was logically a persecuting religion.

Knox was made a King's chaplain and transferred to Newcastle. He saw
that the country was, by preference, Catholic; that the life of Edward
VI. hung on a thread; and that with the accession of his sister, Mary
Tudor, Protestant principles would be as unsafe as under "umquhile the
Cardinal." Knox therefore, "from the foresight of troubles to come" (so
he writes to Mrs. Bowes, February 28, 1554), {36b} declined any post, a
bishopric, or a living, which would in honour oblige him to face the fire
of persecution. At the same time he was even then far at odds with the
Church of England that he had sound reasons for refusing benefices.

On Christmas day, 1552, {37a} he preached at Newcastle against Papists,
as "thirsting nothing more than the King's death, which their iniquity
would procure." In two brief years Knox was himself publicly expressing
his own thirst for the Queen's death, and praying for a Jehu or a
Phinehas, slayers of idolaters, such as Mary Tudor. If any fanatic had
taken this hint, and the life of Mary Tudor, Catholics would have said
that Knox's "iniquity procured" the murder, and they would have had fair
excuse for the assertion.

Meanwhile charges were brought against the Reformer, on the ground of his
Christmas sermon of peace and goodwill. Northumberland (January 9, 1552-
53) sends to Cecil "a letter of poor Knox, by the which you may perceive
what perplexity the poor soul remaineth in at this present." We have not
Knox's interesting letter, but Northumberland pled his cause against a
charge of treason. In fact, however, the Court highly approved of his
sermon. He was presently again in what he believed to be imminent danger
of life: "I fear that I be not yet ripe, nor able to glorify Christ by my
faith," he wrote to Mrs. Bowes, "but what lacketh now, God shall perform
in His own time." {37b} We do not know what peril threatened the
Reformer now (probably in March 1553), but he frequently, later, seems to
have doubted his own "ripeness" for martyrdom. His reluctance to suffer
did not prevent him from constant attendance to the tedious
self-tormentings of Mrs. Bowes, and of "three honest poor women" in
London.

Knox, at all events, was not so "perplexed" that he feared to speak his
mind in the pulpit. In Lent, 1553, preaching before the boy king, he
denounced his ministers in trenchant historical parallels between them
and Achitophel, Shebna, and Judas