John Knox and the Reformation. Lang Andrew
wavering youth; Argyll was very old: Chatelherault was a rival of the Regent, a competitor for the Crown and quite incompetent. The Regent, in short, could scarcely have discovered a Scottish adviser worthy of employment, and when she did trust one, he was the brilliant “chamaeleon,” young Maitland of Lethington, who would rather betray his master cleverly than run a straight course, and did betray the Regent. Thus Mary, a Frenchwoman and a Catholic, governing Scotland for her Catholic daughter, the Dauphiness, with the aid of a few French troops who had just saved the independence of the country, naturally employed French advisers. This made her unpopular; her attempts to bring justice into Scottish courts were odious, and she would not increase the odium by persecuting the Protestants. The Duke’s bastard brother, again, the Archbishop, sharing his family ambition, was in no mood for burning heretics. The Queen Mother herself carried conciliation so far as to pardon and reinstate such trebly dyed traitors as the notorious Crichton of Brunston, and she employed Kirkcaldy of Grange, who intrigued against her while in her employment. An Edinburgh tailor, Harlaw, who seems to have been a deacon in English orders, was allowed to return to Scotland in 1554. He became a very notable preacher. 60
Going from Mrs. Bowes’s house to Edinburgh, Knox found that “the fervency” of the godly “did ravish him.” At the house of one Syme “the trumpet blew the auld sound three days thegither,” he informed Mrs. Bowes, and Knox himself was the trumpeter. He found another lady, “who, by reason that she had a troubled conscience, delighted much in the company of the said John.” There were pleasant sisters in Edinburgh, who later consulted Knox on the delicate subject of dress. He was more tolerant in answering them than when he denounced “the stinking pride of women” at Mary Stuart’s Court; admitting that “in clothes, silks, velvets, gold, and other such, there is no uncleanness,” yet “I cannot praise the common superfluity which women now use in their apparel.” He was quite opposed, however, to what he pleasingly calls “correcting natural beauty” (as by dyeing the hair), and held that “farthingales cannot be justified.”
On the whole, he left the sisters fairly free to dress as they pleased. His curious phrase, 61 in a letter to a pair of sisters, “the prophets of God are often impeded to pray for such as carnally they love unfeignedly,” is difficult to understand. We leave it to the learned to explain this singular limitation of the prophet, which Knox says that he had not as yet experienced. He must have heard about it from other prophets.
Knox found at this time a patron remarkable, says Dr. M‘Crie, “for great respectability of character,” Erskine of Dun. Born in 1508, about 1530 he slew a priest named Thomas Froster, in a curiously selected place, the belfry tower of Montrose. Nobody seems to have thought anything of it, nor should we know the fact, if the record of the blood-price paid by Mr. Erskine to the priest’s father did not testify to the fervent act. Six years later, according to Knox, “God had marvellously illuminated” Erskine, and the mildness of his nature is frequently applauded. He was, for Scotland, a man of learning, and our first amateur of Greek. Why did he kill a priest in a bell tower!
In the winter or autumn of 1555, Erskine gave a supper, where Knox was to argue against crypto-protestantism. When once the Truth, whether Anglican or Presbyterian, was firmly established, Catholics were compelled, under very heavy fines, to attend services and sermons which they believed to be at least erroneous, if not blasphemous. I am not aware that, in 1555, the Catholic Church, in Scotland, thus vigorously forced people of Protestant opinions to present themselves at Mass, punishing nonconformity with ruin. I have not found any complaints to this effect, at that time. But no doubt an appearance of conformity might save much trouble, even in the lenient conditions produced by the character of the Regent and by the political situation. Knox, then, discovered that “divers who had a zeal to godliness made small scruple to go to the Mass, or to communicate with the abused sacraments in the Papistical manner.” He himself, therefore, “began to show the impiety of the Mass, and how dangerous a thing it was to communicate in any sort with idolatry.”
