er
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
facts: 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
the Queen, thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a
delicate high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them altogether.
It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the Queen of
Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the Nation and Cause of Scotland.
A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth made a hunting-