As far as this epistle goes, Beza and his colleagues certainly do not advise the Puritan seceders to secede.

Bullinger and Gualterus in particular were outworn by the pertinacious English Puritans who visited them.  One Sampson had, when in exile, made the life of Peter Martyr a burden to him by his “clamours,” doubts, and restless dissatisfaction.  “England,” wrote Bullinger to Beza (March 15, 1567), “has many characters of this sort, who cannot be at rest, who can never be satisfied, and who have always something or other to complain about.”  Bullinger and Gualterus “were unwilling to contend with these men like fencing-masters,” tired of their argufying; unable to “withdraw our entire confidence from the Bishops.”  “If any others think of coming hither, let them know that they will come to no purpose.” {261a}

Knox may have been less unsympathetic, but his advice agreed with the advice of the Genevans.  Some of the seceders were imprisoned; Cecil and the Queen’s commissioners encouraged others “to go and preach the Gospel in Scotland,” sending with them, as it seems, letters commendatory to the ruling men there.  They went, but they were not long away.  “They liked not that northern climate, but in May returned again,” and fell to their old practices.  One of them reported that, at Dunbar, “he saw men going to the church, on Good Friday, barefooted and bare-kneed, and creeping to the cross!” “If this be so,” said Grindal, “the Church of Scotland will not be pure enough for our men.” {261b}

These English brethren, when in Scotland, consulted Knox on the dispute which they made a ground of schism.  One brother, who was uncertain in his mind, visited Knox in Scotland at this time.  The result appears in a letter to Knox from a seceder, written just after Queen Mary escaped from Lochleven in May 1568.  The dubiously seceding brother “told the Bishop” (Grindal) “that you are flat against and condemn all our doings . . . whereupon the Church” (the seceders) “did excommunicate him”!  He had reviled “the Church,” and they at once caught “the excommunicatory fever.”  Meanwhile the earnestly seceding brother thought that he had won Knox to his side.  But a letter from our Reformer proved his error, and the letter, as the brother writes, “is not in all points liked.”  They would not “go back again to the wafer-cake and kneelings” (the Knoxian Black Rubric had been deleted from Elizabeth’s prayer book), “and to other knackles of Popery.”

In fact they obeyed Knox’s epistle to England of January 1559.  “Mingle-mangle ministry, Popish order, and Popish apparel,” they will not bear.  Knox’s arguments in favour of their conforming, for the time at all events, are quoted and refuted:  “And also concerning Paul his purifying at Jerusalem.”  The analogy of Paul’s conformity had been rejected by Knox, at the supper party with Lethington in 1556.  He had “doubted whether either James’s commandment or Paul’s obedience proceeded from the Holy Ghost.” {262a} Yet now Knox had used the very same argument from Paul’s conformity which, in 1556, he had scouted!  The Mass was not in question in 1568; still, if Paul was wrong (and he did get into peril from a mob!), how could Knox now bid the English brethren follow his example? {262b} (See pp. 65-67 supra.)