isted, in Scotland, that people should kneel, the
upholders of Knox's ideas denied that the magistrate (James VI.) had
any right to issue such an order, and they refused to obey while
remaining within the Established Church. They did not 'disrupt,' like
the Free Church; they simply acted as they pleased, and denounced
their obedient brethren as no 'lawful ministers.' The end of it all
was that they stirred up the Civil War, in which the first shot was
fired by the legendary Jenny Geddes, throwing her stool at the reader
in St. Giles's. Thus we see that the State was to be obeyed in matters
of religion, when the State did the bidding of the Kirk, and not
otherwise. When first employed as a 'licensed preacher,' and agent of
the State in England, Knox accepted just as much of the State's
liturgy as he pleased; the liturgy ordered the people to kneel, Knox
and his Berwick congregation disobeyed. With equal freedom, he and the
other royal chaplains, at Easter, preaching before the King, denounced
his ministers, Northumberland and the rest. Knox spoke of them in his
sermon as Judas, Shebna, and some other scriptural malignants. Later
he said that he repented having put things so mildly; he ought to have
called the ministers by their names, not veiled things in a hint. Now
we cannot easily conceive a chaplain of her late Majesty, in a sermon
preached before her, denouncing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, say
Mr. Gladstone, as 'Judas.' Yet Knox, a licensed preacher of a State
Church, indulged his 'spiritual independence' to that extent, and took
shame to himself that he had not gone further.

Obviously, if this is 'Erastianism,' it is of an unusual kind. The
idea of Knox is that in a Catholic State the ruler is not to be obeyed
in religious matters by the true believers; sometimes Knox wrote that
the Catholic ruler ought to be met by 'passive resistance;' sometimes
that he ought to be shot at sight. He stated these diverse doctrines
in the course of eighteen months. In a Protestant country, the
Catholics must obey the Protestant ruler, or take their chances of
prison, exile, fire and death. The Protestant ruler, in a Protestant
State, is to be obeyed, in spiritual matters, by Protestants, just as
far as the Kirk may happen to approve of his proceedings, or even
further, in practice, if there is no chance of successful resistance.

We may take it that Knox, if he had been alive and retained his old
ideas in 1843, would not hav