on the occasion and opportunity. He speaks with two voices. He was very
impetuous; in the death of Mary Tudor he suddenly saw the chance of
bringing English religion up, or down, to the Genevan level, and so he
wrote this letter of vehement rebuke and inopportune advice.

Knox must have given his biographers "medicines to make them love him."
The learned Dr. Lorimer finds in this epistle, one of the most fierce of
his writings, "a programme of what this Reformation reformed should be--a
programme which was honourable alike to Knox's zeal and his moderation."
The "moderation" apparently consists in not abolishing bishoprics, but
substituting "ten bishops of moderate income for one lordly prelate."
Despite this moderation of the epistle, "its intolerance is extreme,"
says Dr. Lorimer, and Knox's advice "cannot but excite astonishment."
{104} The party which agreed with him in England was the minority of a
minority; the Catholics, it is usually supposed, though we have no
statistics, were the majority of the English nation. Yet the only
chance, according to Knox, that England has of escaping the vengeance of
an irritable Deity, is for the smaller minority to alter the prayer book,
resist the Queen, if she wishes to retain it unaltered, and force the
English people into the "discipline" of a Swiss Protestant town.

Dr. Lorimer, a most industrious and judicious writer, adds that, in these
matters of "discipline," and of intolerance, Knox "went to a tragical
extreme of opinion, of which none of the other leading reformers had set
an example;" also that what he demanded was substantially demanded by the
Puritans all through the reign of Elizabeth. But Knox averred publicly,
and in his "History," that for everything he affirmed in Scotland he had
heard the judgments "of the most godly and learned that be known in
Europe . . . and for my assurance I have the handwritings of many." Now
he had affirmed frequently, in Scotland, the very doctrines of discipline
and persecution "of which none of the other leading Reformers had set an
example," according to Dr. Lorimer. Therefore, either they agreed with
Knox, or what Knox told the Lords in June 1564 was not strictly accurate.
{105} In any case Knox gave to his country the most extreme of
Reformations.

The death of Mary Tudor, and the course of events at home, were now to
afford our Reformer the opportunity of promulgating, in Scotland, those
ideas which we and his learned