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 mediaeval Catholicism, retaining the same God and the same scriptures, but rejecting the mediaeval ceremonial and the mediaeval 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.”