ly felt. Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of
life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received,
when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our
mothers otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a brother
to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it never so unalloyed
and innocent, is not the same as friendship between man and man. Such
friendship is not even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a
woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness
and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the
same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it
would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were,
a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it would mean that he
had accepted the large, simple divisions of society: a strong and
positive spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part
coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain
to himself and others; as one who should go straight before him on a
journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small
lives under foot. It was in virtue of this latter disposition that Knox
was capable of those intimacies with women that embellished his life;
and we find him preserved for us in old letters as a man of many women
friends; a man of some expansion toward the other sex; a man ever ready
to comfort weeping women, and to weep along with them.

Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private life and more
intimate thoughts as have survived to us from all the perils that
environ written paper, an astonishingly large proportion is in the shape
of letters to women of his familiarity. He was twice married, but that
is not greatly to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly
of women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying. What is
really significant is quite apart from marriage. For the man Knox was a
true man, and woman, the _ewig-weibliche_, was as necessary to him, in
spite of all low theories, as ever she was to Goethe. He came to her in
a certain halo of his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came
to her in a glory of art; he made himself necessary to troubled hearts
and minds exercised in the painful complications that naturally result
from all changes in the world's way of thinking; and those whom he had
thus helped became dear