Now to many of his hearers this essential article of his faith – that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist and form of celebration were “idolatry” – may have been quite a new idea. It was already, however, a commonplace with Anglican Protestants. Nothing of the sort was to be found in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI.; broken lights of various ways of regarding the Sacrament probably played, at this moment, over the ideas of Knox’s Scottish disciples. Indeed, their consciences appear to have been at rest, for it was after Knox’s declaration about the “idolatrous” character of the Mass that “the matter began to be agitated from man to man, the conscience of some being afraid.”
To us it may seem that the sudden denunciation of a Christian ceremony, even what may be deemed a perverted Christian ceremony, as sheer “idolatry,” equivalent to the worship of serpents, bulls, or of a foreign Baal in ancient Israel – was a step calculated to confuse the real issues and to provoke a religious war of massacre. Knox, we know, regarded extermination of idolaters as a counsel of perfection, though in the Christian scriptures not one word could be found to justify his position. He relied on texts about massacring Amalekites and about Elijah’s slaughter of the prophets of Baal. The Mass was idolatry, was Baal worship; and Baal worshippers, if recalcitrant, must die.
These extreme unchristian ideas, then, were new in Scotland, even to “divers who had a zeal to godliness.” For their discussion, at Erskine of Dun’s party, were present, among others, Willock, a Scots preacher returned from England, and young Maitland of Lethington. We are not told what part Willock took in the conversation. The arguments turned on biblical analogies, never really coincident with the actual modern circumstances. The analogy produced in discussion by those who did not go to all extremes with Knox did not, however, lack appropriateness. Christianity, in fact, as they seem to have argued, did arise out of Judaism; retaining the same God and the same scriptures, but, in virtue of the sacrifice of its Founder, abstaining from the sacrifices and ceremonial of the law. In the same way Protestantism arose out of mediæval Catholicism, retaining the same God and the same scriptures, but rejecting the mediæval ceremonial and the mediæval theory of the sacrifice of the Mass. It did not follow that the Mass was sheer “idolatry,” at which no friend of the new ideas could be present.
As a proof that such presence or participation was not unlawful, was not idolatry, in the existing state of affairs, was adduced the conduct of St. Paul and the advice given to him by St. James and the Church in Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 18-36). Paul was informed that many thousands of Jews “believed,” yet remained zealous for the law, the old order. They had learned that Paul advised the Jews in Greece and elsewhere not to “walk after the customs.” Paul should prove that “he also kept the law.” For this purpose he, with four Christian Jews under a vow, was to purify himself, and he went into the Temple, “until that an offering should be offered for every one of them.”
“Offerings,” of course, is the term in our version for sacrifices, whether of animals or of “unleavened wafers anointed with oil.” The argument from analogy was, I infer, that the Mass, with its wafer, was precisely such an “offering,” such a survival in Catholic ritual, as in Jewish ritual St. Paul consented to, by the advice of the Church of Jerusalem; consequently Protestants in a Catholic country, under the existing circumstances, might attend the Mass. The Mass was not “idolatry.” The analogy halts, like all analogies, but so, of course, and to fatal results, does Knox’s analogy between the foreign worships of Israel and the Mass. “She thinks not that idolatry, but good religion,” said Lethington to Knox once, speaking of Queen Mary’s Mass. “So thought they that offered their children unto Moloch,” retorted the reformer. Manifestly the Mass is, of the two, much more on a level with the “offering” of St. Paul than with human sacrifices to Moloch! 62
In his reply Knox, as he states his own argument, altogether overlooked the offering of St. Paul, which, as far as we understand, was the essence of his opponents’ contention. He said that “to pay vows was never idolatry,” but “the Mass from the original was and remained odious idolatry, therefore the facts were most unlike. Secondly, I greatly doubt whether either James’s commandment or Paul’s obedience proceeded from the Holy Ghost,” about which Knox was, apparently,
Ibid., iv. 245.
I conceive these to have been the arguments of the party of compromise, judging from the biblical texts which they adduced.