Hearing, at Dieppe, then, in October 1557, of the troubles, and of the faint war with England, and moved, perhaps, he suggests, by Satan, {77a} Knox “began to dispute with himself, as followeth, ’Shall Christ, the author of peace, concord, and quietness, be preached where war is proclaimed, and tumults appear to rise?  What comfort canst thou have to see the one part of the people rise up against the other,’” and so forth.  These truly Christian reflections, as we may think them, “yet do trouble and move my wicked heart,” says Knox.  He adds, hypothetically, that perhaps the letters received at Dieppe “did somewhat discourage me.” {77b} He was only certain that the devil was at the bottom of the whole affair.

The “tumults that appear to arise” are probably the dissensions between the Regent and the mutinous nobles who refused to invade England at her command.  D’Oysel needed a bodyguard; and he feared that the Lords would seize and carry off the Regent.  Arran, in 1564, speaks of a plot to capture her in Holyrood.  Here were promises of tumults.  There were also signs of a renewed feud between the house of Hamilton and the Stewart Earl of Lennox, the rival claimant of the crown.  There seems, moreover, to have been some tumultuary image-breaking. {78}

Knox may have been merely timid:  he is not certain, but his delay passed in consulting the learned, for the satisfaction of his conscience, and his confessed doubts as to whether Christianity should be pushed by civil war, seem to indicate that he was not always the prophet patron of modern Jehus, that he did, occasionally, consult the Gospel as well as the records of pre-Christian Israel.

The general result was that, from October 1557 to March 1558, Knox stayed in Dieppe, preaching with great success, raising up a Protestant church, and writing.

His condition of mind was unenviable.  He had been brought all the way across France, leaving his wife and family; he had, it seems, been met by no letters from his noble friends, who may well have ceased to expect him, so long was his delay.  He was not at ease in his conscience, for, to be plain, he was not sure that he was not afraid to risk himself in Scotland, and he was not certain that his new scruples about the justifiableness of a rising for religion were not the excuses suggested by his own timidity.  Perhaps they were just that, not whisperings either of conscience or of Satan.  Yet in this condition Knox was extremely active.  On December 1 and 17 he wrote, from Dieppe, a “Letter to His Brethren in Scotland,” and another to “The Lords and Others Professing the Truth in Scotland.”  In the former he censures, as well he might, “the dissolute life of (some) such as have professed Christ’s holy Evangel.”  That is no argument, he says, against Protestantism.  Many Turks are virtuous; many orthodox Hebrews, Saints, and Patriarchs occasionally slipped; the Corinthians, though of a “trew Kirk,” were notoriously profligate.  Meanwhile union and virtue are especially desirable; for Satan “fiercely stirreth his terrible tail.”  We do not know what back-slidings of the brethren prompted this letter.