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, {62b} 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.”