ought to defend it and the liberties thereof are so
blind, dull, and obstinate that they will not see their own
destruction?'--'Works,' iv. 251.

[18] The two sources which, next to his own report of this sermon, best
indicate his earliest standpoint, are (1) the (second) _Basel
Confession_--better known as the First Confession of Helvetia--which
Wishart had brought with him from the Continent, and before his death
had translated into English, and which Knox, therefore, must have known
and may have used; and (2) the treatise of his friend, the layman and
lawyer, Balnaves, written two years later, and which Knox then sent from
Rouen to St Andrews with his own approval and abridgement. The former is
distinctly 'Reformed' and Puritan, and lays down that all ceremonies,
other than the two instituted sacraments and preaching, 'as vessels,
garments, wax-lights, altars,' are unprofitable, and 'serve to subvert
the true religion'; while Balnaves repeats the more fundamental
principle of Knox's sermon (that all religion which is 'not commanded,'
or which is 'invented' with the best motives, is wrong). And both
treatises shew that Knox must have had also before him from the first
the thorny question of the relation of the Church and the private
Christian to the civil magistrate--for both solve it, like Knox himself
(but unlike Luther in his original Confession of Augsburg), by giving
the Magistrate sweeping and intolerant powers of reforming alike the
religion and the Church.

[19] 'Lectures on Heroes: The Hero as Priest.

[20] Carlyle, as above.

[21] Lindsay of Pitscottie.

[22] Thus, Mrs M'Cunn, in her charming volume on Knox as a 'Leader of
Religion,' says that he 'constantly claimed the position accorded to the
Hebrew prophets, and claimed it on the same grounds as they.' And even
Dr Hume Brown, when narrating Knox's refusal in the Galleys to kiss the
'Idol' presented to him, adds: 'It is in such passages as these that we
see how completely Knox identified his action with that of the Hebrew
prophets' (vol. i. 84), the passage founded upon being one in which Knox
points out that 'the same obedience that God required of his people
Israel,' even in idolatrous Babylon, was required by Him of the
'Scottish men' in France, and was actually given by 'that whole number
during the time of their bondage,' not merely by the one unnamed
prisoner who flung the painted 'board' into the Loire. One reason why
the prisoner is unnamed i