Peter joins ane
condition with his commandment."

With such extraordinary arguments, unconscious it would seem of the
absolute incongruity of his illustrations, obtusely perverse in the
dogmatism which destroys both Christian charity and sound perception,
though he was as far from obtuse as ever man was by nature--the preacher
stood immovable, nay, unassailable. The perception which defines and
sets apart things that differ was as much beyond his great intellectual
abilities, at least in those personal questions, as was the charity
which thinketh no evil. The tongues of angels could not have convinced
him that what was said to Simon Magus had no fitness to be applied to
Mary Stewart. Such distinctions might be for the profane, they were not
for him, to whom one example of Scripture was like another, always
applicable, of equal authority in every case. It is not difficult to
understand the exasperation of so modern a mind as that of Lethington,
while he attempted in vain to bring this astounding debate to a
conclusion. For Knox always, so to speak, proves his case. Granting the
twist in all his logic, the confusion of things between which there was
no just comparison--and this twist and confusion belonged to his period
as well as to himself--his grotesque argument has an appearance of
reality which carried away those who agreed with him, and confounded in
their inability to come to any ground of comprehension those who did
not.

The debate was long and minute, and Knox was no more shaken from his
determination that the mass was idolatry and that every idolater should
die the death, than from his conviction that he did his utmost for the
Queen in praying that God might convert her, if it were possible. The
argument as to resisting princes is still longer and more elaborate, but
as it involves only large and general questions is argued out with much
more justice and perception. It was one of the subjects most continually
under discussion among all who held the Reformed faith, and Lethington
himself and all his audience had both in profession and practice held
the popular view in the time of Mary of Guise. It is like enough,
indeed, that somewhere among the crowd of faces turned towards the
disputants there was that long head and saturnine countenance, still one
of the best-known effigies of his time, of the scholar who was at that
period proud to be Queen Mary's tutor, reading Livy with her in the
afternoons, and wh