; but the offender, we feare, shall have liberty to hunt after the prey." Lethington, it is added, considered such comparisons-the Queen having shown no desire or inclination to establish Papistry-" veray unsaverie"; and the Assembly appear to have agreed with him; for the supplication, Knox adds, "was given to be reformed as Lethington's wisdom thought best. And in very deed. he framed it so, that when it was delivered, and she had read somewhat of it, she said, 'Here are many fair words; I cannot tell what the hearts are.' And so, for our painted oratory, we were termed the next name to flatterers and dissemblers."

The Queen's growing popularity with her subjects was wormwood to Knox. While the preachers were everywhere denounced as "railers," Mary's conciliatory policy was as widely approved. When she opened the Parliament of 1563, she received, as she rode from Holyrood to the Tolbooth, an enthusiastic welcome from the citizens of the capital. "Such stinking pride of women as was seen at that Parliament, was never seen before in Scotland. Three sundry days the Queen rode to the Tolbooth. The first day she

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." 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 Augustthree 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 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. 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 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 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 highspirited woman may be easily guessed. Knox was the foremost of the Reformers; yet Mary had found that Knox was narrowminded, 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?

IV. 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. 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 felicity-that 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 lords of the Congregation; but it would appear that later on they had come to be of opinion that they had acted unadvisedly; and Lethington's plea, addressed to the members of the Assembly of 1561, that subscription had been a formal act, which meant little or nothing" many subscribed in fide parentum, as the bairns are baptised -seems to have satisfied most of the lords who were present. "How many of those that signed that book would be subject to it?"

The penalties against Popery were, as we have seen, extraordinarily harsh. The Catholics had looked forward to Mary's return, hoping that with her help the severity of the Acts might be relaxed; but they were disappointed. We learn from one of Maitland's earlier letters that the penal statutes had been rigorously enforced, and that in point of fact the Popish priests were in worse plight than before. Maitland, for reasons to which I have already adverted, was distinctly in favour of a lenient administration of the law, and we find the Reformers complaining on more than one occasion that the Secretary was not a keen persecutor. Knox, alluding to a prosecution which was begun when Maitland was in France, observes that the Queen asked counsel of the old Laird of Lethington, "for the younger was absent, and so the Protestants had the fewer unfriends;" and it is quite true that during the latter years of the Lethington administration the penalties inflicted upon those who adhered to the ancient faith were comparatively light. On the other hand, he regarded the seditious doctrines which were aired in the pulpit of St Giles' with marked

disfavour. The preachers declared that they held a civil as well as a divine commission, a secular as well as a spiritual warrant. They were above the law when the law was in their judgment unjust. They prayed for the Queen as "a thrall and bond woman. of Satan," and for the rebel lords as "the best part of the nobility." A religious festival not uncommonly developed into a political saturnalia. The first public fast of the Reformed Church was held during the week for which Rizzio's murder had been planned; and in the form of prayer prepared by Knox for the occasion, his knowledge of the plot enabled him to exercise his prophetic gifts with marked advantage. When, after a tumult in Edinburgh, the lawless citizens were warned not to take the law into their own hands, the Reformers protested against the "high threatenings " and offensive language of the Royal letter. Knox's defiance of authority has been defended by indiscreet apologists; but Maitland's reply to the argument that the godly might break with impunity any law they disliked appears to be unanswerable. "For if all private persons should usurp to take vengeance at their own hands, what lies in ours? And to what purpose hath good laws and lished ?"

statutes been estab

An accidental outburst of fanaticism in the Abbey Church during the Queen's absence at Stirling in 1563 brought the contention between the extreme and moderate parties to a crisis. The Calvinistic rioters were identified, and two of their number were summoned to underlie the law. Knox promptly called his faction to arms. The trial was to take place on the 25th of October, and early in the autumn the fiery cross, in the