ssed
upon his conscience. Was this pearl worth the price of selling all to
buy it? And was such a price demanded of him individually? If these
questions were still unanswered--for that they had been put, and put
incessantly, I have no doubt--then the Knox whom we know was still
waiting to be born, and the representative of Scotland was like Scotland
itself, 'as yet without a soul.'[20] He had carried a sword before
Wishart, and he and the gentlemen of East Lothian would have defended
their saintly guest at the peril of their lives. He had been followed
thereafter by the persecution of his bishop, until he made up his mind
for exile in Germany (rather than in England, where he heard that the
Romish doctrine flourished under Royal Supremacy). And after the
'slaughter of the Cardinal,' he took refuge within the strong walls of
the vacant castle, like other men whose sympathies made them, in the
quaint words of the chronicler[21], 'suspect themselves guilty of the
death' of Beaton, though they might not have known of it before the
fact. But all this Knox might conceivably have done, and still have
borne about with him a troubled and divided mind, until the address of
Rough flashed out upon his conscience his true vocation, and sent him in
tears and solitude to make proof of the Evangel--and of the Evangel in
that form which takes hold of both eternities. This final crisis may
thus have been the only one. And if it were so, Knox would not be the
first man who has found in self-consecration a new birth; nor the first
prophet whose 'Here am I' has been answered by fire from the altar and
the assurance that iniquity is purged.

But even if we assume, what is more probable, that the crisis in St
Andrews was not the first, but the second, in Knox's religious life, the
result for the purposes of critical biography is the same. For the later
crisis resumed and gathered up into itself, on a higher plane, and with
more intensity, the elements of the change which went before. It was, on
this assumption, a new call; and a call to higher and public work. But
it was a call in the same name, and to the same man, to do new work on
the strength of principles and motives to which he had already committed
himself. It was, in short, a greater strain, but upon the first anchor.

This point has acquired more importance since Carlyle, and so many of us
who follow him as admirers of Knox, have adopted the modern trick of
speech of calling him a P