el
during her absence, and committed outrages; for which two of them were
indicted, and it was intended to bring them to a trial. Knox wrote
circular letters to the most considerable zealots of the party, and
charged them to appear in town and protect their brethren. The holy
sacraments, he there said, are abused by profane Papists; the mass has
been said; and in worshipping that idol, the priests have omitted no
ceremony, not even the conjuring of their accursed water, that had ever
been practised in the time of the greatest blindness. These violent
measures for opposing justice were little short of rebellion; and Knox
was summoned before the council to answer for his offence. The courage
of the man was equal to his insolence. He scrupled not to tell the queen
that the pestilent Papists who had inflamed her against these holy men
were the sons of the devil; and must therefore obey the directions of
their father, who had been a liar and a manslayer from the beginning.
The matter ended with the full acquittal of Knox.[**] Randolph, the
English ambassador in Scotland, had reason to write to Cecil, speaking
of the Scottish nation, "I think marvellously of the wisdom of God, that
gave this unruly, inconstant, and cumbersome people no more power nor
substance; for they would otherwise run wild."[***]

* Knox.

** Knox, p. 336, 342.

*** Keith, p. 202.

We have related these incidents at greater length than the necessity of
our subject may seem to require; but even trivial circumstances, which
show the manners of the age, are often more instructive, as well as
entertaining, than the great transactions of wars and negotiations,
which are nearly similar in all periods and in all countries of the
world.

The reformed clergy in Scotland had at that time a very natural reason
for their ill humor; namely, the poverty, or rather beggary, to which
they were reduced. The nobility and gentry had at first laid their hands
on all the property of the regular clergy, without making any provision
for the friars and nuns, whom they turned out of their possessions.
The secular clergy of the Catholic communion, though they lost all
ecclesiastical jurisdiction, still held some of the temporalities of
their benefices; and either became laymen themselves and converted them
into private property, or made conveyance of them at low prices to the
nobility, who thus enriched themselves by the plunder of the church. The
new teache