immediate access to God through his promise, as (with Calvin) on the
more general doctrine of the immediate authority of God through his
word. But the former--the Evangel--was the original life and light of
the Reformation everywhere, and its glow as of 'glad confident morning'
now flushed the whole sky of Western Europe.[13] Knox himself always
preached it, and on the day before his death he let fall an expression
which indicates that his acceptance of it had rescued him at this very
date from the tossings of an inward sea. 'Go, read where I cast my first
anchor!' he said to his wife. 'And so she read the seventeenth of John's
Gospel.' Now the 'Evangel of John' was what Knox tells us he taught
from day to day in the chapel, within the Castle of St Andrews, at a
certain hour; and when on entering the city he took up this book of the
New Testament, he took it up at the point 'where he left at his
departure from Longniddry where before his residence was,' and whither
Wishart had sent him back to his pupils a year before. And of all parts
of this Evangel the rock-built anchorage of the seventeenth chapter may
surely best claim to be that commemorated in Knox's stately and
deliberate words.

But these conjectures must not make us forget the fact that Knox himself
places an undoubted and great crisis at the threshold of his public
life. His teaching in 1547 of John's Gospel, and of a certain
'catechism,' though carried on within the walls, sometimes of the
chapel, and sometimes of the parish kirk, of St Andrews, was supposed to
be private or tutorial. Soon, however, the more influential men there
urged him 'that he would take the preaching place upon him. But he
utterly refused, alleging that he would not run where God had not called
him.... Whereupon, they privily among themselves advising, having with
them in council Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, they concluded that they
would give a charge to the said John, and that publicly by the mouth of
their preacher.' And so, after a sermon turning on the power of the
church or congregation to call men to the ministry,

'The said John Rough, preacher, directed his words to the said
John Knox, saying, "Brother, ye shall not be offended, albeit
that I speak unto you that which I have in charge, even from all
those that are here present, which is this: In the name of God,
and of His Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of these that
presently call you by my mou