it--that he did not take up the function of guide to his people at his
own hand, or accept it at his own leisure. He was suddenly called upon
in God's name to accept or refuse an almost hopeless task, but one in
which success and failure involved the greatest alternatives to him.
That preaching the Gospel to which he was called, if it meant on the
one hand, in the event of failure, exile or death, meant on the other,
in case of success, the salvation of a whole people now sitting in
darkness. But he had to accept the task as a whole or to refuse it;
and his conclusions as to what that task involved were fused into
unity--in some respects into premature unity--in the glow of a supreme
moral trial. For the week of deliberation before he emerged as the
teacher of the Congregation was certainly not spent upon detailed
difficulties either of future legislation or present consistency. It
prolonged itself rather in poise and struggle against the more obvious
and tremendous obstacles, reinforced no doubt by a thousand more
remote behind them. But the ultimate question was whether the gigantic
strain of all of these combined would be too much for an anchor
dropped by one strong hand into the depths of the Evangel.

And so that week saved a nation--perhaps a man.

For I think it quite a possible thing that this crisis in St Andrews,
the only one recorded or even suggested by Knox himself, may have been
the one personal crisis of his life. I cannot indeed say with Carlyle,
that before this Knox 'seemed well content to guide his own steps by the
light of the Reformation, nowise unduly intruding it on others ...
resolute he to walk by the truth, and speak the truth when called to do
it; not ambitious of more, not fancying himself capable of more.'[19]
Of all men living or dead, this is the one whom it is most impossible to
think of as acquiescing in such an easy relation to those around him, or
even as attempting so to acquiesce--at least without inward
self-question and torture. We must remember that Knox had undoubtedly
before this time embraced the doctrinal system of the Reformation, no
doubt in the form taught by Wishart. And a catechism of that doctrine,
perhaps founded upon or identical with that which Wishart brought from
Basel, he gave to his East Lothian pupils. Long before his external
'call' at St Andrews, the inward impulse to preach the message to his
fellow-men, and to champion their right to receive it, must have pre