hiefly and most principally the conservation and purgation
of the Religion appertains,' is not at all stronger than that in the
First Confession of Helvetia which Wishart had brought with him before
1545. Switzerland, taught by bitter experience, exchanged it for a
milder statement in its Second Confession of 1566.[86] But Calvin and
Beza and Knox's friends in the French Protestant Church generally had
held to the stronger view of the magistrate's duty, even amid all his
persecutions of them; and Knox's passionate indignation against idolatry
had led him, even in his early English career, to maintain the duty not
only of the magistrate, but even of the subject in so far as he had
power, to punish it with death. Indeed his only chance of escaping from
the vicious circle of that murderous syllogism[87] was by going back to
the right of the individual to stand against the magistrate, and if need
be to combine against him, in defence of truth. On this side even that
early Helvetic Confession had proclaimed (in Wishart's words but in
Knox's spirit), that subjects should obey the magistrate only 'so long
as his commandments, statutes, and empires, evidently repugn not with
Him for whose sake we honour and worship the magistrate.' And Knox in
later years had travelled so far on the road of modern constitutionalism
as to maintain the right of subjects to combine against and overthrow
the ruler whose intolerant statutes so _repugned_. How far he had
exactly gone would have appeared had the chapter 'of the obedience or
disobedience that subjects owe unto their magistrates' appeared in the
Scottish Confession unrevised. Randolph says that the 'author of this
work' was advised by Lethington and Winram to leave it out. Something,
if not a whole chapter, has been left out; and the consequence is that
the first Confession of the Scottish Church and people is very much
overweighted on the side of absolute power. But had that chapter gone
in, it would have been difficult not to have recognised even then, that
there was an inconsistency between the alleged high function of the
magistrate as to religion, and the _disobedience_ which on that head his
subjects may 'owe unto him'--an inconsistency even in theory. The
inconsistency in practice Providence was to make its early care.

* * * * *

It had been necessary for Parliament to revoke its old persecuting
statutes. And on that side it had gone farther, prosc