t to men, as he had lived.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ST. GILES'S]

No man has been more splendidly applauded, and none more bitterly
dispraised. It is in one sense the misfortune of our age that it is
little able to do either. If steadfast adherence to what he thought the
perfect way, if the most earnest purpose, the most unwearying labour,
the profoundest devotion to his God and his country are enough to
constitute greatness, John Knox is great. He was at the same time a man
all faults, bristling with prejudices, violent in speech, often
merciless in judgment, narrow, dogmatic, fiercely intolerant. He was
incapable of that crowning grace of the imagination and heart which
enables a man to put himself in another's place and do as he would be
done by. But even this we must take with a qualification; for Knox would
no doubt have replied to such an objection that had he been a miserable
idolater, as he considered the upholders of the mass to be, he could not
but have been grateful to any man who had dragged him by whatever means
from that superstition. He was so strong in the certainty of being right
that he was incapable even of considering the possibility that he might
be wrong. And there was in him none of those reluctances to give pain,
none of those softening expedients of charity which veil such a harsh
conviction and make men hesitate to condemn. He knew not what hesitation
was, and scorned a compromise as if it had been a lie, nor would he
suffer that others should do what was impossible to himself. His
determination to have his own way was indeed justified by the conviction
that it was the way of God, but his incapability of waiting or having
patience, or considering the wishes and convictions of others, or
contenting himself with a gradual advance and progression, have no such
excuse.

These were, however, of the very essence of his character. A perfectly
dauntless nature fearing nothing, the self-confidence of an inspired
prophet, the high tyrannical impulse of a swift and fiery genius
impatient of lesser spirits, were all in him, making of him the
imperative, absolute, arrogant autocrat he was; but yet no higher
ambition, no more noble purpose, ever inspired a man. He desired for his
countrymen that they should be a chosen people like those of old whom
God had selected to receive His revelation; his ambition was to make
Scotland the most pure, the most godlike, of all countries of the earth.
In many things