n the stern
conviction which never pauses nor fears. They were so thoroughly
convinced, however, of the necessity which he reasoned out with such
remorseless logic, that Erskine first, and after him many gentlemen
through Scotland, craved the help of the preacher to put the crown upon
their convictions, and spread in their halls and private chambers, no
church being attainable, what was now for the first time called the
Table of the Lord. Knox went to Dun in Forfarshire across the great
firths of Forth and Tay, and to Calder, the house of Sir James
Sandilands, afterwards Lord Torphichen, in Lothian, where many gathered
to hear him. But it would seem to have been in the West, always the most
strenuous in doctrine, that he first celebrated the new rite, the holy
feast as yet unknown in Scotland. During the eventful winter of 1555-56
he pervaded the country thus, setting forth the special bond of
evangelical religion, uniting those different groups by the sacred seal
of the bread and wine--who can doubt received with a profound and
tremulous awe by lips to which the wafer had been hitherto the only
symbol of that act of closest communion?

This would seem to have been the chief work of Knox during the visit
which, in the midst of his Geneva ministry, he paid to his native land:
and it is easy to perceive that it was of supreme importance as
identifying and separating the converts into a definite community, bound
together by that sacrament of fealty, an oath more binding than any
expressed only in words. Hitherto the preaching and teaching of the
Word, which was itself a discovery, and came with all the freshness of a
new revelation, had been the only sacred office carried on by the
Reformers. The Sacraments were all in the hands of ecclesiastics, who
had been for generations past losing the confidence and respect of the
nation--though one cannot but believe there must still have been here
and there a humble curate, a parish priest like Chaucer's Parsoune, to
strengthen the hold of the accustomed ordinances upon men's minds, who,
however strongly they might turn against the miracle of
transubstantiation, could not cast aside the only means of partaking in
the great mystery of the body and blood of Christ. To all such here was
now the answer set forth, and the hope--the holy Table, the communion of
saints, the bread and wine of the great and ceaseless commemoration. It
would be doing the greatest wrong to these small devout