t, perhaps the
crisis, which is worth studying. The contrast, indeed, is not
unprecedented. More than one Knox-like prophet, in the solemn days of
early faith, 'was in the desert until the time of his shewing unto
Israel'; and not the polished shaft only, but the rough spear-head too,
has remained hid in the shadow of a mighty hand until the very day when
it was launched. But each such case impels us the more to inquire, What
was it after all which really made the man who in his turn made the age?

* * * * *

Knox was born in or near Haddington in 1505. Of his father, William
Knox, and his mother, whose maiden name was Sinclair, nothing is known,
except that the parents of both belonged to that district of country,
and had fought under the standard of the House of Bothwell. We shall
never know which of the two contributed the insight or the audacity, the
tenacity or the tenderness, the common-sense or the humour, which must
all have been part of Knox's natural character before it was moulded
from without. His father was of the 'simple,' not of the gentle, sort;
possibly a peasant, or frugal cultivator of the soil. But he saved
enough to send one of his two sons, John, now in the eighteenth year of
his age, and having, no doubt, received his earlier education in the
excellent grammar school of Haddington, to the University of Glasgow.
Haddington was in the diocese of St Andrews, but a native of Haddington,
John Major, was at this time Regent in Glasgow. He had brought from
Paris, four years before, a vast academical reputation, and Knox now
'sat as at his feet' during his last year of teaching in Glasgow. In
1523, however, Major was transferred to St Andrews, and there he taught
theology for more than a quarter of a century, during the latter half of
which time he was Provost or Head of St Salvator's College. Whether Knox
at any time followed him there does not appear. Beza, Knox's earliest
biographer, thought he did. But Beza's information as to this portion of
the life, though apparently derived from Knox's colleague and
successor,[1] is so extremely confused as to suggest that the Reformer
was equally reticent about it to those nearest him as he has chosen to
be to posterity. For nearly twenty years of manhood, indeed, Knox
disappears from our view. And when, in 1540, he emerges again in his
native district, it is as a notary and a priest. 'Sir John Knox' he was
called by others, that b