d to choose, once and for all, amid danger,
confusion, terror, whether they would serve God or Mammon; for to serve
both would be soon impossible.

Which side, in that war of light and darkness, George Buchanan took, is
notorious. He saw then, as others have seen since, that the two men in
Scotland who were capable of being her captains in the strife were Knox
and Murray; and to them he gave in his allegiance heart and soul.

This is the critical epoch in Buchanan's life. By his conduct to Queen
Mary he must stand or fall. It is my belief that he will stand. It is
not my intention to enter into the details of a matter so painful, so
shocking, so prodigious; and now that that question is finally set at
rest, by the writings both of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, there is no need
to allude to it further, save where Buchanan's name is concerned. One
may now have every sympathy with Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe a
figure so stately, so tragic, in one sense so heroic,--for she reminds
one rather of the heroine of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom by
some irresistible fate, than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and
of our modern and Christian times. One may sympathise with the great
womanhood which charmed so many while she was alive; which has charmed,
in later years, so many noble spirits who have believed in her innocence,
and have doubtless been elevated and purified by their devotion to one
who seemed to them an ideal being. So far from regarding her as a
hateful personage, one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a woman whom
God may have loved, and may have pardoned, to judge from the punishment
so swift, and yet so enduring, which He inflicted. At least, he must so
believe who holds that punishment is a sign of mercy; that the most
dreadful of all dooms is impunity. Nay, more, those "casket" letters and
sonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who believes in her guilt on
other grounds; a relief when one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness,
a delicacy, a magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously misplaced,
which shows what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, joined to that
queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to Scotland,
had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from childhood, by an
education so abominable, that any one who knows what words she must have
heard, what scenes she must have beheld in France, from her youth up,
will wonder that she sinn