laimed a universal and God-given morality, a bar at which all, from
the lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.

The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness. Moral life and
death were in the balance. If the Scots people were to be told that the
crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or beyond
punishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way, there was an
end of morality among them. Every man, from the greatest to the least,
would go and do likewise, according to his powers of evil. That method
was being tried in France, and in Spain likewise, during those very
years. Notorious crimes were hushed up under pretence of loyalty;
excused as political necessities; smiled away as natural and pardonable
weaknesses. The result was the utter demoralisation, both of France and
Spain. Knox and Buchanan, the one from the stand-point of an old Hebrew
prophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the
other method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike to
conscience and to God. The result was virtue and piety, and that manly
independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in
a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost into
two hostile camps, two rival races.

And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sided
with Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed them. The
Roman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary's right to impunity,
while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and set themselves
to assert her entire innocence; while the Scots who have followed their
example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground. They have
fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality:
they have alleged--as they had a fair right to do--the probability of
intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a
Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long
while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity
have proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies
have been enlisted--and who can blame them?--in loyalty to a Queen,
chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and--as they conceived--the
innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of
facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always--as far as I know--been
right in their view of morals; they ha