say when he returns to Geneva, and is asked why he did not
carry out his purpose? He then encourages them to be resolute.

Knox "certainly made the most," says Professor Hume Brown, "of the two
letters from correspondents unknown to us." He at once represented them
as the cause of his failure to keep tryst; but, in April 1558, writing
from Geneva to "the sisters," he said, "the cause of my stop to this day
I do not clearly understand." He did not know why he left England before
the Marian persecutions; and he did not know why he had not crossed over
to Scotland in 1557. "It may be that God justly permitted Sathan to put
in my mind such cogitations as these: I heard such troubles as appeared
in that realm;"--troubles presently to be described.

Hearing, at Dieppe, then, in October 1557, of the troubles, and of the
faint war with England, and moved, perhaps, he suggests, by Satan, {77a}
Knox "began to dispute with himself, as followeth, 'Shall Christ, the
author of peace, concord, and quietness, be preached where war is
proclaimed, and tumults appear to rise? What comfort canst thou have to
see the one part of the people rise up against the other,'" and so forth.
These truly Christian reflections, as we may think them, "yet do trouble
and move my wicked heart," says Knox. He adds, hypothetically, that
perhaps the letters received at Dieppe "did somewhat discourage me."
{77b} He was only certain that the devil was at the bottom of the whole
affair.

The "tumults that appear to arise" are probably the dissensions between
the Regent and the mutinous nobles who refused to invade England at her
command. D'Oysel needed a bodyguard; and he feared that the Lords would
seize and carry off the Regent. Arran, in 1564, speaks of a plot to
capture her in Holyrood. Here were promises of tumults. There were also
signs of a renewed feud between the house of Hamilton and the Stewart
Earl of Lennox, the rival claimant of the crown. There seems, moreover,
to have been some tumultuary image-breaking. {78}

Knox may have been merely timid: he is not certain, but his delay passed
in consulting the learned, for the satisfaction of his conscience, and
his confessed doubts as to whether Christianity should be pushed by civil
war, seem to indicate that he was not always the prophet patron of modern
Jehus, that he did, occasionally, consult the Gospel as well as the
records of pre-Christian Israel.

The general result was that, from