e on their side. The Bishop
"hearing of reformation to be made in his cathedral church, thought time
to stir, or else never"--which was very natural. He was accompanied by a
hundred spears, which must have meant a company at least of four or five
hundred armed men, while the Lords of the Congregation had "their quiet
households," no doubt a very adequate escort. The Bishop threatened that
if John Knox showed his face in the cathedral he should be saluted with
a dozen of culverins, and the gentlemen with him hesitated much to
expose him to such a risk: but their doubts were not shared by the
preacher. He had himself given forth, when in the galley labouring at
the oar in sight of the beloved town and sanctuary, a prophecy that he
should yet preach there, unlikely as it looked; and to recoil from any
danger, when such an opportunity arose, was not in him. "To delay to
preach the morrow (unless the bodie be violentlie witholden) I cannot,"
he said. He preached upon the casting out of the money-changers from the
Temple--a very dangerous subject for such an occasion, and "applied the
corruption that was there to the corruption that is in the Papestrie" so
well that the magistrates of the town, and also the commonalty "for the
most part, did agree to remove all monuments of idolatrie, which also
they did with expedition." But it was not on that day that the great
church shining from afar on its rocky headland, a splendid landmark over
the dangerous bay, was reduced to the condition in which it now remains,
with a few forlorn but graceful pinnacles rising against the misty blue
of sea and sky. No harm would seem to have been done except to the
altars and the decorations; and according to all evidence it is more to
the careless brutality of the eighteenth century, which found an
excellent storehouse of materials for building in the abandoned shrine,
than to any absolute outrage that its present state of utter ruin is
due.

[Illustration: ST. ANDREWS]

The Congregation set forth on its march to Stirling, and thence to
Edinburgh in June, and so great was the commotion which had been raised
by the rumour of the "reformation" wrought in the north in Scone and St.
Johnstone that the mere news of their approach roused "the rasckall
multitude" to the mood of destruction. They had cleared out and
destroyed the convents in Stirling, and those of the Black and Grey
Friars in Edinburgh, before the Reformers came--a result which Knox at