IV. His Character. — Knox was a man of small stat- ure, and of a weakly habit of body, but he had a vigor- ous mind and an unconquerable will. Firmness and decision characterized his entire course. His piety was deep and fervent, and the zeal which consumed him never knew abatement. Yet it was not uninteUigent. He was well educated for his time, and always endeav- ored to increase his knowledge, even in middle life seiz- ing his tirst opportunity to learn Hebrew. An inward conviction of eternal realities inspired him with a bold and fervid eloquence which often held thousands of his countrymen as if under a spell. In dealing with men, he was shrewd and penetrating to the last degree. No outward show or conventional jiretence deceived him, ^'\'hether he encountered queens, nobles, or peasants, he went straight to the heart of things, and insisted upon absolute reality. His mind was not of a reflective or speculative cast, and his writings, which are not few, have at this day mainly an antitpiarian interest. His earnestness was all in a practical direction, as, indeed, his life was one long contlict from his flight from St. Andrew's in 1542 until his return thither in 1571. His language was such as became his thought — simjDle, homely, and direct. " He had learned," as he once said in the pulpit, "plainly and boldly to call wickedness by its own terms, a tig a fig, and a spade a spade." Nor did he ever quaU. Nothuig daunted him; his spirit rose high in the midst of danger. The day his body was laid in the grave, the regent INIorton said truh', " There lies he who never feared the face of man." Just such a man was needed for the work to which Provi- dence calk'd him. To lay the axe to the root of the tree and warn a generation of vipers requires one stem as Elijah, vehement as John the Baptist. It has been asked if the work would not have been done better had the spirit of love and moderation, as well as of power, presided over it; the answer is that, considering the character of the times and the jieople, in that case jier- haps the thing would not liave been done at all. But it was done, thoroughly done, and more effectually than in any other country in Europe. The First Book of Discipline required a school in every parish, a college in every " notable town," and three universities in the kingdom. The burst of Carlyle {Essay on Sir Walter Scott) is well deserved: "Honor to all the brave and true ; everlasting honor to brave old Knox, one of the truest of the true ! That, in the moment while he and his cause, amid civil broils, in convidsion and confusion, were still but straggling for life, he sent the schoolmas- ter forth into all corners, and said, ' Let the people bo taught;' this is but one, and, indeed, an inevitable and comparatively inconsiderable item in his great message to men. His message in its true compass was. Let men know that they are men ; created by God, responsible to God; who work in any meanest moment of time what will last through eternity. This great message Knox did deliver with a man's voice and strength, and found a people to believe him .... The Scotch na- tional character originates in many circumstances; first of all, in the Saxon stuff there was to work on; but next, and Iteyond all else except that, m the Presbyte- rian Gospel of .l<ihn Knox."
Says Cunningham (Church Bist. of Scotland [Edinb. 1859, 2 vols. >Svo], i, 407 sq.), " Knox was not perfect, as no man is. He was coarse, tierce, dictatorial ; but he kad
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great redeeming qualities — qualities which are seldom found in such stormy, changeful periods as that in which he lived He was consistent, sincere, unseltish. From first to last he pursued the same straight, unswerving course, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left; tirni amid continual vicissitudes; and if he could have biu-ncd and disembowelled unhappy Papists, he would have done it with the fullest conviction that he was do- ing Goil ser\-ice. He hated Popery with a perfect ha- tred ; and regarding Mary and lier mother as its chief personations in the land, he followed them through life with a rancor which was all the more deadly because it was rooted in religion. He was, perhaps, fond of power and popularity, but he gained them by no mean compli- ances. On a question of principle he would quarrel with the highest, and, having quarreled, he would not hesi- tate to vilify them to their face. His hands were clean of bribes. He did not grow rich by the spoils of the Keformation. He was content to live and die the min- ister of St. Giles's. Is not such a one, rough and bear- ish though he be, more to be venerated than the supple, time-serving Churchmen who were the tools of the Eng- lish Keformation? Does he not stand out in pleasing relief from the grasping barons with whom he was as- sociatetl, who hated monks because they coveted their corn-fields, and afterwards disgraced the religion they professed by their feuds, their conspiracies, and cold- blooded assassinations?" But perhaps the greatest trib- ute that has ever been paid to the memory of John Knox lias of late been penned by Froude {Hist, of Eng- land, X, 457 sq.). Frequently the charge of fanaticism has been laid at the door of the great Scottish reformer; this Froude unhesitatingly refutes, and assures us that it was only against Popery, the system that enslaves both the Church and the State, that he fought. '• He was no narrow fanatic who, in a world in which God's grace was equally visible in a thousand creeds, could see truth and goodness nowhere but in his own formula. He was a large, noble, generous man, with a shrewd perception of actual fact, who found himself face to face with a system of liideous miquity. He believed him- self a prophet, with a direct commission from heaven to overthrow it, and liis return to Scotland became the sig- nal, tlierefore, for the renewal of the struggle."