Hallam, Dr. Joseph Robertson, David Hume, and
the Edinburgh reviewer of 1816, than with several more recent students of
Knox.

"The Reformer's violent counsels and intemperate speech were remarkable,"
writes Dr. Robertson, "even in his own ruthless age," and he gives
fourteen examples. {0a} "Lord Hailes has shown," he adds, "how little
Knox's statements" (in his "History") "are to be relied on even in
matters which were within the Reformer's own knowledge." In Scotland
there has always been the party of Cavalier and White Rose
sentimentalism. To this party Queen Mary is a saintly being, and their
admiration of Claverhouse goes far beyond that entertained by Sir Walter
Scott. On the other side, there is the party, equally sentimental, which
musters under the banner of the Covenant, and sees scarcely a blemish in
Knox. A pretty sample of the sentiment of this party appears in a
biography (1905) of the Reformer by a minister of the Gospel. Knox
summoned the organised brethren, in 1563, to overawe justice, when some
men were to be tried on a charge of invading in arms the chapel of
Holyrood. No proceeding could be more anarchic than Knox's, or more in
accordance with the lovable customs of my dear country, at that time. But
the biographer of 1905, "a placed minister," writes that "the doing of
it" (Knox's summons) "was only an assertion of the liberty of the Church,
and of the members of the Commonwealth as a whole, to assemble for
purposes which were clearly lawful"--the purposes being to overawe
justice in the course of a trial!

On sentiment, Cavalier or Puritan, reason is thrown away.

I have been surprised to find how completely a study of Knox's own works
corroborates the views of Dr. Robertson and Lord Hailes. That Knox ran
so very far ahead of the Genevan pontiffs of his age in violence; and
that in his "History" he needs such careful watching, was, to me, an
unexpected discovery. He may have been "an old Hebrew prophet," as Mr.
Carlyle says, but he had also been a young Scottish notary! A Hebrew
prophet is, at best, a dangerous anachronism in a delicate crisis of the
Church Christian; and the notarial element is too conspicuous in some
passages of Knox's "History."

That Knox was a great man; a disinterested man; in his regard for the
poor a truly Christian man; as a shepherd of Calvinistic souls a man
fervent and considerate; of pure life; in friendship loyal; by jealousy
untainted; in private char