which most needed
them; the second, the verification and establishment of the Confession
of Faith. No more curious scene could have been than this momentous
ceremony. The Parliament consisted of all the nobility of Scotland,
including among them the bishops and peers of the Church, and the
delegates from the boroughs. The Confession was read article by article,
and a vote taken upon each. Three only of the lords voted against it.
The bishops said nothing. What their feelings must have been, as they
sat in their places looking on, while the long array of the Congregation
voted, it is vain to attempt to imagine. There was nothing the Reformers
would have liked better than that discussion to which Knox had vainly
bidden his opponents, throwing down his glove as to mortal combat. "Some
of our ministers were present," he says, "standing upon their feet ready
to have answered in case any would have defended the Papistrie and
impugned our affirmations." But no one of all the ecclesiastics present
said a word. The Earl Marischal, when he rose in his turn to vote,
commented upon this remarkable abstinence with the straightforwardness
of a practical man. "It is long since I have had some favour to the
truth," he said, "and since I have had a suspicion of the Papistical
religion; but I praise my God this day has fully resolved me in the one
and the other. For, seeing that my Lord Bishops here present, who for
their learning can, and for the zeal they should bear to the veritie
would, I suppose, gainsay anything that directly repugns to the veritie
of God, speaks nothing in the contraire of the doctrine proposed, I
cannot but hold it to be the very truth of God." Even this speech moved
the bishops to no reply. They sat silent, perhaps too much astonished at
such an extraordinary revolution to say anything; perhaps alarmed at the
strength of the party against them. It might be that there was little
learning among them, though they had the credit of it; certainly the
arguments which Knox reports on several occasions are inconceivably
feeble on the side of the old faith. But whatever was the meaning there
they sat dumb, and looked on bewildered, confounded, while the new
Confession was voted paragraph by paragraph, and the whole scope of the
Scottish constitution changed.

[Illustration: KNOX'S HOUSE, HIGH STREET]

The next step was the abolition of the mass, an act by which it was
forbidden that any should either hear or say that o