th, I charge you that you refuse not
this holy vocation, but ... that you take upon you the public
office and charge of preaching, even as you look to avoid God's
heavy displeasure, and desire that He shall multiply His graces
with you." And in the end, he said to those that were present,
"Was not this your charge to me? And do ye not approve this
vocation?" They answered, "It was: and we approve it." Whereat
the said John, abashed, burst forth in most abundant tears, and
withdrew himself to his chamber. His countenance and behaviour,
from that day till the day that he was compelled to present
himself to the public place of preaching, did sufficiently
declare the grief and trouble of his heart; for no man saw any
sign of mirth in him, neither yet had he pleasure to accompany
any man, many days together.'[14]

There is no reason to think that Knox exaggerates the importance of this
scene in his own history. A man has but one life, and the choosing even
of his secular work in it is sometimes so difficult as to make him
welcome any external compulsion. But the necessity of an external and
even a divine vocation, in order to justify a man's devoting his life to
handling things divine, has long been a tradition of the Christian
Church--and especially of the Scottish church, which in its parts, and
as a whole, has been repeatedly convulsed by this question of 'The
Call.' And in Knox's time, as in the earliest age of Christianity, what
is now a tradition was a very stern fact. The men who were thus calling
him knew well, and Knox himself, more clear of vision than any of them,
knew better, that what they were inviting him to was in all probability
a violent death. Rough himself perished in the flames at Smithfield; and
four months after this vocation Knox was sitting chained and half-naked
in the galleys at Rouen, under the lash of a French slave-driver. He did
not perhaps himself always remember how the future then appeared to him.
Old men looking back upon their past are apt 'to see in their life the
story of their life,' and the Reformer, after his later amazing
victories, sometimes speaks as if these had been his in hope, or even in
promise, from the outset of his career. But it is plain to us now, as we
study his letters in those early years, that he was repeatedly brought
to accept what we know to have been the real probability--viz., that,
while the ultimate triumph of