John Knox and the Reformation

the "blasphemous cavillations" of an Anabaptist, his treatise on Predestination. Laing thought that this work was "chiefly written

ear as the place of printing; the authorities knowing of what Knox was capable from the specimen given in his "First Blast." There se

gment, and did both say and write that no man ought to be persecuted for his conscience' sake. . . ." {102a} Knox replied that Servetus was a blasphemer, and that Moses had been a more wholesale persecutor than the Edwardian burners of Joan of Kent, and the Genevan Church which roasted Servetus {102b} (October 1553). He incidentally proves that he was better than his doctrine. In England an Anabaptist, after asking for secrecy, showed him a manu

s reached him before January 12, 1559, when he wrote from Geneva a singular "Brief Exhortation to England

hath long deserved," if the country does not become much more puritan than it had ever been, or is ever likely to be. Knox "wraps you all in idolatry, all in murder, all in one and the same iniquity," except the actual Marian martyrs; those who "abstained from idolatry;" and those who "avoided the realm" or ran away. He had set one of th

s services must be reduced, in short, to his own bare standard. Next, the Genevan and Knoxian "kirk discipline" must be introduced. No "power or liberty (must) be permitted to any, of what estate, degree, or authority they be, either to live without the yoke of discipline by God's word

to preach, to preach." A brief sketch of what The Book of Discipline later set forth for the edificat

spoke in a tone much more moderate in addressing the early English nonconformist secessionists (1568). Indeed, it is as easy almost to prove, by isolated passages in Knox's writings, that he was a sensible, moderate man, loathing and condemning active resistance in religion, as to prove him to be a sen

rics, 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 ha

e 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 do

arned Presbyterian student alike regret and condemn. These persecuting ideas "were only a mistaken theory of Christian duty, and nothing worse," says Dr. Lorimer. Nothi

in 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,