omising human conduct is so immense that these fierce servants of
the Lord seem to be fanatics and visionaries. But history demonstrates
that they are among the most practical of all the forces which work in
human affairs; for, without taking into account the response which their
inflexible morality finds in the breasts of inflexibly moral men, their
morality, in its application to common life, often becomes materialized,
and shows an intimate connection with the most ordinary human appetites
and passions. They commune with the mass of men through the subtile
freemasonry of discontent. Compelled to hurl the thunderbolts of the
moral law against injustice in possession, they unwittingly set fire to
injustice smouldering in unrealized passions; and their speech is
translated and transformed, in its passage into the public mind, into
some such shape as this:--"These few persons who are dominant in Church
and State, and who, while you physically and spiritually starve, are fed
fat by the products of your labor and the illusions of your
superstition, are powerful and prosperous, not from any virtue in
themselves, but from the violation of those laws which God has ordained
for the beneficent government of the universe. Their property and their
power are the signs, not of their merits, but of their sins." The
instinctive love of property and power are thus addressed to overturn
the present possessors of property and power; and the vices of men are
unconsciously enlisted in the service of the regeneration of man. The
motives which impel whole masses of the community are commonly different
from the motives of those reformers who urge the community to revolt;
and their fervent denunciations of injustice bring to their side
thousands of men who, perhaps unconsciously to themselves, only desire a
chance to be unjust. The annals of all emancipations, revolutions, and
reformations are disfigured by this fact. Better than what they
supplant, their good is still relative, not absolute.

In the history of religious reforms, few men better illustrate this hard
moral manliness, as distinguished from the highest moral heroism, than
the sturdy Scotch reformer, John Knox. Tenacious, pugnacious, thoroughly
honest and thoroughly earnest, superior to all physical and moral fear,
destitute equally of fine sentiments and weak emotions, blurting out
unwelcome opinions to queens as readily as to peasants, and in words
which hit and hurt like knocks