Knox must have given his biographers “medicines to make them love him.”  The learned Dr. Lorimer finds in this epistle, one of the most fierce of his writings, “a programme of what this Reformation reformed should be—­a programme which was honourable alike to Knox’s zeal and his moderation.”  The “moderation” apparently consists in not abolishing bishoprics, but substituting “ten bishops of moderate income for one lordly prelate.”  Despite this moderation of the epistle, “its intolerance is extreme,” says Dr. Lorimer, and Knox’s advice “cannot but excite astonishment.” {104} The party which agreed with him in England was the minority of a minority; the Catholics, it is usually supposed, though we have no statistics, were the majority of the English nation.  Yet the only chance, according to Knox, that England has of escaping the vengeance of an irritable Deity, is for the smaller minority to alter the prayer book, resist the Queen, if she wishes to retain it unaltered, and force the English people into the “discipline” of a Swiss Protestant town.

Dr. Lorimer, a most industrious and judicious writer, adds that, in these matters of “discipline,” and of intolerance, Knox “went to a tragical extreme of opinion, of which none of the other leading reformers had set an example;” also that what he demanded was substantially demanded by the Puritans all through the reign of Elizabeth.  But Knox averred publicly, and in his “History,” that for everything he affirmed in Scotland he had heard the judgments “of the most godly and learned that be known in Europe . . . and for my assurance I have the handwritings of many.”  Now he had affirmed frequently, in Scotland, the very doctrines of discipline and persecution “of which none of the other leading Reformers had set an example,” according to Dr. Lorimer.  Therefore, either they agreed with Knox, or what Knox told the Lords in June 1564 was not strictly accurate. {105} In any case Knox gave to his country the most extreme of Reformations.

The death of Mary Tudor, and the course of events at home, were now to afford our Reformer the opportunity of promulgating, in Scotland, those ideas which we and his learned Presbyterian student alike regret and condemn.  These persecuting ideas “were only a mistaken theory of Christian duty, and nothing worse,” says Dr. Lorimer.  Nothing could possibly be worse than a doctrine contrary in the highest degree to the teaching of Our Lord, whether the doctrine was proclaimed by Pope, Prelate, or Calvinist.

Here it must be observed that a most important fact in Knox’s career, a most important element in his methods, has been little remarked upon by his biographers.  Ever since he failed, in 1554, to obtain the adhesion of Bullinger and Calvin to his more extreme ideas, he had been his own prophet, and had launched his decrees of the right of the people, of part of the people, and of the individual, to avenge the insulted majesty of God upon idolaters, not only without warrant from the heads of the Calvinistic Church, but to their great annoyance and disgust.  Of this an example will now be given.