might quench their
personal hopes and destroy them, but could not affect the divine cause,
which should surely, triumph whatever man or Satan might do. More than
six hundred trumpets, more than the tramp of a succouring army, it rang
into the men's hearts. Their spirit and their courage rose; the dolorous
night, the fear and shame, dissolved and disappeared; and the question
what to do was met not with dejection and despair but with a rising of
new hope.

The decision of the Congregation in the Senate which was held after this
stirring address was, in the first place, to address an appeal for help
to England, the sister-nation which had already made reformation, though
not in their way, and to fight the matter out with full confidence in a
happy issue. About this appeal to England, however, there were
difficulties; for Knox who suggested it, and whose name could not but
appear in the matter, had given forth, as all the world and especially
the persons chiefly attacked were aware, a tremendous "blast" against
the right of women to reign, particularly well or ill timed in a
generation subject to so many queens; and it was necessary for him to
excuse or defend himself to the greatest of the female sovereigns whom
he had attacked. Of course it was easy for him to say that he had no
great Protestant Elizabeth in his eye when he wrote, but only a bigoted
and sanguinary Mary, of whom no one knew at the time that her reign was
to be short, and her power of doing evil so small. It is almost
impossible to discuss gravely nowadays a treatise which, even in its
name (which is all that most people know of it), has the air of a
whimsical ebullition of passion, leaning towards the ridiculous, rather
than a serious protest calculated to move the minds of men. But this was
not the aspect under which it appeared to the Queens who were assailed,
not as individuals, but as a class intolerable and not to be suffered;
and it was considered necessary that Knox should write to excuse
himself, and apologise as much as was in him to the Queen, who was now
the only person on earth to whom the Congregation could look for help.
Knox's letter to Queen Elizabeth, whom he addressed indeed more as a
lesser prince, respectful but more or less equal, might do, than as a
private individual, is very characteristic. He has to apologise, but he
will not withdraw from the position he had taken. "I cannot deny the
writing," he says, "neither yet am I minded t