at
church. In that church there was occasionally much to draw even the
vulgar eye. One day it was Huntly, the great Catholic Earl, the most
famous man in Knox's opinion among the nobility of Scotland for three
hundred years for 'both felicity and worldly wisdom,' whose huge bulk as
he had sat opposite to the preacher (the year before he died 'without
stroke of sword' on the field of Corrichie) was afterwards, thus vividly
recalled.

'Have ye not seen one greater than any of you sitting where
presently ye sit, pick his nails, and pull down his bonnet over
his eyes, when idolatry, witchcraft, murder, oppression, and
such vices were rebuked? Was not his common talk, When the
knaves have railed their fill, then will they hold their
peace?'[118]

Or, again, it was the French Ambassador, Le Croc, sitting in state on
the first Sunday after the news of St Bartholomew, who heard the
preacher denounce his master, King Charles, as a 'murderer,' from whom
and from whose posterity the vengeance of God would refuse to depart.
But these were incidents dramatic and political. And noble as a
political calling may be, there have always been some to believe that
drawing men and women up to a higher moral life, especially when that
life is fed from an immortal hope, is nobler still. But Knox, let us
remember, was throughout his early ministry the witness of a still more
fascinating and indeed unexampled spectacle--a whole generation suddenly
confronted with the moral call of primitive Christianity, and striving
to respond to it, no longer in dependence on Church tradition, but by
each man moulding himself directly upon Christian facts and Christian
promises in the very form in which these were originally delivered by
the apostolic age. He was witness of it; and more than witness, for
beyond any other man in Scotland Knox was its guide. And while the
guidance of the great theological leaders of that generation tended
naturally--and quite apart from their usurped statutory ascendency--to
press too heavily upon the recovered freedom of Scotland, that danger
was but little felt in those early days of enthusiasm in the High Church
of Edinburgh.

* * * * *

What like was the man who was seen, almost every day during all those
years, pacing up and down between the Netherbow and St Giles?

Knox, as we are told by a surviving contemporary (who enclosed a
portrait of him along with the de