oo, may have unconsciously revealed
to his pupils with how much hope the former generation had looked
forward to a council. We find afterwards that Knox and his friends, like
Luther in his earlier stages, when appealing against the hierarchy,
sometimes appealed to a General Council. But neither side regarded this
as serious. It would have been more important if we could have shown
that Major transmitted to his pupil the opposition maintained for
centuries by his university to an ultramontane Pontiff as the hereditary
opponent of all Church freedom and all Church reform. But Luther and the
German Reformers had already exaggerated this view, so far as to suggest
that the usurping chief of the Church must be the scriptural Antichrist.
And their views, brought direct to Scotland by men like Hamilton, had,
as we have seen, immensely increased the reaction in the mind of Major,
which was begun abroad before 1518. It is, indeed, curious to notice
how in his later writings the old university feeling against tyranny in
the Church almost disappears, while the equally old and honourable
feeling of the learned Middle Age, and especially of its universities,
against the tyranny of kings and nobles, finds expression alike in his
history and his commentaries. Buchanan, who proclaimed to all Europe the
constitutional rights, even against their sovereign, of the people of
Scotland, and Knox, the 'subject born within the same,' who was destined
to translate that Radical theory so largely into fact, were both taught
by Major. And they may well have been much influenced on this side by a
man who had long before written that 'the original and supreme power
resides in the whole of a free people, and is incapable of being
surrendered,' insomuch that an incorrigible tyrant may always be
'deposed by that people as by a superior authority.'[6] For even Fergus
the First, he narrates, 'had no right' other than the nation's choice,
and when Sir William Wallace was yet a boy, he was taught by his
Scottish tutor to repeat continually the rude inspiring rhyme, '_Dico
tibi verum Libertas optima rerum_.'[7] These views as to the rights of
man, and of Scottish men, may well have fanned, or even kindled, the
strong feeling of independence in secular matters and as a citizen,
which burned in the breast of Knox. But as to spiritual matters and the
Church universal, the only feelings which we can imagine Major, on his
return from abroad, to have impressed upon