The elements of a League, as in France, did not exist.  There was no fervently Catholic town population like that of Paris; no popular noble warriors, like the Ducs de Guise, to act as leaders.  Thus Scotland, in this age, ran little risk of a religious civil war.  No organised and armed faction existed to face the Congregation.  When the counter-Reformation set in, many Catholics endured fines and exile with constancy.

The theology of the Confession of Faith is, of course, Calvinistic.  No “works” are, technically, “good” which are not the work of the Spirit of our Lord, dwelling in our hearts by faith.  “Idolaters,” and wicked people, not having that spirit, can do no good works.  The blasphemy that “men who live according to equity and justice shall be saved, what religion soever they have professed,” is to be abhorred.  “The Kirk is invisible,” consisting of the Elect, “who are known only to God.”  This gave much cause of controversy to Knox’s Catholic opponents.  “The notes of the true Church” are those of Calvin’s.  As to the Sacrament, though the elements be not the natural body of Christ, yet “the faithful, in the right use of the Lord’s Table, so do eat the body and drink the blood of the Lord Jesus that He remains in them and they in Him . . . in such conjunction with Christ Jesus as the natural man cannot comprehend.”

This is a highly sacramental and confessedly mystical doctrine, not less unintelligible to “the natural man” than the Catholic theory which Knox so strongly reprobated.  Alas, that men called Christian have shed seas of blood over the precise sense of that touching command of our Lord, which, though admitted to be incomprehensible, they have yet endeavoured to comprehend and define!

A serious task for Knox was to draw up, with others, a “Book of the Policy and Discipline of the Kirk,” a task entrusted to them in April 1560.  In politics, till January 1561, the Lords hoped that they might induce Elizabeth (then entangled with Leicester, as Knox knew) to marry Arran, but whether “Glycerium” (as Bishop Jewel calls her) had already detected in “the saucy youth” “a half crazy fool,” as Mr. Froude says, or not, she firmly refused.  She much preferred Lord Robert Dudley, whose wife had just then broken her neck.  The unfortunate Arran had fought resolutely, Knox tells us, by the side of Lord James, in the winter of 1559, but he already, in 1560, showed strange moods, and later fell into sheer lunacy.  In December died “the young King of France, husband to our Jezebel—­unhappy Francis . . . he suddenly perished of a rotten ear . . . in that deaf ear that never would hear the truth of God” (December 5, 1560).  We have little of Knox’s poetry, but he probably composed a translation, in verse, of a Latin poem indited by one of “the godly in France,” whence he borrowed his phrase “a rotten ear” (aure putrefacta corruit).

   “Last Francis, that unhappy child,
      His father’s footsteps following plain,
   To Christ’s crying deaf ears did yield,
      A rotten ear was then his bane.”