tion
with the other five royal chaplains, he was called to give his opinion
of the Articles then proposed to be adopted as the creed of the English
Church, and of the revised Communion Office then prepared to take the
place of that of 1549. His objections to the act of kneeling in
receiving the elements in the Lord's Supper helped to procure the
insertion of that rubric which high-churchmen term "the black rubric."
He refused both an English bishopric and a London rectory, and continued
to labour on, faithfully and devotedly, as a preacher unattached. He
had a presentiment that the time he would have to do so would be brief,
and he improved it to the uttermost. The Reformation in England at that
date had been forced on by its courtly patrons and their earnest
preachers beyond what was warranted by the hold it had as yet gained on
the mass of the people. When the good King Edward[91] was succeeded by
the bigoted Mary, nothing remained for the Protestant bishops and
preachers but either to prove the sincerity of their convictions in
prison and at the stake, or to leave the country and reserve themselves
in exile for happier times. Knox, as a foreigner, was especially
warranted to choose the latter course; and at the urgent request of his
friends in the north he did so, when it was only not yet too late to
escape.

[Sidenote: Visits Scotland.]

The five years of the reformer's life which followed were not less
eventful for himself nor for those of whom he now became the chosen
leader. After an unsuccessful attempt to set up a substantially Puritan
church among the English exiles at Frankfort, Whittingham and he
obtained at Geneva, through the favour of Calvin, an asylum for
themselves and their like-minded fellow-exiles, where they might be
allowed peacefully to carry out their own forms of worship and
discipline. But he had not been long there till, at the earnest
invitation of the reforming party, he paid a visit to his native land--a
visit which was memorable for its immediate, and still more for its
ultimate, results. For several years the cause of the Reformation had
been making quiet progress. Those who could read the Scriptures had been
drinking the waters of life from the fountain-head. Those who could not,
drank from the streams opened by the Reformation poets, whose verses
were carefully committed to memory. Then came the voice of the living
preacher, accompanied, as it had never yet been in Scotland, with the