Land, but, as the Book of Joshua shows, they did not always do it: "for
with them is always mercy"; despite the massacres, such as that of Agag,
which Knox was wont to cite as examples to the backward brethren! Yet,
relying on another set of texts, not in Joshua, Knox now informed
Lethington that the executors of death on idolatrous princes were "the
people of God"--"the people, or a part of the people." {244a}

Mercy! Happily the policy of carnal men never allowed Knox's "people of
God" to show whether, given a chance to destroy idolaters, they would
display the mercy on which he insists in his reply to the Anabaptist.

It was always useless to argue with Knox; for whatever opinion happened
to suit him at the moment (and at different moments contradictory
opinions happened to suit him), he had ever a Bible text to back him. On
this occasion, if Lethington had been able to quote Knox's own statement,
that with the people of God "there is always mercy" (as in the case of
Cardinal Beaton), he could hardly have escaped by saying that there was
always mercy, _when the people of God had not the upper hand in the
State_, {244b} when unto them God has _not_ "given sufficient force." For
in the chosen people of God "there is _always_ mercy, yea even although
God have pronounced a curse and malediction."

In writing against Anabaptists (1558-59), Knox wanted to make _them_, not
merciful Calvinists, the objects of the fear and revenge of Catholic
rulers. He even hazarded one of his unfulfilled prophecies: Anabaptists,
wicked men, will execute those divine judgments for which Protestants of
his species are too tender-hearted; though, somehow, they make exceptions
in the cases of Beaton and Riccio, and ought to do so in the case of Mary
Stuart!

Lethington did not use this passage of our Reformer's works against him,
though it was published in 1560. Probably the secretary had not worked
his way through the long essay on Predestination. But we have, in the
book against the Anabaptists and in the controversy with Lethington, an
example of Knox's fatal intellectual faults. As an individual man, he
would not have hurt a fly. As a prophet, he deliberately tried to
restore, by a pestilent anachronism, in a Christian age and country, the
ferocities attributed to ancient Israel. This he did not even do
consistently, and when he is inconsistent with his prevailing mood, his
biographers applaud his "moderation"! If he saw a ch