raving for a spiritual and a national existence, and at the call
of the Reformation the Scotch people rose suddenly into a nation and a
Church.

[Sidenote: Knox.]

One well-known figure embodied the moral strength of the new movement.
In the king's boyhood, amidst the wild turmoil which followed on
Murray's fall, an old man bent with years and toil might have been seen
creeping with a secretary's aid to the pulpit of St. Giles. But age and
toil were powerless over the spirit of John Knox. In the pulpit "he
behoved to lean at his first entry: but ere he had done with his sermon
he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit into
blads and fly out of it." It was in vain that men strove to pen the
fiery words of the great preacher. "In the opening up of his text," says
a devout listener, "he was moderate; but when he entered into
application he made me so grue and tremble that I could not hold a pen
to write." What gave its grandeur to the doctrine of Knox was his
resolute assertion of a Christian order before which the social and
political forces of the world about him shrank into insignificance. The
meanest peasant, once called of God, felt within him a strength that was
stronger than the might of nobles, and a wisdom that was wiser than the
statecraft of kings. In that mighty elevation of the masses which was
embodied in the Calvinist doctrines of election and grace lay the germs
of the modern principles of human equality. The fruits of such a
teaching soon showed themselves in a new attitude of the people. "Here,"
said Morton, over the grave of John Knox, "here lies one who never
feared nor flattered any flesh"; and if Scotland still reverences the
memory of the reformer it is because at that grave her peasant and her
trader learned to look in the face of nobles and kings and "not be
ashamed."

[Sidenote: The Kirk and the people.]

The moral power which Knox created was to express itself through the
ecclesiastical forms which had been devised by the genius of Calvin. The
new force of popular opinion was concentrated and formulated in an
ordered system of kirk-sessions and presbyteries and provincial synods,
while chosen delegates formed the General Assembly of the Kirk. In this
organization of her churches, Scotland saw herself for the first time
the possessor of a really representative system, of a popular
government. In her Parliaments the peasant had no voice, the burgher a
feeble and unimpor