p; and Baal worshippers, if recalcitrant, must die.

These extreme unchristian ideas, then, were new in Scotland, even to
"divers who had a zeal to godliness." For their discussion, at Erskine
of Dun's party, were present, among others, Willock, a Scots preacher
returned from England, and young Maitland of Lethington. We are not told
what part Willock took in the conversation. The arguments turned on
biblical analogies, never really coincident with the actual modern
circumstances. The analogy produced in discussion by those who did not
go to all extremes with Knox did not, however, lack appropriateness.
Christianity, in fact, as they seem to have argued, did arise out of
Judaism; retaining the same God and the same scriptures, but, in virtue
of the sacrifice of its Founder, abstaining from the sacrifices and
ceremonial of the law. In the same way Protestantism arose out of
mediaeval Catholicism, retaining the same God and the same scriptures,
but rejecting the mediaeval ceremonial and the mediaeval theory of the
sacrifice of the Mass. It did not follow that the Mass was sheer
"idolatry," at which no friend of the new ideas could be present.

As a proof that such presence or participation was not unlawful, was not
idolatry, in the existing state of affairs, was adduced the conduct of
St. Paul and the advice given to him by St. James and the Church in
Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 18-36). Paul was informed that many thousands of
Jews "believed," yet remained zealous for the law, the old order. They
had learned that Paul advised the Jews in Greece and elsewhere not to
"walk after the customs." Paul should prove that "he also kept the law."
For this purpose he, with four Christian Jews under a vow, was to purify
himself, and he went into the Temple, "until that an offering should be
offered for every one of them."

"Offerings," of course, is the term in our version for sacrifices,
whether of animals or of "unleavened wafers anointed with oil." The
argument from analogy was, I infer, that the Mass, with its wafer, was
precisely such an "offering," such a survival in Catholic ritual, as in
Jewish ritual St. Paul consented to, by the advice of the Church of
Jerusalem; consequently Protestants in a Catholic country, under the
existing circumstances, might attend the Mass. The Mass was not
"idolatry." The analogy halts, like all analogies, but so, of course,
and to fatal results, does Knox's analogy between the foreign worsh