and fact; the truth
alone is there for him, the rest a mere shadow and deceptive
nonentity. However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and
that only _can_ he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire,
whither Knox and the others, after their Castle of St Andrew's was
taken, had been sent as Galley-slaves,--some officer or priest, one
day, presented them an Image of the Virgin Mother, requiring that
they, the blasphemous heretics, should do it reverence. Mother? Mother
of God? said Knox, when the turn came to him: This is no Mother of
God: this is 'a _pented bredd_,'--a piece of wood, I tell you, with
paint on it! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for being
worshipped, added Knox, and flung the thing into the river. It was not
very cheap jesting there: but come of it what might, this thing to
Knox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a
_pented bredd_; worship it he would not.

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage;
the Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; the
whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making; it is
alone strong. How many _pented bredds_, pretending to be real, are
fitter to swim than to be worshipped!--This Knox cannot live but by
fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He
is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic:
it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good honest
intellectual talent, no transcendent one;--a narrow, inconsiderable
man, as compared with Luther: but in heartfelt instinctive adherence
to truth, in _sincerity_, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one
might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet
cast. "He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "who
never feared the face of man." He resembles, more than any of the
moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance,
rigid narrow-looking adherence to God's truth, stern rebuke in the
name of God to all that forsake truth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the
guise of an Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are to
take him for that; not require him to be other.

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her
own palace, to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such
cruelty, such coarseness fills us with indignation. On reading the
actual narrative of the business, what Knox s