h the church
system in which he was brought up. What was that system, and what was
Knox's individual outlook upon the Church--first, of Western Europe, and
secondly of Scotland?

We know at least that Knox, before breaking with the church system of
mediaeval Europe, was for twenty years in close contact with it. And his
was no mere external contact such as Haddington, with its magnificent
churches and monasteries, supplied. It commenced with study, and with
study under the chief theological teacher of the land and the time.
Major was the last of the scholastics in our country. But the energy of
thought of scholasticism, marvellous as it often was, was built upon the
lines and contained within the limits of an already existing church
system. And that system was an authoritative one in every sense. The
hierarchy which governed the Church, and all but constituted it, was
sacerdotal; that is, it interposed its own mediation at the point where
the individual meets and deals with God. But it interposed
correspondingly at every other point of the belief and practice of the
private man, enforcing its doctrine upon the conscience, and its
direction upon the will, of every member of the church. Nor was the
system authoritative only over those who received or accepted it.
Originally, indeed, and even in the age when the faith was digested into
a creed by the first Council, the emperor, himself an ardent member of
the Church, left it free to all his subjects throughout the world to be
its members or not as they chose. But that great experiment of
toleration lasted less than a century. For much more than a thousand
years the same faith, slowly transformed into a church system under the
central administration of the Popes, had been made binding by imperial
and municipal law upon every human being in Europe.

Major, not only by his own earlier writings, but as the representative
in Scotland of the University of Paris, recalled to his countrymen the
great struggle of the Middle Age in favour of freedom--and especially of
church freedom against the Popes. That struggle indeed had Germany
rather than France for its original centre, and it was under the flag of
the Empire that the progressive despotism of Hildebrand and his
successors over the feudal world was chiefly resisted. The Empire,
however, was now a decaying force. Europe was being split into
nationalities; and national churches--a novelty in Christendom--were,
under various pr