Cranmer goes on to denounce the “glorious and unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietude when things be most quiet and in good order.” {35} Their argument (Knox’s favourite), that whatever is not commanded in Scripture is unlawful and ungodly, “is a subversion of all order as well in religion as in common policy.”

Cranmer ends with the amazing challenge:  “I will set my foot by his to be tried in the fire, that his doctrine is untrue, and not only untrue but seditious, and perilous to be heard of any subjects, as a thing breaking the bridle of obedience and loosing them from the bond of all princes’ laws.”

Cranmer had a premonition of the troubled years of James vi. and of the Covenant, when this question of kneeling was the first cause of the Bishops’ wars.  But Knox did not accept, as far as we know, the mediaeval ordeal by fire.

Other questions about practices enjoined in the Articles arose.  A “Confession,” in which Knox’s style may be traced, was drawn up, and consequently that “Declaration on Kneeling” was intercalated into the Prayer Book, wherein it is asserted that the attitude does not imply adoration of the elements, or belief in the Real Presence, “for that were idolatry.”  Elizabeth dropped, and Charles ii. restored, this “Black Rubric” which Anglicanism owes to the Scottish Reformer. {36a} He “once had a good opinion,” he says, of the Liturgy as it now stood, but he soon found that it was full of idolatries.

The most important event in the private life of Knox, during his stay at Berwick, was his acquaintance with a devout lady of tormented conscience, Mrs. Bowes, wife of the Governor of Norham Castle on Tweed.  Mrs. Bowes’s tendency to the new ideas in religion was not shared by her husband and his family; the results will presently be conspicuous.  In April 1550, Knox preached at Newcastle a sermon on his favourite doctrine that the Mass is “Idolatry,” because it is “of man’s invention,” an opinion not shared by Tunstall, then Bishop of Durham.  Knox used “idolatry” in a constructive sense, as when we talk of “constructive treason.”  But, in practice, he regarded Catholics as “idolaters,” in the same sense as Elijah regarded Hebrew worshippers of alien deities, Chemosh or Moloch, and he later drew the inference that idolaters, as in the Old Testament, must be put to death.  Thus his was logically a persecuting religion.

Knox was made a King’s chaplain and transferred to Newcastle.  He saw that the country was, by preference, Catholic; that the life of Edward vi. hung on a thread; and that with the accession of his sister, Mary Tudor, Protestant principles would be as unsafe as under “umquhile the Cardinal.”  Knox therefore, “from the foresight of troubles to come” (so he writes to Mrs. Bowes, February 28, 1554), {36b} declined any post, a bishopric, or a living, which would in honour oblige him to face the fire of persecution.  At the same time he was even then far at odds with the Church of England that he had sound reasons for refusing benefices.