one had
individually received. But he never shrank from it, or from pointing out
that such relation to God himself was the noblest privilege. And the
evidence is plain that all over the Europe of that age this reception of
a Divine message direct to the individual, in the newly opened
Scriptures, was, not a burden, but a source of incomparable energy and
exhilaration--alike to men and women, to the simple and the learned, to
the young and--stranger still--to the old. Knox knew it; and he knew
that his claiming a special message or ambassadorship would be, not so
much 'exceeding the bounds' of his vocation, as denying it altogether.
He was imperious and dogmatic by nature; and he took these natural
qualities with him into his new work. But he would have shuddered at the
idea of formally interposing his own personality between the hearers of
that time and the message which they received. And he would have
regarded the office of a mere prophet--the bearer, that is, of a special
message, even though that message be divine--as a degradation, if, in
order to attain it, he had to lay down the preaching of 'that doctrine
and that heavenly religion, whereof it hath pleased His merciful
providence to make _me, among others, a simple soldier and
witness-bearer unto men_.'[29]

Does it follow that Knox--who thus rejected strongly the idea of being a
prophet to his time, and insisted instead upon his merely receiving and
transmitting the one message which was common to all--that this man was
therefore little more to his age than any other might be? By no means.
The same message comes to all men in an age, and is received by many,
but it is received by each in a different way.[30] And the way in which
this message was then received by one man in East Lothian made all the
difference to Scotland, and perhaps to Europe. It must not be forgotten,
indeed, that the result of it upon Knox himself was to transform him. So
certain is this that some have felt as if this were the case of one
who, up to about his fortieth year, was an ordinary, commonplace, and
representative Scotsman, and was thereafter changed utterly, but only by
being filled with the sacred fire of conviction. This is only about half
the truth, though it is an important half--to Knox himself by far the
more important. But it is not the whole, and it is far from the whole
_for us_. The author who has enabled us to see his own confused and
changing age under 'the broad clear