en sent as
Galley-slaves,--some officer or priest, one day, presented them an Image
of the Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics,
should do it reverence. Mother? Mother of God? said Knox, when the turn
came to him: This is no Mother of God: this is "_a pented bredd_,"--_a_
piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it! She is fitter for swimming,
I think, than for being worshipped, added Knox; and flung the thing
into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there: but come of it what
might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other than the
real truth; it was a _pented bredd_: worship it he would not.

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage;
the Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; the
whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making; it is
alone strong. How many _pented bredds_, pretending to be real, are
fitter to swim than to be worshipped!--This Knox cannot live but by
fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is
an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic: it
is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good honest intellectual
talent, no transcendent one;--a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared
with Luther: but in heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in
_sincerity_, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What
equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. "He lies
there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "who never feared the
face of man." He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an Old-Hebrew
Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking
adherence to God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that
forsake truth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh
Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are to take him for that; not
require him to be other.

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her
own palace, to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such
cruelty, such coarseness fills us with indignation. On reading the
actual narrative of the business, what Knox said, and what Knox meant,
I must say one's tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not
so coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about as fine as the
circumstances would permit! Knox was not there to do the courtier; he
came on another errand. Whoever, reading these colloquies of his with