as in
England, and, while Edward VI. lived, was in comparative safety.

CHAPTER IV: KNOX IN ENGLAND: THE BLACK RUBRIC: EXILE: 1549-1554

Knox at once appeared in England in a character revolting to the later
Presbyterian conscience, which he helped to educate. The State permitted
no cleric to preach without a Royal license, and Knox was now a State
licensed preacher at Berwick, one of many "State officials with a
specified mission." He was an agent of the English administration, then
engaged in forcing a detested religion on the majority of the English
people. But he candidly took his own line, indifferent to the
compromises of the rulers in that chaos of shifting opinions. For
example, the Prayer Book of Edward VI. at that time took for granted
kneeling as the appropriate attitude for communicants. Knox, at Berwick,
on the other hand, bade his congregation sit, as he conceived that to
have been the usage at the first institution of the rite. Possibly the
Apostles, in fact, supped in a recumbent attitude, as Cranmer justly
remarked later (John xiii. 25), but Knox supposed them to have sat. In a
letter to his Berwick flock, he reminds them of his practice on this
point; but he would not dissent from kneeling if "magistrates make known,
as that they" (would?) "have done if ministers were willing to do their
duties, that kneeling is not retained in the Lord's Supper for
maintenance of any superstition," much less as "adoration of the Lord's
Supper." This, "for a time," would content him: and this he obtained.
{33a} Here Knox appears to make the civil authority--"the
magistrates"--governors of the Church, while at the same time he does not
in practice obey them unless they accept his conditions.

This letter to the Berwick flock must be prior to the autumn of 1552, in
which, as we shall see, Knox obtained his terms as to kneeling. He went
on, in his epistle to the Berwickians, to speak in "a tone of moderation
and modesty," for which, says Dr. Lorimer, not many readers will be
prepared. {33b} In this modest passage, Knox says that, as to "the chief
points of religion," he, with God's help, "will give place to neither man
nor angel teaching the contrary" of his preaching. Yet an angel might be
supposed to be well informed on points of doctrine! "But as to
ceremonies or rites, things of smaller weight, I was not minded to move
contention. . . ." The one point which--"because I am but one, having in
my